EducationViews.org; Houston, Texas; June 5, 2013
An Interview with Will Fitzhugh: “The UnCommon Core of Learning: Researching and Writing the Term Paper”
Michael F. Shaughnessy
Eastern New Mexico University,
Portales, New Mexico
1) Will, you have been advocating for the high school term paper for years—why the persistence?
I have worked on The Concord Review for 26 years for several reasons. It pays almost nothing, but we have no children, the house is paid for and my wife has a teacher’s pension. Most of all, I am constantly inspired by the diligent work of high school students from 39 countries on their history research papers. I thought, when I started in 1987, that I would get papers of 4,000, words. But I have been receiving serious readable interesting history research papers of 8,000, 11,000, 13,000 words and more by secondary students, who are often doing independent studies to compete for a place in this unique international journal.
2) I remember with fondness, my term papers in both high school and college—and the feeling of accomplishment I received. Am I alone in this regard?
We did the only study done so far in the United States of the assignment of term paper in U.S. public high schools and about 85% of them never assign even the 4,000-word papers I had hoped for. Most American high school students just don’t do term papers. Teachers say they are too busy, and students are quite reluctant to attempt serious papers on their own, so they arrive in college quite unprepared for college term paper assignments. Many of our authors say that their history papers were the most important and most satisfying work they did in high school.
3) People write and talk about “curriculum issues”—are there any curriculums that you are aware of that focus on library research and writing?
As you know the hottest topic in American education now is “The Common Core Standards,” which are quite explicit in saying over and over that they are “not a curriculum.” They say that nonfiction reading is important, but they recommend no history books, and they say nonfiction writing is important, but they provide no examples, of the kind they might find, for example, in the last 97 issues of The Concord Review. To my mind, the CC initiative is “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” as the man said. As you know, by a huge margin, the focus for writing in our schools is on personal and creative writing and the five-paragraph essay, even for high school students.
4) Let’s discuss some of the skills needed to write a good term paper—what would you say they are?
The most important skill or effort that leads to a good term paper is lots and lots of reading. Too often our literacy experts try to force students to write when they have read nothing and really have nothing to say. So the focus becomes the students’ personal life, which is often none of the teachers’ business, and there is little or no effort to have students read history books and learn about something (besides themselves) that would be worth trying hard to write about. Many of our authors learn enough about their topic that they reach a point where they feel that people ought to know about what they have learned—this is great motivation for a good term paper.
5) You have been publishing exemplary high school research papers from around the world for years—how did you get started doing this and why?
I had been teaching for enough years at the public high school in Concord, Massachusetts to earn a sabbatical (1986-1987). That gave me time to read What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know, Horace’s Compromise, Cultural Literacy and some other books and articles that helped me understand that a concern over students’ knowledge of history and their ability to write term papers was not limited to my classroom or even to my school, but was a national issue. I had usually had a few students in my classes who did more work than they had to, and it occurred to me that if I sent out a call for papers (as I did in August, 1987) to every high school in the United States and Canada and 1,500 schools overseas, I might get some first-rate high school history essays sent to me. I did, and I have now been able to publish 1,066 of them in 97 issues of the journal. [Samples at www.tcr.org.] No one wanted to fund it, so I started The Concord Review with all of an inheritance and the principal from my teacher’s retirement.
6) Has the Internet impacted a high school student’s ability to research? Or is it a different kind of research?
I read history books on my iPad and so can high school history students. I also use the Internet to check facts, and so can students. There is a huge variety of original historical material now available on the Web, as everyone knows, but I would still recommend to students who want to do a serious history research paper that they read a few books and as many articles as they can find on their topic. This will make their paper more worth reading and perhaps worth publishing.
7) It seems that getting a paper into your Concord Review almost always guarantees admission to a top notch college or university—am I off on this?
Thirty percent of our authors have been accepted at Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale, but I have to remember that these serious authors doing exemplary papers for my journal are usually also outstanding in many other areas as well. A number of our authors have become doctors as well, but at least at one point in their lives they wrote a great history paper!
8) I was recently on the East Coast and was reading The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. I was astounded by the quality of writing. There are still good writers out there—but do we treasure, promote and encourage good writing?
Those papers can hire a teeny tiny percent of those who want to make a living by their writing, and they provide a great service to the country, but for the vast majority of our high school students, reading and writing are the most dumbed-down parts of their curriculum. Many never get a chance to find out if they could write a serious history paper, because no one ever asks them to try. And remember, we have nationally-televised high school basketball and football games, but no one knows who is published in The Concord Review and they don’t ask to know.
9) What have I neglected to ask?
My greatest complaint these days is that all our EduPundits, it seems, focus their attention on guidelines, standards, principals, teachers, and so on, and pay no attention to the academic work of students. Indiana University recently interviewed 143,000 U.S. high school students, and found that 42.5% do one hour or less a week on homework. But no one mentions that. Our education experts say that the most important variable in student academic achievement is teacher quality (and thus all the attention on selection, training, assessment and firing of teachers). I maintain that the most important variable in student academic achievement is student academic work, to which the experts pay no attention at all. But then, most of them have never been teachers, and so they usually do not know what they are talking about.
www.tcr.org
fitzhugh@tcr.org
The Concord Review
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
Sunday, June 2, 2013
Gladwell on Grit
Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers
New York: Little, Brown, 2008, pp. 247-249
“Rice Paddies and Math Tests”
Every four years, an international group of educators administers a comprehensive mathematics and science test to elementary and junior high students around the world. It’s the TIMSS...and the point of the TIMSS is to compare the educational achievement of one country with another’s.
When students sit down to take the TIMSS exam, they also have to fill out a questionnaire. It asks them all kinds of questions, such as what their parents’ level of education is, and what their views about math are, and what their friends are like. It’s not a trivial exercise. It’s about 120 questions long. In fact, it is so tedious and demanding that many students leave as many as ten or twenty questions blank.
Now, here’s the interesting part. As it turns out, the average number of items answered on that questionnaire varies from country to country. It is possible, in fact, to rank all the participating countries according to how many items their students answer on the questionnaire. Now, what do you think happens if you compare the questionnaire rankings with the math rankings on the TIMSS? They are exactly the same. In other words, countries whose students are willing to concentrate and sit still long enough to focus on answering every single question in an endless questionnaire are the same countries whose students do the best job of solving math problems.
The person who discovered this fact is an educational researcher at the University of Pennsylvania named Erling Boe, and he stumbled across it by accident. “It came out of the blue,” he says. Boe hasn’t even been able to publish his findings in a scientific journal, because, he says, it’s just a bit too weird. Remember, he’s not saying that the ability to finish the questionnaire and the ability to excel on the math test are related. He’s saying that they are the same: if you compare the two rankings, they are identical.
Think about this another way. Imagine that every year, there was a Math Olympics in some fabulous city in the world. And every country in the world sent its own team of one thousand eighth graders. Boe’s point is that we could predict precisely the order in which every country would finish in the Math Olympics without asking a single math question. All we would have to do is give them some task measuring how hard they were willing to work. In fact, we wouldn’t even have to give them a task. We should be able to predict which countries are best at math simply by looking at which national cultures place the highest emphasis on effort and hard work.
So, which places are at the top of both lists? The answer shouldn’t surprise you: Singapore, South Korea, China (Taiwan), Hong Kong, and Japan. [Mainland China doesn’t yet take part in the TIMSS study.] What those five have in common, of course, is that they are all cultures shaped by the tradition of wet-rice agriculture and meaningful work. They are the kind of places where, for hundreds of years, penniless peasants, slaving away in the rice paddies three thousand hours a year, said things to one another like “No one who can rise before dawn three hundred and sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.”
