Curriculum Interruptus

In Defense of Men (but not Man)

2010-11-01T14:10:00.000-07:00

“Psychologists must tell us: why are boys and young men not as focused on education or performance [other than on the football field]? Are they more easily distracted? If that is so what remedial measures should we put in place in primary or pre-schools to correct this?...The question for determination at the end of the day is not so much where are the men—but why are the men becoming dropouts in society.” [Dana Seetahal, Express, Oct 02, 2010]

I want to respond to two recent provocations, one alluded to above and the second the theme of a panel at this year’s National Parents & Teachers Association conference, High Performing Boys: Finding the Formula. My defense of men is not intended as a condemnation of women. Nor am I attempting or seeking to defend or excuse indefensible behavior by any person. This defense is a focused critique and invitation to a fuller more participatory dialogue on education. My intent is to attempt to interrupt some of our unexamined beliefs and habits of thinking that underlie the powerful, diffuse and debilitating, national narratives about Caribbean male (under) performance.
Let me begin with one that is implied in the excerpt and the NPTA panel theme, namely that there exists ‘a formula’ or ‘remedy’ for what has come to be constructed and accepted as a crisis and somehow naturalized deficiency in young men and boy’s upbringing. That Seetahal seems to be advocating a ‘correctional’ stance beginning in pre-school is understandable given that the 20th century has contributed to the almost complete medicalisation, psychologisation, and carceralisation of mental, physical, and everyday life in ‘Schooled’ societies. Unstated but nevertheless implied in the seemingly neutral call for ‘remedial’ measures to the ‘boy problem’ is the unquestioned validity of privileging ‘focus’ over ‘distraction’ as if physical and mental ‘tinkering’ and ‘messing-around’ had little or no value or relation to innovation, creativity, performance, and human well-being and the belief that dropping out of school to pursue ‘a distraction’ is the worst thing that a person could do. Perhaps many students would benefit from adults taking their ‘distractions’ more seriously as opportunities from which to begin learning rather than starting with a desire to see them disciplined and cured of it?
Many students are distracted in school because in most instances the game of school is just not one that they find very interesting or relevant, they soon figure out that it has few real winners, winning does not make or guarantee happiness or satisfaction, and the game has been set up to find and reward a few, or those with the right ‘connections’ or ‘capitals.’ If one is seeking enlightenment, development or intellectual stimulation, or merely entertainment, one will not find it very frequently in the majority of schools. If you’re seeking power, prestige, and social promotion that comes from following orders and certification then succeeding in school is a better, though not necessarily the most successful strategy.

Alternative educational sites like the football field are also valuable spaces to learn about the fundamentals of high performance. More school is probably not the answer to the problems of schooling and we ought to be constructing a new mindset: a vision for education ‘After-School’ (and I don’t mean ‘extra’-lessons which is sometimes More-School just not in School).

Seetahal’s premise that “boys and young men are not focused on education or performance” is flawed. It begins in the wrong place neglecting to interrogate a more fundamental possibility that what many students are actively resisting is the strictures of schooling, meaningless certification and a meager anesthetizing curriculum – education and performance are not necessarily best served by schools as currently enacted in this historical moment. From my observations in several schools during my time as a teacher and lecturer at UWI, boys in schools of all types from Cedros to Port-of-Spain seemed less willing to ‘go along’, to ‘play nice’ or tolerate the farce that was and is being passed off as ‘teaching’ than their female counterparts. Many students are not prepared to tolerate a precarious educational existence of ‘doing without understanding.’ For them doing and earning are the first movers of learning. This of course is upsetting to the entrenched narrative of the ascendant, educationally progressive and active female – that gets ahead by activity and effort but unacknowledged as a cost is a degree of passivity, acceptance, playing along and playing well with others. The institutionalized consumptive party line that “you can have it all” – fashion, family, financial independence, freedom to fete and…is a dangerous and damaging lie. Only a few women and men can have it all and that usually comes from huge personal sacrifices or seeking dangerous or illegal shortcuts in other areas.

Let me turn now to the 2010 NPTA panel theme, “High Performing Boys: Finding the Formula”. At first I was amused then I became annoyed and finally concerned enough to write about it. It is however the likely difficulty that the members of the NPTA and others have in recognizing that their theme is problematic and the dangers of not addressing these respectfully that is my concern. Indeed they perceive a serious issue and are desirous of talking about it. Professionally I have a responsibility to take their concerns seriously but at the same time to honour the pedagogical moment and work to trouble too simple understandings of the issue. Personally, I have a stake in not allowing the no-more-or-less fairer sex to continue to dominate and dictate the pace, content and direction of a suffocating discourse on the past, present and future education of men and masculinity at home and regionally as if there were a deficit of competent and able men capable of responding.

If I were invited to address this theme my goal would be to argue that the valuing and pursuit of high performance as an educational end for boys and girls in T&T, in and of itself is problematic, perhaps dangerous and part of the very problem that we are seeking to address and perhaps needs to be rethought. Because my hosts requested a ‘formula’ I would provide them with one drawn from the research on high performance/performers across many fields including education. The ‘formula’ simply stated is that high performance is dependent upon (but not determined by – this is an important distinction) deliberate practice, a growth mindset, competent, knowledgeable, effective, resourceful and mindful teachers providing useful and timely feedback, supportive social and personal environments and dogged persistence over a significant period of time. I would also point out the fact that while the literature on high performance describes a particular ethic or attitude towards improvement and growth in a deliberately chosen field, it is exceedingly difficult to achieve high performance in a discipline in which one has not made a commitment to improvement or mastery, and this literature says very little about individual or personal ethics – something that we might also find to be a valuable characteristic in high performing men and women who work their ways up corporate and political ladders.

Having hopefully satisfied my hosts’ desire for a formula, perhaps a lingering legacy of the obsessions of an older educational system, I would turn to the costs and rewards of high performance. Some of the costs of high performance, apart from the obvious ones of time and money include reduced creativity, depression, damage to personal relationships, damage to self, unsustainability, cheating, and illegal or unethical behavior. There are many routes to high performance, not all of them honest, safe or socially sanctioned. Indeed it is the promised rewards of high performance, money, power, prestige, status, comfort, personal satisfaction, and various freedoms that are sometimes part of the motivation to become a high performer. Rarely is ‘utility to others’ a motive. Indeed, in many fields, but not all, to actually become a high performer one has to consciously and deliberately make the decision that it's not first and foremost about helping people, but it’s about personal improvement – ultimately it's a selfish or individualistic pursuit though one that can sometimes also be socially useful.

Part 2
Having begun to trouble the audience a bit I would move to discuss some examples of high performers to illustrate some of these ideas. I’d talk about high-performing celebrity boys and men like Tiger Woods, Dwight Yorke, Russell Latapy, Brian Lara, Lawrence Duprey and VS Naipaul – all exemplars of high performing boys/men and all very, very human. This move would be to emphasize that high performance as an end in itself is neither a guarantee nor predictor of success in other areas of life outside of the domain(s) of high performance and to unlock the door to the question of whether or not high performance is really the main or only thing to which we should be aspiring. My own answer to this is that high performance must seen as being part of a larger, more coherent, sustainable and healthy educational outcome for all students. [I would leave my discussion of exactly what I see this as being for the Q&A session to follow.]

I'd talk about the young man at a good school in the US who committed suicide because he had his sexual orientation ‘outed’ online by a thoughtless series of actions by another young man. I'd talk about boys I see drinking copious amounts of red bull and other stimulants or using steroids in the pursuit of high performance and make the connection explicit that high performance is an addictive behavior and one which, without control and appropriate supervision can be destructive. I'd re-emphasise the HIGH in high performance both the positive and negative dimensions and discuss all the people, including some of those likely in the audience who have come to achieve happiness, peace of mind, and financial security - not by pursuing high performance as an end but by finding and nurturing their passions, positive addictions, and finding the right people, places or opportunities to help them do so.
Next I would raise the issue that in order to become a high performer one must be able to work very closely in a community with other high performers and receive useful, constructive and timely feedback leading to the problem of finding, creating or sustaining such communities locally. A large part of the very definition and central to any value to being a high performer is the premise of there being few or very few who are at that standard. In the case of our two small islands, we simply do not have the carrying capacity, markets or communities to support and reward large numbers of high performing people across every sphere of endeavor. Thus pursuing high performance as an educational end might seem to be setting up the inevitable but understandable conflict with other educational concerns namely national development and the perennial concern with ‘brain drain’ which perhaps is a narrow and misplaced patriotism.

Depending on the mood and composition of the audience I might take a risk towards other more germane understandings of ‘male performance’. Talk of male performance and education seldom goes in the direction of the literal. I would wonder out loud, “How many teachers/principals take time to talk with boys about their sexual futures and how to manage relationships and their developing erotic selves responsibly and maturely without moralizing or imposing a heteronormative and monogamous ideology?” I would probably see certain audience members likely becoming visibly uncomfortable. Male performance cannot be restricted only to academic matters – men have bodies too that matter a great deal to them. Perhaps that is part of why they are on the football field?

IF I were talking to an audience of men I'd also say, hey, let the women continue to pursue this obsession with high performance, in the meantime let us men start to take better care of ourselves so that we will be prepared to take care of our spouses, partners, children and wards, when they break down from this dangerously obsessive, anxiety inducing and ultimately wasteful pursuit of high performance at any cost. If it’s one positive thing 'bro' culture might teach it’s the importance and necessity of certain kinds of social networks for men's survival and sanity. I would recommend to them taking a cue from the disability rights and other recent movements for social justice that a reinvigorated men’s movement ought to proclaim loudly, unapologetically and proudly, “nothing about us without us.” Men cannot continue to be silent as women talk about and disparage us publicly, through media and through research – it does none of us any good. But we men also have to get involved. We also have to listen very closely and hear what women are saying – clearly women want to help though they need to be reminded at times, and become mindful, that well-intentioned and oppressive maternalism can have as disastrous consequences as well-intentioned and oppressive paternalism. Patriarchy and privilege are not naturalized or encoded in the male body or communities but are one form of expression of a particularly pervasive and damaging ideology – what Caribbean philosopher and writer Sylvia Wynter has called Man.

“Man” Wynter writes “is not the human, although it represents itself as if it were. It is a specific, local-cultural conception of the human…Its “Other” is therefore not woman…Rather because Man conceives of itself through its Origin narrative…of Evolution…its “Other” and “Others” are necessarily those categories of human who are projected…as having been bio-evolutionary dysselected – i.e…[all] who are negatively marked as defective humans within the terms of Man’s self-conception and its related understanding of what it is to be human.” It is perhaps ironic (and ultimately tragic) that the memythic ideology of Man has been turned, in the present moment upon the members of the entire class from whom it emerged and who sustained it for centuries while benefiting most directly. It is men everywhere and of every hue who are now suspect and being constructed as the new (educationally) evolutionarily dys-selected class. A ‘distracted’ or ‘disobedient’ boy is broken and a danger, a societal dagger, that needs to be quickly re-sheathed through a formula. I suspect that the ideology of Man has found new millennial hosts – though I would stress that these are not solely female or feminised bodies. Most frightening is the possibility that it might verily turn against life-itself if indeed it is not already doing so.

I’d end by re-stating the formula and reminding them that the pursuit of high performance as an educational end comes with no guarantees about other valuable educational outcomes and requires a price which for some might already be too high.

If I were more entrepreneurial and less concerned about the truth and consequences of my speaking or writing I’d market a programme called “The formula” for academic success. It’s what the target demographic of the NPTA appear to want and is primed to buy. The parent market is largely uncertain, fearful, yet desirous of success for their children and simultaneously trusting and mistrusting of experts and soothsayers – in short they are excellent consumers prone to suasion by the latest fad and lapped up rhetoric. Educators, including myself, have much responsibility and blame to shoulder here – we have not always treated or trusted parents and interested others as competent and intellectual equals. Nor have we always taken the time or care, as I am seeking to do here, to articulate clearly where and how we come to see certain forms of thinking and consequent actions as being too limited or too narrow or incompatible with other commitments to social justice that we might hope to make.

Our semi-literate and barely functional news-media, another group whose under-performance and less than critical literacies educators have yet to answer for, catering to the lowest common reader also does more than its fair share as well to keep conversations within certain tolerable and comprehensible limits. Caribbean educational discourses and especially ones concerning male marginalization or performance suffer simultaneously from a poverty and abundance of words, ideas, and concepts… without connection – the true crises are ones of meaning and of our own making (double entendre intended). In seeking to answer if and why men might be dropping out of society, it might be fruitful to characterize the ways in which the society that they are supposed to be dropping out from has constructed and constrained the range of their performative identities and possible identifications.

We need to look closely and critically at the way our Caribbean media and culture have commodified and corralled male, female and other performative embodiments through its limiting representations of masculinity and femininity and by reinforcing certain unproductive (but economically profitable) habits of thinking (being and doing) and our gender theorists have contributed much there already. There are fewer ways in TT to do male/female that are capable of being scribed outside of received scripts. For example, Seetahal’s suggestion that “…the number of eligible men is dwindling. Soon they will become an endangered specie at the tertiary level, in the professions and in the job market” restates as implied fact rather than open question, a trope introduced into the discourse by Keisha Lindsay’s 1997/2002 paper with the similarly sounding title “Is the Caribbean Male an Endangered Species.” Even the headline, “Where are the Men?” has been uttered before, for example in Carl Wint’s Gleaner article of 1989 which went under the banner, “Where have all the Men gone?” and which has popped up from time to time. Having found a meme to mine, it is not (often) in (most) media’s interest to explore other, perhaps more productive sites of and for the construction of alternative meanings and educational ‘realities’. Seldom called upon are much more nuanced and generative formulations such as the question posed (and answered) by educators Jerome DeLisle, Peter Smith and Vena Jules in their 2005 paper, “Which males or females are most at risk and on what?” which recognizes that factors influencing performance and success affect males and females differentially across the entire educational spectrum. Well intentioned slogans while making for good headlines often do very little to unsettle dominant cultural educational mythologies and at worst naturalize these to the detriment of those who do not fit within the ‘normal’ bounds.

The situation we are witnessing and the difficulties men are having has a long history. One part of it stems from outdated but entrenched and reinforced conceptions of ‘masculine virtue.’ Moral and political philosopher Alasdair Macintyre in Dependent Rational Animals: Why human beings need the virtues (1999) draws attention to the fact that the relationship between our (human) biological constitution, our vulnerability and consequent dependency on others, has been neglected as an object of study. This inattention, he suggests, arose out of interpretations of Aristotle’s conceptions of rationality, experience and masculine virtue. Aristotelian rationality, has been interpreted as something that distinguishes us from other animals while his account of the value of experience excludes that of those most likely to experience vulnerability, affliction and dependence, viz. women, slaves, servants, laborers and manufacturers – Man’s dys-selected. Together, they sever and obscure our familial relationships with our animal natures, from which emerges our capacity to be wounded, i.e. our vulnerability. Macintyre alludes to Aristotle’s elevation of an outward practice of a perception of ‘invulnerability’ that emerges from his (Aristotle’s) description of masculine virtue as one which does not burden others in times of need, sadness or loss, but seeks a detached rational independence. Aristotle’s virtuous man does not reveal how, where or when he is vulnerable. Indeed, he denies the existence of his vulnerable self as dependence on others is seen as a sign of weakness. It is this question of masculine virtue and how it needs to be re-defined, enacted and embodied in a Caribbean context not only for boys/men, but for all human beings that is part of the missing thread in visible public anxieties so far.

Reading within and across the genres of this generalized albeit gendered socio-cultural anxiety about (male) performance I see at work a cultural unconscious working through the implications of the sacrifices, losses, transitions, and traumas of the ‘progress’ made in the name of ‘development’ over the last Quincentenary and especially the last century by women and others together with the insecurities and uncertainties of individual, human and global survival in this one. It is perhaps a necessary work of mourning. The last 30 years have seen a celebration of the ‘diversity of women’s different ways of knowing.’ These were necessary and important critiques of those ways of knowing, doing and being that up until that time were posited as being ‘human universals’ but which for centuries had served as mask, proxy, and inappropriate standard for classifying and justifying the exploitation and exclusion of any abject ‘othered’ or ‘bio-evolutionarily dysseleted’ human beings (mainly indigenous populations, women, and others that deviated from the dominant European male ableist norms) but which turned out to represent mainly the values, concerns and ways of knowing of primarily white, European, college educated, often socially privileged heterosexual men. Since that time however I have found great difficulty in locating or recognizing sustained cultural narratives that do not take this pathological intellectual tradition as the de facto crystallized starting point for imagining some assumed homogeneity among the as diverse fraternity and faculties of men.

I am very concerned as a scholar, (and in this case as a man also), when any social group is consistently constructed, identified and repeatedly represented as being ‘deficient’, ‘defective’, ‘derelict’, ‘deviant’ or at a ‘disadvantage’ primarily or solely by members who (must) locate themselves outside of that group and who happen to be enjoying privileged or elevated status in the dominant cultural mythological narratives of the moment. I am also concerned when a member of a group tries to appropriate a discourse as if seeking to represent the entire spectrum of interests, concerns and values of a group. That is to say, I am cognizant and thus need to explicitly state that my opinion presented here in no way is meant to speak for all or even the majority of ‘men’ in T&T or elsewhere for that matter. Though I do hope that some parts resonate with them.

I wonder, are men finding ways outside of the formal education and certification systems to live productively, sustainably, well and mindfully in Trinidad and Tobago at present? If they are then how are they doing this and who are these men? I can think of a few and don’t think they will be found in what are traditionally perceived to be the highest echelons or with hands on the levers of power, but they are more than likely above average performers, known and highly respected in their sub-fields and more importantly productive citizens. These are the questions I am interested in both as a Caribbean man and as an education researcher. To answer questions about high performing boys, if we still wanted to I’d go talk to the families of high performing boys who seem to have managed to be academically successful and leading successful adult lives. Several families come immediately to mind from my time teaching.

To answer Dana Seetahal’s question directly, I checked Facebook to see “Where my boys at?” The short answer is scattered all over the world including Trinidad and Tobago doing what they have to do – working, hustling, living, loving, learning and liming – to survive. Not all have gone on to pursue higher education. The majority appear (and some are) wise and happy and appear to be ‘living a sustainable reality’ rather than mindlessly chasing after ‘the dream’ of having it all. Some are indeed struggling to realize a place in the world, to leave stifling occupations and to find happiness, contentment and meaning at home or abroad. They (and I) would not, and this is critical, characterize themselves as high performers, but perhaps as disciplined, hard-working, entrepreneurial, and mindful workers and caring citizens. But then again, my social network is probably not very typical for Trinidad and Tobago and Facebook is probably not a class-neutral platform.
Indeed, we ought to be concerned about why some students, especially boys are not doing as well in school. But we ought not pathologize them but also ask whether or not there isn’t something terribly wrong with our plantation educational system, its premises and commitments. I’m going to leave this now and invite other men (and women) to continue this complicated converstion.

Secret Criteria and the Medal

2010-11-01T13:39:00.000-07:00

Offered in response to this article in the Guardian.

