Self-Reported 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.”

Sixteen months after her thesis committee pitch, Margo rips open a manila folder.  Inside there’s raw data collected by the Survey Research Center from 600 7^th graders.  First up:  Grover Cleveland Middle.  Caldwell, NJ.  She gets no further than the demographic summary before the first wave of nausea overtakes her.  The profanity starts low in her belly and works its way up.

The third respondent is seven feet tall, 400 pounds.  A one-legged, Native American bisexual, he has three kids.  He’s served two sentences for dealing crack.  And he’s only 14.

“An outlier.  Please, god, let him be an outlier,” Margo starts to pray.  But the improbable drug dealer has friends.  Extraordinary friends.  Hermaphrodites, award-winning actors, schizophrenics, victims of incest, murderers, spelling bee champions, mathematical savants – a playful group of young teens who have had fun at her very considerable expense.  They have invented personae as comic exercise.  Darkened ovals on their response sheets form geometric patterns.    “Dammit, dammit, dammit,” the grad student chants under her breath.  “They’re useless.”  All she can think about is how far in debt she is, the price tag for a doctorate in Educational Psychology.

Oh, Grow Up!
Tom Hiddleston 
as Loki, Norse God of Mischief
 (in your pick of pretty much 
all the recent Marvel movies)

Maybe Margo calms as she scans the remaining responses, gradually trusting that truth will emerge from time-tested methodology.  Or maybe she becomes a poster child for the research of Joseph P. Robinson-Cimpian from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Last week Robinson-Cimpian published Inaccurate Estimation of Disparities Due to Mischievous Responders.  His common sense observation:  adolescent trouble-makers like to screw with people.  “Mischievous responders are ubiquitous in adolescent research using self-administered questionnaires and can, even in small numbers, lead to inaccurate conclusions that substantively affect research, policy, and public discourse regarding a variety of disparities.” 

The implications are enormous [and obvious], particularly in a world that offers little objective proof of achievement.  Should high schools continue instruction in the fine arts?  Should an assistant professor be promoted?  Are Facebook bullies a threat?  Do the assignments of a given class demand a fair work load?  Ask an adolescent.

As a group, adolescents are not especially evil.  But they don’t generally feel the weight of surveys.  They don’t know they’re used to hire and fire, to fund and defund.  Or maybe they do know.  Maybe anonymity frees a (sometimes-playful) show of power. 

Races are won against clock and competitor.  Walls are built to satisfy a carpenter’s level.  Projects are completed on-time and under-budget.  The success of many human endeavors may be measured by objective means.  Where the measure is anonymous and self-reported, however, it’s possible the resulting data and evaluation deserve greater and more frequent scrutiny.

Trophy Kids

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:

• Kids know the difference between receiving a trophy and earning one… but they’re not sure adults do.  Because adults praise them no matter their level of success, their authenticity is suspect over time.
• Students who are praised for their intelligence are often paralyzed by the threat of failure.  If they fail, are they no longer intelligent?  It’s in the best interest of such children to repeat successes (often beneath their ability level) and avoid challenges (often slightly outside their comfort zone). 
• By contrast, students who are praised for hard work (a character trait over which they seem to have more control than intelligence or beauty) are often emboldened to attempt more.  Hard work (and not success) becomes their defining characteristic – even though the first frequently leads to the second.
• Consider a parent confronting a child:  “Did you break the vase, Mary?”  Mary wants to please her mother.  But answering “yes” admits failure.  Answering “no” is lying.  The question presents Mary no opportunity to make her parents happy.  As an alternative, suggests Merryman, try:  “It would please me to hear the truth about the broken vase.”
• Parents of young children offer incessant praise, expecting the cold reality of criticism to kick in at a later time.  They defer criticism to some future authority in the lives of their children.  But grade inflation – and even workplace perks – suggest that an honest appraisal is simply not forthcoming. 

I haven’t read the book, so I’m not necessarily coming out as an advocate.  The author did present her case with well-reasoned research.  And I’ve taught (and parented) long enough to have encountered anecdotal support of my own.

The Servile Arts

Once upon a time, the world of education was divided into three spheres:  Fine Arts, Liberal Arts, and Servile Arts.  Fine (or “Beaux”) Arts means today pretty much what it meant when the phrase was coined.  Think of bohemians in berets on the southern bank of the Seine.  Painters, sculptors, poets, all making beautiful things.

