Good Drones or Questioning Citizens?

Below is a column, posted online last week, by a blogger who calls himself “The Rude Pundit”. He commonly visits spicy nooks and crannies of the English language which I tend not to visit, myself. So while I would like to quote the piece verbatim here, it includes strong language that I generally avoid in this space, and in my personal and professional life. So I shall quote it after applying a gentle editing pen to it – at the risk of overly watering down what probably a more effective rant when it does include the F-bombs and such. I’m not sure whether I’d want my own stuff edited for content by someone else, so this may be presumptuous of me. Literary and artistic integrity is important. If you want to read the column in the Original Vernacular, and I recommend it (people who know me will be startled to discover that I can approve of the occasional appropriately-flung profanity), do wander over and scroll downward and find it and read it, as well as almost anything else he writes. His blog is basically a series of aggrieved rants that mostly feature a lot of common sense.

The Rude Pundit’s main thrust here is the subject of standardized testing at the college level. I’m a teacher who has experienced the exquisite joy of standardized testing in public secondary education. In Massachusetts, No Child Left Behind and our own state version of education reform has yielded MCAS, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment something-or-other, in which our students get to kill three or four weeks of valuable educational time taking pencil-and-paper tests that will, by the 11th grade, serve as the sole arbiters of “…well? Can s/he graduate or not?” By extension, that will determine how well the schools are doing, which is to say, how well the teachers are doing, so the sword of Damocles hangs over everyone’s head – including (to an extent) administrators, whose jobs occasionally are on the line according to test results, and who pass that stress on to the teaching faculty. The MCAS subjects don’t include music, so at the moment I’m not directly in the crosshairs of the testing push – I have on occasion half-joked that if ever there’s a music MCAS, I’m going into insurance. (If there’s ever a music MCAS, let’s face it, I’ll know I’ve fallen into an alternate universe.)

Another subject of the Pundit’s ire is the array of assessment organizations that swoop in and regularly coerce school administration officials into providing Tasks for its faculty (in addition to, you know, teaching), which usually involve extra time spent on committees and department task forces. Those Tasks include rewriting or re-organizing or re-formatting or just plain re-copying their curriculum materials, and to create exciting new “goals”, and other items that often feel like busy-work. I’ve been mixed up in this process more than once in my teaching career. At those times, I have taken deep breaths, squared my shoulders, and half-convinced myself that it was worthwhile to codify my lesson plans, techniques and tactics. Next to no one, even the administrators who have pointed us toward these tasks, has ever looked to me like they really enjoyed using their time to accomplish these things. But someone, somewhere, out there in the shadowy world of education policymaking, has declared that it has been a Good Idea, so as to Prepare Our Students for the Twenty-First Century and get them Ready to be part of the Workforce.

(As a teacher of the fine arts, I’m usually a little disappointed that we’re not nearly so concerned about Preparing Our Students to have a clue about things like culture and other things that make humans more than just future Twenty-First Century Economic Engine Parts. If they don’t recognize the names Mark Twain, Louis Armstrong, or Mort Sahl, then we got ourselves a problem. But that’s a subject for another time, and another hijacked column.)

So here’s the column, which makes a number of suppositions about the genesis of these Assessments and Tasks that make a certain amount of sense to me [particularly the end of the absurdly long paragraph in the middle of the column]. Although I do post this with apologies to my friends who attended Ivy League schools … whom I know do not fall into the slightly whitewashed category into which the Rude Pundit sees fit to place them all [remember also, one of my favorite phrases, which I may have made up: “People Who Generalize Suck”] …

See what you think.

 

David Brooks Understands [Everything] About Colleges

“The Rude Pundit doesn’t spend a lot of time writing about his profession because, frankly, he just doesn’t think a lot of what we do is very interesting to most everyone everywhere. But New York Times writer David Brooks decided to s*** where the Rude Pundit sleeps, and, between that and an enraging sliming in the Washington Post a couple of weeks ago [a column by a former university chancellor called 'Do College Professors Work Hard Enough?'], a response is more than justified.

“Today, in his ‘column’ (if by ‘column,’ you mean, ‘the pathetic pleadings of an elitist prig begging to demonstrate his regular dude street cred’), Brooks cites a few studies and books that say that students simply aren’t learning very much in their college experience in the last couple of decades. You can tell where he’s coming from by this line: ‘At some point, parents are going to decide that $160,000 is too high a price if all you get is an empty credential and a fancy car-window sticker.’

