Category Archives: education

DARE Is The Worst

You know what I’m retroactively pissed about? DARE.

Well, okay. Probably about half the reason I’m pissed about them is because I had a phobia of mind-altering substances (as I still do) when I went through the program and thus spent the entire time having a panic attack. That kind of soured me on the whole idea.

But the entirety of DARE, as I recall it in between panic attacks, was about how people are going to peer-pressure you into taking drugs. I spent quite a lot of time terrified of this, because basically the only thing I find scarier than drugs is the idea of people pressuring me into things.

As it happens, I attend a college that is one of the top schools for drug use in the entirety of the United States. I lived with a dealer for a while; I’ve slept with multiple enthusiastic drug users. I have experience here.

What DARE Led Me To Believe Would Happen In This Circumstance:

Them: Hey, we’re going to trip. Wanna join in?
Me: No, thank you.
Them: Come on, are you chicken? Don’t be uncool.
Me: Panic attack.

What Actually Happened:

Them: Hey, we’re going to trip. Wanna join in?
Me: No, thank you.
Them: Okay, cool. I have a lot of respect for the straightedge lifestyle, you know. The important thing is that you know what’s right for you and your body. This sort of thing isn’t right for everyone! It’s really great that you know that about yourself.

I suppose that it’s possible all the horrible pressurey people are hiding somewhere and I just happened to run into all the aggressively tolerant drug users. (The previous sentence was not sarcastic. I have a habit of running into nice people. It’s weird. I am the only trans person in the world who never had a friend respond badly to their request to use gender-neutral pronouns.) But most of the people I know didn’t start using because someone peer-pressured them into it; it was more like “hey, want some?” and they were like “sure.”

I feel like this is the problem you run into when you try to construct an entire anti-drug program without acknowledging that drugs are fun. They make you feel good and see interesting colors and feel a deep sense of connection to the universe and stuff. Even the ones that are a bad idea to take are really fun! That’s why people fucking take them. And while peer group does play a role in access to drugs and making drugs seem like a Thing That Normal People Do and there are people who get coerced or worse into taking drugs, most people who take them take them because they’re fun.

If you can’t say that drugs are fun, because that might encourage people to (gasp) try drugs, then you don’t really have an explanation for why people would risk ODing and being arrested and attempting to hug Hell’s Angels and similar utility-reducing consequences of drug use. So you’re stuck with “…peer pressure?”

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Gifted Kid Syndrome

Society is set up in favor of people with brains that more closely approximate the “average” brain, at the expense of those of us with brains that are fucking weird; that’s basically the idea of neurodiversity. A thing I think is potentially important is that “brain that’s fucking weird” doesn’t just include people whose brains are broken or different-but-still-good; it also includes “brains that work better in some important way.”

For instance, think about kids who have, for whatever reason, more academic aptitude than other kids.* The “gifted kids” (ugh, I hate that word) and particularly the kids who always wound up at the top of gifted class.**

There’s a stereotype of the smart kid not having a lot of friends, and in my case and the case of a lot of people I know, that’s true. If you’re good at academics, it’s probably at least in part because you love academics (or at least part of it). You also, once you get at a certain level, have absolutely no one to share your love of academics with. When I was in third grade, I was reading Plato’s the Republic; my peers were playing Pokemon. I’m not saying that I was better (both occupations are entirely useless except for entertainment purposes), but it makes it terribly difficult to make friends if you want to talk philosopher-kings and they want to talk Pikachu. At the same time, while all my peers were out socializing I was… alone. Reading Plato. Because Plato was more interesting than whatever the people in my class were getting up to.

This means I was alone a lot, obviously. Because I was alone I never really learned a lot of really basic social skills you’re supposed to learn when you’re young. (I theorize that this is behind not just former gifted kids with poor social skills but also the geek social fallacies, most of which are about Not Excluding People Like We Were Excluded.) I felt like I was the only person in the world who loved the things I loved, which is a terribly lonely thing to feel. And, well, when kids see someone who’s weird, who doesn’t have a lot of friends, and who has rather poor social skills, they tend to bully them.

Adults don’t help either. There’s a natural tendency when someone is good at academics to praise them for being good at academics, which means that a lot of gifted kids (including me) wound up defining ourselves as The Smart One. This interacts really badly with social exclusion, because it’s really easy to conclude that the reason everyone keeps excluding you is because you’re better than them. That way lies arrogance and a rather unpleasant personality.