Liberal and Servile Arts perhaps require a bit more historical context.  Imagine a bunch of rich lads in Genoa, drinking wine as they plot to spend their fathers’ fortunes.  Theirs is a gentrified world not unlike Downton Abbey (though predating it by at least six centuries).  Lots of leisure time for the upper classes, but with less indoor plumbing and more church attendance.  The fellows decide – more or less as a hobby – they’d like to know something about mathematics.  They pool a few ducats and pay some monk to teach them a little algebra.  Voila!  The University is born.

The subjects they choose are meant to better the minds and character of free citizens.  Artes liberales – the arts of liberty:  grammar, rhetoric, logic, philosophy, arithmetic, astronomy, and the like.  As Academia matures, these subjects expand to include the humanities and sciences.

Lesser known and spoken of today are the Servile Arts.  These are civilization’s necessary skills, practiced by… well… not free men.  A list of these Artes mechanicae from the ninth century includes weaving, cooking, agriculture, masonry, metalwork, and warfare (the martial art).  I'd argue that the class-informed division of Liberal Arts and Servile Arts persists and complicates instruction in a subject like Digital Filmmaking.

Serfing the internet

Imagine, Rachel, a first-year filmmaker is taught the meaning of the phrase “shooting ratio.”  She writes it on a flash card.  On the back of the card is a terse definition:  “the ratio between a film’s final edited running time and the total footage exposed or captured for the project.”  Her roommate quizzes her on it and other terms from her Cinema Appreciation course.  She recalls it on the final exam and even uses it once in class discussion.

Rachel believes her flash cards prepare her her for a 200-level production course.  The professor hands her a camera and tells to practice a focus pull.  Rachel sets the device on a tripod and twists the focus ring.  The frame’s clarity (and viewer’s attention) moves from the background of her shot to its foreground.  She pulls focus a dozen times during the class, until she achieves a satisfying take.  Rachel surrenders the camera to other members of her group.  The five of them take turns doing what Rachel did.  The ritual is repeated around three other cameras.  At the end of the period, all twenty class members will claim they learned how to do a focus pull.

But they are no more proficient at focus pulls than is a bricklayer who’s laid only a dozen bricks.  Who can say he’s “learned” to lay bricks?  A craftsman who can reliably repeat the action on demand, whose mortar lines are consistently even, whose resulting walls are level and plumb.  In short, the useful skills of the Servile Arts take longer to acquire than the knowledge of the Liberal Arts.

But the current paradigm of “learning” the Servile Arts is a bit like following a recipe.  Tom has limited kitchen experience, but is having a dinner party and wants to bake a cake.  He sifts through the internet, collects ingredients, and combines them as instructed.  He pulls the result from the oven and sets it before impressed guests.  They make appreciative yummy noises. 

Tom is not a chef.  He doesn’t understand which ingredients act as leavening agents and which offer flavor.  He has never substituted kefir for buttermilk.  He has not experimented with presentation or garnishes.

In this way, Tom is like Adam, an amateur editor.  Adam is assembling a music video and wants to dissolve from one shot to another.  He looks through the software’s help menu, then consults a YouTube tutorial.  Now he knows the recipe of function keys that will accomplish a given visual effect.  The result pleases him and perhaps even his audience of Facebook followers.

It would be overstatement to call Adam a learned editor.  Or Rachel a competent camera operator.  They each followed a recipe, a filmmaking tip.  Until they’ve done their tasks so often their fingers can perform without their brains, until they can customize their tasks to create meaning, they are amateurs.  They are walking, but they are looking at their feet.  They are dancing, but their lips still move as they count steps.

Rachel is frustrated.  She did so well in Cinema Appreciation.  But it’s taking her for freaking ever to prep for the camera quiz.  Her prof’s asked her to submit five well-executed focus pulls, five smooth pans, and five tilts – all while obeying composition’s Rule of Thirds.

Some of her frustrations arise from the sixteen-week term, the fifty-minute class period, the mythic ratio of “two hours outside class for every one hour in it.”  The Academy’s trusted timetables are better suited to acquiring the Liberal Arts.  Even basic competence in the Servile Arts requires more hours of practice.

Yet the pressure is on to increase the usefulness of a college degree.  Parents in this economy, fearful of considerable student debt, always question their child’s employment prospects.  They do not ask “What will Johnny know when he graduates?”  Rather, they ask “What can Johnny do with his degree?”  These customer inquiries are shoving the Servile Arts into the Liberal Arts mold – frequently to the consternation of students and teachers.