Affective Objectives?
“Are there other affective objectives that would be more in sync with this particular class?”
And there is the rub. It isn’t that I am down on the idea of affective objectives that could be included in a curriculum; it is that all evidence I saw in my exposure to the Boston school system was that the curriculum was built around non-cognitive goals. I once asked a “why” type of a question in one of the groups (I think it was why is studying history important) and the kids answered in a monotone chant, eyes rolling like only a fourteen year old can master, their school mantra about valuing diversity. The question of why is this important had only been put to them in terms of understanding and valuing diversity. They couldn’t have a dance recital to understand dance, they had to have a dance recital that celebrated one of the many ethnic groups heritage, for example. They couldn’t have a cooking class where they learned how to measure and read instructions, they had to have a class on what role the empanada serves in indigenous cultures. They could tell you about esoteric traditions with the same type of recall I break out once every five years for Catholic Mass. Recall that is based solely on repetition with no application
And while I am sure the administrator and the teachers who instituted these guidelines were incredibly well intentioned, the result was that the affective objectives were misfiring, and in the mean time, they were producing kids who couldn’t read and write.
The girls in my knitting class became more self-confident because they finally got math – a freaky, abstract concept that no one ever really explained in a way they could understand and no one ever really required them to know. Their self-confidence came from the mastery of a cognitive skill.
I hope I am not seeming to stubborn or antiquated in my resistance, but I believe that affective objectives need to be introduced at a higher level of the scaffolding, after the mastery of the cognitive skills have been proven. Other wise they can distract from the job at hand.
Olympic Village
The Olympic Flame arrived in Milan today. I wonder what those fashion divas would think of my entry for the ‘06 winter games. Fellow olympiads and spectators alike, may I introduce you to my knitting event? The Thrumb – no, not the ubiquitous thrumb mittens, but Muffy:
I know what you are thinking – you could knit those up during the commerical break of the opening games, but here is the twist. I am going to spin the yarn myself. And, I’m going to use them to wear to my own personal/fitness olympic event – either a rigorous/hilly snowshoe (3 miles) or hike (7 mile) depending on the weather, in any case, I am nominating myself Captain of the 2006 Knitting Olympics Move Your Bottom Challenge and I invite you to join me.
Confessions of a recovering communard:
I spent the better part of the week trying to do this as a podcast, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out my Garage Band and I am resistant to blow the $$ on an upgrade to a program I didn’t know existed a week ago.
In our class forum, Elaine offered the following as a supporting objective to an apprenticeship I taught a few years ago: “students will choose a charity, through the act of consensus, to receive the afghan.” I will confess that my immediate reaction wasn’t words so much as a sound of frustration coming through my nasal cavity. I don’t have a problem with the apprentices * choosing the charity, although in this situation I had picked out a group called Erin’s Afghan’s as the recipients because I thought inner city kids might be able to relate to an organization who provided afghans and fully loaded backpacks to boys and girls ripped from their homes and literally dumped into foster care. I remember picking out the charity before our first meeting as a deliberate action, I didn’t want to distract my apprentices from the process of learning to knit and this was an organization that for some reason really tugged at my heartstrings.
It was, instead, the idea of choosing a charity by consensus that irked me. Consensus is a wonderful idea in theory but in my experience, may be one of the surest ways to kill debate and actually encourage apathy. And I say this as a former believer. In my early twenties I was quite involved in a number of leftist causes, including a well-known intentional community that did some pioneering work regarding consensus. The idea of exhaustive debate and reconciliation is liberating and restraining at the same time and requires the explicit consent of the participants. To drop the idea, let alone the expectation of consensus on a group of educationally disadvantaged pre-teens is misguided.
As I was preparing this post, I kept thinking about the early days of the voter registration drives in the south in the early 1960s. It didn’t take long for the white northern students to realize they needed to educate the locals about voting, so in many communities “voter education” programs gave birth to “voter registration” which then gave birth to the political organizing and political parties, but it took time. Days and weeks turned into months and years. To walk in and expect people who have never voted before to form their own progressive political party would be setting them up for failure.
I find consensus decision making more demanding than forming a political party because you need agreement at every stage of the process and you simultaneously water down all decisions that are made while losing less invested members through attrition in the process. Unless everyone in the group is educated in consensus and freely chose it as the process by which all decision are made, to set consensus decision making up as a subsequent goal would be unrealistic at best and irresponsible at worst.
I am still working out the pedagogical implications for this and will explore that in my next post.
* – Citizen Schools is based on a apprenticeship model and my students were considered apprentices.
Possible Projects for the Winter Olympics
I’m still searching for my event. A trip to Knitty provided some inspiration.
Needs assessment … learning goals
… In which I try to manage my own change here at the Graduate Center …
The list of skills I thought I needed when I entered the the program last fall are quite different from the skills that I am learning, and because of that, my own learning goals are constantly evolving as put more pieces of the puzzle together. While I thought my focus would be narrow and rather methodological, I am finding the process to be far more open and self directed. But the flip side of that is making sure I cover my bases and not go to far a field with any one “frame.” I’ve pulled out Teaching for Understanding, and am hoping it contains a bit more of the “nuts and bolts” that I was expecting when I first enrolled. If I am to create a significant learning experience for myself, I need to make sure that my connections remain in agreement.
