Quiddities — Musings essential and frivolous
My wife and I were laughing helplessly last night watching this video. But you have to watch it without worrying about what’s happening to the cats or babies, who catch a pretty hard time. But then cats and babies are quite resilient, and in most cases, though not always in this video, they’re close to the ground.
Above is the title of Emily Wilson’s review in the current, August 3, Times Literary Supplement of two books about Isidore of Seville, “who became patron saint of the internet in 1999.” Unfortunately the books from Cambridge University are expensive, really expensive: Barney et al.’s The Etymologies of Isidore is $150 for 475 pages, and John Henderson’s The Medieval World of Isidore of Seville: Truth from Words is $99 for 244 pages. But these would be fun books to peruse if they were affordable or if the library purchased them.
Isidore’s effort in sixth-century Spain, when it was ruled by the Visigoths, to reestablish the importance of Roman culture through its language, specifically the etymology of Latin, had an impact that was comparable to the Bible’s. Indeed, Isidore’s family “played an important role in the conversion of the Visigothic kings to Roman Catholicism, away from Arianism (a form of Christianity which denied that the Son is co-eternal with the Father).”
While Isidore’s cultural impact was profound, much of what Isidore wrote, much like the internet today, was made up. “Most of Isidore’s supposed etymologies are — by the standards of modern academic philology — complete twaddle.” Take, for example, his entry on beavers:
It may often seem as if Isadore, like a bad search engine, offers little or no control over all this material. Certainly, much of the “information” he provides is (from a modern perspective) blatantly false, albeit entertaining. For instance, we are assured that “Beavers (castor) are so-called from castrating (castrare). Their testicles are useful for medicines, on account of which, when they anticipate a hunter, they castrate themselves and amputate their own genitals with their teeth.”
Wandering the Internet, passing time while I was eating lunch, I ran across this article by Charles Wheelan, “Want Good Schools? First, Define ‘Good’,” who raises the issue of how we should measure education.
. . . schools with high test scores may or may not be doing a great job; perhaps their students are capable of much more. And conversely, some schools with middling or poor test scores may be doing a terrific job educating students who would otherwise be failing abjectly.
Obviously, we can spot the outliers — the school in the middle of Detroit that manages to send 95 percent of its students to college, say. If we give researchers enough time and enough data, they can try to answer the school-quality question using statistical techniques that take account of what kind of students are walking through the front door.
But even then the results are often equivocal. The bottom line is that it’s hard to evaluate school quality, which is why it’s even harder to make schools better.
What Wheelan is getting at is that not all entering students are equal. Some have vastly more potential than others, and a school district that has a preponderance of such students because of economic influences will score better than another school with fewer students with brainy parents. So we need to figure out what a good education is, but he fails to define what this is.
Yet the answer seems obvious, which is what I get for wandering the Internet when I should have been doing something more productive: The answer is to evaluate the change in each student’s abilities, not his performance on a fixed test.
That we do the latter isn’t surprising because, really, we don’t care about change so much as ability when we’re evaluating an adult who’s going to fly a passenger airplane or operate on our brains. But children aren’t adults, and our hope is as educators that we bring each child along as far as he or she can go during the semester or year.
If a student can’t write an essay at the beginning of the semester but can by the end, that’s terrific progress in 18 weeks. But that does not mean that this same student has become an accomplished writer, which is the performance measurement we apply when we assign a grade or give the student a normalized test.
The two aren’t incompatible during the education process, but they do present problems when it comes time to graduate, which is when society says that it’s time to make sure that students have certain minimum skills. The only thing that’s wrong with this is the nature of the test, which can be hard to fashion fairly in our diverse society, and the psychological impact the test has on students and their families.
But as long as we have a society that depends critically on critically skilled people, there’s no getting around the need for skills-based tests. Perhaps instead of exit exams we should have diploma classifications: first class, second class, etc.
But isn’t this exactly what grades are? If one were to always look at the grade the student achieved in getting his diploma, wouldn’t potential employers already know what they need to know? Certainly colleges already do this.
Ah, there’s the rub. The exit exams are given because some in our society believe that teachers are cheating by giving higher grades than they should. Grade inflation is the cause. So the tests aren’t about the students, but are about the teachers. Interesting.
On the other hand, these students who were said to be passing without being able to read — and the definition of “being able to read” is important here as well — probably did get their diplomas, but what were their grades? Do you really believe a teacher would give a high grade to someone who can’t read or write or do math well?
If they passed with a D, doesn’t that say something about their abilities. In other words, could we have solved this problem by just encouraging everyone to look beyond the diploma to the grade-point average that the student achieved?
There’d still be the problem that an A at one school is not the same as an A at another, so perhaps the exit exams could be used to normalize the grades, but they don’t need to be used to keep students from graduating. The teachers’ grades are perfectly capable of telling us who did well in school and who just got by.
As if Wikipedia wasn’t already confusing enough, because one doesn’t know what to trust, now some UCSC computer scientists are coloring questionable entries orange based on a calculation of author reputation. The trouble is that various intensities of orange, which indicate the degree of unreliability, can turn up in the middle of a sentence. So what do you do then?
Gail Collins of the New York Times has moved from editor of the editorial page on the left to the opinion page on the right, which is most welcome and has nothing at all to do with her political leanings. She’s just a really good writer and thinker.
See in particular her recent column on Mitt Romney who used to strap his dog in his crate on top of the family car when driving for summer vacations from Boston to Ontario, a distance of perhaps as much a 1,000 miles or more going who-knows-how-fast through an area of the country that can have some pretty nasty weather even in the summer.
Seamus, in case you missed the story, was the Romneys’ Irish setter back in the early 1980s. Mitt used to drive the family from Boston to Ontario every summer for a vacation, with the dog strapped to the roof in a crate.
As The Boston Globe reported this summer, Romney had the entire trip planned so rigidly that every gas station stop was predetermined before departure. During the fatal trip of ’83, Seamus apparently needed one more than the schedule allowed. When evidence of the setter’s incontinence came running down the back windshield, Romney abandoned his itinerary and drove to the closest gas station, where he got a hose and sprayed both dog and station wagon clean.
“It was a tiny preview of a trait he would grow famous for in business: emotion-free crisis management,” The Globe said.
The question raised is what ugly snippets like this reveal about character. From Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, we could probably conclude that these little embarrassing moments — not little from Seamus the dog’s POV, certainly — are the most telling of all.