Extra Credit For Sale

I've sent e-mails, Tweets, texts, IMs, and Facebook updates. I've made personal appeals with handshakes in the hall. Finally, I ended the exam period with a reminder to students to fill out their on-line course evaluations. One student said "I hear other teachers are giving points for a certain class response percentage. What do we get if we evaluate you? " A friendly class opinion leader with whom I have a good relationship, he had the mischievous gleam in his eye of a boy who's just discovered the closet in which his parents hide unwrapped presents.

Excellence by Default

"Asking students to evaluate their professors anonymously is like Trader Joe's soliciting Yelp reviews from a shoplifter." -- Rebecca Shuman, education columnist for Slate.

An exhausted alternator took out the truck's electrical system.  I coasted to the side of the road and called AAA.  Six hours and $1100 later, I was back on the road. 

Please, don't give me grief for going to the dealership.  I do know better.  It was the closest service garage.  Yes, $1100 is an outrageous price to pay for an alternator and a new battery.  But the waiting area had a fireplace, a coffee bar, and a concierge.  Well, the coffee bar was really a trio of thermoses.  And the concierge was a secretary who relayed customer questions to mechanics.  But the fireplace was real.  Well, it was a real gas fireplace.  So the flames were real.

Nurture Shock & Trophy Kids

Alex Gregory for The New Yorker

Recently, I listened to an interview with Ashley Merryman, co-author of Nurture Shock: New Thinking About Children.  She argues that we’ve raised a generation of trophy kids.  They are rewarded not for excellence so much as mere existence.  One example:  more money is spent on trophies by youth soccer organizations nationwide than on coach training or equipment.  Indeed, parents faced with little league budget cuts more often choose to save money by playing fewer games than by giving fewer trophies.

Some other highlights from Merryman’s interview:

Self-Reported Mischief

Tom Hiddleston as Loki, the Norse god of mischief.

Last year, Margo created a survey to gauge attitudes toward bullies by their middle school peers.  The questions took months to draft and vet for bias. The Institutional Review Board checked her protocol against NSF rules for the ethical treatment and informed consent of human subjects.  The survey was tested on a dozen middle schoolers.  Three of them misunderstood the wording of question 17.  Six more rewrites.

Next Margo sought guinea pigs.  She needed a representative mix of ethnicities and genders.  Some urban schools, some rural.  Private and public.  Bible Belt South and affluent Northeast.  Six weeks of research, e-mails, and snail mail.  The begging phone calls to sixty principals:  “Yes sir.  Completely anonymous.  I know, sir.  You’re absolutely right; the school day is precious.  I promise.  Fifteen minutes, max.”