New York: Little, Brown, 2008, pp. 247-249
“Rice Paddies and Math Tests”
Every four years, an international group of educators administers a comprehensive mathematics and science test to elementary and junior high students around the world. It’s the TIMSS...and the point of the TIMSS is to compare the educational achievement of one country with another’s.
When students sit down to take the TIMSS exam, they also have to fill out a questionnaire. It asks them all kinds of questions, such as what their parents’ level of education is, and what their views about math are, and what their friends are like. It’s not a trivial exercise. It’s about 120 questions long. In fact, it is so tedious and demanding that many students leave as many as ten or twenty questions blank.
Now, here’s the interesting part. As it turns out, the average number of items answered on that questionnaire varies from country to country. It is possible, in fact, to rank all the participating countries according to how many items their students answer on the questionnaire. Now, what do you think happens if you compare the questionnaire rankings with the math rankings on the TIMSS? They are exactly the same. In other words, countries whose students are willing to concentrate and sit still long enough to focus on answering every single question in an endless questionnaire are the same countries whose students do the best job of solving math problems.
The person who discovered this fact is an educational researcher at the University of Pennsylvania named Erling Boe, and he stumbled across it by accident. “It came out of the blue,” he says. Boe hasn’t even been able to publish his findings in a scientific journal, because, he says, it’s just a bit too weird. Remember, he’s not saying that the ability to finish the questionnaire and the ability to excel on the math test are related. He’s saying that they are the same: if you compare the two rankings, they are identical.
Think about this another way. Imagine that every year, there was a Math Olympics in some fabulous city in the world. And every country in the world sent its own team of one thousand eighth graders. Boe’s point is that we could predict precisely the order in which every country would finish in the Math Olympics without asking a single math question. All we would have to do is give them some task measuring how hard they were willing to work. In fact, we wouldn’t even have to give them a task. We should be able to predict which countries are best at math simply by looking at which national cultures place the highest emphasis on effort and hard work.
So, which places are at the top of both lists? The answer shouldn’t surprise you: Singapore, South Korea, China (Taiwan), Hong Kong, and Japan. [Mainland China doesn’t yet take part in the TIMSS study.] What those five have in common, of course, is that they are all cultures shaped by the tradition of wet-rice agriculture and meaningful work. They are the kind of places where, for hundreds of years, penniless peasants, slaving away in the rice paddies three thousand hours a year, said things to one another like “No one who can rise before dawn three hundred and sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.”
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Best HS Writing Samples
The Report Card Commentary–William Korach
The Concord Review Publishes the Best High School Writing in America
Posted on 14 May 2013
Tags: curriculum reform, educational standards, political correctness, The Concord Review, Will Fitzhugh
(Editor: My friend Will Fitzhugh, Publisher of The Concord Review, and a frequent contributor to The Report Card www.thereportcard.org publishes what is arguably the best high school student writing in the country. The students some of whom attend public schools and others who attend elite private schools have gone on to Oxford, Harvard, Yale, The University of Chicago and other great universities. Colin Rhys-Hill said that the tutors at Christ Church College, Oxford were more interested in his paper than anything else he did in high school. Does your school encourage students to submit to The Concord Review? How good is good at your school? Great writing is a skill that commands recognition and respect. If your school in not teaching rigorous writing, why not? Does your school offer learning or excuses? Sorry, but excuses walk. This is still America, and if you want success in America, learn how to write with clarity and force. Businesses claim they need to spend $3 Billion per year teaching graduates how to read and write. So sorry, but that’s pathetic. The Concord Review demonstrates great writing by high school students of history. Here Will Fitzhugh provides some excerpts. If you want to see more, his website is at www.tcr.org).
Since The Concord Review was founded in 1987, we have published 1,066 exemplary history research papers by high school students from 46 states and 38 other countries. Thirty percent of our authors have gone on to Harvard, Princeton, Stanford or Yale. Endnote numbers omitted. Will Fitzhugh
=================
Jessica Leight went to Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School, then graduated summa cum laude from Yale. She was asked about her essay in The Concord Review during her interview for the Rhodes Scholarship, and after three years at Oxford on the Rhodes, she got a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT. Her paper was on Anne Hutchinson:
“….This bitter speech, made by a man who had seen his entire career threatened by the woman now standing before him, opened a trial marked by extraordinary vindictiveness on the part of the men presiding. Why? Because their regulatory power had been, up to this point, thwarted. Hutchinson had done nothing in public, nothing that could be clearly seen and defined, nothing that could be clearly punished. The principal accusation leveled against her was failure to show proper respect to the ministers, but again, she had made no public speeches or declarations, and the court would soon find that producing evidence of her insolence was very difficult.
The assembly did not immediately strike to the heart of the matter: Hutchinson’s disparagement of the ministers of the colony as under a covenant of works. Instead, the presiding ministers first accused her of disobeying the commandment to obey one’s father and one’s mother by not submitting to the “fathers of the commonwealth,”as Winthrop termed it. Next, Hutchinson’s meetings were condemned, despite her citation of a rule in Titus exhorting the elder women to teach the younger. In the debate of these points, Hutchinson’s scintillating wit showed itself to best advantage; eventually, Dudley jumped in to rescue Winthrop, who was undoubtedly getting the worst of the argument, and quite simply accused Hutchinson of fomenting all discontent in the colony by deprecating the ministers as under a covenant of works. It was stated that she had aired these unacceptable views at the conference held at Cotton’s house the previous December…
Hutchinson immediately bridled at this use of private remarks as evidence and argued that she had spoken in good faith, believing the ministers were genuinely interested in her opinion and her guidance…”
============
Colin Rhys Hill graduated from Atlanta International School with the IB Diploma. He then applied to Christ Church College, Oxford, and during his acceptance interview there, the tutors were more interested in his paper that was in The Concord Review than in any of his other activities. His 15,000-word paper was on the Soviet-Afghan War.
“….Approximately nine years later on February 5th, 1989, Boris Gromov (the commander of the 40th Army and the last Soviet soldier in Afghanistan) would cross the Friendship Bridge at Termez into Uzbekistan. One of his sons was waiting for him at the other end with a bouquet of flowers. In Islamabad, Pakistan, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Station Chief Milton Bearden sent a two-word cable to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia: “WE WON.” Bearden’s celebration was echoed in the headquarters of intelligence agencies from Singapore to France. The Soviet Army, which had not lost a war since the Soviet-Polish war of 1919-1921, had been brought to its knees by decentralized groups of Afghani guerrillas who collectively called themselves ‘The Mujahideen’ (The Holy Warriors).
It had been a bloody decade. The official number of 40th Army troops killed in action (KIA) was 13,833; but revised casualty figures reveal that the actual number was “in the vicinity of 26,000 (KIA).” 49,985 Soviet troops were wounded in action (WIA). Conversely, more than 1.3 million Mujahideen and Afghani civilians were killed by the 40th Army and DRA forces. The war forced 5.5 million Afghani civilians, almost a third of the pre-war population of Afghanistan, to flee the country as refugees. An additional two million Afghan civilians became internally displaced persons (IDPs). The textbook Soviet intervention that had crushed the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and Czechoslovakia’s “Prague Spring” of 1968 failed miserably in Afghanistan. Soon, the once mighty Soviet Union itself would disintegrate.”
==============
Daniel Winik went to Sidwell Friends School and then to Yale. This paper was on American Almanacs.
