Beaneball - Education

Washington and Lee's new 3L year

jasonw@beaneball.org (Jason Wojciechowski) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 12:36:14 -0500

The hot news in the legal blogosphere is that Washington and Lee is overhauling its third year: instead of academic courses, the entire thing will be experiential learning. This will, according to the WSJ Law Blog, include practicing keeping track of billing hours.

Let me first say congratulations to W&L for taking a big experimental step with their educational program -- it takes guts to implement something like this, and hopefully they display the same guts over the years to keep with it and really try to make it work.

That said, while the heart is in the right place on this, I'm not sure that it is going to work out for them. It strikes me that experiential learning should be incorporate all the way through. Two years of classroom instruction and then a year of, what, basically apprenticeship? All this really does is push what used to be the first year in private practice back into the law schools. That's fine, I guess, if you're trying to make the law firms happy, but in the end, you're still just throwing the students into the "actual practice" portion of things with no real preparation beforehand.

The approach I'd want to take would be more integrated. In the first year, you take Legal Research and Writing, where you're really learning the nuts and bolts of, well, legal research and writing. But that first year is also filled with the usual doctrinal classes, partially to learn doctrine, but more importantly, to learn the way lawyers talk and think about things, so that you can actually fill those lovely briefs you're learning about in LR&W with substantive, correct-sounding material. None of this is radical. In fact, none of this is a change at all from what's already done.

The key, I think, is in the later years, when there ought to be requirements that some not insubstantial portion of your credits should be of the clinical/internship/externship/etc., i.e. experiential, variety. Furthermore, upper-level classes should include semi-experiential components. That is, don't just teach for 40 hours and then make the students write an exam; instead have them file short memos on various topics throughout the semester. Don't just do your silly, unexamined version of Socratic teaching. Set up sessions where students make meaningful contributions, like through oral arguments or perhaps presentations of material.

This kind of system requires a couple of things: a willingness on the part of the professor to really engage in teaching (but see Jeff Harrison's blog on the unlikeliness that this will happen); and small classes. There were 121 people in my Evidence class. That doesn't excuse the multiple-choice exam at the end of the semester, but it does excuse not having 3-5 writing assignments throughout the semester. Regardless of your dedication to teaching, grading 600 assignments, even if you limit those to one page apiece, is a ton of work.

The fact that this model law school will require smaller classes will balance, from the law teacher's perspective, the fact that fewer doctrinal classes will be taught (because of the clinics/internships requirement). Thus the faculty size will likely need to remain about the same. What will not remain the same, however, is cost. Building clinical programs, i.e. offering free legal services, isn't cheap. It's a lot cheaper to lecture 120 students about Evidence than it is to pay court costs and things like that for indigent clients in all these new clinics that will be starting. Another issue is the big gap between (relatively) rural and urban law schools. Carbondale just doesn't have the number of people who need legal service as New York City. Of course, given the number of schools in New York, that doesn't address the right question -- the question is whether there are enough people in Carbondale who need Southern Illinois' legal services to justify opening three or four new clinics and expanding the already existing ones to accommodate the fact that now, every student will have to do n credits of that kind of work.

To reiterate, however: all of these difficulties will always exist for any law school that wants to update its curriculum to be more useful, to give students the kind of experiential learning opportunities that forward-thinking educators realize are necessary. Thus it is a real credit to W&L's faculty and administration that they are willing to step up and try to make something new work.

UPDATE: Here's the post about the topic at PrawfsBlawg.

UPDATE 2: Here's Law School Innovation's post.

One size fits none

jasonw@beaneball.org (Jason Wojciechowski) — Fri, 04 May 2007 15:13:15 -0500

Secretary Spellings says that a one-size fits all standardized test isn't going to be developed for colleges. So why do we tolerate these things for lower schools, then?

The Columbia halo

jasonw@beaneball.org (Jason Wojciechowski) — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 21:26:38 -0600

Observation of the day: the area around Yeshiva University's Wilf Campus up here in northern Manhattan is basically a ghetto. Those people who know Washington Heights won't be surprised. Those people familiar with the area immediately surrounding Columbia University, however, might be: while Columbia is certainly in the heart of Harlem, there's this halo around it of shops and restaurants that would be completely out of place but for the university. Yeshiva has no such halo, which I found surprising. Perhaps, though, it's actually Columbia that's the exception. Is there a halo around U.S.C.? Around U. Chicago? That's just to name two schools that are notoriously in the midst of, essentially, ghettos. I'm sure there are more, but I'd be curious to find out whether they have the "Columbia halo."

