Heheh... the world of the nanoblog

I couldn't resist. I had to post this. Too funny:

The Pool, Continued

In case you're wondering, I've been swimming at the condo's pool several times since this happened, the most recent of these times having been this morning. I thought I'd share the good news that each of these swims was completely uneventful and unremarkable, i.e. no more angry racist swimmers trying to ban me from the pool for wearing too much. Thought I'd let y'all know.

For the Love of Language

I love words, so I just had to post this:

Bringing the bling to daily speech
How celebrity speak and TV catchphrases creep into our conversations

By Colleen Ross

As Britney Spears rises again, strutting onto stages to tour her comeback album Circus, I have begun to wonder what would happen to the popular phrase to pull a Britney. It has hitherto meant doing something outlandish: with or without shaving your head, marrying your childhood sweetheart and annulling within three days, or having two kids within a year. Now, because the phrase is so ingrained in popular lingo, perhaps it will come to mean achieving new heights of popularity by acting crazy. The term is as ensconced in popular lore as the celebrity herself.
Celebrity-based words and TV speak are increasingly wending their way into daily speech, reflecting a fame-obsessed society.The Simpsons as linguistic innovators? Meh. (Associated Press)
Before you get the hateration on for this column because you can't handle the truthiness of what I have to say, I urge you: check it out! (That's American Idol's Randy Jackson speaking, not me.) Words from the celebrity world are slowly creeping into our lexicon.
Meh, you say, shrugging your shoulders. (By the way, that word popularized by The Simpsons is on its way into the Collins English Dictionary next year.)
But I've thought this through. I mused when this first started to happen. O.J. Simpson in the news again brought back memories of the white bronco, a term now parked in the Urban Dictionary to mean getaway car. Maybe what that O.J. needs is some more bling. That word, now in the Oxford English Dictionary, was thought up in the late 1990s by rappers Cash Money Millionaires. Then there was of course jump the couch, made famous by Tom Cruise, which means going off the deep end, as he so famously did on Oprah.
Rachael Ray's EVOO (extra-virgin olive oil) is now in the Oxford American College Dictionary and Beyonce's immensely popular bootylicious has sashayed its way into the OED. The Urban Dictionary includes political satirist Stephen Colbert's word truthiness, Jon Stewart's creation catastrof**k, Mary J. Blige's hateration, and the unabashedly simple That's hot! from that celebrity we love to hate, Paris Hilton.
In addition to the celebrity lingo, language spawned by television has been working its way into popular speech. Think of our Seinfeld-isms: yada yada yada, "Not that there's anything wrong with that," high/low/close talkers, double-dipping, and the list goes on. Then there's the lingo from the sitcom Friends: the oft-quoted "How you doin'?" and the uber popular so-not combo as in: "I'm so not going out with that guy." Seriously? That's so Grey's Anatomy.
Repeating what the stars say
While English has long incorporated lingo from the entertainment world, the cool cats pace of acquisition of our parents' generation is much faster now, says Tim Blackmore, who teaches popular culture at the University of Western Ontario.Satirist Stephen Colbert: Truthiness has its social consequences. (Jason DeCrow/Associated Press)
We have the rap world, we have mega stars who shamelessly market themselves, and we have a proliferation of talk shows and reality shows that contribute to our daily lingo. You know, the whole sista ebonics of Tyra Banks and the bumbling deadpan of Ellen Degeneres (who, incidentally, has her very own dictionary). Of course, there's also the quick repartee of political satirists Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart.
Blackmore notices lingo popularized by rappers and talk shows is creeping into daily conversation. He reels off a list: don't go there, that's so whatever, I'm all about the (fill in the blank), let the healing begin, that's what I'm talkin' about, and my favourite: talk to the hand!
"Some of my students, as well as teens and tweens, have a very quick patter," says Blackmore. "It sounds smart, but then I listen more closely. It's a loop. They've picked up some quick responses from a TV show; they have a certain number of responses and then they run out."
Blackmore says the issue is there isn't any conception that what people like Colbert and Stewart say on TV isn't actually 'normal' conversation; it's been heavily scripted by many people. But with Canadians spending an average 21 hours per week watching TV, we may just fall into repeating what the stars say.
"This language shows that we're on top of things, that we're hip to it," says Blackmore. In our fast-paced world, we want to have a smart answer, a slick reaction — and these celebrities do what we feel we can't do for ourselves.
It seems that in talking like celebrities, we're simply mimicking people we deem successful. We use that ancient tool of language: gossip.
Social psychologist Frank McAndrew from Knox College in Illinois just wrote a comprehensive article on gossip for Scientific American Mind. McAndrew says we chat about celebrities because we're so intimate with the details of their lives that we feel we know them. Anthropologically, we consider them part of our inner circle. "We may look to celebrities to learn strategies for being successful, just as we looked to the most influential members of our tribe (e.g. the best hunters and warriors) in days of yore," says McAndrew.
Expressing the deep thoughts
So what's the fallout of all this celebriteez lingo?
As Tim Blackmore deftly puts it: "Knowledge produces eloquence and vocabulary. Going from TV show to show produces pickup lines." He notices that his students are slower to come up with a considered response, consumed by their desire to be quick and funny. He says when they're asked to form an honest answer to a question without quips, they often pause, saying they don't know. But after some hemming and hawing and formulating and reformulating of sentences, they do get down to substance.
So the deep thoughts are there; it's just a matter of finding our own words to express them.
In the end, maybe this celebritized language is an exercise in democracy. We're all equal in our quest for a crib, a boo, and occasionally a little bling, and in so pursuing, we're all speaking the same language. I believe there is some truthiness to that.