At the same time, if you define yourself as Smart, there is going to come a time when you’re Not Smart. When you meet people who are smarter than you, or you  have to suddenly start working at a class. This can induce low self-esteem, depression, and general emotional crisis, because if you’re The Smart One what happens if you aren’t smart anymore? (Bad things. Especially if you’d already decided that you’re better than people because you’re smarter than them and suddenly they’re smarter than you.)

Classes, up to a certain point, are really easy for people with a lot of academic aptitude. You learned it the first time the teacher went through it, but she has to spend the whole hour reviewing it because no one else is as quick as you– for that matter, you might have learned it last year when you taught it to yourself. This means that a lot of people get bored and disengage from classes, which can (oddly) lead to very poor grades and the classic “but you test so well!” syndrome.

If classes are easy, it’s really easy to coast through on native ability, which means you don’t learn how to study or work hard. When suddenly you have to work in class, you haven’t developed the study habits that you need. You’re used to getting to play around on Tumblr or work on your own projects, and now suddenly you have to reread the textbook and make flashcards? And, of course, you suddenly feel stupid because Smart People don’t need to study.

Anyone else have thoughts/experiences about being one of the quote-unquote gifted kids?

Possibly related: The problems with being smart, which offers a different perspective on some of the stuff I’m talking about here.

*Obvious Disclaimer: it is way better to have a ton of academic aptitude and a society that isn’t really set up to deal with people with a lot of academic aptitude than it is to have no academic aptitude and a society that isn’t really set up to deal with people with not very much academic aptitude. In the latter, you get a sucky situation and society makes it worse; in the former, you get something awesome, and there might be shit related to it, but at least you still get academic aptitude. However, we can talk about problems that are not The Worst Problem (TM). It is allowed.
**Other Obvious Disclaimer: this is a generalization that won’t apply to everyone– in fact, most of it doesn’t apply to me. And it’s based on my observation of myself and other former gifted kids, so it is not scientific in any way.

Deconstructing “Intelligence”

I am not sure there’s a single thing called “intelligence.”

Obviously, people have different mental aptitudes and capabilities! I want to put that right up front because people tend to get confused and assume that if one says “I’m not sure intelligence is a singular thing” one actually means “…because no one has different cognitive abilities at all!” However, I think that there are a lot of different kinds of cognitive abilities under the thing normally called “intelligence,” some of which are correlated and some of which are not, and that classifying them all as “intelligence” risks conflating them.

So here are some things I’ve thought of that people mean when they say “intelligence”:

Sounding smart. Your ability to say things like “when I read the Aeneid in the original Latin” and “reifying the social construction of homonormative sexuality” and “its transcendence degree over Q, the prime field of C, is the cardinality of the continuum.” If you want to sound smart, I recommend studying mathematics, philosophy, physics, or classics, using lots of jargon and complex sentence structure, and adopting an aura of arrogance and contempt for the plebes. (Do not, however, brag about your IQ or your Mensa membership. People will laugh at you.)

Unfortunately, while sounding smart does correlate to some degree to Actually Meaningful Cognitive Abilities, a lot of times the person talking about how Feynman is a classy-ass motherfucker has way more knowledge of physics than the person wittering about quantum vibration.

Credentialing. Having a high school degree, a college degree, a master’s, or a PhD. Of course, a lot of people with a college degree are smart. On the other hand, a lot of them got drunk and went to football games and played video games for four years and passed their classes because they cheated or took nothing but easy courses. And a lot of people who don’t have a college degree are very intelligent but were too poor to attend college, flunked out because of depression, or didn’t even realize college was an option for them. Even attendance at a top college is not necessarily an indicator of Actually Meaningful Cognitive Abilities, given the rate of legacy admissions to Ivy League schools. Class and ability are incredibly important here: poor people and disabled people are, all things considered, less likely to have access to credentials.

Knowledge. Knowing Lots of Things. Knowing lots of things about lots of topics, particularly topics that are generally considered academic, is often considered to be a sign of intelligence. Note that there are lots of autodidacts who know lots of things, and people with impressive credentials who forgot it all or never even learned. Also that knowing things does not necessarily mean that you know what you should do with that knowledge, or that you can come up with brilliant new ideas on your own.

Memory. Or, well, semantic memory, anyway. The ability to remember all the world capitals, not the ability to remember where you put your car keys. This is linked to knowledge, but different– after all, if you have a good semantic memory but little library/Internet/school access or no desire to learn things, you’re probably not going to know a whole hell of a lot.

Reasoning ability. Your ability to do things like solve math problems and do well on tests. This gets called “intelligence” a lot, and I don’t have a problem with people calling this “intelligence” as long as they’re careful with their usage. Because, once again, you can have a lot of reasoning ability and be irrational or have really massively incorrect opinions or drop out of high school or speak solely in Tumblr speak.