“…The almanac (from the Arabic word for “a timetable of the skies”) has a distinguished history in America, but it was not original to the continent. The genre began in 13th century England with the Book of Hours, a calendar of Christian holy days. Almanacs came to the New World in 1639, when William Pierce published his Almanack Calculated for New England. Pierce’s almanac was only the second imprint of the sole printing press in America, founded in 1638 by a group of Boston publishers.
Between 1639 and 1675, Harvard University tutors published America’s only almanacs from this press. These Philomath (Greek for “lover of mathematics”) almanacs included astronomical data, poetry, and assorted municipal information. Most contained sixteen pages—a cover, introduction, twelve calendar months with astronomical charts, and two miscellaneous pages that often included an astronomical essay. By the early 1700s, almanacs had spread from Boston to New York and Philadelphia. During the eighteenth century—what Robert K. Dodge calls “the time of glory for the American almanac”—volumes and printing runs expanded.
The popular appeal of almanacs also ballooned. Rob Sagendorph notes that Nathanial Ames’s Astronomical Diary and Almanack, first published in 1726, was the first almanac to become “an household necessity alongside the Bible.” This trend of popularity continued in 1733 with Benjamin Franklin’s first publication of Poor Richard’s Almanack under the pseudonym of Richard Saunders…”
============
Rachel Davidson went to Newton North High School, then studied civil engineering at Princeton and got a Ph.D. in earthquake engineering at Stanford. She is now an associate professor of engineering. This is from her paper on the split in the Woman Suffrage movement in the middle of the nineteenth century.
“…As is usually the case in extended, deeply-held disagreements, no one person or group was the cause of the split in the woman suffrage movement. On both sides, a stubborn eagerness to enfranchise women hindered the effort to do so. Abolitionists and Republicans refused to unite equally with woman suffragists. Stanton and Anthony, blinded for a while by their desperation to succeed, turned to racism, pitting blacks and women against each other at a time when each needed the other’s support most. The one thing that remains clear is that, while in some ways it helped women discover their own power, the division of forces weakened the overall strength of the movement. As a result of the disagreements within the woman suffrage movement, the 1860s turned out to be a missed opportunity for woman suffragists, just as Stanton had predicted. After the passage of the 15th Amendment, they were forced to wait another 50 years for the fulfillment of their dream….”
———————————
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
The Concord Review Publishes the Best High School Writing in America
Posted on 14 May 2013
Tags: curriculum reform, educational standards, political correctness, The Concord Review, Will Fitzhugh
(Editor: My friend Will Fitzhugh, Publisher of The Concord Review, and a frequent contributor to The Report Card www.thereportcard.org publishes what is arguably the best high school student writing in the country. The students some of whom attend public schools and others who attend elite private schools have gone on to Oxford, Harvard, Yale, The University of Chicago and other great universities. Colin Rhys-Hill said that the tutors at Christ Church College, Oxford were more interested in his paper than anything else he did in high school. Does your school encourage students to submit to The Concord Review? How good is good at your school? Great writing is a skill that commands recognition and respect. If your school in not teaching rigorous writing, why not? Does your school offer learning or excuses? Sorry, but excuses walk. This is still America, and if you want success in America, learn how to write with clarity and force. Businesses claim they need to spend $3 Billion per year teaching graduates how to read and write. So sorry, but that’s pathetic. The Concord Review demonstrates great writing by high school students of history. Here Will Fitzhugh provides some excerpts. If you want to see more, his website is at www.tcr.org).
Since The Concord Review was founded in 1987, we have published 1,066 exemplary history research papers by high school students from 46 states and 38 other countries. Thirty percent of our authors have gone on to Harvard, Princeton, Stanford or Yale. Endnote numbers omitted. Will Fitzhugh
=================
Jessica Leight went to Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School, then graduated summa cum laude from Yale. She was asked about her essay in The Concord Review during her interview for the Rhodes Scholarship, and after three years at Oxford on the Rhodes, she got a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT. Her paper was on Anne Hutchinson:
“….This bitter speech, made by a man who had seen his entire career threatened by the woman now standing before him, opened a trial marked by extraordinary vindictiveness on the part of the men presiding. Why? Because their regulatory power had been, up to this point, thwarted. Hutchinson had done nothing in public, nothing that could be clearly seen and defined, nothing that could be clearly punished. The principal accusation leveled against her was failure to show proper respect to the ministers, but again, she had made no public speeches or declarations, and the court would soon find that producing evidence of her insolence was very difficult.
The assembly did not immediately strike to the heart of the matter: Hutchinson’s disparagement of the ministers of the colony as under a covenant of works. Instead, the presiding ministers first accused her of disobeying the commandment to obey one’s father and one’s mother by not submitting to the “fathers of the commonwealth,”as Winthrop termed it. Next, Hutchinson’s meetings were condemned, despite her citation of a rule in Titus exhorting the elder women to teach the younger. In the debate of these points, Hutchinson’s scintillating wit showed itself to best advantage; eventually, Dudley jumped in to rescue Winthrop, who was undoubtedly getting the worst of the argument, and quite simply accused Hutchinson of fomenting all discontent in the colony by deprecating the ministers as under a covenant of works. It was stated that she had aired these unacceptable views at the conference held at Cotton’s house the previous December…
Hutchinson immediately bridled at this use of private remarks as evidence and argued that she had spoken in good faith, believing the ministers were genuinely interested in her opinion and her guidance…”
============
Colin Rhys Hill graduated from Atlanta International School with the IB Diploma. He then applied to Christ Church College, Oxford, and during his acceptance interview there, the tutors were more interested in his paper that was in The Concord Review than in any of his other activities. His 15,000-word paper was on the Soviet-Afghan War.
“….Approximately nine years later on February 5th, 1989, Boris Gromov (the commander of the 40th Army and the last Soviet soldier in Afghanistan) would cross the Friendship Bridge at Termez into Uzbekistan. One of his sons was waiting for him at the other end with a bouquet of flowers. In Islamabad, Pakistan, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Station Chief Milton Bearden sent a two-word cable to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia: “WE WON.” Bearden’s celebration was echoed in the headquarters of intelligence agencies from Singapore to France. The Soviet Army, which had not lost a war since the Soviet-Polish war of 1919-1921, had been brought to its knees by decentralized groups of Afghani guerrillas who collectively called themselves ‘The Mujahideen’ (The Holy Warriors).
It had been a bloody decade. The official number of 40th Army troops killed in action (KIA) was 13,833; but revised casualty figures reveal that the actual number was “in the vicinity of 26,000 (KIA).” 49,985 Soviet troops were wounded in action (WIA). Conversely, more than 1.3 million Mujahideen and Afghani civilians were killed by the 40th Army and DRA forces. The war forced 5.5 million Afghani civilians, almost a third of the pre-war population of Afghanistan, to flee the country as refugees. An additional two million Afghan civilians became internally displaced persons (IDPs). The textbook Soviet intervention that had crushed the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and Czechoslovakia’s “Prague Spring” of 1968 failed miserably in Afghanistan. Soon, the once mighty Soviet Union itself would disintegrate.”
==============
Daniel Winik went to Sidwell Friends School and then to Yale. This paper was on American Almanacs.
“…The almanac (from the Arabic word for “a timetable of the skies”) has a distinguished history in America, but it was not original to the continent. The genre began in 13th century England with the Book of Hours, a calendar of Christian holy days. Almanacs came to the New World in 1639, when William Pierce published his Almanack Calculated for New England. Pierce’s almanac was only the second imprint of the sole printing press in America, founded in 1638 by a group of Boston publishers.