“Let’s unpack that for just a moment: he’s obviously talking about rich students at elite institutions, where ‘parents’ can obviously afford $40,000 a year. Because that ain’t about kids who have to pile up student loans and get government assistance. And it ain’t about the vast majority of schools in the nation which cost far, far less. Oh, and one thing. Let’s not be naive. Of course, those parents are buying a fancy car-window sticker. And the schools know that. Grade inflation has been a far greater problem at Ivy League institutions than elsewhere. Why? Because Harvard and Columbia and Yale need to keep those cash teats good and ready for suckling.

“’One part of the solution is found in three little words,’ Brooks says, and if you know anything about a conservative approach to education, you know what he’s gonna say. ‘Value-added assessments. Colleges have to test more to find out how they’re doing.’ Yes, yes, yes, let’s test more because it’s done so very much to improve public schools in America.

“Let’s get this straight, David Brooks and every other stupid [person] on the right who wants to solve the ‘problem’ of college education (or any education) in America, and this comes from someone who has been at this job for over twenty [expletive deleted] years: You [screwed] it up. Back in the 1980s, you got [scared] when multiculturalism and ethnic/gender/queer/whatever studies began to take hold in academia. You published idiot books that said that what educators wanted to do about education was wrong and that people outside of academia should actually be involved in setting standards. And then you went further. Colleges, you decided, needed to be run like businesses, blaming colleges for the ever-rising tuition rates when, in reality, the problem was worthless tax cuts, going back to Sainted Reagan, that did [nothing] to help the economy but forced states to gut funding to universities, but, no, no, it really was that schools needed to be run efficiently, like businesses, and if a college is now a business, with the bottom line being the only line, and not a place where people get, you know, educated, then you have a [expletive deleted] responsibility to your customers, in this case, the students, to make them happy with the business where they are spending their money. The Rude Pundit’s own institution is now in the midst of ‘streamlining’ the general education requirements so that students can graduate more easily. It’s under the guise of ‘making transfer easier’ or some such [nonsense], but it’s really about getting the kids through to get more money. And let’s not even get into the evisceration of public education at the primary and secondary levels so that the students that are coming to college are starting at a point where freshman composition is now ‘How you write a sentence with proper grammar and punctuation because your high school teachers were forced to transform their classrooms into test prep labs so that the place where they work won’t be shut down.’ And let’s not get into the over-reliance on criminally overworked and underpaid adjunct faculty to teach the vast majority of college classes, people who often work at several institutions in order to cobble together a liveable wage. And let’s not even get into an economy that has transformed technologically and socially without any concomitant investment in those things that might actually allow people to be ready for the jobs that are out there. And let’s not get into the devaluing of a broad, liberal arts education that creates thinkers and doesn’t just train people to work. [Expletive deleted], what’s better to those in power? Good drones or questioning citizens?

“And you know who caused all these [expletive deleted] problems? The [people] who went to the $160,000 schools who figured out a way to scam and scare everyone into ‘value-added assessments’ as some kind of Holy Grail of education.

“Every couple of years, every department in the Rude Pundit’s college has to deal with some ‘assessment’ organization coming in and forcing them to justify everything they do. One of the last groups made the departments create rubrics of goals and lists of assessment tools to reach those goals. It was pencil-pushing, ego-soothing nonsense. It was overlaying a factory model onto the role of colleges. But you can be sure as [hell] that someone made money on the whole nonsensical exercise in futility.

“But, no, really, David Brooks, by all means, let’s waste another s***load of everyone’s time and money on more worthless testing. It’s far better than just letting professors do their [expletive deleted] jobs.”

Gotta Love It

“Don’t judge a book by its cover.” This is what I was taught when I was very small. Just because someone’s appearance matches a widely-accepted image of how this or that person or people usually are … doesn’t necessarily mean that’s how that someone really is.

Every once in a while, though, image and reality are one and the same.

As a high school student, years and years before I succumbed to the truth that I really wanted music to be my vocation, I had clung to the philosophy that “you can’t make a living at it”. So, as I tried to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up, I considered that writing had always been one of my “other” favorite activities — and my experiences with school newspapers and the like suggested that journalism might be the path to follow. Following the time-honored tradition of 17-year-olds being asked to decide on a collegiate major that would in turn influence their life’s work, I looked for a college that had a well-regarded journalism major program. (Considering what I knew and didn’t know at age 17 … and what I didn’t know that I didn’t know! … I now believe that time-honored tradition to be entirely unrealistic. On the other hand, there are people who fret that if their kid doesn’t get into the right preschool, Harvard and Yale won’t be an option later, so what do I know?)