The recent concerns expressed about the criteria for being awarded the President’s Medal and that of CXC’s Dennis Irvine Award provide further justification of the need for more transparent selection processes everywhere in education and in political life, as well as the need for a more critical, reflective and informed public. I mean to take nothing away from the remarkable performance under trying circumstances by Nicholas Sammy, especially when so few men are being held up as academic role models, but quite simply the two awards are from two different organizations with differing philosophies and stakeholders and designed for entirely different purposes each with its own selection criteria. In both cases it is likely that the award is based on a sum and not an average score.

In the case of the President’s Medal it is likely a total score based on performance in eight (8) Units, including Caribbean Studies and Communication Studies, over two consecutive years, i.e. three (3) Unit1 and three (3) Unit2. This makes the Medal open to ALL students from T&T completing the minimum requirements for a full CAPE certificate in the required time period. Where a student does additional Units one would hope that their best six Units in three subjects (in addition to the Communication and Caribbean Studies) would be considered. By pursuing additional Units he likely did not maximise his scores on those Units that would eventually be considered in awarding the Medal. This will likely be the eventual explanation for the government’s “failure to award” Nicholas the Medal. Simple economics (not one of the Units he studied).

Now on to CXC’s Dennis Irvine Award. CXC, as I have argued before, is a for-profit business. It is in their interest to promote their testing products and to elect, brand, and promote admirable spokespersons such as Mr. Sammy, who have used their product in excess to success as exemplifying, ‘The Most Outstanding CAPE Candidate Overall.’ Here the award is not based on pursuing and succeeding in a minimum number of Units but rather the maximum utilization and ‘enjoyment’ of their product/brand – this year 14 Units. A similar award is made at CSEC Level and the winner likely also has something like 12-16 distinctions at CSEC.

The President’s Medal and CXC’s Awards are based on two different standards and criteria and serve two different purposes and constituencies. Despite the media`s mamaguay it is no real mystery as to why one could be awarded one and not the other. One reason we and Nicholas have heard relatively little of CXC’s Award is that the payoff in the short-term for individuals is negligible as compared to that of the Medal which, encouraged by uncritical journalistic practices, has achieved its own mythic status in our academic culture. The annual return on investment for CXC though is increased and unquestioned brand loyalty from regional governments and perhaps more students across the Caribbean being encouraged (by parents, teachers, competitiveness and media attention) to pursue more Units. ‘Ka-ching’!

The sense of outrage and injustice, both real and media manufactured, done to Mr. Sammy and Mr. Jaikaransingh, the Principal of Presentation College, San Fernando, soon to be branded ‘CXC School of the Year’, speaks to an as yet unsatisfied desire in our society for increased transparency, accountability and oversight in managing selection processes at ALL levels and in ALL spheres where valuable social goods involving the public purse are at stake such as the award of (secret) scholarships, contracts, or privileged entry into secondary schools. The promise of ‘New Politics’ demands nothing less. Indeed, while we are hurt by this perceived injustice done to a single ‘son-of-the-soil’ we are not so moved, and there is nary a peep from any Principal of any prestige school, when he/she legally disenfranchises a significant number of other people’s children, our sons and daughters, who have legitimately and legally earned places at mainly tax-payer financed schools under the anachronism that continues to be allowed by the Concordat. Our government assisted schools too perhaps have ‘secret’ criteria for admissions that go beyond simply ‘belonging’ to the right religious denominations.
Imagine what would happen if in addition to the names of students and the schools passed for the newspapers published students’ scores on SEA. The whole of Trinidad and Tobago would be in an uproar when they saw the same questionable selective principles operating as students with lower percentages were admitted to a prestige school ahead of other students with higher scores. There is an obvious reason this is not done – it would upset the way things are. Questions must also be raised and answers sought to the `uncertainties` surrounding selection criteria as to how individual students are admitted into 6th form and how some transfers are effected when others are denied. If some Principals of prestige schools are feeling a little uncomfortable, then I’ve done my job.

As a friend of mine related to me, we cannot only demand the truth and selection criteria when it is favourable to us. That we see no problem with agitating for transparency in one situation but keeping a studied silence in another analogous situation is telling. We cannot have one set of standards for some and another set for others if the game and its outcomes are to be claimed to be fair and just for all. We cannot demand full disclosure only for those powerfully placed and their agents. We must ask after that which continues to take place behind closed doors with and without our continued legal blessings and who benefits and who is disadvantaged and how. We are all complicit in the annual injustices meted out by successive and successful educational establishments. If our selection processes do not pass ethical scrutiny they must be abandoned and rethought. The door has been unlocked for students who have superior marks and who are not selected for the school of their choice to likewise demand a public justification from the Principals of Prestige Schools as to why they ‘failed to be awarded’ a place.

In closing I offer some final, more personal, messages. To Nicholas, Naipaul’s description is apt, “the world is what it is” and by and large it is not fair. If an injustice has been done to you I hope it will come to light and be corrected. Congratulations and I hope you commit yourself to fighting with the same spirit against those more common injustices inflicted upon and which manifest themselves day-to-day and year-to-year upon those who have not been as privileged as you and I. To the Principals of the Prestige schools I ask that they with one voice and in a singular act of altruism end the continued violence and injustice done to the nation’s children via the 20% selection mechanism. Note this does not mean abandoning the Concordat only this unjust element. To the Ministry of Education, don’t get played by the media or the Prestige schools. Don’t pander to public pressure and rush in to redress this perceived injustice without serious consideration and deliberation. Please do it right and make it fair the first time!

A Bad Romance: Hope and Heroism, not Heroes.

2010-08-18T22:12:00.000-07:00

I want to respectfully disagree with my former colleague Dr. Maharaj-Sharma on the need for more ‘heroes’ in our school system. There are already sufficient numbers out there doing what heroes do – doing what needs doing with the resources and abilities that they have – generously, altruistically, silently and without recognition. I believe we need to shift the conversation to considering the qualities of heroism or expressions of heroic virtue. My personal position as a scholar is that the hero is an inappropriate archetype and metaphor upon which to found a renewed millennial project for Caribbean Education and Society. It is too close in my opinion to the religious call, one expressed by Fr. Harvey quite recently, on a need for martyrs. I prefer to found my philosophy of education on and in our history, art, and science; our models of resistance, hope and resilience which I find in our maroon heritage and an associated kumbla consciousness with its gesture towards intervulnerability. But I can appreciate the need, especially from those who experienced the tail end of British Colonialism, to begin with the Romantic mythologies of the hero.

Indeed this ground has been well trod by Professor Emeritus of the Institute of Education (London) David Halpin who has argued for the recovery of a Romantic conception of education (see Romanticism and Education: Love, Heroism and Imagination in Pedagogy and Heroism and Pedagogy). By ‘Romantic’ he refers specifically to some of the central elements (as he sees it) of the British literary-historical tradition known as Romanticism. He suggests that recognizing and supporting these conceptions in education might play a role in helping us to recover a sense of hope as educators. While acknowledging the diverse interests of the Romantic period and the ongoing debates within literary criticism he defines the Romantic Vision as “a tradition said to embody a recognizable aesthetic sensibility that centrally attaches great importance to the power of the imagination and the need for spontaneity in thought and action” (p.2). It is to these aesthetic sensibilities: an ideal of love, the heroic, the power of the imagination, and commitment to a rebellious and critical stance that I now turn.

Love for Halpin in the works of the Romantic poets is an overarching and unifying theme. He distinguishes between the different forms of love in their works, namely Eros, “denoting a form of passionate desire of a possessive and sexual nature…that seeks to consume sexually what it passionately desires, in other contexts, like for instance in Plato’s dialogue the Symposium, it provides the initial impetus for an erotically mediated pursuit of the truth – one in which selfish desires are ‘educated’ and ultimately won over in favour of the Good,” and Agape, the self-transcendent form “of caring for the Other that entails a selfless and public-spirited unsparing generosity”. It is this latter form, Agape, that Halpin suggests needs to (re)permeate/reanimate educational discourses and which I believe is the focus of Dr. Maharaj-Sharma’s article though she does not use the term.
Halpin makes a strong case that teachers must be able to find ways to love like this, both for their own well-being and that of their students. He also draws attention to the real difficulty of sustaining such a pedagogical practice and thus the need for “commitment, intimacy and passion” of which passion is seen as the innervating medium that supports others. He cautions against an excess and unalloyed passion (eros). Instead he argues for a passionate teaching that, “places the greatest emphasis, not on charisma, but on a form of earnestness about teaching …[associated with] “enthusiasm, caring commitment and hope . . .; with fairness and understanding . . .; with being close rather than distant; with having a good sense of playfulness; with encouraging students to learn in different ways; with relating learning to experience; with encouraging students to take responsibility for their own learning; . . .; [and] with being knowledgeable about their subject; with creating learning environments that engage students and stimulate in them an excitement to learn”. Such teachers have “a genuine concern for the Truth” [ . . . .] ”which they know is “a passionate business.”
In his description and rationale for a ‘heroic conception’ of teaching he focuses on the element of “daring to struggle for some form of inner authenticity as the basis for personal imaginative freedom” that he sees as another common theme in Romanticism. He draws extensively on the work of Curriculum theorist Kieran Egan who recommends identifying with the transcendent and admirable qualities of the hero. The rationale for this is given as “by associating with whomever or whatever in the world seems to best transcend (the threats posed by external reality and personal circumstances), we too feel some security against them as well, some confidence that we might transcend them also”. This heroizing is meant to be of benefit to teachers as well and leads Halpin to equate heroic teaching of the nature he describes as a vocation. He writes, “such vocationalism requires courage, entailing a willingness by teachers to take risks, sometimes at some cost to themselves… it remains the virtue of heroes. It is also a necessary virtue in teaching. The courageous teacher-hero, on this interpretation, is someone who seeks bravely and disinterestedly to serve the needs of others; who takes moral duty and personal authenticity seriously; and who eschews cowardice in the pursuit of the common good.”

After love and heroism Halpin next focuses on the role and power of imagination in Romanticism and for education. Here he draws extensively on Romantic critic, journalist and essayist William Hazlitt. He draws on Hazlitt’s thesis that, “the human mind is simultaneously ‘sympathetically disinterested’ and ‘autonomously creative’. It is ‘sympathetically disinterested’ in the controversial sense that people, according to Hazlitt, are not inherently selfishly motivated, but rather are as sympathetically interested in the welfare of others as in their own happiness; it is ‘autonomously creative’ in the sense that it is the imaginative master and not - as the empiricists would have us believe - the mechanistic slave of sense impressions”. Indeed, much of the work in positive psychology, the science of human goodness, is lending strong empirical support to Hazlitt’s thesis. For Hazlittit it is the imagination that empowers us to imagine and work towards creating a better future. As I and others have argued repeatedly, the real crisis in education in T&T, aside from incompetency and fixed-mindsetedness, is both a lack of imaginative vision of how it could be otherwise and the socio-cultural inertia that often prevents us from following through on what we know should be done.

Finally Halpin looks to rebellion as a virtue of the Romantic which compels him to a critical stance as a ‘public’ or ‘professional’ intellectual. Here he draws on postcolonial and cultural theorist Edward Said as one embodying the Romantic virtues of rebellion, social critic and public intellectual. Said describes the intellectual as, “…a person who is “set apart, someone who is able to speak the truth to power, a crusty, eloquent, fantastically courageous and angry individual for whom no worldly power is too big and imposing to be criticized and pointedly taken to task…an opponent of consensus and orthodoxy”, acting as “a kind of public memory; to recall what is forgotten or ignored; to connect and contextualise and to generalize from what appear to be the fixed truths…”. Prof. Kenny, smelter activists Vine and Kublalsingh, educator Raymond Hackett and journalist Kevin Baldeosingh meet these criteria as has Lloyd Best and others in the past. Indeed we have a rich tradition of this in the Caribbean but unfortunately we work very hard to discipline our rebellious and unorthodox teachers in primary, secondary and tertiary schools. Let me also be clear that this particular enactment of heroic virtue is difficult and dangerous resulting in exile, ostracism, loneliness, impoverishment and despair – it is not something to be entered into lightly. Heroism is a risky business.

While preparing this response I had occasion to chat with a friend associated with the now grieving and guilt-racked Naparima Girls’ High School community. We discussed the general lack of courage among students, teachers, staff and parents in failing to say what needed to be said to each other and indeed in not being able to listen to one another. As she said to me, “many people don’t speak up because they are afraid, afraid of subtle victimization.” I wonder whether some will manage to find their heroic voices in the new academic year as they work through this trauma?

A Romantic conception of education (teaching and learning) which acknowledges rebellion and criticism as virtues is perhaps a more open and desirable one than that which currently prevails. Such a view helps teachers to appropriate and value the agency that they always already have though which may be at times diminished by forms of pedagogical and institutional control. It is a perspective that adds to the discourses on teacher empowerment and critical pedagogy.

Halpin’s arguments and examples elaborate Maharaj-Sharma’s musings and calls us then to consider what we have lost and to consider what is likely to be gained by adopting a Romantic conception of education in which love, imagination, heroism, rebellion and criticism are all valued. He offers that “Romance is a necessary condition for being hopeful in education” (p.15) and that we may need “…somewhat against the grain of events, and maybe in order to challenge them - to restore to critical consciousness some of the ideals, values and beliefs of the Romantic Period, many of which in any event interpenetrate unconsciously our thinking today about education, but not in ways that sufficiently influence for the better our actions within it.” As educator Ivan Illich has argued, organizations, systems and institutions have futures, but only people hope. Hope, it appears, is a scarce resource in education at present, scarce but not yet exhausted.

While I have taken pains to be sensitive to the Romantic values and palpable despair that underlies Maharaj-Sharma’s and other teachers’ desires for heroes, the desire to be saved, note how it fits right in with an patriarchal infantilizing damsel-in-distress trope – the damsel being the feminized profession of school teaching – I want to re-iterate that for me the British and European hero motif and narrative perhaps is not the most appropriate one for our situation as it continues to limit and locate the locus of action in a mercenary individual (who does not necessarily live happily-ever-after) independent of the actions of a community that is itself transformed and self-transforming. Indeed, the hero brand today is too easily co-opted into a marketable fetishizable commodity and transformed by the cult of celebrity and narcissism. It is quite likely that we will never come to know of most heroic actions – those that result from the multitude of everyday people doing what they know to be good and right with love, imagination and courage. We do need heroic actions, the virtues associated with heroism (love, imagination, care, courage) available to all of us. As I said earlier, I find my models among the maroons.

Earl McKenzie, in Philosophy in the West Indian novel has recently thrown out a challenge for Caribbean philosophers to articulate our own aims for education. I too want to end with a focused challenge to Dr. Maharaj-Sharma and the staff at UWI and UTT – will you provide the necessary emotional, legal, and financial supports for the type of heroic teachers and teaching you are advocating? If not, then why should anyone choose the path of the hero which comes too closely to resemble that of the martyr? Have you chosen it and followed through on it for yourselves?

A design for sex-segregation research in T&T: A thought experiment

2010-06-18T08:07:00.000-07:00

While I have many criticisms and concerns with the decision to pursue sex-segregation research in education in Trinidad and Tobago, especially in the top-down manner with which it is being imposed on schools, (I have outlined these elsewhere here and here)), I want to offer for discussion a research design that I consider to be potentially viable if one wished to pursue this line of action (i.e. cognizant of the limitations to the claims that can be made, the ‘ill-definedness’ of the variables/constructs themselves, the complexity and ethical difficulty of research with vulnerable social agents, and the difficulty of generalizability to other schools and of providing a sound basis upon which policy could be founded). I invite reasoned discussion and feedback on any aspect of the design from interested parties in the media and via email. As a scientist, one has to think through and actively construct a design that is fit to the research question, i.e. one that can potentially provide evidence to support or refute the claim. Research designs or experimental protocols do not magically materialize and aren’t simply thrown together from a tool-kit of parts. Ethically, one also has to consider potential harms and iatrogenic effects, again cognizant that one cannot know all possible benefits or potential harms before-hand. One of the frequently ignored or unspoken possible harmful effects of most intervention research in education is reduction in learning/performance, i.e. lower achievement is a possibility.

While I don’t believe that we can PROVE that sex-segregation ALONE improves performance – there are too many exogenous variables that influence the latter – I am assuming that very possibility, (mathematicians can do this: assume a converse or contradictory proposition), and ask, as a scientist, how could/would I go about showing that it did or did not? I am also assuming that researchers are not going to actually analyze blood, hormone and chromosomes to determine children’s sex. Such a protocol, while informative would be invasive and expensive on a large scale. They will rely on visible characteristics, socio-cultural conventions and the assignment given by parents as authorized by medical authorities at birth as a proxy or ‘good-enough’ indicator for biological sex. I am also assuming no questions will be asked about sexual identity, i.e. feeling like a man in a woman’s body etc., and heterosexuality will be assumed as these are not considered ‘relevant’ to the question by authorities in Trinidad and Tobago at this time. Sex will be assumed by looking at visible characteristics. Male and female would have to be defined as mutually exclusive categories in all regards relevant to the experiment. Whether this is a valid assumption for researchers or sound basis for policy is another matter. What will matter to policy-makers is not what sex students are in any objective way but what researchers and society say that they are for the purpose of the intervention.

To even have a chance at proving that sex-segregation alone improved performance nothing else would have to be changed, i.e. we’d have to keep the curriculum the same, the teacher, the assessment, there could be no sex-differentiated instruction etc. The design could be easily modified to test claims of the relationship between “sex-segregation + sex-differentiated instruction on performance.” But one could not determine if it were the segregation or the instruction and we would not have previously ruled out that it was segregation alone that was responsible. If baseline data was collected we’d have to know under what conditions and try to collect the experimental data under similar conditions. Given the networked nature of societies, and especially in a small place like Trinidad, interventions, observation and analysis would have to be on short time-frames initially to limit communication among individuals involved. While scientists may speculate, conjecture or theorize, they must not ‘overclaim’, i.e. their conclusions must be warranted from the evidence available. I do believe that small, very narrow claims are sustainable if the observations are about very small time frames initially where there is little possibility of individuals’ history affecting the observations and little time for outside influences to confound. We might for example be able to support/refute claims of the form, “based upon these definitions and assumptions about sex and educational outcomes, sex-segregation leads to greater/lesser/no change in outcome on this measure of this variable (retention/attention/performance etc) we deem important, of this idea/concept x from discipline y, under these learning conditions z for the period of time t.” Specificity is everything.

Here’s the first part of my design. Begin with a class of close to equal numbers of Males and Females matched as best as possible on other variables like real-age, developmental age, SES, etc. Then separate M/Fs for a single short period of Math, English, Chemistry, or whatever. Instruction is to be a constant, delivered by the same teacher, same lesson, same jokes etc. (In variations of this design I have a strategy for separating students that hopefully would not clue them in right away that they were being separated by sex, but it relies on a little deliberate deception.) The content and structure of the lesson would have to be well-designed prior to implementation via extensive consultation between researchers, subject matter specialists, and teachers taking into account what is known about teaching that concept in general and in our educational context in particular. I would recommend the concepts/skills chosen be something with which all students, boys and girls, have fairly equal difficulty and perhaps little, ideally no prior experience with in the curriculum at their age-level (but which is part of the curriculum). In this way the knowledge/skills that are being assessed are new and more importantly have little consequence for students in the long term, i.e. they are not part of a consequential exam. Examples abound in mathematics but in order not to confound the design if pursued I won’t reveal that aspect to the public just yet. Specifically, avoid concepts/tasks that are known to favour one sex over another like spatial rotation tasks or some verbally complex reasoning tasks. Ideally I’d want to see lessons drawn from all of the disciplines from Art to English, French to P.E. and Social Studies to Zoology as we are interested in sex differences across the curriculum, not just in Mathematics, Science, and English, though we might choose to begin there. The lessons and topics chosen should span a wide range of educational levels, from first-year (infants) to Form One to first-year of University. Again all lessons would need to be well designed, pedagogically and disciplinary sound and scripted before being used in an actual classroom.

