{"id":656,"date":"2009-03-02T08:23:49","date_gmt":"2009-03-02T14:23:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/?p=656"},"modified":"2009-03-02T08:23:49","modified_gmt":"2009-03-02T14:23:49","slug":"springing-the-inner-outlier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/springing-the-inner-outlier\/","title":{"rendered":"Springing the inner outlier"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve got a special volunteer teaching assignment tonight, an Honors Program event called “Colloquium” in which students enroll in a series of evening seminars, five all told, each led by a different professor, and each of them centered on a particular book or set of readings. This one’s my first (the second of the term for the students), so of course I decided on something a bit over-ambitious and assigned a long, rambling, urgent, personal, repetitive, provocative book called The Black Swan<\/em>. It’s exhilarating stuff but who knows what the students will make of it. I’m not sure what I<\/em>\u00a0make of it all.<\/p>\n

Actually, I think I’ve just described the makings of a potentially great discussion. But I digress….<\/p>\n

I’m going through the book a second time in preparation for the seminar. As any teacher can tell you, reading a book with an eye to teaching it is a much deeper and more fraught experience than simply reading it. I guess the simplest way to say it is that I find I have to have at least three voices in my head as I go along: the author’s, my own, and the student voice I anticipate moment to moment as I think about how the discussion might–and sometimes I hope will<\/em>–go. That’s an impressive number of voices in my head, one channel past stereo. Cognitive surround sound. Immersive, yes, and busy.<\/p>\n

Then I’ll hit a statement like this one and suddenly the entire metaframe begins to glow: Taleb’s writing, my reading, my imagined colloquy, even the way I anticipate the room will look and feel:<\/p>\n

Assuming there is something desirable in being an average man, he must have an unspecified specialty in which he would be more gifted than other people–he cannot be average in everything.A pianist would be better on average at playing the piano, but worse than the norm at, say, horseback riding. A draftsman would have better drafting skills, and so on. The notion of \u00a0a man deemed average is different from that of a man who is average in everything he does…. <\/em>Quetelet completely missed that point. (242)<\/p>\n

Taleb’s words resonate for me through many chords and along many soundboards. I think of David Berliner’s tremendous call-to-arms here at Baylor just a couple of weeks ago as he presented the research he and Susan Nichols have done on the damage caused by the current fashion for high-stakes testing, work recently published in Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America’s Schools<\/a>. <\/em>Among the many tragic and nonsensical outcomes of this drill-and-kill approach \u00a0(many predicted with great accuracy for over thirty years by “Campbell’s Law,”<\/a> one of the most astounding things I learned at Berliner’s talk) is a monomaniacal focus on the “bubble,” that is, the students who are just below passing and are brought up to just over passing by these tests. These success stories are touted by many advocates of these programs, none of whom seem to know about “Campbell’s Law,” and none of whom seem to have thought hard about what definition of “success” is content with getting students from just-under-mediocre to just-above-mediocre, if in fact the tests and the passing have even that<\/em>\u00a0much meaning. And then I think of the truly mournful set of comments on Cole Camplese’s justifiably outraged post about Pennsylvania’s “adequate progress” awards.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

I can’t stop dreaming of the day we educators turn the paradigm around. What if we had an education focused on the above-average in everyone, the place of the inner outlier? What if education, inescapably difficult and dispiriting in the parts that don’t come naturally<\/a>, had as its clear and beckoning aim the hard work of setting up empowering contexts for each person’s excellence to attain its true force and maturity? We say words to this effect at the inspirational moments, at the great matriculation and graduation gatherings. What of the in-betweens? What of the walk we walk–or not?<\/p>\n

Instead, we continue to generate models of “assessment” that consume themselves in a feast of invalidity. We generate models of education that boast of adequacy. We go for bell curves and standard deviations, not outliers and positive deviation<\/a>. We push out the underperforming, ignore the top achievers, and do no justice to the inner outliers in every student, no matter what his or her general aptitude.<\/p>\n

And we say we’ve done something worth doing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve got a special volunteer teaching assignment tonight, an Honors Program event called “Colloquium” in which students enroll in a series of evening seminars, five all told, each led by a different professor, and each of them centered on a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4bHwM-aA","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}