The Overground Underground (or "I can't feel my toes")

There was another Gaza demonstration today - around 10 000 of us showed up, and it was a good mix of people too (not just Arabs or Muslims. Seems to be that as the crisis goes on for an extended period of time, more and more people are becoming aware of just how bad it is...)
We marched from Dorchester Square at Peel and Renee Levesque all the way to the Complexe Desjardins at Renee Levesque and St-Urbain (1.1 km away).
After the Demonstration, we were too cold to walk home outside, so M introduced me to a new area of the Montreal underground. Now, having lived in the city for about 10 months (and living downtown!) I've walked the underground in the core downtown area a fair amount, but this was a whole other area I didn't even realize was connected. We walked for about 40 minutes without stepping outside at all and exited 3 (3!) minutes from our place for the last bit. Not only could I actually feel my feet by this point; they were actually warm. And I should clarify that the underground is actually a stretch of tunnels and overpasses, so the term underground is not 100% accurate. Sometimes, you're inside and at street level. Sometimes you're a floor up...
But here's the coolest part: on our walk, we came across two separate wedding parties using random parts of the underground as background for their wedding photos. Now, some areas are just regular brick wall, or completely ordinary, but some are actually extremely artistic. The first bride and groom were taking photos against a yellow background. The second were in Windsor Station, taking their photos at a pretty elaborate staircase. I took no pictures of either couple (though I did congratulate them as we passed), but here are a few grainy cell phone shots of a neat tunnel area on our route....

Why the Economic Downturn is Good for You

Check out this great article at MacLeans about the joys of frugality, and how the recession could actually make you healthier, happier, and more environmentally friendly. Seriously, it's not just a way to make ourselves feel better about the whole thing. They make some very relevant points...

Happy Eidin' to All!

And to all a good night... Heheh, no just kidding.
Yesterday one of my colleagues at work asked me what we said to each other to wish each other a good Eid: Merry Eid? Happy Eid?
I guess everyone says their own thing, right? When I'm saying it in English, I tend to say "Happy Eid". "Merry Eid" just sounds too Christmas-y, and "Blessed Eid", which would be a literal translation of "Eid Mubarak", which is how we say it in Arabic, sounds too old school in English. It makes me feel like pronouncing the second "e" in "blessed" and getting all Shakespeare-like...
So, Happy Eid it is. I hope those celebrating have a fabulous day, filled with their favourite things, whatever they may be (friends, family, sugar, chocolate, laughter....)
Tune in soon for a great story on how my Little Angela handled her first Eid in Dubai... and in other important Little Angel/Angela news, my Little Angel is now able to say "Nonno" (which is the baby-version of my name that Little Angela came up with). For this delightful tidbit of info, I must take my sister' and parent's word: he refuses to say it into the phone to me... Ah well, good enough I s'pose.