The next part of my design is about delivery. In thinking about how to have students in experimental and control classes receive the same lesson from the same teacher at the same time given the resources available one approach is to use a standardized video lesson or virtual tutor. This could then be used at all schools on both islands with little cost beyond the initial production of the video and resources for showing, thus allowing for wider application to a broader sample, for example in single sex-schools. It would add a level of similarity and redundancy to the instruction at a reasonable cost and massive potential gain in knowledge. The video content should be short, 10-15 minutes. This considers that students will be aware that they don’t have the physical presence of a teacher and the authority represented present in the normal ways as well as the limitations of working memory and human attention. We could then make sound claims about our outcome measure(s) under these fairly fixed conditions thus avoiding the complications of different tutors and feedback at this early stage of the design. These important elements of instruction should be incorporated over time in other designs but not in the beginning. Different video lessons (within the same discipline) should involve teachers/tutors/actors that differ by gender, race, dress, accent etc. If well-designed these could be used for other research studies providing a larger return-on-investment.

If a class is separated the physical space and psychological space is changed. To compensate classes should be merged so that the total numbers remain the same else we are also testing possible effect of class size on the outcome phenomenon of interest. One group should not be sex-segregated but be kept intact and shown the same video. Another kept intact and not shown the video at all and yet another sex-segregated but not shown the same video (they should be shown a video of someone teaching something). That the content of the lessons are not regular curriculum topics at that level means that performance/non-performance on the measure(s) are not academically consequential for students’ lives in the short term. We wouldn’t want students to feel that they were being ranked/scored or valued in a way that could influence their future in this experiment. They get enough of that already.
We don’t necessarily have to show these videos in school settings, though it is likely to be more practical and economical to do so. In fact, we probably could make stronger claims by not doing so initially. Though we would lose the richness and complexity of the school classroom we would gain significantly by having a controlled environment in the beginning stages. Boys and girls could register or be randomly selected (by lottery for example), and volunteer to be part of this research and come to identical centres, located in different parts of either island, either after-school or on weekends, where they would be assigned to the various groups. I like this as it allows students to be simply boys and girls and not representatives of one school or another with all that social baggage. In fact groups could be constituted of students of relatively similar backgrounds from different types of schools if we thought this would yield interesting and relevant data. This would also reduce the influence of peer and cohort dynamics as everyone in a group might be relative strangers to each other. The issue here is whether or not some of the students we would like to be part of the research would actually be part of it, but the same applies in that the students we might be concerned about might not be in school on the day the research takes place. This is a serious problem, a significant sampling error and one for which I have not thought of a solution as yet that does not involve steps that I am not comfortable taking as a researcher. Incentives for participation in the research may be necessary.

The third part is about data-collection and analysis. The actions of students in the different groups as they engaged in the lesson should be recorded. Their talk, questions, movements, notes, doodles during and after the lesson and of course the assessment, form the initial data-set. I’m leaning more strongly now to fixed laboratory styled research settings to capture this data in the initial stages as described above and not existing schools. I am again assuming we’re not after physiological data such as cortisol, adrenaline or glucose levels (indicators of stress) or eye-movement (indicator of focus of attention) – at least not on a large scale. In the pre-stages of the video-lesson design eye-tracking studies might be important with a few students of different sexes to observe what they focus on before taking it to a classroom or experimental setting. One would look at actions during the same time across various groups, for example, in the first minute, or at fixed critical points in the lesson. Keeping the time restricted in this way allows for some strong claims to be made and backed-up.
Analysis of the classroom data should be supplemented with focus group or individual interviews about the lesson, learning, the sex-segregation dimension, performance, etc. As you can see this is a difficult and data rich design. We’re talking, at the minimum, many hours of video, thousands of pages of transcripts - terabytes of data - to be analyzed. A strong set of appropriate analytic resources from a wide range of fields should be brought to bear on the data including but not restricted to tools, concepts and methods drawn from fields as disparate as cognitive science, linguistics, gender studies, cultural studies, mathematics etc. Nobody said that research was fast, easy (or cheap).

A good research design is like a good story – well thought out, plausible plot and potentially satisfying to the consumer. More than this though the design I have offered above, while still in rough form, I think, offers many opportunities for new knowledge generation and innovation in education – one of the goals of this new government. Importantly the design is adaptable, transferable, and scalable. From these perspectives I believe such a project would be valuable. When I started writing this piece the design was meant to be implemented in schools. After receiving some feedback from more experienced peers, I am more convinced that it should first be pursued (or perhaps simultaneously pursued) via research laboratories, a network of knowledge-centres, set up across both islands in various communities where not only education but health or other inter and trans disciplinary knowledge projects could be pursued using the equipment there. This might be a better way to invest in innovation and capacity building for some types of research involving humans. I envision facilities that researchers from different disciplines or interested groups could book/rent with recording equipment already set up to capture voice, video, etc. [We’ll have to deal with crime and security but we have to do that anyway.] These could probably be added to or formed from already existing infrastructure eg. in community centre/health centres. Through such an initiative I see the possibility for involving more and more people in participating in the processes of knowledge creation through research and study in their own communities. Independent groups and entrepreneurs can likely begin to pursue this strategy without government subsidization but I would wish that they did so as social businesses instead of profit-making-businesses, i.e. not for any more individual profit than one’s initial investment. In my thinking here I am heavily indebted to the ideas of Dr. Mary King, Muhammad Yunis and the late Lloyd Best’s call for more research, auto-research in particular.

In recent months I have found the local educational conversations on sex-segregation to be superficial, stale, or stalled and not moving forward in a productive or meaningful way for the national community. Few have offered anything significant or meaningful from which the population could even begin to have a reasoned conversation. My hope with this piece is that by providing something substantial, albeit provisional, concerned and interested individuals will challenge, advise, direct and shape (or reject) this research design in a way that might be useful to us all through civil discourse. My goal in crowd-sourcing is both to get more people to engage in some aspects of scientific design thinking and to actually think deeply and rigorously about what would have to be done, and how that could happen, and ultimately why we want to do this and how to improve this research so that we get value for money and the answers we seek. I know that this is the right thing to do. It is an invitation that I sincerely hope is taken up.

In closing, I wish to remind readers of my earlier concerns about the definitions used and values underlying all research endeavors and this one in particular. These are not simple problems of epistemology and ontology that can be overlooked or left to philosophers but are often important determinants of the findings themselves. I have ignored them only to be able to begin to speak to those who are not familiar with those discourses. One learns a great deal from thinking, reading, observation and experiment, but it matters a great deal with what tools and which theoretical frameworks one chooses to use and how one chooses to wield them. Not all frameworks or designs (or writers) however are mindful of their capacity for harm, respectful of the dignity of the diversity of all (human) research participants or honors the integrity of self-determining beings. Such considerations though must be among the very first in any research programme.

The Reader Bytes Back

2010-06-14T16:02:00.000-07:00

“The ethics of criticism requires pointing out the faults in a colleague's thinking.” (Jeffrey R. Di Lio, 2010)

In the digital era one of the tasks facing teachers of the art of persuasive writing is the responsible use of source material. There are many dimensions to responsible use. One of these is appropriate attribution of sources, the breach of which, in an argumentative setting by one seeking to perform as a scholar or intellectual, public, or otherwise, is plagiarism, a species of academic dishonesty. This is a lesson Fr. Henry Charles, President Richards and T&T will likely not forget any time soon. A more difficult skill for many argumentative writers, one exacerbated by the hyper-geometric increase in available and accessible information is responsible use of source material. Irresponsible use of sources, in the context of persuasive writing or scholarly work, takes many forms ranging from the professed naïveté of students who print out Wikipedia articles or web-pages, place them in folders and try to pass them off as ‘research’ papers, to more subtle scholarly improprieties such as that employed by Kevin Baldeosingh in his article Laptops dance with danger (11/06/10).

Baldeosingh’s arguments are typically presented as an intertextual mashup – a sampling of exemplary excerpts from various commentaries made in public fora which are eviscerated with sardonic commentary while buttressing his own position by appealing to ‘expert’ testimony drawn from one or more of his stable of scientists du jour. His style is, usually, a hybrid genre blending acerbic satire and critique and last Friday’s is no exception. Now satire, when it is done well, can be an effective means of critique, persuasion and entertainment, and there have been occasions when he has achieved this harmony to great effect. Last week’s piece however is neither effective nor well done and bad satire is neither an excuse for, nor can it serve as a rhetorical sanctuary from professional irresponsibility as a writer and journalist.

The article represents an example of irresponsible use of source material as Baldeosingh excises and presents segments of text from the letters of Drs. Sharma and Kalicharan as metonymies for positions they do not advocate. Severed from the contexts of their original utterance, Baldeosingh’s injudicious juxtapositions facilitate the construction of these individuals’ contributions to the national conversation on education as simplistic, spurious and suspicious. In short, he misrepresents their arguments through selective quotation in order to generate (false) ‘evidence’ of the antagonistic position he wishes to critique. He invents his opponents.

Consider the way Baldeosingh very early on elevates the emotional ante by descriptively framing the contributions as “dire warnings” and “passionate denunciations.” Are they really? As a scholar when one suspects that what one is reading is untrustworthy or that claims are exaggerated, or worse unfounded, it is incumbent to check for oneself, and indeed a laptop and internet connection makes this easier than ever. I mean no offense to Dr. Sharma, but in her writing she is rarely what I would call a ‘passionate denunciator’ of any kind. She is typically measured, and restrained. This is what aroused my suspicions and led me back to the sources – the three public commentaries.

I noticed - and readers are advised to check this for themselves - that Sharma offered neither dire warnings nor passionate denunciations. Rather, she attempted to raise critical “issues that need to be considered to honour this commitment” from her perspective as an educator who works with teachers across Trinidad and Tobago. She does not isolate the potential benefits from the possible iatrogenic effects and the practical difficulties likely to be encountered in implementing this election promise that voters forget is not yet educational policy. She wisely situates the decision within the culture and climate of schools in T&T where violence, indiscipline, bullying, theft, infrastructural, human and knowledge resource deficiencies, and a lack of training and supervision are commonplace. In short she does not over-simplify the matter but attempts to present and retain some of the complexity of the situation. Likewise, reading Kalicharan’s letter for myself I take it as a public intellectual’s wondering and questioning of the rationale behind this decision to give laptops away. His central point, like Sharma’s, is that laptops alone are not going to be a panacea for some of the challenges facing education in Trinidad and Tobago. Baldeosingh eschews these central points completely in his attempts to paint these educators as alarmists though it is he who lays the foundation for a media-sustained panic discourse through his interpretation and public presentation of their concerns as “dire warnings” and “passionate denunciations.”

There is some evidence of Baldeosingh’s success in at least one case that I could find and which serves as an example of why I consider this particular piece of writing irresponsible. Consider, Trinizagada, a cotecicotelatnt blogger’s response to this article, “After reading the article (Baldeosingh’s) in the Trinidad Express I was lost for words. Now the laptop program of the People's Partnership is going to create morons? What in heavens name are these so called educated people thinking?” S/he goes on to describe details about a laptop programme in the US. To be fair, many in T&T do not read satire well. We respond to picong, brutish humiliation and humbling of authorities and experts when they can be shown to be talking/doing nonsense, and we are fortunate to have an unnatural abundance so as not to have to invent such opportunities, but that is not the case here and is certainly not my intent with this critique.

By irresponsibly misrepresenting and misreporting the central concerns raised by Sharma and Kalicharan, Baldeosingh has influenced this blogger’s, and perhaps some of the general public’s, opinion in a way that undermines their credibility as educators. This is likely not libelous as the piece is sufficiently satirical for this argument to function as a valid defense. In an academic setting however the student would be counseled to return to the sources, read them more carefully, attend to what they are actually saying and responsibly re-present their positions before critiquing them. Indeed, I note that of the three writers (Sharma, Kalicharan, Furlonge), the only person who actually constructs a link between laptops, reduced intelligence and moral questionability (morons, thieves, perverts, politicians, priests, pundits) is Baldeosingh himself. He manages however to successfully obscure this fact by creating and transferring a set of false associations with these ideas and those of the letter-writers. That deception finds any home in Baldeosingh’s argumentative algorithm calls into question his corpus of work as a reliable writer and commentator as well as his ethics. There are other examples in Baldeosingh’s piece, but taking a cue from many good math texts, and a proven strategy for prompting ‘active learning’, “the remainder of the proof is left as an exercise for the interested reader.”

Perhaps of greater concern is the way Baldeosingh deliberately uses misdirection and scientific language to fashion an identity as a knowledge-broker. Globally, there is great concern about the public’s lack of critical understanding of the science, and scientific thinking necessary for enacting democratic citizenship and in helping societies to govern themselves. News media are tasked, perhaps unfairly, with an important educative role in this project. Baldeosingh’s work this week, atypically, works against such goals. In presenting the evidence for his own case Baldeosingh also oversimplifies and misrepresents his sources. Citing psychologist Richard Nesbitt and journalist Steven Johnson he argues for the importance of play in learning and the contributions of popular culture, video-games in particular via Nesbitt, to increasing IQ scores. Baldeosingh neglects however the importance of context to learning and the limits of such learning, viz. the difficulty of transfer. Fortunately, Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker, (someone who also apparently doesn’t teach) provides the missing nuance. In a New York Times Op-ed piece which appeared on the same day as Baldeosingh’s article, he notes that, “If you train people to do one thing (recognize shapes, solve math puzzles, find hidden words), they get better at doing that thing, but almost nothing else…Accomplished people…immerse themselves in their fields.” Despite many of my former students’ protestations, playing FIFA’s video games will only make you a better video-game player, but it won’t get you to a World Cup or improve your skills significantly on the field without significant physical, emotional and mental effort. I don’t think Farmville is going to help us solve our food problems.

Pinker also makes the important educational point that mere access to technology is not going to suddenly usher in some democratic educational utopia. I have made similar arguments in my scholarly publication Harnessing the Complexity of Children’s Consumer Culture, in particular I believe that while popular culture is a powerful pedagogue, there are some things it does not teach very well and indeed is inimical to the development of some important human and democratic values. Pinker likewise argues that good and responsible intellectual habits “of deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning” have never been easy to develop, rather, “they must be acquired in special institutions…and maintained with constant upkeep, which we call analysis, criticism and debate. They are not granted by propping a heavy encyclopedia on your lap, nor are they taken away by efficient access to information on the Internet.” Imagining what those institutions might be like, understanding why they have found difficulty flourishing locally and then working together to actively construct ones that will work for us to achieve the goals of good, responsible habits of mind and being are what we ought to be debating. These are but a few of the tasks which the privileged people who “can’t teach” should be doing and doing well. It is partly what I have tried to do here.

Finally, Baldeosingh notes rhetorically, “when the lower orders begin to get smarter, they aren’t as easy to fool, which leads to all kinds of dangerous trends…do we really want a society where students challenge teachers…?” The same resources that destabilize the authority of the professor and the priests and their claim to being the final, irrefutable source and arbiters of knowledge can also be applied to other knowledge producing agents including media practitioners and cultural workers but we must be care full. As I continue to advocate we must learn to read and write different types of texts more carefully and critically than we have been doing. We must also teach these skills and be prepared for the painful occasions when they will be applied to our own works.

If democracy and skepticism, digital and otherwise, are to flourish in T&T it will not likely be without effort, struggle, and the courage to take on powerful gatekeepers, including journalists, when they act irresponsibly without also acting irresponsibly ourselves. If we can learn that responsible critique and debate do not necessarily have to humiliate, brutalise, or belittle others to be effective, educative or entertaining, and that compassion is not an estranged kin of argument, then perhaps we might create conditions for fecund conversations. If we can demonstrate that we are a society where thoughtful readers can challenge established writers to be first ‘better’, i.e. more conscientious, in their craft, and secondly, better human beings, then perhaps we might truly create new, more fit models of dialogue for our civilization…

Gift of a Growth-Mindset

2010-05-10T08:41:00.000-07:00

"The miracle, or the power, that elevates the few is to be found in their industry, application, and perseverance under the prompting of a brave, determined spirit." (Mark Twain)

I’m always somewhat taken aback, slightly hurt even, when people praise or express admiration for my intelligence rather than the effort, persistence and dogged determination I’ve put into being prepared, or, divorce my accomplishment from the sacrifices and contributions made by individuals and the opportunities afforded to me by participation in different learning networks. My response is usually an uncomfortable silence and a ‘thank you’ muttered de sotto voce. I have a confession to make. I’m not really that smart. Indeed, as we appear to be moving full-steam-ahead towards another highly contested and questionable educational innovation, viz. sex-segregation, whose outcome is likely to be an increase in the gender gap favouring girls, I want to share some research that suggests why this might not be the best approach and to offer an alternative to educational professionals that is likely to make more of a difference in the immediate and long term – the Theory of Mindsets.

Carol S. Dweck, Professor of Psychology at Stanford, in Mindset: The new psychology of success defines two types of mindsets that everyone utilizes to different degrees in different domains of life. When operating within a fixed-mindset the individual believes that some human quality like intelligence, (or some other ability), is static, pre-given or fixed at birth and that individuals possess a certain limited/fixed capacity. Growth-mindset individuals on the other hand believe that human qualities are not static, but learned and can be increased through purposeful effort. From this slight distinction a whole host of differences and associated psychological dispositions develop.

An immediate corollary is that individuals operating in a fixed mindset (FM) have as their goal proving themselves on tasks of fixed difficulty, thereby validating their sense of self through performance while for individuals operating in a growth mindset (GM), the goal, indeed the hallmark, is learning through stretching and perseverance. FM individuals view challenges as a threat to be avoided while GM individuals take these as opportunities to learn, develop and become deeply engaged. In the FM obstacles trigger a response to quit or resign while for GM obstacles trigger persistence and an occasion for exerting more effort. Indeed, effort is a key difference, for FM, effort is seen as embarrassing or fruitless – a demonstration or proof that one is not able to do something while for GM purposeful effort is simply the way one learns, gets better and ultimately the only way one can expect to develop competence or expertise in something that one does not yet know how to do. Dweck states, “it’s startling to see the degree to which people with the fixed mindset do not believe in effort.”