I found such a school, right in my backyard, more or less: the University of Massachusetts.  At the time, research could not be done online, since there really was no such thing as online … so, utilizing the information gleaned from the card catalogs and reference books of various local public libraries and guidance department bookshelves, I got the sense that UMass-Amherst had journalistic things happening.

Plus, a heck of a band. We’re immediately into the double bonus here.

Fast-forward to a couple of semesters into my college life. One particular journalism class that I needed to take was taught by just one professor – and my thought was, “ah! At last.”

The professor’s name was Howard Ziff.

I’d occasionally glimpsed him on my way through the halls of journalism (well, okay, the one hallway in UMass’ Bartlett Hall wherein the Journalistic Studies program offices were located): a grizzly bear of a man, with a voice that rumbled at about a comfortable 2.1 on the Richter scale.

I hadn’t had a single conversation with him yet, but somehow I knew that he fit my stereotypical image of a genuine journalist perfectly.

As the Pulitzer prize-winning UMass journalism professor Madeleine Blais said recently, Ziff “was more of a city editor than even a real city editor. Young men and women came to feel like they had met the real thing. He had a gruff exterior, was good with one-liners, smoked a pipe and claimed to have a bottle of Scotch in his desk.”

And so, I attended his class at the wintry beginning of an Amherst spring semester.

First impressions don’t often lie. I left the first meeting of the class wishing that the second one would start right away. As the semester went on, I did the readings, wrote the papers, completed the course requirements. But, to paraphrase an old saying, I came for the coursework but I stayed for the stories. The man was the city editor at the Chicago Daily News in the 1960s, for heaven’s sake! He had an air of authenticity that simply cannot be bought at the local 7-11.

 

Howard M. Ziff passed away yesterday. Already, myriad Ziff stories have begun to surface publicly, brought forward by legions of former students and other admirers; and most of them in some way point to that quality of being the Real Deal, the (forgive the pun) genuine article. (The stories were always there, of course … but as always seems to be the case, it’s after someone passes away that people are moved to wax eloquent. It’s not wrong; though it is sad that so often that’s what it takes for us to tell people what we think of them. I could honestly have written this very piece last week, last month, last year… last decade?  Once upon a time I heard someone suggest that they wouldn’t mind hearing how they’d be eulogized – and I heard someone else suggest that we should hold “memorial services” for people while they’re still with us … though I do get a slightly odd sense about that idea.)

One Ziff story goes this way: word came in to the Chicago Daily News city desk in April of 1968 that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. Ziff turned to a reporter and said, “Find Rosa Parks.”

Holy cow.

In the Daily Hampshire Gazette’s article about Ziff’s passing, there is a proliferation of nouns such as editor, teacher, mentor, raconteur (love that one!), friend; and adjectives including dedicated, ebullient, streetwise, legendary, gruff, wise. All accurate. Most important – and most desperately needed nowadays – was his philosophy of the teaching of journalism: that, as UMass journalism professor B.J. Roche put it, “it should be not just a vocational field but a humanities-based thing where professors were not just teaching people how to type but to understand the role of journalism in the world. [Ziff] thought there were certain obligations that went beyond interviewing celebrities.”

Anyway, back to the mid/late-1980s. This journalism major … whose life was at least as much wrapped up in music made while on one’s feet and wearing a bright red uniform and a hat with feathers sticking up out of it … received the benefit of Howard Ziff’s wisdom for several semesters. He took me seriously as a journalism student – seriously enough that I made sure to take his subject seriously right back. You cannot fool the Real Deal. You cannot fudge an assignment, not if you’re going to pass it in to a professor who, as UMass Alumni Association fixture Jon Hite put it, “could very easily be the most interesting man in the world.”

And yet … here I am, making a living as a music teacher now. Ordinarily, I’d be unsure as to how to square that reality with the fact that one of my professors was as committed to journalism as anyone could be, and that I had reacted so strongly and positively to that commitment. I had been considering moving on from the editorial world, as I was starting to doubt my ability to make an actual living within it (how do those words taste, Rob?). Weirdly, when that editorial world laid me off, even though the layoff cleared the way for me to pursue a next career, I felt just a wee bit … well, if not guilty, then at least odd … about the fact that not quite seven years after having invested all that time and money in a journalism degree, I was pulling the ripcord.