Between 1639 and 1675, Harvard University tutors published America’s only almanacs from this press. These Philomath (Greek for “lover of mathematics”) almanacs included astronomical data, poetry, and assorted municipal information. Most contained sixteen pages—a cover, introduction, twelve calendar months with astronomical charts, and two miscellaneous pages that often included an astronomical essay. By the early 1700s, almanacs had spread from Boston to New York and Philadelphia. During the eighteenth century—what Robert K. Dodge calls “the time of glory for the American almanac”—volumes and printing runs expanded.
The popular appeal of almanacs also ballooned. Rob Sagendorph notes that Nathanial Ames’s Astronomical Diary and Almanack, first published in 1726, was the first almanac to become “an household necessity alongside the Bible.” This trend of popularity continued in 1733 with Benjamin Franklin’s first publication of Poor Richard’s Almanack under the pseudonym of Richard Saunders…”
============
Rachel Davidson went to Newton North High School, then studied civil engineering at Princeton and got a Ph.D. in earthquake engineering at Stanford. She is now an associate professor of engineering. This is from her paper on the split in the Woman Suffrage movement in the middle of the nineteenth century.
“…As is usually the case in extended, deeply-held disagreements, no one person or group was the cause of the split in the woman suffrage movement. On both sides, a stubborn eagerness to enfranchise women hindered the effort to do so. Abolitionists and Republicans refused to unite equally with woman suffragists. Stanton and Anthony, blinded for a while by their desperation to succeed, turned to racism, pitting blacks and women against each other at a time when each needed the other’s support most. The one thing that remains clear is that, while in some ways it helped women discover their own power, the division of forces weakened the overall strength of the movement. As a result of the disagreements within the woman suffrage movement, the 1860s turned out to be a missed opportunity for woman suffragists, just as Stanton had predicted. After the passage of the 15th Amendment, they were forced to wait another 50 years for the fulfillment of their dream….”
———————————
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
Thursday, April 18, 2013
NAIS Blog: On Serious Secondary School Scholarship
National Association of Independent Schools
April 17, 2013
Bassett Blog: On Serious Secondary School Scholarship
by Patrick Bassett, President, NAIS
I’ve often said that all NAIS schools are “college-prep,” even the early childhood schools like The Children’s School (Connecticut) [age 2 through eighth grade], and the learning differences (LD) schools like Lawrence School (Ohio) [grades K – 12], and scores of other independent schools like them across the country. They, like their more traditional cousins in our membership, are college-prep because parents choose them with college in mind, believing, rightfully, that an independent school with a mission that matches their child’s needs and proclivities will be the surest path to success in secondary school and college. And all of our schools deliver on that expectation.
I’ve also often said that the early childhood programs in NAIS schools and our LD schools (or the LD “schools within a school” in the traditional school model) are often the most innovative, often the first to adopt the new thinking, the new technologies, and the new research (especially on brain-based learning and differentiated instruction). That said, we are collectively, in the independent school world, on the cusp of significant re-engineering of schools, and what it means to be an outstanding place to learn. This is exemplified by Grant Lichtman’s blogs on his journey across America to discover where innovation is sprouting up in independent schools. No better time, no better place for every independent school leader and teacher to think about where, and how, we will innovate at each of our schools.
While “Change is inevitable, growth optional” (John C. Maxwell), I’d like to note that a rapidly changing landscape does not mean that everything old should be subject to change. For me, character first is the defining quality that makes independent schools strong. The founders of the first independent schools in America knew that, as do the founders of our newest schools. For example, the constitutions of both Phillips Academy (Massachusetts) and Phillips Exeter Academy (New Hampshire) include a charge to the masters (teachers) exhorting them to attend to the character of their wards: “[T]hough goodness without knowledge (as it respects others) is weak and feeble; yet knowledge without goodness is dangerous; and that both united form the noblest character, and lay the surest foundation of usefulness to mankind.”1 Have truer words ever been spoken? Or clearer insight into what makes great schools and successful (“good and smart”) graduates?
So, character first. And the adults are the moral mentors and models. But for college-prep schools, a second maxim should be “academics second,” meaning what one might call “serious scholarship.” While the means of conducting serious scholarship (video oral histories, crowd-sourcing, data mining via the Internet, etc.) are indeed changing, I like the case made by Will Fitzhugh, editor of The Concord Review, (fitzhugh@tcr.org), that serious scholarship in the form of a substantial publication-worthy research paper is the entry ticket for future academic success (and selective college admissions).
The Concord Review, launched by Fitzhugh in 1987, is an excellent periodical of secondary school research in the subject of history. As Fitzhugh is fond of pointing out, The Concord Review is more “selective” than Princeton: one out of 20 submissions to the Review published vs. one out of 19 applicants to Princeton admitted. And the requirements of the paper would be daunting to all but the most ambitious student (typically 4,000 - 6,000 words, but sometimes much longer, 10,000 words or more).2 A quick scan of the research paper titles from the most recent issue of the Review reveals both the most esoteric and fascinating of subjects chosen by these young scholars.
I recommend that all teachers read (and perhaps weep about) any student essay from past Concord Review papers archived on the magazine’s website to find out what serious scholarship at the secondary school level looks, and sounds, like. (In fact, from what my college president colleagues tell me, much college student writing today wouldn’t have a chance of publication in The Concord Review.)
The remarkable college placement results of students published in The Concord Review speaks for itself: Many of the authors have sent reprints of their papers with their college application materials and thereby established their credentials as budding scholars. And they have been rewarded with matriculation to an impressive list of highly selective colleges and universities: Brown (25), University of Chicago (18), Columbia (21), Cornell (16), Dartmouth (20), Harvard (115), Oxford (13), Princeton (60), Stanford (37), Yale (96), and a number of other fine institutions, including Amherst, Bowdoin, Bryn Mawr, Caltech, Cambridge, Carnegie Mellon, Duke, Emory, Johns Hopkins, McGill, Michigan, Middlebury, MIT, Northwestern, Notre Dame, Reed, Rice, Smith, Trinity, Tufts, Virginia, Washington University, Wellesley, and Williams.
Top Ten Colleges Attended by Authors from The Concord Review
Of course, “serious scholarship” exists in all the disciplines and in “cross-disciplinary” courses as well. And “Varsity Academics”* emerges in science, drama, and robotics competitions as much as in history research competitions. (*Varsity Academics® is a registered trademark of The Concord Review, Inc. a 501(c)(3) Massachusetts corporation.)
So, dear reader, is your school committed to “serious scholarship”? How is it manifested? With all the changes sweeping over schools, will the tradition of substantial research paper writing survive?
Endnotes:
1. The constitutions of both Phillips Academy (in Andover) and Phillips Exeter Academy are almost identical. Although signed by the two brothers, Samuel and John Phillips, the constitution of Phillips Academy is reported to have been written by John’s nephew Samuel. That particular phrase appears in a section that outlines the expectations of the Master: “But, above all, it is expected, that the Master’s attention to the disposition of the Minds and Morals of the Youth, under his charge, will exceed every care; well considering that, though goodness without knowledge (as it respects others) is weak and feeble; yet knowledge without goodness is dangerous; and that both united form the noblest character, and lay the surest foundation of usefulness to mankind.” When John wrote to his nephew indicating that he was thinking of starting his own school in Exeter, on his own, the nephew wrote back saying, surely the seal and constitution that we have just adopted for Phillips Academy can be modified for your own school. Source: Edouard L. Desrochers, Assistant Librarian and Academy Archivist, Phillips Exeter Academy.