What does it mean to be well-educated

I stumbled upon this post on Mud Mama's blog (via XUP's blogroll) and found this article fascinating. It discusses the "definition" of education and the different criteria we consider to define whether someone is or isn't well-educated. I am the result traditional school systems in Ottawa, but I would argue that a lot of my education came informally from my parents and my community, and that has done a lot to make me who I am. For the teachers out there (I'm thinking specifically of my sister and Sajda


PRINCIPAL LEADERSHIP
March 2003
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------What Does It Mean to Be Well-Educated?
By Alfie Kohn
No one should offer pronouncements about what it means to be well-educated without meeting my wife. When I met Alisa, she was at Harvard, putting the finishing touches on her doctoral dissertation in anthropology. A year later, having spent her entire life in school, she decided to do the only logical thing . . . and apply to medical school. Today she is a practicing physician -- and an excellent one at that, judging by feedback from her patients and colleagues.

She will, however, freeze up if you ask her what 8 times 7 is, because she never learned the multiplication table. And forget about grammar (“Me and him went over her house today” is fairly typical) or literature (“Who’s Faulkner?”). After a dozen years, I continue to be impressed on a regular basis by the agility of her mind as well as by how much she doesn’t know. (I’m also bowled over by what a wonderful person she is, but that’s beside the point.

So what do you make of this paradox with whom I live? Is she a walking indictment of the system that let her get so far -- 29 years of schooling, not counting medical residency -- without acquiring the basics of English and math? Or does she offer an invitation to rethink what it means to be well-educated since what she lacks hasn’t prevented her from being a deep-thinking, high-functioning, multiply credentialed, professionally successful individual?

Of course, if those features describe what it means to be well-educated, then there is no dilemma to be resolved. She fits the bill. The problem arises only if your definition includes a list of facts and skills that one must have but that she lacks. In that case, though, my wife is not alone. Thanks to the internet, which allows writers and researchers to circulate rough drafts of their manuscripts, I’ve come to realize just how many truly brilliant people cannot spell or punctuate. Their insights and discoveries may be changing the shape of their respective fields, but they can’t use an apostrophe correctly to save their lives.

Or what about me (he suddenly inquired, relinquishing his comfortable perch from which issue all those judgments of other people)? I could embarrass myself pretty quickly by listing the number of classic works of literature I’ve never read. And I can multiply reasonably well, but everything mathematical I was taught after first-year algebra (and even some of that) is completely gone. How well-educated am I?
*
The issue is sufficiently complex that questions are easier to formulate than answers. So let’s at least be sure we’re asking the right questions and framing them well.

1. The Point of Schooling: Rather than attempting to define what it means to be well-educated, should we instead be asking about the purposes of education? The latter formulation invites us to look beyond academic goals. For example, Nel Noddings, professor emerita at Stanford University, urges us to reject “the deadly notion that the schools’ first priority should be intellectual development” and contends that “the main aim of education should be to produce competent, caring, loving, and lovable people.” Alternatively, we might wade into the dispute between those who see education as a means to creating or sustaining a democratic society and those who believe its primary role is economic, amounting to an “investment” in future workers and, ultimately, corporate profits. In short, perhaps the question “How do we know if education has been successful?” shouldn’t be posed until we have asked what it’s supposed to be successful at.

2. Evaluating People vs. Their Education: Does the phrase well-educated refer to a quality of the schooling you received, or to something about you? Does it denote what you were taught, or what you learned (and remember)? If the term applies to what you now know and can do, you could be poorly educated despite having received a top-notch education. However, if the term refers to the quality of your schooling, then we’d have to conclude that a lot of “well-educated” people sat through lessons that barely registered, or at least are hazy to the point of irrelevance a few years later.

