Donate to Harper High School

Some of you might remember the This American Life episodes focused on Harper High School in Chicago. If you don’t, you can listen to part one here and part two here.

Last year alone, 29 current and former students of Harper High were shot, and eight died. The teachers and administrators there are fighting enormous odds to try to get these kids through the day, through the week, through the semester; to try to get some of them to graduate, some of them to move away from gangs and towards college. It’s an uphill battle, and it’s made even more difficult by a lack of resources. 

I know this not just because of This American Life, but also because my cousin teaches Spanish at the school. I’ve heard her stories, heard how she has largely given up on the idea of teaching most of her students any of the subject matter itself. How, rather than teach them Spanish, she’s struggling just to teach them the value of showing up to class, being respectful, being present, attempting some organizational skills (can you keep this handout in a folder and not lose it?). How some weeks feel like a lost cause. How some days feel like a triumph.

My cousin is currently pregnant with her first child. So is one of her 14-year-old students. They made a deal: they’re both allowed to eat in class. 

This American Life set up a donation page after listeners asked how they could help. I know most of us don’t have that much money, and that we’re constantly giving a few bucks here to friends’ Kickstarters, a few bucks there to wedding gifts or birthday presents. But if you have ANYTHING to spare, think about sending some money to Harper High School. They’re only taking donations for 26 more days! 

Listen to the story and give what you can. There are kids out there for whom this could make the difference between ending up in a hospital or ending up with a degree. 

About That Whole Florida Tuition Task Force Thing

Okay guys. I love math and science. Seriously. I love physics, I love how Isaac Newton was pretty much nutso, I love the way Algebra 2 equations look on the page, I love the feeling of balancing a chemistry equation. I love thinking about evolutionary biology, and the science of clouds, and the reason bridges work.

Sure, I’m a poet. But I don’t think I’d be half as interested in writing poetry if all I thought about was Dante and DeLillo and rhyme. I write the poetry I write because I can’t stop thinking about the Higgs boson, about sleep disorders, about concepts of ethics in various communities, about airports, about football, about optics, about the Rosetta stone. I would write terrible poetry if all I thought about was poetry. I also know scientists and mathematicians who feel the same way—that they would have missed important insights in their fields if they didn’t sometimes think about the mechanics of a Jackson Pollack painting, or listen to Mozart at night in surround sound.

So I hate this Us vs. Them mentality that certain People are trying to spread among the general population with regards to the arts and the sciences. The message seems to be: You can choose one. There is no such thing as Both. And we will reward you for making the “right” choice.

That’s not what education is about. You can no more take a lot of engineering classes and claim that you’ve gotten a full education than you can take a lot of Renaissance poetry classes and claim that you’ve gotten a full education.

Education has to be holistic. There is no compromising on this. We can’t continue chopping it up into easy segments and claiming they can stand on their own.

We can’t put monetary value on specific subjects. This is devaluing the whole enterprise.

I get very scared when I hear about things like this, but then I think about myself and I think about how many other people out there are like me and I feel reassured. This isn’t going to happen. It can’t happen.

Too many of us know better.

Community colleges' crisis slows students' progress to a crawl

This is what happens when there’s no money in the educational system.

The first course Charity Hansen is taking as a freshman at Pasadena City College is a basic class on managing time, speaking up in discussions, setting ambitious goals and then going after them.

If only she could.

It’s the only class she managed to get this semester. No math. No English. No science …

Hansen’s college education has stalled just as it is beginning. Like thousands of students in California’s community college system, she has been reduced to taking one class because there’s no room in other classes.

Frustrated students linger on waiting lists or crash packed classes hoping professors will add them later. They see their chances of graduating or transferring diminishing.

Lately I’ve just been very scared and upset and frustrated by what I’ve seen happening in California, and what I know is happening all over the country.

Earlier this week I went into a high school in Boyle Heights where over 3,000 students are enrolled. I was volunteering there as part of a program to help some of the more academically-motivated seniors understand the college admissions process. To help them answer the application questions for programs that are out there to help kids like them—low-income kids, minority kids, kids whose grades are probably far from representing who they are inside—get some sort of higher education.

I was volunteering there because this school, this school with an enrollment of over 3,000 kids (Wikipedia says there were over 5,000 enrolled in 2007; I don’t know what the number is now), this school has one college counselor.

One.

And even if some of these kids were able to fight through all the shit that’s in their way—the friends who are pregnant and have long since dropped out, the brothers who depend on them to make their meals and buy their clothes, the parents who are getting deported or have already been deported, the fights, the still-hardening belief they have no one on their side—and get to a community college and want to really succeed, even then, even after all that, the chances of them being able to get a degree that means something from this community college in a decent amount of time are getting lower and lower.

I’m frustrated and I want you to be, too.

I think there is a difference between the effects of financial incentives and forces of motivation that are more intrinsic to the activity. Rather than paying each individual student based on his or her score on a standardized test, you can imagine an alternative, such as motivating students by offering to reward the entire class—let’s say, at the end of the semester— by going on a field trip to the zoo or museum. This kind of motivation (I mean the field trip example) is different from paying individual students cash, because the field trip reward is more in line with the purpose of the activity—namely, education.


I think the reason we might hesitate to pay cash to students for doing well on tests or getting good grades or reading books is that we sense that the monetary payment is an extrinsic reward. It’s not related to the fundamental purpose, which, after all, is not just to get good grades, or to read more books. It’s ultimately the purpose of education to cultivate the love of learning for its own sake. So the rewards that are more closely connected with that intrinsic purpose are more appropriate because they’re more in line with the goal of the activity, the attitudes and norms that we’re trying to inculcate. One of the worries about using cash payments is that the money may erode, or you can crowd out the attitudes and norms—in this case the love of learning—that we want to instill.

What Money Can’t Buy | Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to live in a society where everything seems to be driven by economic concerns - especially in relation to education. I’m in a seminar right now where we’ve been discussing, among other things, the university-as-corporation; I’ve been increasingly troubled by how seamlessly an institution that was once devoted to cultural advancement and critical thinking has transitioned into a bureaucratic structure with value-driven goals. This interview really drives home a lot of the concerns I’ve been sort of vaguely attempting to wrestle with.

I guess the scariest thing is that, at first, doesn’t the Dallas experiment (paying third graders $2 for each book they read) sound decent to you? I mean, my initial reaction was certainly along the lines of “well, at least their hearts are in the right place!” Maybe we’ve all become a little too complacent with regard to economic jargon - a little too comfortable with monetizing and quantifying everything around us. As Sandel says here,

we take markets and market values for granted to such a degree that we sometimes don’t even notice the dilemmas which derive from markets.

And it’s also true that we tend to hold off on having this conversation because

such a debate would require us to reason together in public about some big and controversial ethical questions that touch on moral and sometimes spiritual values about the meaning of goods, where people disagree very often, whether we’re talking about the meaning of teaching and learning or of health or of procreation, family life, civic duties and obligations, how properly to value nature and the environment. These all raise big ethical questions on which we disagree. And I think we have a tendency to shy away from public debate that touch on questions on the good life and the meaning of goods and how to value various goods and social practices such as these. We need to overcome that reluctance, if we’re to improve the state of our public discourse.

All the reading I’ve been doing on this issue has had me waffling between despair (“Everything’s fucked, the university is dead, I am going to move to the wilderness”) and hope (“There are so many people who feel the same way I do!”). Currently trying to cling to that hope category for as long as possible.

Source: guernicamag.com