2. Essay Requirements
April 17, 2013
Bassett Blog: On Serious Secondary School Scholarship
by Patrick Bassett, President, NAIS
 |
| NAIS President Patrick F. Bassett |
I’ve also often said that the early childhood programs in NAIS schools and our LD schools (or the LD “schools within a school” in the traditional school model) are often the most innovative, often the first to adopt the new thinking, the new technologies, and the new research (especially on brain-based learning and differentiated instruction). That said, we are collectively, in the independent school world, on the cusp of significant re-engineering of schools, and what it means to be an outstanding place to learn. This is exemplified by Grant Lichtman’s blogs on his journey across America to discover where innovation is sprouting up in independent schools. No better time, no better place for every independent school leader and teacher to think about where, and how, we will innovate at each of our schools.
While “Change is inevitable, growth optional” (John C. Maxwell), I’d like to note that a rapidly changing landscape does not mean that everything old should be subject to change. For me, character first is the defining quality that makes independent schools strong. The founders of the first independent schools in America knew that, as do the founders of our newest schools. For example, the constitutions of both Phillips Academy (Massachusetts) and Phillips Exeter Academy (New Hampshire) include a charge to the masters (teachers) exhorting them to attend to the character of their wards: “[T]hough goodness without knowledge (as it respects others) is weak and feeble; yet knowledge without goodness is dangerous; and that both united form the noblest character, and lay the surest foundation of usefulness to mankind.”1 Have truer words ever been spoken? Or clearer insight into what makes great schools and successful (“good and smart”) graduates?
So, character first. And the adults are the moral mentors and models. But for college-prep schools, a second maxim should be “academics second,” meaning what one might call “serious scholarship.” While the means of conducting serious scholarship (video oral histories, crowd-sourcing, data mining via the Internet, etc.) are indeed changing, I like the case made by Will Fitzhugh, editor of The Concord Review, (fitzhugh@tcr.org), that serious scholarship in the form of a substantial publication-worthy research paper is the entry ticket for future academic success (and selective college admissions).
The Concord Review, launched by Fitzhugh in 1987, is an excellent periodical of secondary school research in the subject of history. As Fitzhugh is fond of pointing out, The Concord Review is more “selective” than Princeton: one out of 20 submissions to the Review published vs. one out of 19 applicants to Princeton admitted. And the requirements of the paper would be daunting to all but the most ambitious student (typically 4,000 - 6,000 words, but sometimes much longer, 10,000 words or more).2 A quick scan of the research paper titles from the most recent issue of the Review reveals both the most esoteric and fascinating of subjects chosen by these young scholars.
I recommend that all teachers read (and perhaps weep about) any student essay from past Concord Review papers archived on the magazine’s website to find out what serious scholarship at the secondary school level looks, and sounds, like. (In fact, from what my college president colleagues tell me, much college student writing today wouldn’t have a chance of publication in The Concord Review.)
Top Ten Colleges Attended by Authors from The Concord Review
So, dear reader, is your school committed to “serious scholarship”? How is it manifested? With all the changes sweeping over schools, will the tradition of substantial research paper writing survive?
Endnotes:
1. The constitutions of both Phillips Academy (in Andover) and Phillips Exeter Academy are almost identical. Although signed by the two brothers, Samuel and John Phillips, the constitution of Phillips Academy is reported to have been written by John’s nephew Samuel. That particular phrase appears in a section that outlines the expectations of the Master: “But, above all, it is expected, that the Master’s attention to the disposition of the Minds and Morals of the Youth, under his charge, will exceed every care; well considering that, though goodness without knowledge (as it respects others) is weak and feeble; yet knowledge without goodness is dangerous; and that both united form the noblest character, and lay the surest foundation of usefulness to mankind.” When John wrote to his nephew indicating that he was thinking of starting his own school in Exeter, on his own, the nephew wrote back saying, surely the seal and constitution that we have just adopted for Phillips Academy can be modified for your own school. Source: Edouard L. Desrochers, Assistant Librarian and Academy Archivist, Phillips Exeter Academy.
2. Essay Requirements
- You may submit a paper to The Concord Review if you completed the paper before finishing secondary school.
- You must be the sole author.
- The paper must be in English, and may not have been previously published except in a publication of a secondary school that you attended.
- Essays should be in the 4,000 - 6,000 (or more) word range, with Turabian (Chicago) endnotes and bibliography. The longest paper published was 21,000 words (on the Mountain Meadows Massacre...see it on the website—www.tcr.org).
- Essays may be on any historical topic, ancient or modern, domestic or foreign, and must be typed, or printed from a computer.
- Essays should have the notes and bibliography placed at the end (Chicago Style).
- Essays must be printed and accompanied by a check for $40, made out to The Concord Review, and by our 'Form to Accompany Essays' and mailed to Submissions, The Concord Review, 730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24, Sudbury, MA 01776 USA. www.tcr.org, fitzhugh@tcr.org
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Bend it Like Truman
SchoolInfoSystem.org; Madison, Wisconsin
EducationViews.org; Houston, Texas
Bend it Like Truman
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
3 April 2013
In the United Kingdom the number of reports of the verbal and physical abuse of teachers is growing at a sad and steady rate. In the United States as well, a number of fine teachers say that they are leaving the profession primarily because of the out-of-control attitudes and behavior of poorly-raised children who will not take any responsibility for their own education and don’t seem to mind if they ruin the educational chances of their peers.
David McCullough tells us that when Harry Truman took over the artillery outfit, Battery ‘D’, “the new captain said nothing for what seemed the longest time. He just stood looking everybody over, up and down the line slowly, several times. Because of their previous (mis) conduct, the men were expecting a tongue lashing. Captain Truman only studied them...At last he called ‘Dismissed!’ As he turned and walked away, the men gave him a Bronx cheer....In the morning Captain Truman posted the names of the non-commissioned officers who were ‘busted’ in rank...the First Sergeant was at the head of the list...Harry called in the other non-commissioned officers and told them it was up to them to straighten things out. ‘I didn’t come here to get along with you,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to get along with me. And if there are any of you who can’t, speak up right now, and I’ll bust you back right now.”
Now, I do realize the classroom is not a military unit, and that students cannot be busted back to a previous grade, however much their behavior suggests that they don’t belong in a higher grade. But Truman realized poor discipline would endanger the lives of the men in his unit, and teachers, no matter how much they yearn to be liked, relevant, and even loved, need to realize and accept that poor discipline in their classes will destroy some of the educational opportunities of their students. As it turned out, his unit respected and loved Truman in time, and lined Pennsylvania avenue for his inauguration parade.
For years, the Old Battleaxe was offered as a stereotype of the stern, demanding teacher who represented the expectations of the wider community in the classroom and required students to meet her standards.
In The Lowering of Higher Education, Jackson Toby quotes the experience of one man with an Old Battleaxe:
“Professor Emeritus of Religion at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, Walter Benjamin, wrote about a demanding freshman English teacher, Dr. Doris Garey, whose course he had taken in 1946, in an article entitled ‘When an ‘A’ Meant Something.’ Professor Benjamin praised the memory of Dr. Garey and expressed gratitude for what her demanding standards had taught him.
‘Even though she had a bachelor’s degree from Mount Holyoke and a doctorate from Wisconsin, Miss Garey was the low person in the department pecking order. And physically she was a lightweight—she could not have stood more than 4-foot-10 or weighed more than 100 pounds. But she had the pedagogical mass of a Sumo wrestler. Her literary expectations were stratospheric; she was the academic equivalent of my [Marine] boot camp drill instructor...The showboats (other instructors) had long since faded, along with their banter, jokes and easy grades. It was the no-nonsense Miss Garey whose memory endured.’”