For FM individuals, correction is ignored as not being useful or relevant and blame is assigned to outside sources or forces while GM individuals listen carefully to what can be improved, and pay attention for useable information. For FM individuals other people’s successes are seen as threats which can detract from one’s need to demonstrate superiority while for GM other’s successes are inspirational and again provide opportunities to learn and grow. Dweck’s research has consistenly shown that FM people plateau early, sometimes as early as Grade 6-7 (10-11 years) while GM people experience consistent growth and plateaus do not persist for very long.
With respect to education, FM learners take smart to be “a perfect performance” or “100%” while GM learners view accomplishment as an indicator of progress and expanding capabilities and might make statements like “I got 60% which is great cause I got 52% last time and I’ve been working really hard.” FM students greet lack of success by attempting to avoid such occasions while GM students view it as a necessary reality check, an opportunity for important and constructive feedback and persist with changes to their previous behavior/strategies. FM learners tend to remain at a consistent level of performance, if they start high they end high and vice-versa. GM learners almost all end up higher no matter where they begin. Finally, FM learners tend not to assess their ability accurately, lie about their grades/accomplishment and effort, blame others for their failure and may cheat to maintain a level of performance and achievement they believe should come ‘naturally’ without requisite effort. If this sounds like some politicians, well, I leave you to form your own opinion. GM learners on the other hand tend be more honest about grades, their self-assessments are more accurate and they assume responsibility for their achievements or lack thereof.

A caution and a clarification. The Theory of Mindsets seeks to provide an explanation at individual, inter-individual, and socio-cultural levels of the complex relationship among individual effort, failure, persistence, motivation and societal messages, in achievement, or rather, life-long learning. It does not ignore the contributions made by biology, but suggests that it is not as critical a factor as one’s belief in (and actual) effort, persistence and challenge seeking that influences learning for the majority of individuals in a population. Indeed while there may in time prove to be a biological basis for different mindsets, and perhaps even other types of mindsets, at present, the importance of the theory is in sensitizing educational consciousness to the important role that certain types of beliefs play in achievement and success across different spheres of endeavor. While I present the mindsets dichotomously this is a simplification and I invite interested readers to check the entire book and Carol Dweck’s website for themselves where she engages with the more subtle nuances of the theory.

So how are these mindsets created and can they be changed? What can teachers and parents do and what are the wider implications of these mindsets for our society? I’ll discuss that in the second and third parts of this article.

(Part 2)
Very early in Form 4 Mr. Mercier, our English teacher graded an essay of mine as a D (fail). Looking over that piece I suspect he was being a little generous – somewhat gently telling me that the quality of work was not quite up to his standard and that I could improve with effort if I worked at it. Over the course of form four, through lots of independent extra reading, time in Carnegie library, writing practice, and without going for extra lessons my English mark crept up slowly through a C a B and eventually a low A. More importantly, I knew for myself that the quality of my writing was improving. I had learnt to assess my own work. In form 5 I finally earned an A from Mr. Mercier, it was for a short story on a hurricane and its aftermath which I had spent weeks researching and pleasurably writing and rewriting in a state of flow the weekend before submission. Several months later I would learn that I had won the “Best Short Story” prize from CXC in the 1993 examination, however it is the D and the A from Mr. Mercier on those essay which I hold more dearly as the indicators of my determination to get better at writing.

Teachers and parents play a crucial role in creating (and sustaining) fixed or growth mindsets. They are also essential in changing mindsets. According to Dweck’s research the way praise and labels are used and what is emphasized, are important. In her studies on praise she found that almost all students who were praised for their ability were pushed almost immediately into the fixed-mindset, becoming more risk-averse to challenge, failure and sources of potentially disconfirming information about their ‘brightness.’ In contrast 90% of students who were praised for their effort, i.e. for doing what is needed to succeed, took up new more challenging tasks from which they could learn. The take-away message here is if you want to create fixed mindsets in children praise their ability/intelligence or talent, say things like, “Kevin you’re so smart/dumb/bright/stupid/fast/slow.” But if you want to create a growth-mindset person, praise the effort with statements like, “Kevin, that was a great report, I can tell you did a lot of research and put in a lot of hard work, it shows, there are a couple of places you might like to go to develop your thinking on this further…”. Dweck says, “praising children’s intelligence harms their motivation and it harms their performance” and advises, “If parents want to give their children a gift, the best thing they can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort and keep on learning.” She offers suggestions for after-school conversations involving every member of the family answering questions like, “What did you learn today?”, “What mistake did you make that taught you something?” “What did you try hard at today?”

Labels and stereotypes also work to affect mindsets. Dweck’s research suggests that a great way to create FM learners is to use limiting labels such as “What type of learning mode are you? Are you a visual learner?” Rather fewer labels should be used and when necessary ones that are as expansive as possible such as, “I see you’re really good at picking up visual information from the environment…how else might you learn?” These different approaches send different messages. When teachers use limiting labels the message is “you have fixed traits and I’m judging them” while the other message is “I see you as a developing person and I’m interested in your growth.” Indeed this is one way the FM undermines achievement – by turning every opportunity to learn into a test and need to ‘prove’ oneself as ‘good/smart/bright/able’ and turning teachers into judges (sometimes jury and executioner as well) instead of allies in learning.

Finally teachers (and administrators) whose pedagogy is conducive to producing FM learners tend to focus on knowledge as product in their classroom, i.e. something pre-given and fixed, right or wrong. Growth-mindset teachers however make a subtle shift of focus to knowing as way of being – helping learners to connect disparate bits of knowledge into robust knowledge networks by emphasizing processes of coming to know. While both FM and GM teachers (and parents) may set high standards, GM teachers are honest with students about where they are, teach children how to reach them, help them to develop the tools and skills to succeed and actively enact the belief that all students can reach them. They see these as their responsibilities and they cultivate an atmosphere of mutual trust and intervulnerability where it is safe to learn from failure, including their own. Growth mindset teachers love, and live, to learn. This is critical. FM teachers (and administrators) on the other hand create an atmosphere of judging, mistrust, and fear of failure. They see themselves as “finished products” whose sole responsibility is to “impart their knowledge” and assess the correspondence between what they know and what their students have come to know. They believe that tests measure intelligence, now and forever and since ability is fixed, there’s no point in expending effort behind someone who doesn’t have the ability.

Teachers themselves have to be in the growth-mindset. The best teachers I have met in the Dip Ed and B.Ed were not necessarily the ones with the highest certificates, teaching at the best schools with the best students, but rather the ones whose emphasis in the programme, and in their classrooms was learning from and with their students – developing (as) growth mindset learners. These have been far too few though as many aspects of our education system and national culture, including teacher preparation, reinforce the fixed-mindset. The good news however, is that because mindsets are beliefs, we can choose to believe, and then do otherwise. We can change our minds. Dweck’s research demonstrates that a person can be shifted from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset over the course of 20 minutes, perhaps even over three short articles, simply by shifting focus and emphasis, drawing attention to the mindsets and being attentive to language. Conversely, a person can be shifted out of growth to fixed mode by emphasizing the wrong things, the wrong utterance, praising individual ability rather than effort etc. One wonders what happens when this happens day in day out, year in year out via our educational policies and systems? We need to ask ourselves in our classrooms and homes who/what do we want (our students) to be? I want my children to be surrounded by GM teachers at home and in school and in their community.

Finally, while I’ve used the term FM and GM teachers or learners I don’t mean to label some people as inherently possessing a fixed-mindset or growth-mindset. All of us are capable of being on either side in some domain and it is our mindset in the domain of interest that influences our actions. For example, when it comes to learning about changing and improving education, especially mathematics, I think I’m a growth mindset person. When it comes to football, I’m more a fixed mindset person, though adopting a more growth mindset position it is likely that I haven’t gotten anywhere with football because I haven’t ever put in much effort there – so who knows what I might accomplish if I spent more time and energy learning to play football? A growth mindset is infective. Dweck says it well, “with the right mindset and the right teaching people are capable of a lot more than we think.” The choice of where to expend our efforts though is still ours.

Part 3- Wider implications
When I began submitting articles as a new staff member to the UWI School of Education column, I was told, that my ideas, interesting as they were, were not presented in a style that was appropriate to the medium (Newspaper) and appealing to its audience. I could have approached this with a fixed mindset that I already knew how to write, the editors couldn’t appreciate what I was trying to say, or that I wasn’t any good at that type of writing and stick to writing in and for the Academy. Instead I approached it as a challenge – to learn how to write for different audiences. I talked with people, like Pat, whose growth-mindset and effort over a long time made her demonstrably more competent at it than I; like Lynda, who understood about the nature of the medium; and my wife Shalini who could help me with my grammar, clarity, and expression. I did that not because I like writing – indeed writing remains for me the least pleasurable aspect of intellectual work – but because I believed I had, and have, a responsibility to help others to grow and learn from my learning also. It also provides yet another occasion from which I learn.

So, why bring these ideas to the attention of educators? It is not an attempt to demonstrate superior intelligence nor is it my staking out a little space in the academic agora of educational reform ideas in Trinidad & Tobago, rather it is to say, “I’ve had opportunities as part of my Phd. thus far to engage with some really interesting ideas and people from whom I have learnt and from whom I think educators in TT could also learn and which pose some interesting challenges for rethinking education that goes beyond simply separating boys from girls but speaks to the whole fixed-mindset system of education in Trinidad and Tobago. Where and when does the fixed mindset enter into the educational consciousness of our population? How does it happen? Does our obsession with SEA, CXC and now Phds. have anything to do with it? Perhaps our tiered educational system? And what about the media attention given to the top 100 and scholarship winners? By looking at these might we find something more to learn that what we already know? Might we learn something about what we value and what we teach our children to value?

In Dweck’s research fixed-mindset learners, of all achievement levels, by as early as Grade 5 (9-10 years or about Std. 4) had come to believe that tests measured not only how smart they were at present but how smart they’d be in the future when they grew up! They defined themselves by the test. Consequently, for FM learners, not only was it important to succeed now, but such success had to be flawless and flawless in the right way – perfect and fast. I’ve heard similar sentiments from a high-achieving student in my research, where a transition from pencil to pen between Primary and Secondary school was blamed for her performance on a test as she could no longer erase and her mistakes remained as an indictment rather than a testament to her learning.

“Speed and perfection are the enemy of difficult learning” Dweck argues, providing a strong critique against timed-testing used for dubious if not dangerous sorting purposes. For FM learners, success is proof of their ability, and for high achieving FM students, this is often the route to being seen as special, better, superior and ultimately entitled to rewards without effort or (in)actions without consequences. I recognize, sadly, such a mindset among those posted on a Facebook group by students of a school which has produced two of our Prime Ministers, who mindlessly brag about abuse, fraud, cheating, laziness, lack of effort, greed and their insensitive, ignorant and uncritical individualism.

Fixed-mindset educational cultures, Dweck notes, have transformed failure from an action (I failed) to an identity (I am a failure) and continually reinforce this idea. Failing at anything becomes the great Fear and since one’s abilities are fixed, there’s no way out – why even bother trying. Growth-mindset cultures on the other hand don’t send the message that failure or success defines one’s identity – but that intelligence can be developed with effort and appropriate, knowledgeable guidance. I don’t know that this is the message we’ve been sending to boys and men over the last few months (and indeed years). Indeed we’ve got fixed-mindset and growth-mindset learners across all of our school types, gender categories, races, religions etc. and we ought to be as concerned with the ill-effects of high achieving FM learners who rise to positions of authority and (ir)responsibility as we are with low-achieving FM learners. A question we ought to be asking is “Do we produce too many fixed mindset learners and what are they doing to our society?”
What I find useful about the Theory of Mindsets is how it productively re-situates the locus of the problem of achievement from within individual gendered and racialised bodies constructed as deficient, defective or deviant in some way to a broader network of capillary relations which can be affected by a certain degree of mindfulness on every individual’s part. I also think Dweck’s ideas have implications for our culture as a whole especially leadership at the highest levels. Indeed I find a certain resonance with ideas of Wilson Harris in his descriptions of the Block Mentality and the Literate imagination, the different types of consciousness described by Fanon and Freire, Bob Marley’s endless invitation to “Emancipate ourselves from mental slavery” and the questions and pleas of Dr. Morgan Job and Lloyd Best, especially his obsession with understanding “how a culture could escape itself.” A short answer, perhaps, is that it must do more than change its leaders – it must also change its mindset.

While its been said that politics has a morality of its own, in our history thus far, such a morality seems to be have been more aligned with fixed mindsets than growth mindsets. I invite those offering themselves up for election, especially those new to national politics, to bring their growth mindsets to the parliament, serving, representing and ultimately learning from the population. For those going to the polls I suggest an alternative to choosing between person or party – vote for the candidate with the growth mindset! One way to assess that is not to look only at their history of success, but look especially at their history of recovery from failure and setback. Look at whether or not they assign blame or take responsibility. This silly season let’s give ourselves and the next generation the gift of growth mindset leaders. Primary teachers and Principals, when exam results come out in the next month or so, praise the effort not the ability. Be honest about what SEA is and does. Let’s work to break the cycle of fixed-mindset-edness among our students. When the new academic year rolls around next September it is my hope that teachers, in all schools facing the same issues and concerns that they faced this year might begin to face them with, and offer their students, something hopeful – the generative germ of a growth-mindset. Finally, maybe if we could stop pretending that we already know it all, maybe, just maybe, we might as Sprang used to say, “lun sumting.”

Experiments and Education

2010-04-11T16:50:00.000-07:00

I want to make a few critical points in response to columnist Kevin Baldeosingh’s Express article, Experimental Sex Education of Friday April 9th. But first I want to point interested parties to Visible Learning by John Hattie, which is a synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses representing over 50,000 studies related to student achievement. Of the 138 factors that he lists as key influences on student learning, gender ranks 122nd in terms of effect size (d=0.12) while variables relating to what teachers actually do in their classrooms make up more than half of the top twenty (d= 0.61-1.44). In this piece though I want to explain why it is extremely difficult to run a true experimental design in education and even more so in the educational climate of administration/governance/policy by vaps as occurs frequently in T&T.

The medical ‘gold-standard’ of controlled randomly assigned double-blind experiments is inappropriate for education. Neither teachers nor students are randomly assigned to secondary schools in T&T nor is it feasible to do so at present. Even among the entrants to ‘prestige’ schools, the legacy mechanism of selecting the 20% confounds the assumption of a randomly selected ‘statistically similar’ population in terms of achievement.

Secondly, in a densely networked place such as T&T or a small community where everybody talks, any group that was receiving a ‘placebo’ treatment would likely figure this out quickly. Also, as is already the case with the media attention given to the potential decision to pilot a shift from co-ed to single-sex schools, if you knew that you were part of a study there is a strong likelihood that some actions/behaviors relevant to one’s learning would be altered and could be attributed to the fact of being aware that one was being studied. His suggestion to convert a single-sex government school to a co-ed one is prone to this critique.

So we cannot have randomly assigned nor double-blind, perhaps even single-blind experimental designs in education. Now what about controls? There is no way to ‘control’ or perhaps even list all of the variables that might affect learning during a study Hattie’s 138 culled from the quantitative literature is a good start. In T&T the phenomenon of extra-lessons as well as (lack of) homework assistance/supervision at home would confound any attempt at ‘proving’ that a perhaps not well understood construct like gender and the decision to separate ‘girls’ from ‘boys’ ‘results’ in greater achievement. The warrant to support the claim would simply be too weak.

Now on to the ethical concerns of conducting ‘experiments’ on ‘other people’s children’ in a field as politically and emotionally charged as education. The most important one, in my opinion, being the way it robs children and teachers of any human agency and reduces the diversity and variability of human beings into the limited pigeon-holes of researcher determined categories. In the first case, experimental design assumes a correspondence between changes in the manipulated variable(s) (independent) and the observed/measured (dependent) variable(s) and since all other variables are kept constant (controlled) cause and effect can be established and one of several outcomes can be predicted. Experimental design also depends critically upon on an assumption that the thing(s) being experimented on do not, cannot (or should not) act intentionally to alter the quality of the variables being investigated or that such actions can be ignored and requires that agents’ histories have no bearing upon the experiment’s outcomes.

Experimental design depends on ignorant, passive and essentially ahistorical agents. Learners do not meet these criteria. They are not inert bits of matter buffeted about solely by external forces despite dominant discourses that continue to talk about increasing the numbers of some type of students in the pipeline or the misleading misnomer brain drain for what is a more complex phenomenon. Nor are learners eternal captives of prior conditioning, but rather they are engaged in continuously construing and re-construing their experiences, testing new knowledge for ‘fit’ with prior experiences, expectations, future goals, desires, aversions, and personal beliefs and altering their actions and their environments. Prior experience or history plays a significant role, but does not determine the complete landscape of future learning. What is learnt in any moment is unpredictable. To treat any learner, group of learners or learning system in this instrumental fashion raises profoundly disturbing ethical concerns.

Experiments are especially good at generating waste in their pursuit of determining cause and effect. Many failed experiments often precede the one that ‘works’ and being a part of a failed experiment in a consequential area such as education is not what parents, teachers or students have signed up for. In other areas, medicine for example, risks, including death, are discussed with participants. Which researcher in our system would dare say that potential risks include lower achievement and failure to complete the mandated curriculum even if the quality of what is learnt is improved? We talk only of potential benefits.

What systems, legislation and oversight are in place to seek and protect students, teachers and parents’ rights from researchers desire to know whether acting as proxies validating government’s policies or academic entrepreneurs? I do know that in T&T some schools have developed their own in-house guidelines and policies for participation in research, though at times I feel this is being used to protect reputations (read prestige) from unfavourable or less than flattering findings and limits reporting of classroom based research by teachers – another factor which robs policy makers of valuable data. Whether such policies are ‘legal’, however, remains to be tested in the future.

While ethical research policies, like other educational policies could be imposed from above without widespread stake-holder consultation, a more dialogical approach coupled with the simultaneous development of the requisite institutional, infrastructural, legislative, and enforcement capabilities would likely create a better climate for the conduct and reporting of useful education research in T&T.

Finally, a brief comment on Mr. Baldeosingh’s ‘poke’ at the UWI School of Education Express column that “99 per cent of the pedagogy in those articles was not based on any scientific research.” I don’t dispute this claim because as I have outlined above, it is next to impossible to do true experimental research in education, and I think this is how he might have been defining ‘scientific’. I also don’t dispute the claim because, as a former contributor to that weekly column, I know that many of the articles weren’t about pedagogy – education isn’t only about teaching or method after all – but there was an invisible pedagogy at work in the occasional reminders to write in a style appropriate to the format of a newspaper and the general “readership of the Express” which I was told required a less academic, less theory or research heavy focus, and a more – albeit no less difficult to learn and master – clear, concise, and convincing journalistic style.

Now, while I don’t want to, because I would prefer Kevin to spend his time on more important things, like unearthing corruption and mocking Ministerial malfeasance, but I’m calling his bluff on the invented, arbitrary, and likely hyperbolic statistic. A simple apology to my former colleagues will suffice.

‘After’ Gender: An Other Genre

2010-04-11T16:27:00.000-07:00

I wish to add what I hope is a different perspective on the issue of the Ministry of Education’s planned experiment to convert some co-ed to single-sex schools. On the same day that Dr. Raymond Hackett’s Schooling and Gendermania appeared in the Express (16/03/10), I presented a lunchtime seminar at the UWI School of Education entitled “After Gender towards a human genre in mathematics education (research).” From the feedback received from the small audience it was well received. Given the concerns raised since by Prof. Spence in Co-ed or single-sex schools (18/03/10, 25/03/10), Dr. David Subran (23/03/10) and Kevin Baldeosingh (28/03/10), citizens, educators, and public intellectuals I have great respect and admiration for, and other interested stakeholders (eg. Sara Chookolingo, Edmund Gall (knowtnt.com)) I have decided to share some of the main ideas of that presentation. At times I restrict my examples to mathematics education, my disciplinary home, but invite you to draw parallels if and where appropriate.