3. An Absence of Consensus: Is it even possible to agree on a single definition of what every high school student should know or be able to do in order to be considered well-educated? Is such a definition expected to remain invariant across cultures (with a single standard for the U.S. and Somalia, for example), or even across subcultures (South-Central Los Angeles and Scarsdale; a Louisiana fishing community, the upper East side of Manhattan, and Pennsylvania Dutch country)? How about across historical eras: would anyone seriously argue that our criteria for “well-educated” today are exactly the same as those used a century ago – or that they should be?

To cast a skeptical eye on such claims is not necessarily to suggest that the term is purely relativistic: you like vanilla, I like chocolate; you favor knowledge about poetry, I prefer familiarity with the Gettysburg Address. Some criteria are more defensible than others. Nevertheless, we have to acknowledge a striking absence of consensus about what the term ought to mean. Furthermore, any consensus that does develop is ineluctably rooted in time and place. It is misleading and even dangerous to justify our own pedagogical values by pretending they are grounded in some objective, transcendent Truth, as though the quality of being well-educated is a Platonic form waiting to be discovered.

4. Some Poor Definitions: Should we instead try to stipulate which answers don’t make sense? I’d argue that certain attributes are either insufficient (possessing them isn’t enough to make one well-educated) or unnecessary (one can be well-educated without possessing them) -- or both. Let us therefore consider ruling out:

Seat time. Merely sitting in classrooms for x hours doesn’t make one well-educated.

Job skills. It would be a mistake to reduce schooling to vocational preparation, if only because we can easily imagine graduates who are well-prepared for the workplace (or at least for some workplaces) but whom we would not regard as well-educated. In any case, pressure to redesign secondary education so as to suit the demands of employers reflects little more than the financial interests -- and the political power -- of these corporations.

Test scores. To a disconcerting extent, high scores on standardized tests signify a facility with taking standardized tests. Most teachers can instantly name students who are talented thinkers but who just don’t do well on these exams – as well as students whose scores seem to overestimate their intellectual gifts. Indeed, researchers have found a statistically significant correlation between high scores on a range of standardized tests and a shallow approach to learning. In any case, no single test is sufficiently valid, reliable, or meaningful that it can be treated as a marker for academic success.

Memorization of a bunch o’ facts. Familiarity with a list of words, names, books, and ideas is a uniquely poor way to judge who is well-educated. As the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead observed long ago, “A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God’s earth. . . . Scraps of information” are only worth something if they are put to use, or at least “thrown into fresh combinations.”

Look more carefully at the superficially plausible claim that you must be familiar with, say, King Lear in order to be considered well-educated. To be sure, it’s a classic meditation on mortality, greed, belated understanding, and other important themes. But how familiar with it must you be? Is it enough that you can name its author, or that you know it’s a play? Do you have to be able to recite the basic plot? What if you read it once but barely remember it now?

If you don’t like that example, pick another one. How much do you have to know about neutrinos, or the Boxer rebellion, or the side-angle-side theorem? If deep understanding is required, then (a) very few people could be considered well-educated (which raises serious doubts about the reasonableness of such a definition), and (b) the number of items about which anyone could have that level of knowledge is sharply limited because time is finite. On the other hand, how can we justify a cocktail-party level of familiarity with all these items – reminiscent of Woody Allen’s summary of War and Peace after taking a speed-reading course: “It’s about Russia.” What sense does it make to say that one person is well-educated for having a single sentence’s worth of knowledge about the Progressive Era or photosynthesis, while someone who has to look it up is not?

Knowing a lot of stuff may seem harmless, albeit insufficient, but the problem is that efforts to shape schooling around this goal, dressed up with pretentious labels like “cultural literacy,” have the effect of taking time away from more meaningful objectives, such as knowing how to think. If the Bunch o’ Facts model proves a poor foundation on which to decide who is properly educated, it makes no sense to peel off items from such a list and assign clusters of them to students at each grade level. It is as poor a basis for designing curriculum as it is for judging the success of schooling.