There was one conversation, though, that occurred somewhat before that layoff … which eased my mind a bit.

 

I was spending a fall weekend back on the UMass campus, staying overnight with local friends and visiting the Friday afternoon and Saturday morning rehearsals of the Minuteman Marching Band – followed of course by the Saturday football game, and all the halftime and postgame pageantry that went with it. I wore my band jacket all weekend – badly faded, but still evidence of all the school spirit that came with four years in the band.

After the Friday afternoon rehearsal, I walked away from Old Chapel, then the home of the band, and past the nearby Bartlett Hall, on my way to my car … and crossed paths with Professor Ziff.

A great big rumble of a greeting: “Rob Hammerton, how are you.” There was no question mark at the end of that sentence, so I have dutifully not included it here either. I was beyond pleased: years later after my graduation, I was still somewhere in his database. I obviously would have hoped so, but … at the same time, I wasn’t quite sure. He was a busy man; and how many hundreds – thousands? – of names and faces has he had to keep straight over the years?

We exchanged questions and answers that were just this side of small talk. “What’re you doing now. How’s it going.” (Again, no question marks.) Well, there’s not much actual journalism in my current editorial job; in fact, the writing that I do, according to the style sheet of the magazine, doesn’t even get me a byline. Tough to develop a portfolio that way. It’s a trade magazine, after all, not the Boston Globe. To my employers, Chicago isn’t an editorial style, it’s a trade show locale.

Ziff grunted sympathetically. Then he asked a question that he seemed to know the answer to, already.

“So, it’s after business hours. What brings you back here tonight?” There was a definite question mark there.

Well, tomorrow’s High School Band Day, and I came out from eastern Mass. to lend a hand wherever they might need it. It’s going to be the usual 3000-person-strong day of organized chaos, …so.

“Ah yes,” said Ziff. “Makes sense.” Without a trace of guilt-laying, or sarcasm, or disappointment. “It’s great that you still come up and stay connected with this.” Well, I’ve got friends and a sister who are marching right now, so I get to hang out with them as well. “Which is important.” And then, Ziff said it:

“Anyway, yes, you were a good journalism guy, but let’s face it: you were really majoring in band.”

In the hands of a different person, that remark might have reduced me to a smoldering pile of journalistic ashes. But Ziff said it with a conspiratorial twinkle in his eye and a smile in his voice (he might have been actually smiling, but his beard and pipe made it tough to spot sometimes). So instead, I was able to smile a bit, to abashedly agree with him, to be not at all surprised that all that time he’d seen right through me … and to walk away not just alive (!) but reassured that it was probably okay if I pursued a career other than journalism. I’d been reassured by one of the titans of the industry that I should do something I love, even if it was in someone else’s industry. Perhaps if it had been any other (lesser?) journalism professor, I’d have spent the rest of the weekend with the weight of that world on my shoulders. But Howard Ziff made it clear: you need to do what you love.

That’s not all I miss him for; but it counts for a lot, I think.

Revenge of the Subconscious

I will admit that in the past, when I have seen the slogan “My Karma Ran Over Your Dogma”, I have chuckled, without fully understanding it. Karma, dualism, existentialism … I think I managed not to take any classes in college that would help me with philosophical matters. For the love of God (or whomever claims jurisdiction in this case), I had to go to Wikipedia to find out a decent definition.

Not eight hours after posting my most recent diatribe about ineffective presenters, I found myself an unwilling participant in a dream whose details I now still recall rather vividly, and whose plot can be boiled down to this: your humble blogger was a humble and, in spite of all possible efforts, pretty ineffective presenter – to the point that someone else (a rather justly-famous Someone Else) stepped in and bailed me out. (At least I had the presence of mind to thank that Someone at the end of the dream for his work. No, I’m serious. “Thank him, please!”, I called out to my class, in a very familiar tone of voice … )

Whether it was my subconscious mind “doing its laundry”, as dreams are alleged to do … or whether it was my various (otherwise harshly tamped-down) professional insecurities holding court … or whether it was my mind wondering how many of my readers read “Professional Development is Where You Find It” and deduced that I must be an egotistical lout who thinks he knows more about teaching and effective presenting than anyone else on the face of this utterly insignificant little blue-green planet …

It was a rather fitful lesson in humility.

Ouch.

Now, to prepare that piece about Great Teachers I Have Known …