A math problem

jasonw@beaneball.org (Jason Wojciechowski) — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 10:14:28 -0600

Somebody managed to get to this blog by using the following search: "juan gave two thirds of his baseball card collection to his best friend marcus. he gave one half of the cards he had left to his brother. finally he gave one half of the cards he had left to his sister. he had 25 cards left. how many cards did juan have originally in his collection?" First, that's pretty amazing. Second, let's figure this out, since I am, after all, a former high-school math teacher. The easiest way is probably to work backwards. If he's got 25 now, and he gave half to his sister, he must have had 25 x 2 = 50 before he gave to his sister. And if he had 50 before he gave to his brother, he must have had 50 x 2 = 100 before he gave to his brother. And if he had 100 after he gave 2/3 to Marcus, then he must have had 100 x 3/2 = 300/2 = 150 before he gave to Marcus. So to check: 150 x 2/3 = 300 / 3 = 100 x 1/2 = 50 x 1/2 = 25, as he's supposed to have. So he had 150 when he started. EDIT: I'm stupid. If Juan gave 2/3 of his collection to Marcus, then he retained 1/3. Thus if he had 100 after giving 2/3 to Marcus, he actually had 100 x 3 = 300 before giving to Marcus. Thus the correct answer is 300, and I'm an idiot. Thanks to the rather charitable commenter who pointed this mistake out. Technorati: Math, Word problems, Baseball cards.

Cracking that marrow

jasonw@beaneball.org (Jason Wojciechowski) — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 07:04:04 -0600

For those of you interested in my experiences as a teacher in a Bronx public high school, here's an Onion story about Teach for America that's highly amusing.

Merit slush funds for teachers

jasonw@beaneball.org (Jason Wojciechowski) — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 16:55:28 -0500

A guest-blogger at Eduwonk wonders whether there are other things to offer "meritorious teachers" instead of just pay increases, and suggests a sort of "slush fund" reward that would give teachers money to spend on their classrooms. I'm not sure how serious (s)he is being, but the idea that meritorious teachers should get money to improve their classrooms and their schools (like the idea of teachers banding together to hire a social worker) and "bad" teachers shouldn't is ridiculous. Utterly insane. What kind of logic is it that sends the scarce resources a system has to the places where they're least needed? Merit pay is a bad idea on its own, simply because the idea of rewarding teachers for test scores is a horrible one. I've said it before and I'll say it again: these little incremental fixes (like merit pay, or smaller schools, or buses to the suburbs) people keep wanting to implement aren't going to get the job done. Education needs to be completely re-imagined and have its purposes re-investigated before anything's ever going to get fixed. As long as we're focused on the idea that a student's vocabulary quiz is all that matters, education isn't going to work all that well.

Sharpton with the UFT

jasonw@beaneball.org (Jason Wojciechowski) — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 21:05:26 -0500

Al Sharpton showed up at a meeting earlier today to show his support for the teachers in their battle with the city for a contract (since it appears more and more that Bloomberg's earlier "imminent" talk was the usual political rhetoric). A choice quote: "I came (here) today to make it clear to this mayor and this chancellor that if we have to strike this year, the communities of color and the teachers will be together to get what is right in the city of New York." And another: "Let the teachers teach in freedom schools, in churches if it comes to that. This is no bluff." (The quotes come from an e-mail from the UFT and will likely show up in newspapers and such tomorrow.) The question is how seriously the idea of "freedom schools" can be taken and, more importantly, whether Sharpton really does speak for the "communities of color." He certainly has considerable power within the African American community, which is a large part of the city (26.6% of the population, by 2000 census), but what about the huge number of Latinos? Asians? Everyone else? Does the average (say) Iranian family listen to Al Sharpton? Dominican? Korean? I guess the idea is that Sharpton is hooked in with the leaders of those smaller communities, and that those leaders speak to the members of those communities more directly than he does, but that he still can claim their support. Just as with Bloomberg's intimations of a contract coming soon, though, these are just words until proven otherwise.

Law blog

jasonw@beaneball.org (jason) — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 14:38:01 -0500

I've joined the blog of my Hampshire friend Brady, Non Compos Mentis. We're both going to law school in the fall, so the idea is to compare and contrast our experiences on the blog. Check it out!

Neat newspaper site

jasonw@beaneball.org (jason) — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 14:37:17 -0500

Courtesy of Chris Lehmann's blog, here's a really neat site that shows the current front page of newspapers all over the world. Awesome!