Creativity: The ability to think of new ideas! I… really can’t think of much to say about this, okay. But it’s a thing.

Executive functioning. Executive functioning is one’s brain’s ability to do things like “remember what you’re doing” and “do what you’re supposed to do when you’re supposed to do it” and “get to class on time.” People don’t necessarily assume that people with a low level of executive functioning are stupid– as everyone with poor executive functioning who gets told “you’re so smart, why can’t you just–?” knows– but a person with a high level of executive functioning often is likely to come off as more intelligent.

Rationality. Susceptibility to cognitive biases! Like “I already know this, so I’m going to avoid any information that might disprove it.” Or “look, the coin came up heads a dozen times, we’re due for a tail.” Or “that person cut me off because he’s a jerk, but I cut this person off because the sun was in my eyes.” (It occurs to me that not all cognitive biases have the same origin, so you might be able to divide up this category further, but I don’t know enough to say what the divisions are.)

Desire to know. Do you like thinking? Do you want to learn? Is knowing things fun to you? Do you like debate and solving problems? This is the one I tend to value most highly in people, and what I’m most likely to mean when I say “smart.” (Which is weird, because everyone else seems to mean “reasoning ability.” Harrumph. Perhaps I should start saying I only want to be friends with people with a high need for cognition instead.)

All those those things are pretty heavily correlated with each other. For instance, wanting to know things, reasoning ability, and memory are all probably correlated to how much you know. Reasoning ability, creativity, and memory are also correlated fairly well, at least if you believe our current methods of measuring those three things work fairly well. Credentialing and sounding smart are correlated to all the Actually Meaningful Cognitive Abilities.

But they are not all the same thing. Do not assume that because someone is good at reasoning that they’re necessarily rational, or that because someone has a college degree that they necessarily know lots of stuff. In particular, credentialing, sounding smart, and knowledge are influenced by things like social class and access to an actually decent educational system and not being mentally ill and having parents that take an interest in your upbringing and who your friends were as a kid and so on.

Improve Education by Teaching Less

(Okay, everyone, we know that Ozy Is Not An Education Reform Specialist Or A Teacher And Has Actually Not Even Taken Sociology of Education Yet Despite It Being Offered Every Year, right? Please take this as more “food for thought” than “serious policy suggestion.”)

Right now, schools try to cram in a lot of stuff. Anyone remember the American history classes that never got past the Civil War? Biology classes that never got around to covering vertebrates? World History classes that have a week for Greece and Rome or a day for Vietnam? Math classes where half the textbook could have been blank white pages, because you’re certainly not addressing any of it?

Not just that, but a lot of the stuff schools teach is totally useless. I spent three years in middle school learning how to write five-paragraph essays and four years in high school learning how to write literary criticism. I find it amazing that I spent seven years of my life learning how to write the only two genres that absolutely no one in the world wants to read. I mean, Jesus, I could have spent seven years working on my sonnet skills. At least that would get me laid.

Let me be clear: I’m not blaming teachers for this shit. Most teachers are good people doing the best they can in an absolutely crappy incentive system.

“Our students should learn about Important Subject X!” is popular and “maybe we should take some of this out of the textbook?” leads to cries of dumbing down education. So textbooks have more information than you could possibly teach to a bunch of bored freshmen no matter how good a teacher you are. Someone decided that reading and writing ought to be taught in the same class and “students write about what they’re reading” is a natural way to synthesize that. Someone else decided that a single essay in a prescribed and absurdly artificial format* should be the sole way of assessing how well students are doing at writing, and you cannot blame people for responding rationally to incentives.

But the problem remains: students are being taught things they don’t need to know, and not being taught things they need to know, and this is a terrible way to run an educational system.

I suggest triage. Create a bare minimum list of things that people absolutely need to know– things that are highly effective in making people happier and better citizens, that either you or people around you will seriously regret your not knowing– and concentrate on teaching that. My preliminary list:

  • How to read. 
  • How to write a clear sentence and paragraph.
  • Some foreign language fluently. Probably more than one.
  • Basic arithmetic.
  • Statistics.
  • How to assess information for quality (statistics is related to this).
  • The scientific method.
  • Basic science: how evolution works, what the atom theory is, etc.
  • Civics.
  • Basic psychology.
  • Et cetera, I highly doubt this list is complete.

