Primrose Road

The Passover Haggadah, told in Facebook.

(I like God's "25 Things You Didn't Know About Me" list and the random Bernie Madoff appearance.)

There's an article in this quarter's Skeptic magazine about some of the causes and effects of the "positive thinking" movement in American culture that for the most part rehashes previous arguments about self-esteem and The Secret but presents some interesting facts about the self-esteem movement in the classroom. Author Steve Salerno notes that psychologists found that while students in three Asian countries had stronger academic skills, students to whom they were compared in the United States "expressed much higher self-appraisals." The self-esteem movement may have simply made students feel more confident about poor academic skills and destroyed their ability to self-appraise, a skill that educational psychologists have shown is actually important to academic performance.

I remember several years ago taking a course within the composition program at my university's English department and students presenting unreflectingly positive reviews of a book that suggested that grading was akin to violence. At the same time, I was taking educational psychology courses and learning about research that shows that teaching is most effective when clear objectives are set and evaluated as quantitatively as possible. Though grading, when not used correctly, can indeed serve as a method of punishing students who do not enter the classroom with a certain skill set, I wonder if the grading-as-metaphor-for-violence idea instead comes from a concern that grading simply doesn't feel good.

Self-esteem feels good. Of course, as any competent psychologist will tell you, what feels good isn't always good for you; in fact, psychological treatment itself can often be unpleasant. While I think that we do need to eliminate the correlation between standardized testing and funding and socialize our public schools a bit more so that every child actually does have the opportunity to start from the same place, I at the same time do not believe that holding this view means that I must also buy into the idea that if it feels good, it is good. Policy in this case needs to be left up to educational psychologists, not self-esteem pushers and people with ideas about metaphors.

Many apologies, dear reader(s?), for the lack of updates. (Oddly, I've had over 2500 hits this month. Remind me to do a wacky searches post soon.) I had to travel to the West Coast for a conference and have had much to do teaching- and dissertation-wise.

More posts soon, I assure you.

Tonight I went to Purim services (description for the uninitiated) dressed as my dissertation.

I pinned a title page to the front of my shirt and a few pages of footnotes to the back, then printed out random pages from drafts and pinned them to my sleeves and trousers. During the service, I kept turning around to find people reading my back!

Still, nothing beat the grown man dressed in a full Tigger suit.

Along with seder plates, shabbat candles, and kiddush cups, Bed Bath and Beyond's "Judaica" section includes a Pig-Wearing-a-Bikini Wine Stopper.

To answer your question: OF COURSE we're going to register for it.

Updates will likely be slow for a while ... I'm grading this week and writing a paper for a conference that's two weeks away.

http://www.weebls-stuff.com/toons/Potato/