The number of people who do, in fact, confuse the possession of a storehouse of knowledge with being “smart” – the latter being a disconcertingly common designation for those who fare well on quiz shows -- is testament to the naïve appeal that such a model holds. But there are also political implications to be considered here. To emphasize the importance of absorbing a pile of information is to support a larger worldview that sees the primary purpose of education as reproducing our current culture. It is probably not a coincidence that a Core Knowledge model wins rave reviews from Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum (and other conservative Christian groups) as well as from the likes of Investor’s Business Daily. To be sure, not every individual who favors this approach is a right-winger, but defining the notion of educational mastery in terms of the number of facts one can recall is well-suited to the task of preserving the status quo. By contrast, consider Dewey’s suggestion that an educated person is one who has “gained the power of reflective attention, the power to hold problems, questions, before the mind.” Without this capability, he added, “the mind remains at the mercy of custom and external suggestions.”

5. Mandating a Single Definition: Who gets to decide what it means to be well-educated? Even assuming that you and I agree to include one criterion and exclude another, that doesn’t mean our definition should be imposed with the force of law – taking the form, for example, of requirements for a high school diploma. There are other considerations, such as the real suffering imposed on individuals who aren’t permitted to graduate from high school, the egregious disparities in resources and opportunities available in different neighborhoods, and so on.

More to the point, the fact that so many of us don’t agree suggests that a national (or, better yet, international) conversation should continue, that one definition may never fit all, and, therefore, that we should leave it up to local communities to decide who gets to graduate. But that is not what has happened. In about half the states, people sitting atop Mount Olympus have decreed that anyone who doesn’t pass a certain standardized test will be denied a diploma and, by implication, classified as inadequately educated. This example of accountability gone haywire violates not only common sense but the consensus of educational measurement specialists. And the consequences are entirely predictable: no high school graduation for a disproportionate number of students of color, from low-income neighborhoods, with learning disabilities, attending vocational schools, or not yet fluent in English.

Less obviously, the idea of making diplomas contingent on passing an exam answers by default the question of what it means to be well- (or sufficiently) educated: Rather than grappling with the messy issues involved, we simply declare that standardized tests will tell us the answer. This is disturbing not merely because of the inherent limits of the tests, but also because teaching becomes distorted when passing those tests becomes the paramount goal. Students arguably receive an inferior education when pressure is applied to raise their test scores, which means that high school exit exams may actually lower standards.

Beyond proclaiming “Pass this standardized test or you don’t graduate,” most states now issue long lists of curriculum standards, containing hundreds of facts, skills, and subskills that all students are expected to master at a given grade level and for a given subject. These standards are not guidelines but mandates (to which teachers are supposed to “align” their instruction). In effect, a Core Knowledge model, with its implication of students as interchangeable receptacles into which knowledge is poured, has become the law of the land in many places. Surely even defenders of this approach can appreciate the difference between arguing in its behalf and requiring that every school adopt it.

6. The Good School: Finally, instead of asking what it means to be well-educated, perhaps we should inquire into the qualities of a school likely to offer a good education. I’ve offered my own answer to that question at book length, as have other contributors to this issue. As I see it, the best sort of schooling is organized around problems, projects, and questions – as opposed to facts, skills, and disciplines. Knowledge is acquired, of course, but in a context and for a purpose. The emphasis is not only on depth rather than breadth, but also on discovering ideas rather than on covering a prescribed curriculum. Teachers are generalists first and specialists (in a given subject matter) second; they commonly collaborate to offer interdisciplinary courses that students play an active role in designing. All of this happens in small, democratic schools that are experienced as caring communities.

Notwithstanding the claims of traditionalists eager to offer – and then dismiss -- a touchy-feely caricature of progressive education, a substantial body of evidence exists to support the effectiveness of each of these components as well as the benefits of using them in combination. By contrast, it isn’t easy to find any data to justify the traditional (and still dominant) model of secondary education: large schools, short classes, huge student loads for each teacher, a fact-transmission kind of instruction that is the very antithesis of “student-centered,” the virtual absence of any attempt to integrate diverse areas of study, the rating and ranking of students, and so on. Such a system acts as a powerful obstacle to good teaching, and it thwarts the best efforts of many talented educators on a daily basis.