More education (sorry, baseball fans)

jasonw@beaneball.org (jason) — Thu, 03 Mar 2005 15:56:56 -0600

My old friend Julio posted a comment to my last entry. I responded to part of it there, but I thought I'd put some thoughts and responses up on the main section here, as well, for those who don't descend to comment-land. First,

One of the key issues in education today that has been put on the back burner, is tracking. Many of the issues we see in high schools today is students that have been tracked at early grade levels and are left with a lack of motivation to excel, since in their minds they are "stuck" taking certain courses.

There are definitely issues with tracking that I see within my school. As I mentioned, due to tracking on a macro (city-wide) level, we don't have that many strong kids in the first place, and now the strong ones we do have are being placed in different classes from the other ones. I happen to have drawn one of the weakest ninth grade classes this year (I think; it's not really official). However, since it was apparently based only on reading level, I do have some kids whose mathematics ability is quite good. That said, it's an incredibly tough class to manage because many of them gave up on school and being able to do well a long time ago, just as Julio mentions. The kids in there who are failing run the gamut: there's the thug archetype; the immature kids who, less than not caring, just don't yet realize the importance of school; the socially-awkward kids who are trying to gain acceptance and neglecting work in the process; and then there are the kids who don't really fit any of these but just don't have the mathematical ability to succeed in high school. With few real peer role models in class, there's nothing really driving these kids toward any level of success. Now, I do believe in the necessity of tracking to some degree. Having every kid in a high school in the same math class isn't good for the kids who want to be doing calculus while their peers are still struggling to master geometry. In addition, it's tough on teachers, not just to try to create lessons that meet the variety of needs their kids have, but also, as I alluded to before, in management. When kids are bored, they become problems. When you add problems to a class that already has kids who would be problems in almost any setting, it's a recipe for disaster. That said, there's a difference between leveling and tracking. When you track somebody, they can never get off that track. When you put them in rooms that are a little bit level-homogenous and give them the opportunity to work to the next level, that's not so onerous. Sure, you lose the benefits that hetergenous classes provide (the aforementioned peer role models, for example), but it allows teachers to not have to worry about meeting five or six different levels of need within one class. This sounds like common sense, but there are plenty of places where being in a certain science or math or English class in the freshman year dooms the student to never be able to get to Advanced Placement or honors classes later on. Some children bloom late and tracking does that group a great disservice. Julio also mentions

What educators both in K-12 and higher education are faced with today is standards-based education, one of the most controversial methods to educate youth. Adding to the pot, the fact that schools are struggling financially, doesn't make the situation any better.

Now, I hadn't ever thought about strict standards causing issues in higher education the way they do in K-12, but, as I consider my teacher education program at Lehman College, I realize that Julio is, of course, dead on. My current education class (essentially a teaching methods course for 11th-12th grade math) revolves around the graphing calculator and how to teach pre-calculus and calculus using it. On the first day of class, the professor explained the evolution of the course: it had formerly been a simple methods class, not necessarily focusing on technology more than any other class. Lehman, however, wants to have and maintain NCATE accreditation because it supposedly indicates that "the Unit's Programs in Teacher Education meet the highest national standards." In order to get this accreditation, Lehman needed to institute a greater focus on technology, so they re-arranged how this course was taught to satisfy the accreditation group. That Lehman is forced to use technology in its classrooms is not a bad thing, of course. The problem is that the school has to follow what appear to be rather rigid rules (another example is that the syllabi in every one of my education classes has looked exactly the same) and structure its program precisely as NCATE tells it to. There's great potential here for stifling of creativity, which is precisely the same problem we find in the K-12 public schools. It's hard to come up with new, creative ways to teach when you are being told exactly the model of instruction to use, exactly the timing the various components of your lesson must use, and so on. (Thankfully, my school backs off of us a lot; we're still teaching the same curriculum as everyone else in the city, and on the same pace, but the infamous Workshop Model is great de-emphasized in favor of finding whatever method or methods work best in any given lesson or unit. There are other schools in my building where the teachers are not so lucky to be able to develop their own methods, though.) If innovation and creativity can't be used in the classroom, whether at the K-12 or higher-ed level, the country's education system is going to fall into greater disarray than ever. There can't be a lack of oversight, of course, and teachers have to be held accountable (though not in the usual way, by examining the test scores of their students), but let's bring this back to baseball. A general manager often has great say over what goes on in his organization. He doesn't control the budget, but he controls almost everything else. He is, like Billy Beane, like Branch Rickey, allowed to innovate in order to make his team better. If his innovations just end up being wheels spun uselessly, he loses his job. If his innovations work, or if he is able to realize when things aren't working and fix them, he keeps his job. If I'm the general manager of my classrooms, then I'm essentially Brian Cashman, of the Yankees, at this point. Cashman is, it seems, a GM in name only. George Steinbrenner seems to be calling a lot of the shots. When he wants a big-name pitcher, regardless of the cost, Cashman has to get it done. When someone on high decides that I'm supposed to teach the slope-intercept form of a line to kids who still count on their fingers, I have to get it done.