I opened the presentation with several stories one of which involved an autobiographical fragment from one of my former B.Ed students, a teacher in Trinidad, who wrote, “For the past thirty years or so I have been engaged in the discipline of numbers. My first introduction was to arithmetic and the first resources I interacted with were a copybook, a pencil and a ruler. The ruler was not for measuring…By the time I had gotten accustomed to doing mathematics I had learnt to associate it with dread.” Another more recent story involved my three year old cousin Janie who having started pre-school recently was angry and sad at home after school one day. Her mother, also a teacher, investigated and learnt that her child’s unhappy mood stemmed from at least two sources. The first, a pedagogical decision by a teacher to have students make, over a hundred times, the numerals 1 and 0, justifying her decision when questioned in terms of preparation for SEA (an event at least 7 years in the future). Janie relayed her dissatisfaction with this saying “Is just too many square mummy…I get tired.” The second source of her unhappiness and sour mood stemmed from the fact that her best friend had not come to school that day. Sometimes the presence of good company can make even tiresome, tedious work, even among professional mathematicians, more tolerable.

Next I moved to an examination of some international newspaper headlines, the currency of our globalized “attention economy,” concerning mathematics and gender which included, for example, “Failing at fairness: How schools cheat girls” a 2009 piece by Wachira Kigotho out of Sub-Saharan Africa and “Girls make boys worse at English, says new study” also published in 2009, by Jessica Shepherd in the UK. I noted that gender problems are similarly framed but differentially oriented around the globe. For example, in the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere, the ‘gender’ problem in education is currently dominated by discussions of the “crises of masculinity”—(under)achievement, abuse, apathy, and anomie—and the concomitant consequences which include concerns with the social, political and economic uncertainties wrought by the marginalization of men, namely, increases in ‘domestic’ violence, and the political and the economic instability that has accompanied male militarization and militantism – discourses which have taken a not unexpected and important, ethnic and socioeconomic turns in exploring the complex intersectionalities among these (and other) variables with gender. Indeed in the Caribbean some researchers wonder whether or not the Caribbean male is endangered. This type of research, in my opinion, enacts/constructs “masculinity as pathology” – a disease to be feared and cured.

In North America and the UK however, gender research in education seems to be continuously framed as a power-struggle and zero-sum game between the sexes. There seems to be at times a push to ‘prove’ that females, as a population, are mathematically inferior to males, despite research which refutes this claim. There appears to be an equal push however to ‘prove’ that boys are underachieving in the arts and literature portion of the curriculum. This practice of continuing to attribute such gendered descriptions to subject areas (math/science/technology as masculine, the arts/humanities/ literature as feminine) is extremely limiting and intensely problematic. The practice seems to act to reinforce/reinscribe a perception and stereotype of biologically based sex-differences in ability that can be located in individual bodies which must be categorized as belonging to one or another sex. Such stereotypes can, for both sexes and learners of all abilities and at all stages of development, affect test-performance negatively. Furthermore, given that many recent research reports have concluded that at present there remain greater disparities within gender or between students of different SES groups one wonders, who benefits, who is disadvantaged and how by creating and continuing to maintain this extremely narrow focus on dichotomized ‘gender’ (read sex) differences?
At this point I outlined my argument based on two premises and implications. The first being that gender (like mathematics, education, and culture) is transphenomenal and therefore requires a transdisciplinary approach to its study. In addition there is a coloniality of gender which requires a decolonial attitude. The second part of the argument was based on Jamaican, Stanford Professor emeritus, Sylvia Wynter’s “After Man” project, which I framed as a decolonizing transdisciplinary approach that is “fit” to studying Gender in Education in T&T & the Caribbean. However, this requires an initial (and perhaps temporary) reframing of Gender problems as problems in Genre if any progress is to be made in changing the script which based on Hackett, Spence, Subran, Chookolingo, and Baldeosingh’s articles is unfolding as expected and is likely to be replaced by the next crisis in education or political revelation. I develop these more fully in due course.

Education, Transphenomenality and Complexity

A transphenomenon is a form (structure) or happening (phenomenon) that emerges and can only be understood by simultaneously considering (other relevant) forms and happenings across multiple levels of organization (see accompanying graphic © Steven Khan). An example is obesity where research evidence from across domains implicates genetic, biological, personal, social and cultural factors in the visible phenomenon. Education is transphenomenal with a big T. Some educational transphenomena include knowing (consciousness, comprehension, etc.), learning (memory, intelligence, creativity etc.), teaching (errors, pedagogy, burnout, etc.), leadership, management (policy making) and ethics/wisdom/holiness. In addition phenomena like violence, indiscipline, corruption, motivation, and performance are also transphenomenal. This is just another way of saying that education is a Complex phenomenon (with a Big C) and complexity thinking is a transdisciplinary approach that is “fit” to studying this type of system.

There are many ways to talk about complex systems. The easiest way perhaps is to contrast them with simple systems and complicated systems. Both simple and complicated systems are fully deterministic, another way is to say they are well-defined. Simple systems have few parts (a pendulum) while complicated systems have many parts, (think of a watch). However in both cases once the initial conditions are known and the mechanism can be described any future position can be determined to a given degree of accuracy, i.e. they are predictable once certain criteria are met. Such systems are in theory, fully knowable.

Another feature of such systems is that they can be dismantled into their components and, if put back together correctly, work in exactly the same way. Complex systems however have many parts but they also possess properties which are emergent. These are properties that emerge as a result of the interactions of the many parts/agents through iterative (feedback) processes and which could not have been predicted with absolute certainty beforehand based on our current understanding of these systems. For example, it has recently been proposed that gravity is an emergent phenomena from quantum information. Emergent properties are properties of the system as a whole and of no individual agent/part. Such systems show evolutionary dynamics, sensitivity to initial conditions (the butterfly effect) are resistant to some types of change (the bureaucratic effect) and long-term prediction is not possible. Such systems can be taken apart, but there are no guarantees that if the parts are re-assembled the whole will function as before since the initial conditions that seeded the original system are usually unknown. Ecosystems demonstrate this idea beautifully – they are easily dismantled, the complex networks of relationships that sustain it destroyed, but they cannot be as easily put back together. Complex systems cannot be built like a factory but must be allowed to grow and adapt.

Complexity thinking has, for at least two decades, been an integral part of the scientific, business and economic landscapes. The type of thinking that it entails, thinking transphenomenally, has only recently begun to enter into and impact educational discourses. Evidence of the importance of this type of thinking for re-thinking education in the 21st century is the fact that the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Conference’s theme this year is “Understanding Complex Ecologies in a Changing World” and the annual Complexity Science and Educational Research (CSER) conference will be hosted for the first time outside of North America, in China, a country that is not only revolutionizing its approach to business and industry, but also to education, later this year. Both of these meetings recognize the potential and take serious the implications for practice and policy that follow from a discursive reframing of the language of education transphenomenally.

Transphenomena require more than a mere interdisciplinary approach to their study. They often insist upon an emergent eclecticism or transdisciplinary approach as for example that advocated for and enacted in the scholarship of Jamaican born Cultural Studies theorist, Stuart Hall, who writes, “[w]e do live in a period when many of the existing paradigms established and developed within the traditional intellectual disciplines either no longer in themselves adequately correspond to the problems that we have to resolve, or require supplementing from other disciplines with which they have not historically been directly been connected.” Indeed many new domains of inquiry are being created by creatively fusing approaches drawn from or inspired by medical, psychological, sociological, artistic, performative, anthropological, biological, ecological and spiritual/theological discourses. Among complexivists multiple passageways have been and are being created between the cultures of science and the humanities.

Mathematics is Transphenomenal
Adopting this transphenomenal attitude, I defined (formal) mathematics as “a biologically constrained human activity, a deeply affective legacy of human culture that is socially mediated, enacting material, performative and discursive regimes of understanding and which is historically evolved/evolving in earth’s unique environment. This conception is far removed from neat and tidy perfect Platonic and Formalist philosophies of mathematics and mathematics education which are often, unfortunately, and unwittingly reinforced by shallow media reporting. Mathematics and mathematics education, like other complex transphenonema, are messy and difficult disciplines. I also outlined some of the current transdisciplinary approaches to studying the learning of mathematics such as embodied perspectives, neuro/psycho-analytic/affective/phenomenological and hermeneutic approaches, critical mathematics, ethnomathematics, mathemaesthethics and biosemiotics, some of which I have discussed previously in the Express while working at the School of Education.

Drawing from some of this literature I presented evidence that attempted to trouble too ‘simple’ understandings of mathematics, gender and differential accomplishment. For example David Halpern and his colleagues state clearly in their review of the literature that “there is no single factor by itself that has been shown to determine sex differences in science and math. Early experience, biological constraints, educational policy, and cultural contexts each have effects, and these effects add and interact in complex and sometimes unpredictable ways.” For example, Entwistle has suggested that, “different degrees of freedom in early childhood, such as the unsupervised freedom and larger play ranges of boys versus the supervised house play of girls may provide more opportunities for boys to learn and develop spatial skills than their female counterparts” providing a social dimension to understanding a factor that perhaps contributes to differences in spatial and geometric reasoning tasks and which troubles simplistic essentialist gender readings such as that of Michael Gurian reported by Baldeosingh that “male toddlers explore more than their female counterparts.” As a mathematics educator, this finding in particular worries me given the increasingly claustrophobic restrictions on freedom of movement imposed upon children from an ever earlier age in T&T mainly due to (unnecessary in most cases) extra lessons, increased time in front of screens, and health and safety (kidnapping, accidents, and violent crime) concerns.

At a cultural level and consistent with findings from gender researchers, “countries with smaller female disadvantage in mathematics achievement tend to be countries where 1) women are less associated with home and children, 2) there is greater educational gender equality, 3) there is little gender inequality in the labor force, and 4) women have a higher status in general.” At the genetic level, Penner suggests that “while genes play an important role in sex-determination there does not seem to be conclusive evidence of sex-linked recessive genes linked to mathematical ability.” Finally as Suzanne Damarin argues, “the powers of rationality and mathematical thinking are so bound up with the cultural definition of masculinity, and "that the discursive production of femininity [is] antithetical to masculine rationality to such an extent that femininity is equated to poor performance, even when the girl or woman is performing well.” This small sampling from the research literature suggests that improving math performance among the
sexes is not simple, indeed the situation is quite complex.

According to Halpern and colleagues progress on understanding sex differences in mathematics has not moved very far. They note that “despite more than a century of effort and empirical investigation, (into sex differences in mathematics achievement) in many ways, we are still asking the same basic questions.” This is telling if not damning of the research paradigms in education that have dominated education discourse in the 20th century. It is quite likely that we’ve been using the wrong sort of frameworks and looking in the wrong places.

Shifting levels to sociological and cultural researchers sheds some light on why this might be so. Amy Parks in a 2009 paper writes that “educational measurement (re)produces regimes of ‘truth’ through pre-selecting what is measured, how it is measured and what filters are used in reporting scores (eg. race, gender, SES) and what are not used (eg. marital status, sibling order, teacher’s level of education etc.).” Parks echoes earlier feminist critiques of the gendered nature of mathematics (and mathematics education) such as Lyn Shulman who more than a decade ago noted that “the categories we choose to use, frame “what constitutes not only an answer but even the questions we can ask.” thereby already limiting ourselves only to that which we can name and classify and thereby mark as acceptable or unacceptable, normal or deviant. In my own research in Trinidad at a prestigious all girls’ high school, I found that relatively minor things can affect students’ engagement with mathematics as they transitioned to secondary school. For example, students described being limited by their move to the usage of pens in secondary school and the inability to erase mistakes, errors becoming permanently marked in their notebooks, a mark of personal intellectual failing rather than learning. They also discussed the difficulty of presenting their working and thinking in the, to them, “too small boxes” on the SEA exam form. I guess Janie will learn this too eventually.

Gender is Transphenomenal & Colonized
Gender too is transphenomenal, it is not as simple as some have made it a matter of male versus female or of sexual preference, rather one must look at the phenomenon across levels for an understanding of gender. Beginning at the embodied level, Professor Mark Blumberg, a behavioral and cognitive developmental neuroscience (Iowa) explains, “…sexual identity [is like] a meandering, unfolding path that begins early in embryonic development and continues after birth…the vagaries of development can produce alternative paths and short cuts that effectively break down our standard conceptions of male and female…although male and female human newborns are traveling on different paths to sexual identity, they must still make the journey. The destination is not fixed and it does not exist anywhere within the child. Even the path does not exist. It is rolled out…as the child interacts with its world through developmental time.” The recent case with South African runner Caster Semenya also highlights the general oversimplification of sex and gender into two dichotomous categories with one usually constructed in a superior position to the other. Arne Ljungqvist, chair of the IOC medical commission has stated emphatically that "there is no scientifically sound lab-based technique that can differentiate between man and woman”.

In education, researchers Glasser and Smith argue that the terms gender and ‘sex’ have not been carefully distinguished in research reports and are often conflated, used interchangeably or indiscriminately and that this lack of conceptual clarity has proven a hindrance in understanding how students’ educational experiences are influenced by gender. They note that “without careful exposition of how terms are being used, the common-ground assumption of a shared common understanding can lead to confusion or terminological conflation which ultimately rests upon dichotomous sex categories.” Moving outside of these categories, Julie Greenberg, in Definitional Dilemmas, notes that, “sex is still presumed to be binary and easily determinable by an analysis of biological factors. Despite anthropological and medical studies to the contrary, society presumes an unambiguous sex paradigm in which all individuals can be classified neatly as male or female.”

Based on their articles it appears that my esteemed colleagues and friends appear to be bound within this paradigm at present and while I acknowledge the value of the work they are doing in keeping this important conversation going and demanding more open and transparent dialogue and rational debate, I fear their presentations thus far offer no way out of the impasses in education in which we find ourselves in T&T. Finally, our own Professor Patricia Mohammed has repeatedly made calls for a transdisciplinary approach to understanding gender arguing that, “[t]he study of understanding of gender should not be limited by the boundaries of the contemporary intellectual imagination. In the same way that our gendered identities are at some level fluid and malleable, so too should the thought processes that allow us to explore the many dimensions of our gender and sexual identities.” Next I address briefly the idea that gender is as much a colonized concept as other categories of difference such as race.

In The Coloniality of Gender, Maria Lugones demonstrates how the concept of dichotomized sex categories based on taken as ‘normal’ and ‘universal’ European ideas of sexual dimorphism served Eurocentered global capitalist exploitation during the colonialist era and that the categories that we use to organize our world and in our case our schooling are neither natural nor neutral. Drawing on Oyéronké Oyewùmí, author of The Invention of Women, she argues that “gender was not an organizing principle of Yoruba society prior to colonization by the West”, rather, “the usual gloss of the Yoruba categories obinrin and okunrin as “female/woman” and “male/man” respectively, is a mistranslation” an imposition of a colonist’s categories upon a colonized peoples. She goes on make trace the political implications of the narrowing of the concept of gender and the introduction of the categories ‘male’ and ‘female’ through which “females were categorized and reduced to “women” [thus] ma[king] them ineligible for leadership roles…” Indeed, she notes that, “it was unthinkable for the colonized government to recognize female leaders among the peoples they colonized” and in this way “State power was transformed to male-gender power by the exclusion of women from state structures.”

Selwyn Ryan (04/04/10) claims that “women in power are still a novelty” but Lugones demonstrates that this was not always the case. Drawing upon the scholarship of Paula Gunn Allen on Native American (Indian) tribal cultures she argues that gender roles were not as sharply delineated in some tribes as they have come to be in the modern West. Tribal gender roles were often determined “on the basis of proclivity, inclination, and temperament. The Yuma had a tradition of gender designation based on dreams; a female who dreamed of weapons became a male for all practical purposes.” In addition she notes that, “Cherokee women had had the power to wage war, to decide the fate of captives, to speak to the men’s council, they had the right to inclusion in public policy decisions, the right to choose whom and whether to marry, the right to bear arms. The Women’s Council was politically and spiritually powerful. Cherokee women lost all these powers and rights, as the Cherokee were removed and patriarchal arrangements were introduced.” In addition, many tribes, including the Susquehanna, Iroquois, Cherokee, and Navajo were gynecratic and recognized homosexuals and “third genders” or ‘berdache’ positively. Unfortunately little can perhaps be said of the gender organization of our own decimated indigenous populations that has not already been coloured by the vivid colonial sexual imagination.

In Trinidad and Tobago the gender and genre of our colonial heritage in education is entangled with the relics of religious sensibilities. Kwok-Pui-Lan’s Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology is perhaps one of the more important works I have recently come across as a scholar and (questioning) Catholic in beginning the important work of engaging the complex intersectionalities that make up this difficult and painful heritage. Her discussion renders it impossible to turn a blind eye or deaf ear to the complicity of the Church, men and women, colonized and colonizer, abuser and abused, teachers and students, in the suffering, enslavement, and sickness of spirit theft that continues to unfold in education in Trinidad and Tobago, the Caribbean and elsewhere. In our context, that the current discussions about education and gender have been dominated thus far by anamales (anatomical males), including myself, is not without concern. That the arguments have NOT, until this point, called into question the very categories and basis for such classification and separation, have not looked beyond the constraints of a very narrow and limited disciplinary framework suggests a commitment to a questionable epistemology and a reproduction of the coloniality of power including its gendered dimensions. Coverage of competing and refutational views to the “official knowledge” regarding education and gender are usually not vigorously pursued, promoted or reported on in a timely fashion by the media, in particular in a closeted, heteronormative, homophobic and neo-colonial society such as ours. What is really needed a framework that offers a productive way and means to transform relationships of colonized gender domination in and out of education/school.

After Gender towards a Human Genre
At this point in the presentation I turned to the wonderfully frustrating intellectual thought of the Caribbean’s own Sylvia Wynter whom I framed as a transdisciplinary scholar. Wynter’s oeuvre is a carefully fashioned theoretical bricolage which draws upon, and strategically deploys a wealth of concepts drawn from across the landscapes of human inquiry, in seeking to effect a rupture and displacement among the complex configurations and accretive articulations of institutional associations within which she sees a dominant bio-cidal episteme, cultural logic or order of consciousness, that engendered and accompanied the rise of Western Humanism, rationalized colonial expansion, and undergirded the rise of the modern world. The overrepresentation of this episteme that she calls man, as the only ‘true’ logic or way of being human, enacts a pandemic genre which negatively marks ‘otherness’ and ‘difference’ as ‘defect’, deficit’ or ‘deviance’. In her own words, she states, “Man” is not the human, although it represents itself as if it were. It is a specific, local-cultural conception of the human…Its “Other” is therefore not woman…Rather because Man conceives of itself through its Origin narrative…of Evolution…its “Other” and “Others” are necessarily those categories of human who are projected…as having been bio-evolutionary dysselected – i.e…[all] who are negatively marked as defective humans within the terms of Man’s self-conception and its related understanding of what it is to be human.” The classes of humans who have been bio-evolutionaryily dysselected, constructed as disposable humans, ‘waste’ or ‘other’-than-human, chattel, include the ancestors and contemporaries of every Caribbean citizen.

