Primrose Road

It's fascinating (yet not surprising) that confidence doesn't correlate with correctness at all. In fact, when a professor teaching a Cognitive Psych class showed us some studies published in educational psychology journals that suggested a negative correlation between learner confidence and learner correctness, I wanted to jump up out of my seat and wave the studies in the faces of those "self-esteem philosophy" advocates who prefer feel-good teaching to methods of teaching that actually allow learners to, well, learn.

Harriet Hall offers a nice summary of this concept in her review of On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not, which will most likely be my book-of-choice for a 12-hour train ride I'll be taking early next month.

Though I wish the commenters on the Science Based Medicine blog would stop hatin' on postmodernism. ::sniffle:: ;)

Apply Corner allows you to rate grad school applicants' chances of getting into various programs. Applicants post their degree information and GRE scores, and you select from a scale of "reach" to "safety."

It's a nice way to inject a dose of realism into the "I like to read, I'm gonna go to grad school!" process, but it doesn't go far enough. First, there's no such thing as a 'safety' school when it comes to a Ph.D. program; it's not like undergrad. They're going to accept a lot fewer applicants, and they're not looking for the "well-rounded" student who's in every club and volunteers in the community - they're looking for people who can do the work. So unless you're applying to Bob's Online College of Diploma Mill Studies, there's no 'sure thing' or 'safety school' for the Ph.D.

And looking at some of the GPAs and undergrad majors on the site, the top of the scale should not be "reach." NYU and Columbia were big reaches for me. If your GPA is below 3.3 and you're just going to grad school because you like books, those schools would be in the "impossible" category.

(I tried to get into the Yale School of Drama once, but the door was locked.)

Educational psychologists often remind us that the philosophy of "you can do whatever you put your mind to" has negative effects on young people because you can't do whatever you put your mind to. (I should probably cite something here, but my ed psych notes remain in a not-yet-unpacked abyss.)

The ed psych grad student who taught the Cognitive class I took last summer said that one of the worst things you can say to a kid is, "JUST TRY HARDER," because a lot of kids will try harder and will still not succeed. Just try harder, you can do whatever you put your mind to, it's all very Puritan-work-ethic.

So I call for "impossible" and "there are many other things you can do, just not this" categories on the site.

Why we teach Shakespeare: because he's not full of cliches, because his plays don't follow anything resembling Freytag's Pyramid, and because half the time, what happens just doesn't make sense. Hamlet stabs the guy behind the curtain even though he just saw Uncle Dad praying down the hall. Everyone Caesar ever met stabs him and all he can ask -- when he's inexplicably still alive -- is "et tu, Brute?". Cressida goes back home. Hermione is magically resurrected and no one ever asks if it's possible to bring her son back to life too. Valentine says, "ok, take her, she's yours, it's better we should stay friends." Life for most people doesn't work via action-reaction, cause-effect, motivation, or "if you just try harder ..." and neither does Shakespeare.

When Mary Janell Metzger spent a month observing a high school Advanced Placement class, she found that the course's standardization exerted "a pressure that at once excludes ambiguity and reflection and encourages vague generalities" (24). This is what my 'best' students have come to me with: vague generalities. The students Metzger observed, college bound and at the top of their graduating class, read in Shakespeare meaningless self-esteem driven cliches like "imagination is important" and "follow your dreams."

Sure, she concedes, Shakespeare's work encourages students to develop "imagination." But so much more importantly, they call for "a daring capacity to entertain ambiguity and the paradoxes of human life and history" (24). And Shakespeare sure is a great way of teaching them that human history is damn ambiguous.

(At the same time, maybe happiness on a personal level is being in a place where you are able to believe that your life is entirely unparadoxical, explainable, and simultaneously dependent on moments of character-driven motivation and miracles.)

....

Works Cited:

Metzger, Mary Janell. "The villainy you teach me ...": Shakespeare and AP English literature. The English Journal. 92:1 (2002): 22-28.