A rare education post

jasonw@beaneball.org (jason) — Sun, 27 Feb 2005 18:58:25 -0600

This is about the nation's high schools being broken and not challenging enough. As someone who's teaching high school, though, I'm going to pass the buck. Instead of all the focus on what we're not teaching high school kids, how about some focus on what they're learning in middle and elementary school to prepare them for high school? High school can't prepare kids for college if those kids don't have the proper foundation when they get to high school. Now, I come from a very particular background on this: the kids in my school are unselected, in a sense. Had they done better in middle school, they might have gotten in to high schools with tougher admissions requirements. That's not to say that we don't have smart kids, because we do have some students who should go on and be very successful in college and life beyond that. What we don't have is enough of those kids, and what the city doesn't have is enough of those kids. I think Bill Gates is right about something: the system might need to be torn down and rebuilt from the beginning. My professor this summer was adamant, and somewhat convincing, in his belief that the nation's mandatory education system grew out of a need to keep kids out of the labor force, for economic reasons. This meant that schools were essentially babysitters, time-occupiers to keep kids doing something semi-productive while the parents were free to have jobs. Supposing this is true, perhaps the way school works ought to be re-thought from the perspective that everybody actually needs an education. Even supposing it isn't true, if our schools aren't working, we can't be afraid of radical change. What kind of radical change? Look around at various alternative schools in the country: small classes with mixed ages; curricula driven by skills and abilities, rather than by rote knowledge; less textbooks, more hands-on work; more art and music, particularly with respect to appreciation of those subjects; cross- or inter-disciplinary work; meaningful, real-world questions and problems in classes, rather than knowledge-based exercises and ridiculous hypotheticals; etc. Some of these ideas are slowly gaining traction in the mainstream educational world (though they're often poorly implemented because they try to compromise with the old ideals rather than realizing that the old ideals ought to be completely replaced), but not enough of them and not quickly enough. My path from traditional public-school student to non-traditional private college student to traditional public-school teacher has disillusioned me in some ways about the educational system, but I do have some hope. I do think things can be changed. They can't be changed effectively from the front lines, the teachers, not with the top-down systems being implemented, but there are places where change can be effected.

Tracking

jasonw@beaneball.org (jason) — Tue, 13 Apr 2004 11:27:09 -0500

Chris Lehmann asks the questions I've been agonizing over myself for quite some time. Namely, how good or evil is tracking kids into different levels in high school classes? The progressive education ideal, that Chris seems to believe in, and I think I do to, is that tracking is not such a hot idea. The basic criticism is that it hurts the kids tracked low more than it helps the kids tracked high, and I think I agree with that to a certain degree. In my own personal case, teaching in my current school, it's not even an issue, though. The kids are already tracked, just by being placed in this high school. New York's public school system is tiered into an incredible number of levels. I couldn't even begin to know how many, really. There's the standard top of the list, Stuyvesant and its sister schools. After that, things get hazy. There are alternative schools, charter schools, and schools with varying levels of ability to choose their students. That last link is to my school, which is certainly going to be near the bottom of any hierarchical list of schools kids might want to go to in the city. It's a mini-school, which has plenty of advantages, but it's not like there's a lot of choice in that regard for kids in my region: all of the big high schools are breaking down into small ones. The kids we get are the ones books about urban education are written about: they read and do math at 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade levels; English is a struggle; they have difficult home situations. And what do they get for their struggles? A school full of Teaching Fellows, people who've never taught a day in their lives and have no education experience, when what they need are the best teachers, the ones with experience and confidence in methods that work, whether traditionally progressive or not. (NB: I'm a Fellow myself, so don't take this as me bashing the program or the members of it.) In what I'd consider a "normal" school (one that has kids of all ability and performance levels, not just the kids who can't get into the good schools), even if there were tracking, there would be peer role models in the school. No, they wouldn't be in classes together, and that's a problem, but schools like mine and many others don't even have the option of tracking. We have heterogenous populations in our classrooms, but it doesn't mean anything, because they're all struggling. This isn't literally true, because I have some kids who, comparatively, are very good at math, and learn quickly. But those kids and the kids who aren't as good as them know the reality of the situation just as well as the teachers do: the smart kids in this school would be only a little above average in a truly heterogenous (with regard to NYC's entire population) school. That has to be depressing to them, and you'd think they last thing the school system would want to foist on these kids is another reason to be depressed. They know the realities of where the housing projects where they live. They've seen how few of the people around them have moved up in the world or "gotten out of the ghetto," to use the old movie cliche. That school is just a continuation of the life around them, rather than an escape from it, might be the biggest problem urban schools face.

