Great Blunders of History, part 1

James Boutin of An Urban Teacher's Education wrote a post in response to a question I asked him about curricula for world history.  He mentioned that his goal is to present history as a series of narratives, which I agree is the most engaging approach.

For me, history is especially interesting when you get the sense that things could have gone differently.  You can get this sense by contemplating mysteries and errors.

So, here's one of my favorite historical blunders — made by an archaeologist. 

In 1907, Theodore Davis, a leading Egyptian archaeologist, was digging in the Valley of the Kings when he came across a small pit containing various funereal artifacts, one inscribed with the name of Tutankhamun.   After some further investigation, he concluded that this pit must be all that was left of the missing tomb of Tutankhamun, and since it was found, "the valley was exhausted", and there was no point to any further excavation in the Valley of the Kings.

In 1922, Howard Carter found the real tomb of Tutankhamun.  The steps leading to the tomb were less than 10 feet away from where Theodore Davis had stopped digging.

It is now believed that the cache found by Theodore Davis was the leavings of a funeral feast engaged in by the priests involved in Tutankhamun's burial.

How Rote Learning Got a Bad Name

I read somewhere the memoirs of a writer who went to Catholic schools as a kid. He reports that he was made to memorize a list of the popes, and it was only after he graduated that he discovered how difficult and contentious it is to write such a list. For several decades during the middle ages, there were actually two (or three!) simultaneous competing popes, which the ruler-wielding nuns had neglected to mention.

That's why Blackadder's Baldrick claims to have an all-purpose pardon "signed by both popes!"

When you reduce learning to memorizing factoids, you can't handle ambiguity or complexity.  There's no grappling with meaning or ideas. You wind up dumbing down content.

For a painful example, here's Farrah Shipley using Whole Brain Teaching to inflict "fractions" on a kindergarten class.

WARNING!  Side effects include nausea, vomiting, dizziness, despair, and suicidal ideation.  If uncontrollable ranting persists for more than four hours, see a doctor, psychiatrist, or bartender.

I have thrown myself on the grenade by listening to this "lesson" so you don't have to.  Here's what the hapless 5-year-olds are memorizing:

A fraction is when we cut something into equal pieces.  [Grammar, anyone?]

A fraction has two parts: a denominator [low silly voice] and a numerator [high silly voice].

The denominator tells us how many pieces in all.

The numerator tells us how many pieces are shaded.

Think how confused these kids will be when they actually need to understand fractions, and nothing's been shaded!  We can only hope they forget this whole nightmare over the summer.

At one point in the video, Mrs. Shipley actually grabs a little boy's wrists and forces him to do the gestures.

At another point, she asks the class, "wouldn't you like to know what the numerator does?" and a bunch of the kids yell back, "NO!"  Then she tells them to beg her.

For a rousing climax, she walks the kids through the "genius" segment, where they're encouraged to produce sentences that nobody would ever actually say, like "I eat watermelon, but first I cut it into fractions."

The way she reaches into her jacket pocket for a dry-erase marker reminds me of a dog trainer reaching into her pocket for little treats.

Guest post: Tolstoy in the schools of Marseilles

[From Chris, originally posted at A Blog About School]

As a follow-up to FedUpMom’s post earlier today, here’s Tolstoy, writing almost a hundred and fifty years ago:

Last year I was in Marseilles, where I visited all the schools for the working people of that city.

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The school programmes consist in learning by heart the catechism, Biblical and universal history, the four operations of arithmetic, French orthography, and bookkeeping. In what way bookkeeping could form the subject of instruction I was unable to comprehend, and not one teacher could explain it to me. The only explanation I was able to make to myself, when I examined the books kept by the students who had finished the course, was that they did not know even three rules of arithmetic, but that they had learned by heart to operate with figures and that, therefore, they had also learned by rote how to keep books.

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Not one boy in these schools was able to solve, that is, to put the simplest problem in addition and subtraction. And yet, they operated with abstract numbers, multiplying thousands with ease and rapidity. To questions from the history of France they answered well by rote, but if asked at haphazard, I received such answers as that Henry IV. had been killed by Julius Caesar. The same was the case with geography and sacred history. The same with orthography and reading. More than one half of the girls cannot read any other books than those they have studied. Six years of school had not given them the faculty of writing a word without a mistake.

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After the lay school, I saw the daily instruction offered in the churches; I saw the salles d’asiles, in which four-year-old children, at a given whistle, like soldiers, made evolutions around the benches, at a given command lifted and folded their hands, and with quivering and strange voices sang laudatory hymns to God and to their benefactors, and I convinced myself that the educational institutions of the city of Marseilles were exceedingly bad.

At the root of the problem, Tolstoy believed, was the degree of compulsion -- which “becomes worse and worse in every year and with every hour,” to the point where “There is left only the despotic form with hardly any contents.” To the contrary, Tolstoy concluded, “the criterion of pedagogics is only liberty.”

But why listen to people like Tolstoy and Einstein when we have Arne Duncan, E.D. Hirsch, and that principal with the baseball bat?

Puberty 1, Mathematics 0

From The World of Simon Raven:  The Green Years:

At the end of the Easter Term the maths master had very properly followed the call of the bugle, and the school had been compelled to employ a middle-aged temporary called "Wally" Wallace.  Although Wally knew little mathematics and less science, he was quite a plausible bluffer and had the wit to discover straight away which boys had some reputation at his subjects and then, as it were, to pace himself by them.  If he were uncertain how to solve a problem, he would not flounder about trying to do it himself, he would set the whole class on to it and then announce that the school swot had come up with the correct answer.  The school swot ("Lotty" Loder he was called) would then be invited to come up to the blackboard and demonstrate his solution to the accompaniment of grateful and approving nods from Wally ... who, however, was calamitously found out on the day when Lotty had been introduced by his neighbor to the delights of self-abuse.

Wally by now had such trust in him that he summoned him to the blackboard without even bothering to look at his work; whereupon the wretched child came limping forward with a huge erection clearly visible under his grey shorts and no solution to propose to his audience.  After a few feeble attempts at improvisation he asked to be allowed "to go to the bog, sir, please", stayed there exploring the full possibilities of his new-found hobby, and left Wally to do his own job for once.  

And a sad mess Wally made of it.

A Radical Unschooler

I grew up reading the works of Gerald Durrell, beginning with My Family and Other Animals. This is an account of the 5 years the young Gerald Durrell spent with his family on the island of Corfu. (There's a nice BBC adaptation which is available on Netflix.)

Louisa Durrell occasionally worried about young Gerald's schooling, and employed various tutors to transmit the basics, but she also gave her son enormous freedom to explore the island's wildlife. His years on Corfu launched his later career as a naturalist and writer. Gerald Durrell treats his mother as a comic figure in his books, but it's clear that she was an adventurous and unconventional spirit who gave her children a wonderful start on life.

I've always admired those, like Durrell, who, rather than climbing up some prefabricated career ladder, invented their own career to suit their passions and abilities. In our times of rapid social change and economic uncertainty, more and more people will be called on to do this. How can a lockstep, authoritarian school system help our children find their own way in a constantly changing world?