“But Ozy?” I hear you say. “What about the love of learning, knowledge for its own sake? Don’t you value that?” Of course I do. I read textbooks for fun. But the love of learning cannot be coerced. You can’t make someone be passionate about learning world history because you passed a law that says everyone in tenth grade has to learn about world history. And even if that magically worked, they would probably be endlessly frustrated that you only spent a week on Greece and Rome.

Once you teach people the absolute basics, they can go where their passions take them: solving math problems, doing experiments, going to Shakespeare performances, writing poems, playing drums, programming, learning everything there is to know about the Abbasids. If people do things they care about, they are more likely to actually remember them a decade later; furthermore, it teaches important skills like How To Find Things Out that are way more important than a half-remembered quadratic equation.

Some people think people wouldn’t learn unless you coerced them. I highly doubt this. Humans’ comparative advantage is intelligence; we evolved to be thinking animals. It is really a sign of success at… something… that schools have managed to convince so many people that learning is boring and sucks. Besides, I highly doubt Hypothetical Would Rather Sit On Her Ass Than Learn To Play Drums Or Something Lady would be much good at learning things in a regular school system either. 

So basically I propose modified unschooling! With a caveat that some things are important enough that everyone has to learn them even if they don’t want to! Okay.

*People who didn’t spend three years learning how to write a five-paragraph essay, you cannot imagine how terrible they are. Imagine the guidelines an Overly Literal Genie who’s read too much Strunk and White would give for writing an essay. “There must be an introduction, a conclusion, and three paragraphs of evidence. The introduction contains two sentences of hook, two sentences of transition, and a thesis statement which says exactly what the next three paragraphs are going to say…”

Why Discussion-Based Classes Can Suck My Silicone Dick

(Ooooh, yay, I can swear in titles again!)

I absolutely love discussion. There’s nothing better than hanging out till 4 am exploring different facets of an idea, critiquing each other’s ideas, learning from another person’s lived experience, synthesizing different worldviews into a more full and nuanced whole, finding out what Judith Butler was saying from someone who could actually put up with that asshole’s terrible writing.

So, of course, I picked a school that advertised its seminar-style discussion-based classes.

As it turns out, discussion has roughly the same relationship to discussion-based classes as brie does to Extruded Cheese-Based Snack Product.

When you talk about interesting ideas with people, they’re generally people you choose to talk to. Of course, you don’t want to just talk to people who agree with you, that’s boring. (In fact, one of my favorite people to argue with is a libertarian moral realist Kantian.) But you get to filter for things like “has insight and interesting ideas” and “is willing to change their mind when presented with new evidence” and “listens and attempts to understand your point of view.”

In a discussion-based class, you are talking to an arbitrary collection of random students. (Occasionally, in upper-level classes, they may even be an arbitrary collection of random students from your major.) This means you have to put up with That Guy who thinks of themself as a great philosopher, as shown by their tendency to interrupt social psych class with questions like “what is love really? Like, on a spiritual level?”

Furthermore, there’s a certain level of trust and mutual respect you need for a really good conversation about ideas. The kind where you’ll wait and see where someone’s going with that absolutely ludicrous notion, or ask for clarification instead of just assuming that someone meant something utterly idiotic. The kind where you can point out flaws in your own position or defend the other person’s, because both of you know that this is not a game where you win by proving the other guy wrong (whether they are or not). The kind where either you have similar worldviews or you understand why and how your worldviews are different, so you don’t run into the rocks trying to explain things to each other. 

It’s really hard to get that kind of trust in a discussion-based class unless everyone knows each other really well already (which is uncommon, especially if you have classes with asocial cockends like me).

In any given class, there are a couple people who don’t want to be there. The class fit their schedule, or it’s a requirement for their major or a distribution requirement, or their best friend is taking it, or they got dropped from the class they wanted to take at the last minute, or they have an enormous crush on the professor, or whatever. Those people are likely to be utterly uninterested in the topic and, thus, have very little of interest to say about it. But since the class is partially graded on participation, they have to speak up anyway. People being forced to talk about things they don’t care about is a recipe for conversational disaster and lack of insight. 

In addition, in any class, at least half the people did not do the reading. (These probably include the uninterested people, but also a bunch of other people who are lazy, disorganized, depressed, taking six other classes and supporting themselves so they don’t have time for this bullshit, or more interested in parties than studying.) In normal discussion, you can simply explain the author’s point and move on; in addition, since you’re basically familiar with what people have and have not read, you can just talk about the things both of you have read. But since we’re all participating in the collective fiction that everyone has done the reading, no one is allowed to explain the reading to the people who didn’t do it or decide to talk about something everyone has read instead.