What to make, what to make?
I’m in. I thought about being a cheerleader for this event, but couldn’t resist being part of the hometown team. But what to knit? What will be my challenge? Do I stash dive and get creative or splurge for something new? Do I knit for myself or for others? Do I want the knitting to overcome a project that has become a chore or do I want to create something completely new? What is my event?
Possible events:
Sheep to shawl – if a they can do it at a Sheep and Wool festival in one day, surely I can do it in two weeks, no?
Lace Shawl – Something with more than a k2,yo pattern. Flower basket shawl perhaps?
Practical Sweater – Raid the stash, pull out the salmon/pink cestari wool and whip up a shapely raglan that I can squeeze a few more wearings out of before spring. Throw in a a cable or two to up the ante.
Sockapalozza – Break out of my hand painted sock rut and use a pattern to decorate the sock.
Maybe I’ll wait and see what events the home team is signing up for and follow the herd.
Thanks to Claudia for an amazing time on Sunday, I talked to so many interesting and kind women from near and far – enjoyed some wonderful food and made some good progress on the CO2 shrug.
Legal Cheating?
“Today, if one of the main tools workers use in a digital age is the Internet, why not include it in test-taking? After all, asserts M.I.T. economist Frank Levy, it’s more important to locate and piece together information about the World Bank than to know when it was founded.” Read more here
Study: Most College Students Lack Skills
Wow, what timing!
Study: Most College Students Lack Skills
Jan 19 2:43 PM US/Eastern
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By BEN FELLER
AP Education Writer
WASHINGTON
Nearing a diploma, most college students cannot handle many complex but common tasks, from understanding credit card offers to comparing the cost per ounce of food.
Those are the sobering findings of a study of literacy on college campuses, the first to target the skills of students as they approach the start of their careers.
More than 50 percent of students at four-year schools and more than 75 percent at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks. [ http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/01/19/D8F7UO204.html ]…
New and notable
Blog: If:Book
… “the aim of Google Book Search” is also to discover who you are. It’s capturing our clickstreams, analyzing what we’ve searched and the terms we’ve used to get there. The book is reading you. [my emphisis]
Pod:Accident Hash, its like college radio for your mid life crisis and innoculates your mind against the evil music generated by american idol.
[next up in the rotation will be The Mommy Cast Music Show ]
B is for ball
*** edited to note*** this is one from the vault, written in January 2006
A follow up to A is for Arggg.
The original ball of yarn cost me $55 (for 750 yards, I think). I’ve spent 10 hours untangling it and even though I don’t have an income stream right now, if I was billing for my time at my old rate, this ball of yarn would be costing me about $700 with about another 3-4 hours worth of untangling to go. I haven’t knit in days and won’t until I’m finished with this damn thing. Frustrated, me? No, never.
Yesterday, in an impulse moment, I took Cate to the local mall for a little indoor playground time and to do a quick check of the sales racks. It has been a year since I broke up with food, and in that time, DH and I completely changed the course of our lives. We both gave up fairly lucrative careers in finance to get our souls back – he wanted to be a stay at home dad, I wanted to go back to academics, starting with adding another graduate degree to my resume. This is our year of frugality and thrift. As the pounds started to come off, there were plenty of clothes in my closet to transition into – you know those pants you pushed to the back of the closet when they got just a smidge to small, thinking you’d pull them out when you weren’t bloated? Clothes that were too big were immediately banished to a box and when that filled up, off to the salvation army or friends in need. I’ve filled in with a piece or two from Target, but haven’t done any of that shopping that most girls claim will be the first thing they do when they lose the weight. I haven’t been tempted, mostly because I’m reluctant to spend money on transitional clothes unless they are really cheap. The result is a wardrobe built around rather butch looking basics. But something weird happened yesterday, I went in to Lane Bryant looking for a pair of chinos, (I have three pairs of pants that fit me right now, two pairs of jeans and one pair of black pants) and ended up with this:
A very, very girly looking skirt. Cate picked out a frilly, lacy cami and we topped it of with a black cardigan and some jewerly.
There are two points to this, the first is that I noticed Lane Bryant was still featuring shrugs, and very few were on sale, which tells me the moment has not passed yet. So I’m going to try and take those balls up there and turn them into one of the staff shrugs from Interweave Knits.
The second point is food/weight related. While I’ve lost a lot of weight, the progress is fairly slow and I’m ok with that most of the time. I figure slow and steady is the only way to make the changes stick and conquer my demons. I’ve been at my plateau for a while now and am ready to move on and am thinking alot about the next changes I need to make. I already walk 3.5 miles a day, close to 5 days a week, throwing in some snowshoeing when the weather allows it, with a random yoga class when I can squeeze it in. Lately, though, that isn’t enough. I know my 3 biggest weakness in exercise are the weightlifting, my cardio is no longer as intense as I need it to be, and random yoga isn’t enough to get the mind/body benefits I need. Now that I can recognize this, I’m going to try and fix it and see if I can move to the next level. For the next few weeks, I’m going to try to do weightlifting at least 3x a week, 20 minutes on the eliptical 3x a week and 10 minutes of yoga every day, in addition to my regular walk – which I can not imagine living without.