Low-quality instruction can be assessed with low-quality tests, including homegrown quizzes and standardized exams designed to measure (with faux objectivity) the number of facts and skills crammed into short-term memory. The effects of high-quality instruction are trickier, but not impossible, to assess. The most promising model turns on the notion of “exhibitions” of learning, in which students reveal their understanding by means of in-depth projects, portfolios of assignments, and other demonstrations – a model pioneered by Ted Sizer, Deborah Meier, and others affiliated with the Coalition of Essential Schools. By now we’re fortunate to have access not only to essays about how this might be done (such as Sizer’s invaluable Horace series) but to books about schools that are actually doing it: The Power of Their Ideas by Meier, about Central Park East Secondary School in New York City; Rethinking High School by Harvey Daniels and his colleagues, about Best Practice High School in Chicago; and One Kid at a Time by Eliot Levine, about the Met in Providence, RI.

The assessments in such schools are based on meaningful standards of excellence, standards that may collectively offer the best answer to our original question simply because to meet those criteria is as good a way as any to show that one is well-educated. The Met School focuses on social reasoning, empirical reasoning, quantitative reasoning, communication, and personal qualities (such as responsibility, capacity for leadership, and self-awareness). Meier has emphasized the importance of developing five “habits of mind”: the value of raising questions about evidence (“How do we know what we know?”), point of view (“Whose perspective does this represent?”), connections (“How is this related to that?”), supposition (“How might things have been otherwise?”), and relevance (“Why is this important?”).

It’s not only the ability to raise and answer those questions that matters, though, but also the disposition to do so. For that matter, any set of intellectual objectives, any description of what it means to think deeply and critically, should be accompanied by a reference to one’s interest or intrinsic motivation to do such thinking. Dewey reminded us that the goal of education is more education. To be well-educated, then, is to have the desire as well as the means to make sure that learning never ends.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright © 2003 by Alfie Kohn. This article may be downloaded, reproduced, and distributed without permission as long as each copy includes this notice along with citation information (i.e., name of the periodical in which it originally appeared, date of publication, and author's name). Permission must be obtained in order to reprint this article in a published work or in order to offer it for sale in any form. Please write to the address indicated on the Contact Us page.www.alfiekohn.org -- © Alfie Kohn

Hijabi Swimwear Hullabaloo

First, to set the tone, I wear something that looks like this when I go swimming:

I bought it from a swimsuit store. You can buy it online. You can buy it around the world. It's made from the same material as any other swimsuits. My sister has one just like it, but don't worry, they're different colours and different patterns. We're not trying to look like twins.
So, today we went for a swim in our condo's pool. It was pretty quiet and uneventful, until 3 minutes before we were planning on leaving anyway, a custodian approached us and told us we weren't allowed to swim here anymore.
Excuse me? Sorry? What's that? I pay condo fees like anyone else. I hurt no one by wearing my fabulous hijabi swimsuit.
The bottom line is that apparently, someone complained about our attire and she came to tell us we had to go. Sorry but no... We stayed, we discussed, we explained, we had her call a member of the condo board, and before it was time to go, we were told we could swim in our hijabi swimsuits without any problem (which we already knew, but now they knew too).
So, the sweetness of victory, or the bitterness of feeling the sting of ignorance? Well, a bit of both... I have to admit that it hurts when I find someone out there is still determined to limit my abilities to enjoy my basic rights just because I'm a Muslim woman who chooses to demonstrate my faith. Live and let live. We're in a pluralistic society, which means we all have the right to go on and act on our beliefs, so long as they don't hurt other members of that society. Hopefully, everyone comes to that conclusion soon.

Egypt Air Brings People Together

We were at the P.E. Trudeau airport last night waiting for my aunt to arrive on Egypt Air's first summer flight, and wouldn't you know it, so was half the population of Montreal! In the hour we stood at the arrivals section, my sister was approached by 3 different people she knew who were waiting for relatives, and in a bizarre domino-effect, a couple of those people were approached by other people they knew. It was like a fabulous meet-and-greet and the airport. Everyone kept commenting on how the last time they'd run into each other was also when picking people up the summer before. It speaks to the beauty of this country, that so many of come from so many other places, and that then our families, who come here to visit us, can find out just how great this place is.
So far, my aunt is impressed.