Wynter’s challenge is to attempt to simultaneously re-imagine Humanism outside and beside the apparatuses employed by man to move towards an “autopoiesis of the human” i.e. following Fanon “to redefine what it is to be human.” Her ultimate concern is with human freedom and its trans-formative potential, rather than the freedom of man. This is the foundation of her ‘after man’ proposal in which she wonders, “How then shall we reimagine freedom as emancipation from our present ethno-class or Western bourgeois conception of freedom? And therefore, in human rather than as now, Man’s terms?...beyond those of Man’s oppositional sub-versions – that of Marxism’s proletariat, that of feminism’s woman (gender rights), and that of our multiple multiculturalisms and/or centric cultural nationalisms (minority rights), to that of gay liberation (homosexual rights), but also a conception of freedom able to draw them all together in a synthesis.” Wynter’s words resonate with that of my former B.Ed student, the primary teacher mentioned earlier, who also wrote in her autobiography, “I am particularly interested in freedom…I am very interested in the freedom that comes from knowledge and the knowledge that comes from enquiry rather than mere absorption…I am also interested in enquiry that seeks to find pathways to peace and self-fulfillment rather than enquiry to unearth some injustice to seek revenge. I am interested in helping students to partake of the beauty that is available to all human beings and to create beauty for others through mathematics…I think I have achieved my ultimate goal and that is a language to describe the freedom that I so dearly want and want others to strive for…The education system does not teach us how not to bury the rich gifts of humanity – love, art, collective learning, aesthetics, diversity, easy of knowing and the self transforming responsibility to the other, the fruits of which every human being has the potential to reap.”

To think “after man” is to think transphenomenally and to ask what (or who) is already besides, already existent, and thus more than potential but not yet afforded recognition or full value as being, and to begin to wonder how and why this might have come to be so. As I have argued elsewhere, what we need in the Caribbean is to develop our kumbla consciousness and to pursue intervulnerability as an aim for education.

In discussing the resistance to her discussions of gender by feminists, Wynter elaborates a position that draws attention to the instituting of ‘kind’ or genre, the discursive making and marking of difference. She says, “[a]lthough I use the term “race,”…“race” itself is a function of something else which is much closer to “gender.”…there cannot be only one mode of being human; there are a multiplicity of modes. So I coined the word “genre,” or I adapted it, because “genre” and “gender” come from the same root. They mean “kind,” one of the meanings is “kind.” Now what I am suggesting is that “gender” has always been a function of the instituting of “kind.” Indeed the root of gender, like genre is the same as genus, and genesis, and means ‘kin,’ ‘origin,’ or ‘type.’ Wynter’s etymological reminder, her proposal that “gender” is a function of “genre” advances calls that have been made for a feminist degendering movement. Working from this position then what might it mean to conceive and perform research in mathematics education “after gender” i.e. in another, more human genre that does not essentialize, reify or neglect or overlook biological sex-differences? How shallow now does the Ministry’s experiment in gender re-socialization seem now – entrenched as it is firmly within the genre of Man?

Within the current Gender-genre, for example note a conspicuous absence of studies of ‘men’ doing femininities in and through mathematics or ‘women’ in mathematics doing any form of masculinity that is not negatively scribed. In the realm of the political too much has been focused on Mrs. Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s gender, though the headline on Mary King’s article (15/03/10) which declares “Change but no Change”, could be applied transphenomenally to much in Trinidad including the possible result of the Ministry’s gender experiment if the only thing that is changed is the sex-gender composition of the schools and not the genre of education that is at present authoritative, inhuman, aconsequential, and unholy. As I have written recently (04/04/10), the inconclusive research literature, which rests upon a too simple understanding of sex as gender, suggests that if the genre in schools remains the same then ‘girls’ are likely to increase the level of their performance at a much faster rate than ‘boys’. This will likely amplify the academic panic of the current discourses in Caribbean education which have constructed all forms of non-normative masculinities as pathologies in need of cure or rehabilitation. Politically as well as in education we need genre change.

A Closing Hope
I’ve often been asked, why, despite finishing at the top end of my undergraduate mathematics (and botany) cohort I have not pursued mathematics in any meaningful way at the graduate level. The short answer is that while I retain an interest and love for Mathematics as a discipline, my experiences, and, in particular the experiences of many of my colleagues and former students, was often not pleasant. I really was not inspired by the end of my B.Sc. to go follow that (Eulerian) path again. Speaking to many other mathematically gifted men, I hear similar stories. It is not about gender in the main, but the destructive inhuman genre of mathematics education in some university departments, or by some faculty members, a genre that is often repeated sometimes in teacher education, staffrooms, and very often in daily classroom practice by people of all genders.

Unlike expensive foreign consultants, my advice, at present, is free. I do not think it is a ‘wrong’ move to separate ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ at the secondary level – I do think we need to rethink what we think a boy and a girl is and whether this is a justifiable basis for this decision. I do think it is not going to be ‘right’ for every case. Certainly the Ministry’s continued dependence on a top-down closed-mouth approach is an inappropriate way to go about the process of educational improvement. I am not alone in this assessment. If I had to do this, following the free advice offered by Professors Spence and King over the years, I would seek to create a research grant/innovation /experimentation system open to all schools to submit proposals for their own reform/ improvement initiatives that could range from curricular innovations, social experiments to infrastructural transformations. The schools would be responsible for accounting and reporting back both to the Ministry and the public on the success of their efforts within a fixed time frame (probably 3-5 years depending on the type of project). This is an integral part of what is meant by creating schools as learning communities and building a sustainable knowledge society/economy. Such things do not happen overnight, but a culture of innovation, risk and responsibility has to be seeded and nurtured over time. Many individuals at UWI, UTT, USC, DERE and other educational research institutions as well as teachers in schools, retired, and in private practice would be able to add valuable expertise to this process. Some of these schools would likely figure out that separating students by sex would probably be a change that would have a reasonable chance of success, i.e. of increasing achievement (not the sole aim of education mind you) for the majority of students. However other contextually relevant innovations would probably emerge from this crowd-sourcing approach. (A caveat – sometimes the crowd can be very stupid). It would not though be a top-down imposed solution that few are invested in, rather like the transphenomenal complex systems that schools and learning are, such strategies would belong to the whole school community and to no one individual.

In ending my turn, it is my hope that other interested and affected parties will get into this important conversation. Indeed, while (mathematics) education and gender studies have developed alongside each other in the academy, until fairly recently and with relatively few exceptions, they have remained mutually indifferent, perhaps even estranged, to one another’s work. Going forward this has to change.
The challenges of the present demand that we read learn to across disciplinary boundaries and learn to read differently if we are to progress together. Wilson Harris describes societies that are unable to do this as block societies, he writes, “we have seen violence erupt out of block societies…If we have cultures which are locked into certain functions, which read the world in only one way, then fanaticism grows out of that, terror grows out of that…” and notes that “lots of people may be able to read and write competently, but if they are locked within block functions, either they submit or they rebel (perhaps in T&T they revel?) violently, they burn property, they do terrible things, they protest against the society without a grain of understanding that they carry within themselves the very seeds of disaster against which they protest. Unless they can understand that, complex, inner revision, complex, outer dialogue is lost.”

We cannot afford to continue to lock our children, as Janie has already begun to learn, as children in SEA, CXC and CAPE learn, into block societies to fulfill block functions. It is my hope that in approaching mathematics, gender and education transphenomenally and adopting transdisciplinary approaches to their study that we might embrace the literate imagination of what Harris calls the ‘Infinite Rehearsal’ or ‘the Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination’ in which we might discover the reality that “to convert rooted deprivations into complex parables of freedom and truth is a formidable but not impossible task.”

TT Express News 2010 - Squandermania

2010-01-04T06:57:00.000-08:00

Mary King has always been a favourite read of minem she does address educational issues, especially entrepreneurship and innovation, two aspects of education that are seldom dealt with by traditional educators (Sam Lochan being one exception).
Squandermania - Mary King
Monday, January 4th 2010

Part I
During the property tax debate the Opposition charged that the Government squandered almost TT$300 billion over the last eight years or so. In reply the Minister of Finance and other PNM MPs waved a newspaper article which purported to demonstrate that this was not the case. One MP even suggested that this article should be required reading for the Opposition and possibly all of us.

The article argued that if we agreed that the buildings constructed by the PNM would appreciate in value then the PNM government did not squander the money! Further, that in the Ryan poll 76 per cent of the respondents agreed that there was squander-mania and extravagance yet 65 per cent approved of the National Academy for the Performance Arts.

The article concludes that this evidence does not support squandermania and challenged readers to say how they would have allocated the funds.

As an Independent Senator I repeatedly cajoled both Governments to spend, especially in booms, in order to reconstruct our socio-economy. However, both the PNM’s and UNC’s spending, respectively, is and was not socially and economic efficient - i.e. the spending was in support of an unsustainable system.

Some of us still think that our private sector in this plantation economy that exploits a depleting resource, can, if facilitated or bribed by the government, diversify this economy. This view ignores the work of the New World Group, that of Lloyd Best, Kari Levitt, Beckford etc., which is also echoed by Sir Arthur Lewis.

Diversification requires the direct intervention by the Government in, as this column has discussed in detail, the creation of a National Innovation System, wherein the government takes a hands-on role to help create a new knowledge-based innovative and entrepreneurial class which would eventually pervade the country’s private sector.

The current private sector does very well in the boom times of our economy and, like our present government, sees the energy sector as everlasting, either that or business in T&T has a short time horizon.

In 2008 the Government spent TT$28.3 billion on subsidies and transfers, of which the petroleum subsidy was TT$2.1 billion. With PM Manning as the ’de facto’ Commonwealth champion of climate-change management and in a world not only attempting to constrain fossil fuel use but also considering imposing a carbon tax on users of petroleum products, our Government is subsidising the use of fossil energy.

Our manufacturers, who have found it impossible to break into the global market, have cheap, subsidised energy as their competitive advantage. When the RIC recommended rate increases for T&TEC our Government stalled these increases for years and then allowed only certain sectors to have increases, all the while subsidising T&TEC. The subsidisation of energy, the use of cheap natural resources to foster industrialisation, including the proposed aluminium smelter, is economically inefficient - squander-mania.

The Government spent as recurrent expenditure TT$1.66 billion on pensions and gratuities. Any enlightened business entity would recognise that pensions for its employees should be based on employee/employer contributions to an investment fund whose returns on investment pay pensions -- a yearly call on otherwise generated income should not be the source of pension payments.

Further, this fund guaranteed by Government can serve as investments into the diversification of the on-shore into a knowledge-based economy. This pension transfer is economically inefficient.

In 2008 the Government contributed some TT$1 billion to the education institutions. Following the UNC’s call that no child should be left behind, the present GATE programme funds anyone who is at least marginally qualified to attend an approved tertiary institution of her choice.

Our education system is about certification and is judged by the quantity of its output -- the aim is 60 per cent of the cohort. The quality of its graduates with respect to their demonstrated ability to move this nation towards a knowledge-based society is hopelessly inadequate.

The hope that UTT could project us into such a society has not materialised, though to date enormous sums of money have been spent on it. The tremendously expensive Tamana Technology Park is useless as a vector of this transformation since, like the energy sector but without the attraction of cheap gas, the plan is for foreign investment to diversify our on-shore economy. This transfer of funds to education is economic and socially inefficient.

Happy New Year to all (continued) maryking@tstt.net.tt

TT Express Education News - CSEC January Exams & Vacation days

2010-01-03T10:09:00.000-08:00

So this year I hope to begin following particular news-stories published in the Express (I would like to do the other newspapers but is only me and a dissertation doesn't write itself...ah if only...volunteers welcome).
The first one for the year seems to be the 2 extra days given to students for the CSEC exams.

The story begins with Camille Bechtel's piece on Dec 29th, 2009, 2 more vacation days
Tuesday, December 29th 2009
cbethel@trinidadexpress.com

All secondary school pupils will have two days added to their Christmas vacation.
The Ministry of Education announced yesterday that secondary schools would now reopen on January 6. Primary schools, however, will reopen on January 4, as scheduled.
Teaching and non-teaching staff have been asked to report for work on January 4 and 5 to ensure the smooth resumption of classes.
’The Ministry of education advises parents, teachers and students of all public secondary schools that classes will resume on Wednesday 6 January 2010. This new date for reopening of schools has become necessary in order to utilise the schools as examination centres for the numerous candidates registered to write the January 2010 Caribbean Secondary Examination Certificate (CSEC), particularly in the areas of English A and Mathematics,’ a release from the ministry stated.
For an entire week in September, hundreds crowded the Ministry’s offices across the country, to submit their CSEC forms for the examination in January.

This was followed by a critique by B. Joseph on Sunday January 3rd Better planning needed from CXC, Education Ministry

Sunday, January 3rd 2010

How do you make sense of the Education Ministry’s decision to postpone the January 2010 restart of school for two days to facilitate external CSEC exams? Don’t the people at the Education Ministry talk to the people who plan exam schedules at CXC? Are all Caribbean territories also postponing the January 2010 reopening of schools for said reason, or is this just a T&T Education Ministry decision?

Is CXC hard-pressed to alter their traditional January exam schedule?

Conducting CSEC and CAPE exams during schools’ vacation time is not unprecedented. And schools were pretty much vacant for the last three weeks, with children on the traditional Christmas school break.

The CXC January exam planners should have taken full advantage of this downtime to do their CSEC math and English Language exams. After all, schools all across the Caribbean also close for three weeks for Christmas, unless I am mistaken. Had CXC scheduled these exams for dates during the vacation, they would have had full access to schools with few exceptions, eliminating the possibility of displacing normal school schedules. This assumes that CXC’s timetabling schedule is the source of the problem.

On the other hand, didn’t government spend billions on buildings during the last eight years and shell out billions to Caribbean neighbours for infrastructure and education? Where’s the infrastructure to circumvent this problem, which may very well become an annual event? Where are the people with better ideas than the ministry’s solution? Government spent some $300 billion in the last eight years, so where’s the education infrastructure to deal with this scenario? Why is children’s in-school contact time viewed as satisfactory sacrificial fat to alleviate the Education Ministry’s exam candidate spacing problem?

Curiously, many of those so-called dedicated teachers are silently glowing with joy for the extra downtime. That’s a sad attitude for people charged with delivering quality education. If only you took pride in your work, the Education Ministry would have had to back down on this one but as anticipated, not a peep from the nation’s educators, and they say what they do is important. And what of parents and the PTA? Not a peep from these ’stakeholders’ either.

Now don’t go demanding new buildings in hope of solving this problem in time for next year’s exams. Learn to maximize the use of what’s in front of you. Think vacation downtime, Education Ministry and CXC timetable planners. Schedule your exams to coincide with the vacation; don’t impose upon the children and don’t impose upon taxpayers’ pockets either.

B Joseph

And here's my response to B. Jospeh and this first education story for 2010.

CXC's BusinessThis is a response to B. Joseph's Letter in the Trinidad Express (Jan 3rd 2010).
One way to make sense of the TT Ministry of Education's decision to delay the January 2010 restart of school for two days to facilitate external CSEC exams is to acknowledge that CXC is first and foremost a business organization. They are not (primarily) an educational entity though the "products" and services that they market are branded as educational. Their products/services are assessment and certification through syllabus preparation, renewals and examinations. CXC's ‘business’ is neither teaching nor learning but the assessment and certification of educational accomplishment, or knowledge acquisition, or lack thereof. That being said while they do collaborate regularly with consumers of their products, viz. teachers, policy makers, educational professionals, etc. they essentially operate independently of them and thus they, like other testing organizations, are free to schedule examinations at a time and cost convenient to their business cycle. I would wager that from CXC's perspective they do not see their timetabling as a source of any problem. Rather the problem emanates from the over-subscription for the January examination brought about in no small part by our own Ministry's decision to pay the fees for all students who wished the write these exams at this time, without prejudice, and our TT culture of freeness which repeatedly manifests itself in a lack of restraint or mindfulness. CXC will likely be quite pleased with the revenue generated from servicing such a large candidate population in what has typically been a low subscription exam to facilitate the small number of repeaters, students seeking admissions to some foreign universities and those seeking to prepare for June exams by choosing to face the anxieties of a real but of limited consequence exam scenario.
Fueling the fervour, perhaps, (at least in the case of mathematics), is the major revision of CSEC examinations in June 2010 when the Basic proficiency certification will be eliminated in all subjects. This will add an additional four to five thousand students annually to the pool of students taking the General proficiency examinations. In mathematics, the structure of the Paper 2 will change ever so slightly but in a way that will have significant consequences. In the optional section students’ choices will be reduced to picking two questions from four where they now have a choice from six. This will make the paper more difficult for many students who will have to learn more mathematics than they have had to in the past in order to get a good grade. This does not mean though that students will learn any more useful mathematics than they do at present. In this light many students, perhaps, are, understandably, but unecessarily, taking advantage of a free opportunity to write the last examination of the current syllabus.
Mr. Joseph asks, "Why is children’s in-school contact time viewed as satisfactory sacrificial fat to alleviate the Education Ministry’s exam candidate spacing problem?" In response I offer that this is yet another exemplification of our distorted commitments, values, and priorities in education in Trinidad &Tobago where teaching (and teachers), learning, creative and critical thinking etc. are summarily sacrificed to business ideologies which are embodied in the pursuit of examinations and certification as ends in and of themselves rather than as means to more nobler ends.
Finally, as a former secondary teacher, I agree with Mr. Joseph that taking joy in not having to turn up for a job that does not value you or what you do as much as what you produce towards the educational bottom-line, viz. passes or scholarships, is a sad attitude. Indeed many of our most dedicated and professional teachers are sad, frustrated, hurt, depressed and angry. Unfortunately they are not militant, a consequence of years of conditioning for domestic docility, and rightly fear to take a stand or speak up given the example made of those who have and the rewards that have gone to those who continue to keep silent and do their duty. It is a sad but understandable attitude given the reality, culture and consequences of being a teacher in TT at this time. Mr. Joseph reasons wrongly however in that it does not matter how much pride teachers take in their work, the Education Ministry could not have backed down even if they wanted to. These exams will happen at this time according to CXC's timetable and no one else's because CXC has no other regional competition in the exam/certification business. Perhaps that too needs to change?
If we do value teaching, teachers, and schooling as much as we say we do we should take care that this debacle does not become a staple in the school calendar, yet another annual local spectacle and waste of taxpayers' monies.

Steven Khan

Architectural Megalomania

2009-11-16T16:20:00.000-08:00

Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief architect, in his memoir Inside the Third Reich, describes what I consider to be some uncanny similarities between Hitler’s architectural megalomania and the current ‘tsunami’ of government sponsored construction. Hitler, he says, “liked to say that the purpose of his building was to transmit his time and its spirit to posterity…[he] also stressed the value of a permanent type of construction.” Or consider the similarities between Speers recollection of a 1939 speech by Hitler to construction workers who, in justifying the huge dimensions of his projects, argued, “Why always the biggest? I do this to restore to each individual German his self-respect. In a hundred areas I want to say to the individual: we are not inferiors; on the contrary, we are the complete equals of every other nation”, and the recent gratuitous (but vacuous) justifications given by Manning, Hunt et al. Speers, the inside man, notes finally that “Hitler’s demand for huge dimensions…involved more than he was willing to admit to the workers. He wanted the biggest of everything to glorify his works and magnify his pride. These monuments were an assertion of his claim to world dominion long before he dared to voice any such intention even to his closest associates.” Read those lines again and draw whatever inferences or implications seem most reasonable.