In my view, too many of our teachers have been seduced by the ideas that they should be making sure their students have fun, and that their teaching should include “relevant” material from the evanescent present of her students, their egregiously temporary pop culture, and from current events of passing interest.
Once discipline and student responsibility for their own learning is established and understood, there can be a lot of interesting and even entertaining times in the classroom. Without them, classes are in a world of trouble. Samuel Gompers used to read aloud for their enjoyment to a room full of employees making cigars, but they continued to make the cigars while he did it.
In education reform discussions in general, in my view practically all the attention is on what the adults are and/or should be doing, and almost no attention is given to what students are and should be doing. Leaving them out of the equation quite naturally contributes to poor discipline and reduced learning.
A suburban high school English teacher in Pennsylvania wrote that: "My students are out of control," Munroe, who has taught 10th, 11th and 12th grades, wrote in one post: "They are rude, disengaged, lazy whiners. They curse, discuss drugs, talk back, argue for grades, complain about everything, fancy themselves entitled to whatever they desire, and are just generally annoying." And one of her students commented: "As far as motivated high school students, she's completely correct. High school kids don't want to do anything...It's a teacher's job, however, to give students the motivation to learn." (!)
As long as too many of us think education is the teacher’s responsibility alone, we will have failed to understand what the job of learning requires of students, and we will be unable to make sense of the outcomes of our huge investments in education.
Friday, March 22, 2013
IT'S THE STUDENTS !!
SchoolInfoSystem.org; Madison, Wisconsin
EducationViews.org; Houston, Texas
It’s the Students, Stupid!
16 March 2013
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
The billionaires’ club, with their long retinue of pundits, researchers, and other hangers-on, are giving their attention, some of the time, to education. But they are not paying attention to the academic work of students, or to their responsibility for their own education.
Mr. Gates spent nearly two hundred million dollars recently on a program for teacher assessment, but does he realize that in almost every class there are students as well, and that they have a lot to say about what the teacher can accomplish?
One pundit came to speak in Boston. When told that lots of good teachers were being driven out of the profession by the absence of discipline among students, he said, “They need better classroom management skills.” I don’t think he had ever “managed” a classroom, but I told him this story:
When Theodore Roosevelt was President, he had a guest one day in the oval office, and his daughter Alice came roaring through the room disturbing everything. The guest said, “Can’t you control Alice?” And Roosevelt said, “I can be President of the United States, or I can control Alice, but not both.”
Lots and lots of teachers have students in their classes who have not been taught by KIPP, to “Work Hard, Be Nice.” Their inability to control themselves and behave with courtesy and respect for their teacher and their fellow students frequently degrades and can even disintegrate the academic integrity of the class, which damages not only their own chance to learn, but prevents all their classmates from learning as well.
In 2004, Paul A. Zoch, a teacher from Texas, wrote in Doomed to Fail (p. 150) that: “Let there be no doubt about it: the United States looks to its teachers and their efforts, but not to its students and their efforts, for success in education.” Nine years later that remains the problem with the Edupundits and their funders.
Of course, one problem for the edureformers is that you can fire teachers but you can’t fire students. If students fail, largely through their own poor attendance, inattention and destructive behavior in class, we can’t blame them. Only the teachers can be held to account. This is beyond stupid, verging on willful blindness.
Indiana University, in its most recent Survey of High School Student Engagement, interviewed 143,052 U.S. high school students and found that 42.5% of them spend an hour or less each week on homework and 82.7% spend five hours or less each week on their homework. The average Korean student spends fifteen hours a week on homework, and that does not include evening hagwon sessions of two or three hours. Can anyone see a difference here? And, by the way, American students spend 53 hours a week playing video games and using other sorts of electronic entertainment.
While they play, and consume expensive products of the technology companies, students in other countries are studying hard, behaving in class, and taking their educational opportunities seriously so they can eat our lunch, which they are starting to do.
But let’s blame the teachers in the United States and ignore what their students are doing, in class and after class. That will work, won’t it?
Of course what teachers and all the other employees of our school systems do is important. But ignoring students and their work, and blaming teachers for poor student academic performance, would be like blaming a trainer if his boxer gets knocked out in the ring, while not noticing that the boxer stands in front of his opponent with his hands at his sides all the time.
We need high academic achievement, but we will not get it by blaming teachers and driving them out of the profession, while not noticing that students have an important, and even crucial, responsibility for their own learning.
Ignoring the role of our students in their own education, which at the “highest” levels of funded programs we do, is not only dumb, it will virtually consign all the other efforts to failure. Think about it.
Monday, March 11, 2013
SPEECH AT "HOGWARTS"
Oklahoma School of Science and Mathematics
OSSM
Monday, 25 February, 2013
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
Dr. Wong, members of the faculty, students and guests. Many thanks for this opportunity to speak here at Hogwarts...I mean the Oklahoma School of Science and Mathematics....I am glad to be at a place where serious students are taken seriously.
I once saw Neal Armstrong speak on television and he began his remarks by saying: “The only bird who can talk, can’t fly very well, so I will be brief.” I am not an astronaut, but I will also be somewhat brief in the hope we will have time for comments and questions at the end.
It was 50 years ago, but it seems like yesterday to me...In 1963, when I was 27, almost by accident, I found myself working at the Space & Information Systems Division of North American Aviation, at a very low-level job, helping thirty or so other people prepare reports for the Director of Manufacturing. North American Aviation at the time had contracts for the Saturn 5 rocket at its Rocketdyne Division and for the Apollo command modules at the Space & Information Systems Division, so from time to time I could go out on the factory floor and see several command modules being assembled. John Glenn had orbited the earth the year before, and it was a very exciting time to have even a small job on that project.
Six years later, In 1969, I had a job (I have had a poorly-planned career) as a staff psychologist on a Peace Corps program for volunteers to Iran, and I spent two months in country. The Shah was still in power and he had a literacy program which the Peace Corps was helping with. On July 20th Apollo 11 was getting ready to land on the Moon and I was staying in a big beautiful hotel in Hamadan, Iran, a city of 100,000 or so. I went down to the hotel desk to ask about watching the landing on television. An Australian man leaning against the desk heard my question and let me know that there was no television in the city of Hamadan. By the way, when Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon, you may remember he didn’t say anything about steps and leaps. He said, as a pilot would: “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”
This last week I watched “Apollo 13” on television a couple of times, and I think that is a truly great movie. Jim Lovell’s book Lost Moon is also wonderful, if you get a chance to to read it. One of things I love about that movie is that it helps to demolish the fantasy that engineers are Nerds, who only sit in rows in class, wear pocket protectors and glasses, use slide rules, and are not capable of creativity, like artists and poets are.
As you may know the Apollo Program was one of the most thoroughly planned and simulated of any program ever. Every conceivable contingency was rehearsed and simulated in the training program. Yet there, with Apollo 13, was a series of completely unforeseen problems to be solved creatively under immense time pressure with three astronaut lives at stake. And they solved all those problems in the time they had and brought the men home safely. Amazing!
So, anyway, I am a great admirer of engineers and scientists, in spite of my own academic background in literature and history.
One more story about Neil Armstrong, who, as you may know, flew 78 combat missions in Korea and was a test pilot in just about all of the experimental aircraft of his day.... At the end of the twentieth century, the major engineering organizations in the United States formed a committee with one member from each to review the achievements of the century and choose the most important. Neil Armstrong shared the report with the National Press Club in Washington. The committee had agreed that Electrical Engineering had made the most important engineering achievements of the century, because without electricity, little else would have been possible.