Where's the time?

jasonw@beaneball.org (jason) — Fri, 09 Apr 2004 13:08:20 -0500

Chris Lehmann asks how teachers can make a little life for themselves. It's a question I haven't adequately answered for myself, either. I can't remember the last time I finished a book (though that's more due to reading way too many magazines than anything else), I rarely get the chance to blog as often as I like (it being spring break makes this week the exception), and so on. I can force myself to chill out at home, instead of spending time on school stuff, but then I get behind on school stuff, or I do a sloppier job with it. Maybe this wouldn't be so bad if I actually liked the work, if I was truly enjoying my teaching. I can't honestly say that I am, though, so the time spent feels like a waste. On the other hand, time spent not doing teacher stuff makes me feel guilty for slacking off. One of the problems is that I can't know whether my current situation, with a tough, new school, grad school on top of that, and this being my first year, is what's making things so hard, or whether it's teaching in general that I don't really like. I don't want to spend five years to find out, either. And of course, this post ends on a far different note than it started.

Affirmative Action in Rhode Island

jasonw@beaneball.org (jason) — Wed, 18 Feb 2004 00:21:23 -0600

The New York Times has this cute article about a College Republicans group that's stirring up controversy by offering a "white heritage" scholarship. The group's founder says he created the scholarship (which has, not surprisingly, since received interest and money from around the country) as a critique of scholarships for minorities (usually specific minorities) only. My first, and the obvious, response was that the sheltered white kid needed a lesson, as I received when I went to college, in the realities of American education for non-whites. A less reactionary reaction: to be a conservative on most college campuses these days is to be pretty brave. I had a little experience with seeing conservative groups start springing up at Hampshire toward the end of my time there, so I'm a bit sympathetic toward people who want to step out and create some debate rather than just quietly ignore the jackbooted liberalism that permeates academia. You have to applaud the student, then, for being a leader, for espousing his views, in spite of popular criticism. Then I reached the final lines:

On campus, some of Mr. Mattera's critics have pointed out that he received a $5,000 Sallie Mae Fund scholarship for Hispanic students. "You should practice what you preach," said Maria Ahmed, 20, president of the university's Multicultural Student Union.

You can't really blame the kid for taking money when someone offered, I guess, but it does smack of hypocrisy. If he really is against affirmative action, and doesn't believe that minorities need an extra push here and there to reach a more equitable place in society, then wouldn't he have to take a moral stand against that scholarship? The writer, Elissa Gootman, doesn't say whether she asked Mattera about this scholarship. Leaving the article at the end there with that little statement feels kind of sloppy. Did she ask Mattera about the money? What did he say? Did he refuse to comment? We're left in a situation where all we can do is speculate. Perhaps he's only recently come to the conclusion that affirmative action is wrong, and he accepted the scholarship before a moral stand ever entered his mind. Or perhaps it's juicier. Maybe he really did accept the money while at the same time, in his own head at least, decrying the institutions that allowed him to receive the money in the first place. Maybe that's why we're left hanging at the end. Did Gootman's editor decide that (s)he didn't want the piece to turn into a huge trashing of Mattera, and thus cut the juicy interview material to keep the article relatively civil? Or maybe the New York Times writers and editors get sloppy just like everyone else does.

Portfolios and passing -- A study in stupidity

jasonw@beaneball.org (jason) — Wed, 28 Jan 2004 00:18:13 -0600

From almost a week ago, in the Times, comes the story that some schools that were allowed to keep their "portfolio requirements" are now, because of a technicality, being rated as "failing schools" under the current accountability laws. It's really just another example of the ridiculous state of education today. Paul Krugman recently referred to Bush's No Child Left Behind laws as a "sick joke." One of the things that interested me about the article was that the whole mess began because the schools wanted to keep their portfolio assessment methods of determining who graduates rather than submit to state testing. Unfortunately, the state declined to permit this, and the mess described in the article occurred. I'd love to implement portfolio-type assessment in my classes. The problem is that it's essentially impossible given the nature of the curriculum that has to be taught, the pace it must be taught at, and the apparent philosophies of the administration. If I could teach these kids at the pace they need to be taught at and teach them the material they need to be taught (i.e. addition and multipliction for the finger counters instead of how to graph parabolas), then maybe it could happen. These are the reasons I consider law school more strongly every day.