Our TT-DNA

2009-11-16T16:19:00.001-08:00

I have been dreaming about the Government’s 1.98 M$ erection, err, flagpole and those 0.02 M$ flags recently. In my dream I was sitting at the foot of the pole, looking up towards its vanishing point. I saw inscribed/etched onto the pole the names of all of our heroes, not just those who receive public recognition and national awards, but those who toil long and lovingly serve others, winding its way around the pole in one continuous line. Then I noticed a separate line of names running parallel to the first. On this line, somewhat faded, were the names of every murder victim, both old and young, every ‘accident’ victim, every executed “community leader”, every ‘failed’ commission of integrity/inquiry. I saw these as representing the two strands of the Trinbagonian DNA – the source simultaneously of our pride and our shame, our celebration and our suffering. And binding this double helix together were the names of every corrupt, lazy, indifferent or dishonest public official, every inconsiderate road-user, every greedy corporate executive, every cowardly citizen, every public ineffectual, and every political party we have ever had govern us.

And the rhythm section played on...

2009-11-16T16:14:00.000-08:00

A young man, not unlike my friends in younger days and former students, who loved attending Secondary Schools’ football, was murdered after attending the Big 5 playoff between my alma mater and another school. He cannot merely be more “collateral damage.” These blows from children’s empty hands on mordant drum strikes (too) close to home. I strike these keys in this cold foreign place, where memories of fading suns litter sidewalks, a reminder of the savagery, brutality and senselessness of this and so many others’ fatal blows. I strike these keys hoping that they are not as puerile or futile as fetal forms or police protection. I strike these keys, making and unmaking worlds, hoping not for a sword with which to strike, to wound or sever thought from action, but for a pin to prick the conscience of (former) friends and family.

I ask my former teacher, now the Principal, and other friends involved with team management to open a discussion, a real honest-to-God educational conversation around considering withdrawing from the final and what this might mean. Time is short, shorter than young men’s dreams and busy men’s nostalgic ambitions. I ask what will be gained by playing the final now? Take time to mourn. Will what we might win in anyway compare to what we have already lost? We may win a title but a young man, not marked with the crest of (y)our tribe will still be dead. Consider that! What does it matter then to you, majestic on its verdant hill, overlooking the overflowing necropolis? What do I/you/we really rePRESent? Consider withdrawing. Take a pause. Ask the other team to consider doing the same. Someone has to take in front, set an example, take the lead, make a stand…for something. There is no shame in calling it a draw for now. Today there are as yet two winners. Do play the match later. But do not play it for the stakes set out by others for their vain glories. Play it for something else, when it might mean something else. Stand on the field, in the October rain, and weep. No one will see you. Weep, if you can, as many tears as bullets and blows that have rained, now reign and will rein in our fragile futures unless we do something… something different…now. Weep for all of 90 minutes. Weep and know what it is like to be a man. We have all already lost too much but we have not yet lost it all. Please let it not be said that on that day, this day, the rhythm section played on…

Yours,

Steven Khan

Intervulnerability in Education (3/3)

2009-09-05T19:29:00.000-07:00

Football as Policy is Folly

2009-08-21T12:59:00.001-07:00

This is my fairly lengthy response to the PSA email.
A shorter version may appear in the future.

Three-hundred thousand dollars ($300,000) is what the propaganda, sorry, email, from my Past Students’ Association suggests as an estimate of the cost to finance the School’s football campaign for the upcoming season. Indeed at my alma mater, and former place of employment, where the Principal’s vision is “to be recognized as the Best Catholic Boys’ School by 2010” through deployment of strategies aimed at “raising the public profile of the school in all spheres,” success at football has been named explicitly as being integral to realizing his vision in the administrative policy framework. In this article I argue that adopting football as policy is folly.

Let me be clear at the outset that I see football, competitive sport, and physical activity in general, as being important elements of curricula for maintaining healthy individual and social lives, in and out of School, and at the national level. Indeed all schools have their traditions of accomplishment in which they rightly take pride and which contribute, mostly positively, to their identity via the un-measurable yet un-mistakable school Spirit. This fact should not blind us however to the negative educational consequences that follow from flawed decision-making processes that lie behind the neurotic, almost monomaniac pursuit of football as policy, or indeed any goal which does not have at its heart the support and improvement of learning.

Every year when exam results are released, and this year has and will be no exception, an alarm is raised about the performance of boys in general and boys’ schools in particular. One explanation given short shrift in analyses is the Carnival mentality of “half days” and “whole days” off to attend football matches in the important first term in some schools, usually at the Principal’s discretion. In my experience as a teacher as much as one third of class time can be lost in the first term with the unreasonable expectation that all teachers can and must somehow manufacture more time for their students. Many of the non-competitive, occasionally athletic, students make up such deficits by seeking out extra-lessons. The top Girls’ Secondary Schools are not so encumbered by this lost time (though their students seek out extra-lessons for other reasons). Some of the under-performance of boys in examinations at some Secondary Schools is perhaps attributable to this lost face-to-face class time and not to some inherent deficiency on their part or to poor teaching. The necessity of winning, demonstrating dominance and increasing recognition no matter the cost, perhaps at almost any cost, is fiscally irresponsible. The Girls’ Colleges, by not engaging in such massive single expenditures perhaps have more to draw upon for funding the no less visible or important academic and co-curricular pursuits? Perhaps it is more their management genre than their gender that explains their success and that of their students?

The winner-take-all mentality, the obsession with being the best at any cost marks, masks, and makes the bodies of our young talented footballers into economic commodities – semi-professionals. Individual skill is traded–up for the educational capital in our society of having worn the uniform of a prestige school and access to those networks of power and privilege. Coaches scout and poach talent everywhere. Like other flesh-peddlers they make promises, play on fears and dreams and take advantage of youthful naïveté. All that is missing for now are enterprising agents for these young stars to negotiate contracts with their school clubs and to hold them accountable should the schools not be able to provide them with what they promise before the season.

Remaining at the level of the student, it is important for sponsors, administrators and students themselves to recognize that as student-athletes they are student first and athletic representative second. They are not professional athletes, though given their grueling training and match schedules that, depending on success, might extend into early December, it oftentimes seems that they might come out better if they were categorized and afforded the protections of such. Under these conditions it is difficult for the majority to successfully balance their ‘work’ and ‘school’ careers in the times allotted. Indeed, while intense pre-season training takes place during the July-August break, some teams travelling overseas for ‘international’ competition, I often wonder if a simultaneous effort is made by coaching staff to provide an academic buffer, a pre-emptive intervention for time that will be lost through injury or fatigue in the upcoming term? My experience and conversations suggest that this is not the case in most instances. Indeed one of the follies of football as policy is that it treats individuals as a means to an end – in the case of my alma mater public recognition as being prestigious – with little concern for what happens after the season and any vain glories celebrated are over. Nor does there appear to be discussion with players of the dangers of having too many eggs in one basket and what opportunities are forever forfeited should a serious or career-ending injury occur on the field. Sponsors, donors, and fans are not usually around then. In business a worker’s value is determined by his contribution to the bottom line. It is sad when we use children in this way.

“Football as policy” also serves to undermine teacher professionalism and systems of meritocracy upon which a sustainable culture of academic excellence can be built. Government Assisted Secondary Schools, like my alma mater, have final discretion in who they allow into 6th form. What many are unaware of is that the process of selecting the 6th form intake has already begun. With the email sent long before CSEC results have been released the machine has been turned on. Teachers, those who interact with students on a daily basis in and out of the classroom, better positioned than most and more reliable than an exam score to comment on students’ preparedness for 6th form and advanced study, are not part of that process. Indeed even when they are part of the process to enact a completely meritocratic selection based on past performance (academic and behavioural) they are too often thwarted by Principals, coaches or the board who have the final decision based on other agendas. Many schools do not behave in ways consonant with their marketing as nationalistic institutions upholding democratic, religious, or meritocratic ideals. They are businesses masquerading as intellectual enterprise. Indeed, “busy-men”, not patient thoughtful teachers or educators, dominate educational decision making in Trinidad and Tobago.

Once a student is selected for a non-academic reason, with sub-par grades, either the minimum requirements or not even that, anyone with grades as good as or better who has applied, but fails to be admitted, has a valid case for being admitted also under a system which proclaims that admission policies are fair, just and based on principle. Fear of litigation perhaps leads to the excessive intake of students such that class numbers are sometimes double the recommended number in some schools. Teachers must shut up and suck it up as their professional autonomy is undermined. Again these are elements of a genre that perhaps contributes to the continued underperformance of Catholic Boys’ School relative to their female and Presbyterian counterparts.

Denominational schools however are partially protected from litigation arising from academic discrimination by not having to make their decision-making public, in much the same way they don’t have to justify who they take on the 20% for the SEA. Government and the people of Trinidad and Tobago may not think that they pay to subsidize students coming into a 6th form to play football in order to increase the prestige brand’s recognition. If they think about it at all, they might believe that they are paying for the all-round development of the individual – a future citizen – for whom football and other curricular activities are appropriately balanced. How naïve of them! Unfortunately, not selecting the best students that one can, undermining teacher autonomy and professionalism, over-subscribing courses of study in enacting the football as policy folly has consequences for teacher morale, health, absenteeism, good-will, school spirit and student achievement. Again, one does not have to go much further than the culture of some schools, that ought to be doing much better, and their policy framework that somehow imagines that excellent results can come before excellent motivated teachers, with football strategically serving up recognition somewhere in the mid-field, to explain and understand the continued mediocrity of their academic achievements.

This logic runs contrary to every successful academic institution of which I am aware. It makes perfect sense in business however. But like politics, business has a morality of its own, one that does not traffic natively in the currency of the public imaginary of school. Indeed, in business, the expression “you’ve got to spend money to make money” is not unheard of. Spending $300,000 on football to “experience even greater success in the upcoming season” than last year is really small change chasing the big money, millions of dollars, in alumni and business contributions to make up government shortfalls in advancing other developmental agendas. I wonder though how reasonable and sustainable the budget is in these belt-tightening times and how the cost to manage a school football season could skyrocket 375% from $80,000 a mere three years ago to $300,000 at present. I can’t begin to imagine how much money will circulate during this season when you consider the schools involved if this is what one school is willing to spend. I shudder at the thought of the potential for corruption.

Barring sponsorship and donations where would $300,000 to cover $1000 per game laundry bills, $800 boots, meals and transportation costs have normally come from? The answer is these costs would have been invisibly borne, as in the recent past, by being distributed among the community, parents and well-wishers. My first point here is to highlight the type and value of resources that one usually takes for granted in a community and to draw attention to the fact that while other school communities may not be able to raise the same kinds of funds their respective communities nevertheless contribute directly to their representatives. In such cases the team indeed comes to represent the community from which the players come and do not become mercenaries – laws unto themselves who are financed externally to mount campaigns over straw. My second point is that competitive football in schools, unlike most other after-school curricular activities is far from a free activity. As in other areas of life where market values predominate, those who can pay can play. I am sure others blanch at these costs for a single activity in a school. As the email wisely suggests at one point, a washing machine and dryer would be a better investment for the school community than $30,000 in laundry bills! In helping football to find a sustainable place in the school’s curriculum, more of that sort of reasoning is necessary.

Those who have been reading between the lines will see my thinly veiled allusions to events at the national level – where football cannot escape politics and politics is treated like a football by those who are ruining our society and institutions. Many of whom, having passed through the same types of schools enacting this pedagogy have learnt the lessons of football as policy on and off the field. Indeed part of my moral outrage and reason for this lengthy response are the similarities and grim resonances I find between the email request by the PSA, statements by the Principal and our PM and his companions. I find intolerable those pecuniary truths which exaggerate accomplishment, defy evidence, confuse correlations with causation and seek justification for personal ambition and monomaniacal monument at the expense of individual lives, sustainability and security. School is often championed as being a microcosm of society. Our national culture nests in schools and the similarities between the current climates in school and in political life at the national level ought to trouble us greatly.

I implore educators of all schools now, not just Catholic Colleges, to consider my previous advice to work ceaselessly to, “create schools and curricula that are of the community, not merely in the community, or worse, that live on and off, and contribute only waste for life in the community; and to compete to outdo each other in responsibility, goodness, imagination, virtue and generosity to one another.” Football as school policy as historically and currently enacted is not the route. Indeed, there has been for far too long an unholy alliance among greed, ungraciousness, irresponsibility, aconsequentality, and a false sense of entitlement surrounding success at the expense of others which I do not believe would find favour with serious educational philosophies including those of the religious Founders of many of these institutions.

I wish my College team any and all deserved successes. However, if my alma mater should happen to win this year I wonder what they will find it necessary to spend to keep on winning? How much will they ask for in next year’s email or the year after that? Half-a-million dollars – When will it be too much? What will be the cost?
I like meh school and I like meh football but this nonsense have to stop!

PSA Football Email

2009-08-17T09:40:00.000-07:00

This is the email that I responded to:

Proposal for Organisations (Sponsor) and Individuals (Donate). You can contact Micheal Toney or myself if you require a formal letterhead request and/or --- to engage your organisation.
*** College, is currently preparing its football teams for the upcoming 2009/10 College football season. In 2008, in light of moderate results coupled with the impact on school spirit, reputation and performance, the Past Students? Association was asked to coordinate the College?s football program. The Association accepted the responsibility and through ***, a ?fete match? team made up of former College players, the program was revamped. Results far surpassed expectations in 2008/09 with the Championship team reaching the national Intercol semi-finals and placing second in the South Zone to perennial rivals, *** College. There was also a marked improvement in school spirit and discipline. This success can be largely attributed to a structured all- encompassing program, top coaching staff and strong stakeholder support.
The teams have been training hard in the current pre-season and, from all indications, we anticipate even greater success in the upcoming season. In order for the program to be effective, these efforts require funding. The current program shall cost approximately $300,000.
SPONSORSHIPS
We wish to ask your organisation to support this endeavour by considering one of the following sponsorship options:
1. 25 Home and Away Playing Kits (chest logo) - $60,000
2. 25 Home and Away Playing Kits (sleeve logo) - $25,000
3. 25 Warm up jerseys (chest logo) - $10,000
4. 40 Travelling polos (breast logo) - $10,000
5. 700 Fan T-shirts (Logo on Gents, Ladies, Boys, Girls)- $10,000
6. Team Banners (2 logos on either end of Team banner)- $ 5,000
Items 5 and 6 can be sponsored by more than one organisation. Each sponsor for the packages above will have their logo appearing on the supporters? jersey that is currently being designed for a modern, world class look and also on ***.com. DONATIONS
There are 30 games for the season. Some of the major cost items are:
Laundry - $1,000 per game
Meals - $1,000 per game
Boots - $800 per pair for 20 players
Medical Supplies - $5,000 for the season
Transport - $500 per game.
The aquisition of a washer, dryer and team bus would greatly help. The bus is long term however, the washer/dryer can be used for other sports and will pay back for itself within the fuirst month of the football season.
OTHERWe also would appreciate any technical help - Physio, Team Doctor, Coaches, Motivational speakers. We once more look forward to your support and thank you for helping us in our preparation for what we expect to be a very rewarding season. Your soonest feedback would be appreciated and please do not hesitate to contact us should you require further information. Cheques can be made payable to *** College Past Students? Association?. Queries and artwork can be sent to ***@gmail.com. Thank you

The human

2009-07-15T07:27:00.001-07:00

Still wrestling with the problems of what it is to be and what it means to be human.
DB says "All of the problems of the human professions are a fight with Science and partly a fight with belief"...I want to expand this a bit...
Perhaps the problem of the human Being (and human-ness) begins with the difficulty of recognizing (and only later representing) its un-homedness, its resistances and struggles to repress the poesis of Knowledge, Belief and Value that emerge from Science, Religion, and Economics? Perhaps this is a necessary un-settledness in working through the unruliness and vicissitudes of Desire and un-Desire?

Successful Teaching - More than a mouthful

2009-07-14T15:52:00.000-07:00

For successful teaching-learning (and research) we must do the opposite of suspending our discrimination as to context, i.e. we must make context central to thinking. What this means for development, or more specifically situated to education as a context with which we are more familiar, learning, is that pedagogical practice is dependent upon but not determined by [alternatively “is a function of but is not fettered by”] (un)consciousness of one’s recursively elaborative socio-cognitive networks of abilities to discriminate, attend to, draw up on, symbolize, connect and incorporate, diverse polyphonous, polyvocal and polysemous elements of social interaction and discourse, i.e. the (in)visible, (in)audible, (in/ex)scribed, and (an)aesthetic consequences of (in)appropriate contingent interventions which one might have deliberately and accidentally occasioned. Pedagogy then involves proairesis [desire guided by deliberation, deliberate choice of a means towards an end] and poesis grounded in a politics [Best] of pro-phetic [before speaking, i.e. hermeneutic listening] phronesis"

The successful teacher inhabits three moments and draws upon 3 sets of dispositions/skills:
The "What just happened?"..........Hystory......Analytic/Interpretive
The "What's happening now?"........Presence.....Attentiveness/Awareness/Consciousness
The "What might happen next?"......Emergent.....Anticipatory/Creative/Poetic

Girls v Boys Nonsense Again & Other News Articles

2009-07-12T12:41:00.001-07:00

Another report out of the TT Guardian (July 12, 2009) continuing this debilitating myth butressed by developmental research on differences between male and female acheivement.
Illiteracy not tackled seriously
National School Code coming (TG July 10th)
11 CXC Subjects to Come under review (T Express July 14th 2009)
CXC Planning drastic reform to Syllabuses (TG July 14th 2009)
CXC to review 11 subjects (Newsday July 14th 2009)
Going to School with Critical Thinking (TExpress Editorial July 16th 2009)
The success of Hindu Schools in SEA Exams (TExpress, July 16th 2009)
Ah go deal with these eventually...too tired today.

Proof and Refutation

2009-07-11T12:35:00.000-07:00

The PM’s statement that “T&T is doing far better than all the other territories in the Caribbean at this time” (Tdad Guardian, July 11) is like saying that the PNM has more “moral and spiritual values” than any other party at this time. It is a seductive truth. Once again we seem caught in the Manning-Hart-Richards administration’s fantasy, a seemingly endless repetition of authoritative dream-statements and infantile wish-fulfillments without reference to actual evidence or room for refutation. While I do not have at my disposal access to the wealth of information and resources that the PM’s Office does (unlike the President’s presumably) I base my refutation of the PM’s statement on a single counter-example – the case of CSEC mathematics 2008. I choose mathematics as it is the area with which I am most familiar, the one perhaps most relevant to our leaders’ Desire to make T&T into a preferred destination for financial services and which (presumably) justifies our current developmental decisions and agenda.
The report on the performance of students of T&T on the 2008 CSEC Mathematics examination (available through the CXC website) is disaggregated from the rest of the region’s because of the compromised examination of last year. The results however are not atypical. It states on its first page that of the 20,000 or so T&T students writing the General Proficiency exam in mathematics last year, 47 percent of the candidates ‘passed’, i.e. achieved Grades I – III and 40 percent of the candidates scored at least half the available marks. This indeed is “far better” than the rest of the region where the overall pass rate is an abysmal 37 percent with only 28 percent scoring more than half of the marks. Far better is yet far from satisfactory. We ought not to congratulate ourselves so heartily on our measurable mediocrity. On the Paper 2, which requires students to demonstrate solutions not merely shade answers, only 33 percent of candidates in T&T scored at least half of the marks. The true scale of our underperformance is detailed in the litany of errors, mistakes and lack of mathematical understanding reported. On the very first question which assesses fundamental mathematical skills such as students’ ability to perform basic operations on mixed numbers, solve problems associated with income tax, calculate a percentage of a derived quantity and write as a percentage the ratio of two quantities, only 15 percent of students were able to get a full score, the most for any question on the paper, yet the overall mean score of which was less than half of the total. In fact only for 3 out of the 14 questions on the paper is the mean score more than half of the total available for the problem!
I am a little disappointed, the PM’s spin is usually “far better.”