Here is some of what he said:
“I am honored to be speaking on behalf of the National Academy of Engineering and our nation’s professional engineering societies.
I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer—born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in the steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace, and propelled by compressible flow.
As an engineer, I take a substantial amount of pride in the accomplishments of my profession. Bill Wulf, president of the National Academy of Engineering, has said that science is about what is, and engineering is about what can be. The Greek letter eta, in lower case, often shows up in engineering documents. Engineers pay a good bit of attention to improving eta because it is a symbol for efficiency—doing an equivalent or better job with less weight, less power, less time, less cost. The entire existence of engineers is dedicated to doing things better and more efficiently.”
He concluded his remarks in this way:
“For three decades, I have enjoyed the work and friendship of Arthur Clarke, a prolific science and science fiction writer, who back in 1945 first suggested the possibility of the communications satellite. In addition to writing some wonderful books, he has also proposed a few memorable laws. Clarke’s third law seems particularly apt today: ‘Any sufficiently developed technology is indistinguishable from magic....’
And then he said:
It has been a magical century...”
--------------------
I should tell you that I also take serious students seriously. Now that I have made it clear that I am an admirer of all those who toil in some of the fields which are your primary areas of study here, I want to turn to some bad news, which may or may not be important for the students here.
First of all, I should remind you that even engineers and scientists need to be able to read and write. I got a letter from a college chemistry professor not too long ago, in which she said, in talking about her students’ ability to read and write:
“For several years I didn’t realize this was happening until one year when we had invited an author of a popular freshman chemistry text to give a seminar. He explained that he wrote the text to be read sequentially page by page and that if students read only here and there that they wouldn’t be getting the most out of the text. My thought was, 'Well, duh!! Why state the obvious?' That afternoon I was helping one of my students in my office hours and it was obvious from her responses that she was using the “shotgun” approach to the assigned problem. If I hadn’t just attended the seminar, I probably would not have noticed. I then began asking my students how they used the text and the vast majority, over 98% (that’s the chemist in me!), quite nonchalantly explained how they used the text as a 'backup' to the lecture and used the “shotgun” approach to problems. I somehow got the impression they were taught these methods in high school since they were used by such a large majority. Ever after that my first lecture always included a discussion (diatribe?) on how to use the text effectively. I found it had little effect and I believe that to be because they were unable to read and comprehend at a college level.
I began listing 'college level reading and writing skills' as prerequisites for my courses. In my first lecture I also included a section on how to overcome poor reading and writing skills. However, I have to say that it is VERY difficult for a college student to learn reading and writing skills 'after the fact' while pursuing their college degree. They really need to learn these in high school (which they definitely are not) and come in prepared, or spend a year in college learning them before they begin their degree program—what a waste of their time and money!”
Now, I don’t know much about what reading of nonfiction books and writing of serious history research papers students do here, but the Chronicle of Higher Education did a survey of high school teachers and college professors a few years ago, and found that about 90% of college professors reported that the students they were getting were not very well prepared in reading, or in doing research, or in academic writing.
As far as I can tell, the majority of American public high school students now graduate without ever having been assigned one complete nonfiction book and without ever having written one serious research paper.
Naturally, this is not good preparation for college reading lists and college term papers. But the colleges, although they complain about the academic reading and writing skills of the students they get, ask only for a 500-word “personal” essay when students apply for admission, which only compounds the problems.
Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, has said that “The single biggest complaint from college teachers and employers is that high school graduates cannot write as well as they need to.”
This situation is made worse by the facts, recently reported by the University of Indiana’s perennial High School Survey of Student Engagement, that, in their survey of 143,052 public high school students they found that 82.7% spend 5 or fewer hours a week doing homework, and 42.5% spend an hour or less each week on homework. A friend in South Korea informs me that the average Korean student spends 15 hours a week doing homework and that does not include any time spent at hagwon tutoring classes in the evenings........Houston, we have a problem...
Twenty-five years ago, in 1987, while on sabbatical from teaching history at the high school in Concord, Massachusetts, I was reading some recent books pointing out how ignorant of history our high school students were, and how poor their academic writing was...but I knew I had received a few excellent history papers from my students over the years and it occurred to me that with 24,000 high schools in the United States and 3,500 in Canada, and more overseas in the English-speaking world, there had to be lots of excellent history research papers being written by high school students. If I could get some sent to me, and I could publish them in a quarterly journal, then that exemplary work might be useful in challenging and inspiring their peers to read more history, write more serious papers and be better prepared for further education—in addition to their learning more history in the process.
Since I started it with the last of my own money in March of 1987, The Concord Review has published 96 issues, with 1,055 history research papers by secondary students from 46 states and 38 other countries. The quality of the papers sent to me gets higher all the time, and we now publish about 6% of the ones we get.
But I have to report to you that I am constantly surprised by the dislike of academic excellence in the education world. I will just offer one example.
I believe that, as Samuel Johnson wrote in Rasselas: “Example is always more efficacious than precept.” That is why I publish examples of fine academic work instead of a manual of tips on how to write papers...I was pleased when David Brooks, in a review of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers in the New York Times, wrote: “As the classical philosophers understood, examples of individual greatness inspire achievement more reliably than any other form of education.”
To give you an idea of the reaction to this among some educational leaders, I sent this comment to the Dean of the School of Education at Boston University, and he replied with this email: “The myth of individual greatness is a myth (sic).”
I am in the middle of Ron Chernow’s biography of George Washington, and I can assure you, if you had any doubt, that individual greatness is no myth.
The only way to sustain an attitude like that Dean’s, in my view, is to be completely ignorant of human history, including the history of Apollo 13, and to be prejudiced, for some bizarre reason, against exemplary academic work. I admit it continues to baffle me when I encounter the avoidance, among both educators and funders, of the exemplary history papers I publish.
But here you are in a school which does admire individual greatness and which gives you an unusual chance to do outstanding academic work, whether the wider American society wants you to spend 53 hours a week on electronic entertainment media, and one hour on homework, or not.
Thanks again for this opportunity to speak to you, and I will conclude by encouraging you as students of Magic not to neglect your study of the Defense Against the Dark Arts—of ignorance, superstition and anti-elitism.
Thank you.
OSSM
Monday, 25 February, 2013
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
 |
| Will Fitzhugh at the Oklahoma School of Science and Mathematics |
I once saw Neal Armstrong speak on television and he began his remarks by saying: “The only bird who can talk, can’t fly very well, so I will be brief.” I am not an astronaut, but I will also be somewhat brief in the hope we will have time for comments and questions at the end.
It was 50 years ago, but it seems like yesterday to me...In 1963, when I was 27, almost by accident, I found myself working at the Space & Information Systems Division of North American Aviation, at a very low-level job, helping thirty or so other people prepare reports for the Director of Manufacturing. North American Aviation at the time had contracts for the Saturn 5 rocket at its Rocketdyne Division and for the Apollo command modules at the Space & Information Systems Division, so from time to time I could go out on the factory floor and see several command modules being assembled. John Glenn had orbited the earth the year before, and it was a very exciting time to have even a small job on that project.
Six years later, In 1969, I had a job (I have had a poorly-planned career) as a staff psychologist on a Peace Corps program for volunteers to Iran, and I spent two months in country. The Shah was still in power and he had a literacy program which the Peace Corps was helping with. On July 20th Apollo 11 was getting ready to land on the Moon and I was staying in a big beautiful hotel in Hamadan, Iran, a city of 100,000 or so. I went down to the hotel desk to ask about watching the landing on television. An Australian man leaning against the desk heard my question and let me know that there was no television in the city of Hamadan. By the way, when Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon, you may remember he didn’t say anything about steps and leaps. He said, as a pilot would: “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”
This last week I watched “Apollo 13” on television a couple of times, and I think that is a truly great movie. Jim Lovell’s book Lost Moon is also wonderful, if you get a chance to to read it. One of things I love about that movie is that it helps to demolish the fantasy that engineers are Nerds, who only sit in rows in class, wear pocket protectors and glasses, use slide rules, and are not capable of creativity, like artists and poets are.
As you may know the Apollo Program was one of the most thoroughly planned and simulated of any program ever. Every conceivable contingency was rehearsed and simulated in the training program. Yet there, with Apollo 13, was a series of completely unforeseen problems to be solved creatively under immense time pressure with three astronaut lives at stake. And they solved all those problems in the time they had and brought the men home safely. Amazing!
So, anyway, I am a great admirer of engineers and scientists, in spite of my own academic background in literature and history.
One more story about Neil Armstrong, who, as you may know, flew 78 combat missions in Korea and was a test pilot in just about all of the experimental aircraft of his day.... At the end of the twentieth century, the major engineering organizations in the United States formed a committee with one member from each to review the achievements of the century and choose the most important. Neil Armstrong shared the report with the National Press Club in Washington. The committee had agreed that Electrical Engineering had made the most important engineering achievements of the century, because without electricity, little else would have been possible.
Here is some of what he said:
“I am honored to be speaking on behalf of the National Academy of Engineering and our nation’s professional engineering societies.
I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer—born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in the steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace, and propelled by compressible flow.
As an engineer, I take a substantial amount of pride in the accomplishments of my profession. Bill Wulf, president of the National Academy of Engineering, has said that science is about what is, and engineering is about what can be. The Greek letter eta, in lower case, often shows up in engineering documents. Engineers pay a good bit of attention to improving eta because it is a symbol for efficiency—doing an equivalent or better job with less weight, less power, less time, less cost. The entire existence of engineers is dedicated to doing things better and more efficiently.”
He concluded his remarks in this way:
“For three decades, I have enjoyed the work and friendship of Arthur Clarke, a prolific science and science fiction writer, who back in 1945 first suggested the possibility of the communications satellite. In addition to writing some wonderful books, he has also proposed a few memorable laws. Clarke’s third law seems particularly apt today: ‘Any sufficiently developed technology is indistinguishable from magic....’
And then he said:
It has been a magical century...”
--------------------
I should tell you that I also take serious students seriously. Now that I have made it clear that I am an admirer of all those who toil in some of the fields which are your primary areas of study here, I want to turn to some bad news, which may or may not be important for the students here.
First of all, I should remind you that even engineers and scientists need to be able to read and write. I got a letter from a college chemistry professor not too long ago, in which she said, in talking about her students’ ability to read and write:
“For several years I didn’t realize this was happening until one year when we had invited an author of a popular freshman chemistry text to give a seminar. He explained that he wrote the text to be read sequentially page by page and that if students read only here and there that they wouldn’t be getting the most out of the text. My thought was, 'Well, duh!! Why state the obvious?' That afternoon I was helping one of my students in my office hours and it was obvious from her responses that she was using the “shotgun” approach to the assigned problem. If I hadn’t just attended the seminar, I probably would not have noticed. I then began asking my students how they used the text and the vast majority, over 98% (that’s the chemist in me!), quite nonchalantly explained how they used the text as a 'backup' to the lecture and used the “shotgun” approach to problems. I somehow got the impression they were taught these methods in high school since they were used by such a large majority. Ever after that my first lecture always included a discussion (diatribe?) on how to use the text effectively. I found it had little effect and I believe that to be because they were unable to read and comprehend at a college level.
I began listing 'college level reading and writing skills' as prerequisites for my courses. In my first lecture I also included a section on how to overcome poor reading and writing skills. However, I have to say that it is VERY difficult for a college student to learn reading and writing skills 'after the fact' while pursuing their college degree. They really need to learn these in high school (which they definitely are not) and come in prepared, or spend a year in college learning them before they begin their degree program—what a waste of their time and money!”
Now, I don’t know much about what reading of nonfiction books and writing of serious history research papers students do here, but the Chronicle of Higher Education did a survey of high school teachers and college professors a few years ago, and found that about 90% of college professors reported that the students they were getting were not very well prepared in reading, or in doing research, or in academic writing.
As far as I can tell, the majority of American public high school students now graduate without ever having been assigned one complete nonfiction book and without ever having written one serious research paper.
Naturally, this is not good preparation for college reading lists and college term papers. But the colleges, although they complain about the academic reading and writing skills of the students they get, ask only for a 500-word “personal” essay when students apply for admission, which only compounds the problems.
Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, has said that “The single biggest complaint from college teachers and employers is that high school graduates cannot write as well as they need to.”
This situation is made worse by the facts, recently reported by the University of Indiana’s perennial High School Survey of Student Engagement, that, in their survey of 143,052 public high school students they found that 82.7% spend 5 or fewer hours a week doing homework, and 42.5% spend an hour or less each week on homework. A friend in South Korea informs me that the average Korean student spends 15 hours a week doing homework and that does not include any time spent at hagwon tutoring classes in the evenings........Houston, we have a problem...
Twenty-five years ago, in 1987, while on sabbatical from teaching history at the high school in Concord, Massachusetts, I was reading some recent books pointing out how ignorant of history our high school students were, and how poor their academic writing was...but I knew I had received a few excellent history papers from my students over the years and it occurred to me that with 24,000 high schools in the United States and 3,500 in Canada, and more overseas in the English-speaking world, there had to be lots of excellent history research papers being written by high school students. If I could get some sent to me, and I could publish them in a quarterly journal, then that exemplary work might be useful in challenging and inspiring their peers to read more history, write more serious papers and be better prepared for further education—in addition to their learning more history in the process.
Since I started it with the last of my own money in March of 1987, The Concord Review has published 96 issues, with 1,055 history research papers by secondary students from 46 states and 38 other countries. The quality of the papers sent to me gets higher all the time, and we now publish about 6% of the ones we get.
But I have to report to you that I am constantly surprised by the dislike of academic excellence in the education world. I will just offer one example.
I believe that, as Samuel Johnson wrote in Rasselas: “Example is always more efficacious than precept.” That is why I publish examples of fine academic work instead of a manual of tips on how to write papers...I was pleased when David Brooks, in a review of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers in the New York Times, wrote: “As the classical philosophers understood, examples of individual greatness inspire achievement more reliably than any other form of education.”
To give you an idea of the reaction to this among some educational leaders, I sent this comment to the Dean of the School of Education at Boston University, and he replied with this email: “The myth of individual greatness is a myth (sic).”
I am in the middle of Ron Chernow’s biography of George Washington, and I can assure you, if you had any doubt, that individual greatness is no myth.
The only way to sustain an attitude like that Dean’s, in my view, is to be completely ignorant of human history, including the history of Apollo 13, and to be prejudiced, for some bizarre reason, against exemplary academic work. I admit it continues to baffle me when I encounter the avoidance, among both educators and funders, of the exemplary history papers I publish.
But here you are in a school which does admire individual greatness and which gives you an unusual chance to do outstanding academic work, whether the wider American society wants you to spend 53 hours a week on electronic entertainment media, and one hour on homework, or not.
Thanks again for this opportunity to speak to you, and I will conclude by encouraging you as students of Magic not to neglect your study of the Defense Against the Dark Arts—of ignorance, superstition and anti-elitism.
Thank you.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