SEA What happens next

2009-07-11T08:04:00.000-07:00

I want to congratulate the Express for displaying courage in breaking with tradition to foreground questions that are often neglected in the outpourings of pride that we feel for the ‘winners’ and the silent pain we feel towards the ‘losers’ in the SEA competition and lottery in their Editorial of July 2. On principle I refuse to refer to it any longer as merely an examination or assessment. However, there are several oversimplifications in their analysis, which, while necessary for an Editorial, work against the hopes expressed by the authors therein for substantial and meaningful change for the better, for more, if not for all, which need to be addressed. For example, in the first paragraph the Editor writes of the “intellectual talent and hard work” that allows the best and brightest to beat out all the rest and which we uneasily celebrate. But as a former top Common Entrance student, National, Commonwealth and now Canadian Vanier Scholar as well as a critical educator, I am cognizant of the fact that these are insufficient determinants of success. Like many of our successful students success has also been purchased for me through the cultural capital earned and provided by ancestors, extended family, recursively elaborative educational experiences and social networks of friends, peers and mentors at all stages of my development. That is to say I have been part of rich educational ecosystems, knowledge networks, which have provided me significant and ongoing developmental opportunities to learn.

It is time to end the myth of the isolated and individual genius as this stereotype misleadingly sets up an outlier phenomenon as a norm. Rather, it is clear from an abundance of research sources that individuals’ potentials unfold and develop in safe supportive networks of relationships that provide ongoing, meaningful opportunities to learn in a timely fashion. That certain groups do not appear to succeed as well as others do in this competition is not to say that members of those groups do not work as hard or are not as intelligent. Indeed, while we ought to look towards school reform, our chief concerns as individuals and as a community ought to be on the networks of economic, social, political, preferential, and intellectual relations that continue to structure our neo-colonial plantation society in increasingly unjust ways. If we want to change education we are going to have to change those networks, the systems of distribution and production and flow, and the ways we relate and function in the new networks we create. This is an argument that has been made by Lloyd Best and others and repeatedly ignored. I do not think it likely that I will fare more successfully than my predecessors. But I will try nevertheless to help us to call to mind, name, and question our currently limiting educational mythology and work towards beginning to imagine and narrate different, more hopeful ones.

Imagine for a moment the highly improbable scenario that somehow all of our teacher education, curriculum reform, infrastructural improvements, resourcing, and other professional development initiatives bore their fruits simultaneously with a result that all schools and every student performed as well as every other student on the SEA, or as the Editors put it that all schools managed to reach the same high standard. What if we actually succeeded in our stated ambitions? Can you imagine the panic that would ensue? Our ability to choose and sort students and thus to determine an identity and assign intellectual status would be compromised. What a wonderful day that would be. Unfortunately, as long as our networks, relationships and performances remain as they are, that day is unlikely to come.

Examinations are premised on variability in student achievement. The latter is correlated and co-varies with a large number of variables, not all known and not all applicable to a given individual at a given moment. These range from parental education to teacher marital status to frequency and quality of “breakfasses” and other meals to the availability of personal, quiet individual study space. When examinations were developed it was never the intent or purpose that all those examined should achieve at the same level in the same time or at the same age. The purpose of examinations is to discriminate, i.e. to make distinctions for a particular purpose such as suitability for military service or identifying and diagnosing specific deficiencies. Indeed, the continued existence of SEA inhibits our ability to ever achieve our educational goals for all. The philosophies underlying SEA, together with the associated practice of sorting and assigning value and worth are incompatible with and antagonistic to our goals of helping all students reach their full potential as human beings. Competitive exams like SEA within social systems like our own are designed, and designed well, to create a taxonomy of human value that sorts humans into categories suitable either as products for different degrees of further processing, some for eventual export to the metropolitan capitals of the world, a phenomenon Naipaul and other Caribbean or post-colonial writers have dealt with better than I can, or to discursively construct a class of sub-humans seen as only as waste or collateral damage. Schools and examinations are extremely good at producing such failure and waste.

What would happen if every student who went into the SEA examination room wrote nothing on their papers? What was highly improbable just a moment ago becomes absolute certainty. Students and children are not so positioned as to wield such political capital, nor are they taught how to, nor should they be used as pawns to advance the agenda of others. Such a decision is a choice that they have to make for themselves. It is perhaps the most important decision they will have to make, or can make in their young lives – much more important that writing an exam that is at best loosely related to what they can do and what they might be capable of doing in the future. It is a decision to down tools, lime many of our ancestors, and say, collectively, “this is neither good nor just.” An act of collective resistance by the least powerfully positioned might just be the thing to bring to an end this repressive regime of inappropriate testing once and for all. For my alma mater, San Fernando TML, and other Schools it would mean giving up the annual public spectacle and photo-ops surrounding the SEA, important marketing for future fund-raising, and actually thinking about what might be good for the education of all not just those that I happen to teach. For the media, they would have to want to create new narratives of educational success which the Express seems to be moving towards.

The Editors are wrong when they claim that “In every education system, it will always be a minority who excel.” This inductive leap, a hyperbolic generalization is false. It is more correct to say that in every education system set up as ours has been and continues to be – to identify a few elites and mandarins – there is a very large probability, approaching certainty, that only a minority will ever be allowed to demonstrate an excellence as narrowly defined by a single measure taken early in life. As argued above and elsewhere, variability in what we call success in our system does not come from talent and effort alone. Where this variation is attached to important social goods, namely a ‘prestigious’ educational trajectory, a visit from the Prime Minister, the Minister of Education, or a front page on a newspaper, and attached to a valued social category – winner, success, bright – it can only be a minority who are allowed to excel. Drawing attention to the way our systems are set up as the source of the differential achievement and waste production however opens space for imagining that indeed they might be set up differently in ways that give rise to more hopeful emergent possibilities than the nihilistic assumption that it is only ever a minority who can excel, an ideology that flirts with biological and social determinism.

By way of counter example, consider Finland which finished first in several recent international benchmarks in science (PISA) and mathematics (TIMMS) education. Among the attributions given for this phenomenon by Finnish researchers in the book “How Finns Learn Mathematics and Science” are commitments by the government to fostering a knowledge-based-society, promoting educational equality and devolving decision making power to local school levels. These commitments are manifested in practices such as having common comprehensive schools in which all types of students learn together for as long as possible and ensuring special needs teachers and guidance counselors are available to render assistance and give advice. Significantly, schools and teachers are responsible for selecting learning materials, organizing general assessment and for using the data to evaluate how well they are meeting goals. They are given full professional responsibility for their decision-making. Theirs is not a top-down hierarchical model as National level inspections of learning materials ended in the early 1990's and there are no national or local school inspectors since “teachers are valued as experts in curriculum development, teaching and in assessment at all levels." This strong testament of professional confidence in their teaching fraternity is warranted as Finland has a rigorous programme of teacher education. [Note Finland’s success in the 90’s and first part of this century is partly due also to a fairly homogenous population and economy. With immigration and the global financial crisis this is changing.]

The Editors ask “why aren’t more primary schools reaching the highest standards?” That ‘talent’ seems to be concentrated in localized hubs of excellence is easily explained: success tends to function as an attractor basin and amplifier for future success. ‘Successful’ schools have developed and evolved so as to maintain a successful ‘fit’ within our educational landscape based on selection pressures such as SEA and contingent upon a geography and history, shaped by the forces of the colonial civilizing mission. A large part also has to do with parental choices. Take for example Cipero R.C., my mother’s former school in Rambert Village. The school is small, quiet, safe, the staff and Principal are talented and motivated and doing very good work, the community is involved and this year they had a 100% pass rate. Few if any children from the neighboring communities of Palmiste, Gulf View, or Bel Air, many Catholics included, attend or will attend school there. Instead, many parents elect to send their children to Private schools or sit in traffic in San Fernando to pick their children up from the more prestigious San Fernando Boys’ R.C. and St. Gabriel’s R.C. schools, neither of which has much open space and whose classes are much larger than at Cipero. I wonder how the small southern community might be transformed if the networks of flow of students were altered such that different decisions were made about where children were to be educated and with whom they might interact. I encourage parents to consider sending their children to schools in closer proximity to where they reside and to work to build all the schools in their communities, not merely the ones that their children attend. In this way our diverse talents and cultural capitals might be dispersed differently.

I don’t wish to get drawn into the sex and race debates at this time. However, I wish to point out that these visible markers of difference are not the only relevant variables relating to student achievement – they are however easy to attribute and record. If we were to examine other criteria that relate to successful or unsuccessful students we might find that there are other important variables which we could in fact attend to structurally and systematically, rather than continuing to re-inscribe failure and deficiency onto individually sexed and raced biological and discursively constructed bodies. Further, if the narrative of academic ‘panic’ is put in our back pocket perhaps we might understand those students who are not succeeding to be like canaries in a mineshaft, telling us that there is something terribly wrong with the environment in our schools and perhaps with the institution of School itself for them. School is not habitable, hospitable or hopeful for many of our students. Let’s SEA what happens next…
[Originally published in the Trinidad Express on July 9th and July 10th 2009. This is a slightly expanded version.]

A parable for Education

2009-06-25T10:10:00.000-07:00

On my recent return to Trinidad during the Lenten season, I began to reflect and to articulate a response to questions and concerns posed to me by (Catholic) educators as they struggle to come to terms with the implications and challenges posed by the changing nature of the relationships among consumers, commodities, communities, cultures, environment, knowledge, values, spirituality, and education, and the human institutions which facilitate these for better and worse. In private conversations I offered a limited exegesis of a parable: the parable of the rich young man (Lk18:18-23) which I believe offer insights for inspiring our educational imagination.

The parable of the rich young man who is obedient to the law and commandments but finds it difficult to sell all that he has, give the money to the poor, and follow the Master teacher because of his attachment to wealth, offers an invitation, an opportunity to examine and learn what it is that we are in love with the most. Below is my retelling, interpretation, and elaboration of this parable in/for our context:

And so it happened that the principals of some "successful" and "prestigious" secondary schools sat at table with a teacher-educator and said, "What good things do we need to do in our school in order that all our children might experience success?" He responded, "You know the theories of curriculum and pedagogy. Do treat yourself, your students, their parents, your colleagues, and other stakeholders with an ethic of respect and care. Do request that they do the same. Do prepare yourself continuously for the mental, physical, and emotional demands and surprises that each day will reveal. Do enable those over whom you have authority and responsibility to share in the processes of negotiation and decision making necessary for the establishment of social norms that enable equitable, meaningful, and respectful participation. Do work to foster a climate which values reciprocity and risk-taking in the respectful exchange and challenging of ideas.

Do create time and space for meaningful and sustained engagement with significant ideas both individually and collaboratively. Do listen more and talk less. Do get your community more meaningfully involved. Do establish a culture of learning. Do not be afraid to experiment and try new things. Do follow through on what you have learnt.''

The group smiled somewhat contentedly, "We think we are doing all of these things. Yet we are very concerned about rising indiscipline, violence, inequality, and unequal accomplishment. What more must we do to stop the tsunami of terror and escape the kumblas in which we are confined?" Looking directly at them and speaking slowly and clearly he said, "Go back to your schools and open them up to difference and diversity. Find new, more just, ways to invite and welcome the poor, the less fortunate, the academically less successful, the disabled, les damnés, and the otherwise abject in this society and in your communities to fuller participation in the reformatting and reconceiving of your holy institutions. Learn how to create schools and curricula that are of the community, not merely in the community, or worse, that live on and off, and contribute only waste for life in the community. Refuse to participate in and profit from the unholy biocidal alliances, the carrion cultures that continue to reproduce anew, historical, material, economic, and discursive enslavements and extinction. Seek and teach the truths about the value of human life that lie beyond SEA and CXC success. Be patient. Compete to outdo each other in responsibility, goodness, imagination, virtue and generosity to one another, to the earth and to that which gives Life."

When they heard this they went away confused, angry, sorrowful, and deeply troubled, for while they wished to contribute to a better society they found that as yet they were very much bound to and by structures, institutions, and patterns of thinking and acting that narrowly defined and confined their beloved identity and ability to imagine what they might be through an "ill'' logic of success.

In the parable we are never told what happened to the rich young man-perhaps he reconsidered and returned to follow the teacher? Indeed, there are numerous examples of men and women who have taken this parable to heart-founders and members of religious, charitable, and volunteer communities. What is it that we so love that restricts us from seeking anew, paths to Life for all? I wonder, what our own "rich" young people's responses would be if the question were put to them today.

Casting the Net

2009-06-01T21:58:00.000-07:00

"What is the net of an open-ended cylinder?" This is one of the most productive activities that I use to illustrate concepts related to teaching and learning and for providing meaningful opportunities to learn. Adults and students alike rush to give "the answer" - "a square" - quickly amended to the more general category, "a rectangle." "How do you know?" I challenge, which is usually greeted by an anguished silence as if the right answer was all that would ever be required.

A few brave souls eventually attempt an explanation that runs in one of two directions - cutting an open-ended cylinder, such as a paper towel roll, with scissors (which have been strategically provided) in a straight line along the vertical axis and flattening the surface, or folding a rectangular sheet of paper so that the two opposite parallel sides meet.

At this point, most are quite satisfied with their mathematical knowledge, and are prepared or can be easily instructed to handle the algorithmic computations that are instrumentally tied to the determination of (surface) areas and volumes of real-world cylinders like pipes, hoses, blood vessels, reeds, rods, and other structures with uniform circular cross section; tasks that frequently appear in SEA and CXC exams. This, however, is where the real lessons about teaching and learning begin.

"Examine the paper towel rolls in front of you. Are there any other nets that can produce a cylinder?" After short work and some discussion, many, having unfurled the roll along the continuous spiral where it is stuck, declare the net to be "a parallelogram." Some begin to make connections between the areas of parallelograms and rectangles, others between the shapes themselves. Continuing the investigation, "Are there any more?"

Encouraged by having found one more than they had anticipated, and armed with simple concrete materials - scissors and discarded paper towel rolls, investigations and discussions proliferate. Soon all manner of "shapes"-parallelograms of different sizes, V-shaped chevrons, serrated polygons, beautiful obzocky plane figures with no names-populate the learning space. All are nets of the same cylinder, all with the same area, and all with (at least) one other "mathematical" feature in common.

Looking across the seemingly endless variety of forms most beautiful and wonderful, two mathematical truths eventually become apparent to learners. However, it usually takes them a little while longer to be able to articulate their insight in acceptable mathematical language - "each 'shape' has one pair of parallel sides of the same length" - the reminder that this was and could become a cylinder. Secondly, they complete the generalisation, "the other two sides fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, they are geometrical 'opposites'."

Tracking back now we try to put our growing insights together with what we already know. The challenging question and task becoming the articulation, communication, and inscription (in acceptable mathematical discourse) of how these different nets are generated, that is, to relate the different ways in which "cuts" are made with the final forms obtained, to delineate the forbidden cut(s), and to understand the rectangle and parallelogram as the result of special cases of cutting.

Other questions arise - Why is the parallelogram used so frequently to construct cylinders? What advantages does it have over other forms? These lead in the direction of aesthetics, optimisation, the mathematics of spirals, fault lines, and structural integrity.

Unsettling questions emerge - both conceptually and pedagogically. Are these things really nets? Wouldn't students be confused and disadvantaged in their examination by learning how to think differently about the net of a cylinder when all they are required to know is what it is and how to find its area and volume? What about the people setting and marking the papers? Would they accept the answer that the net of an open-ended cylinder is something other than a rectangle or parallelogram?

Many teachers declare in our debriefing after the activity that while they have enjoyed the learning experience, "we were never taught this" or "in this way" or "I couldn't do this in my school," or ominously invoke the inviolable authority of "the syllabus." "Neither was I", "yes you can" and "So what?" I respond. Might we find the courage to shift the sole focus away from the requirements of a syllabus or an exam to support learning?

The curriculum is what we make it in our classrooms. I end by rephrasing the opening question and title of the lesson in the plural, more generative, form, "What are the nets of an open-ended cylinder?" The answer, hopefully, a rich space for experiencing meaningful and memorable learning.

Learning to Read

2009-06-01T08:13:00.001-07:00

"There is no economic solution to the ills of the world until the arts of originality - arts that are driven by mysterious strangeness - open the partialities and biases of tradition in ways that address the very core of our pre-possessions. This involves paradoxical orders of readership...I find myself reading in continuously changing ways..." (Wilson Harris, The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination, p.251).

I was a precocious and promiscuous reader. This was partly a function of there always being books and literary material lying around—a consequence of there being an unreasonable number of teachers in my family tree as well as my father’s affinity for the spy/action novel genre. I was one of those “delinquent” children represented on television reading well past their bedtime with a flashlight under the covers. As a child I read everything I could lay my hands on that interested me. As a teenager I loved libraries and revelled in unexpected discoveries and delights when I picked up a title that sounded interesting. This is how I first encountered those authors, titles, and disciplines that I would later come to know more intimately within sociology, psychology, philosophy, mathematics, science, art and literature.

As a very young academic, I am always conscious that I have not had the wealth and diversity of experiences in education as my peers/colleagues who have spent significant time within schools and elsewhere performing different roles and crafting diverse identities. However, in examining my own story I realize I began to read education from a very early age. I think John Holt’s How Children Learn and How Children Fail were the first two education books I read, somewhere around age 14. From these I learnt about the “game of school” and how to play it successfully. Knowing this allowed me to get on with really educating myself about teaching by scrutinising my teachers’ pedagogical practices. This was soon followed by books on the psychology and sociology of education, which though conceptually interesting were literarily insipid. Sometime in Lower Six I began reading Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a masterpiece, but well above my then level of understanding. I left it and returned to more approachable material.

At 28 I learnt to read, again. And once again found excitement and intrigue. Following the post-structuralist turn in literature and the social sciences I learnt that one could read almost anything as a “text.” Coming from the hard and natural sciences this was a challenge. I attempted to read the then (perhaps still) popular multimedia phenomenon Yugioh as a pedagogical text. This required that I learn how to read and interpret the form and content of graphic novels and Manga as more than mere comic books. Once again I found and fell in love with “scholarly” books like The Rise of the Graphic Novel, Understanding Comics, and Superheroes and Philosophy, as well as more serious graphic novels including the Pulitzer prize-winning Maus, the acclaimed King (a biography of Martin Luther King), and the poignant Faxes from Sarajevo. Learning to read different textual forms opened my interests to cultural and critical theorists in art, cinema, and popular culture; and philosophers and educators who had been reading and writing in/about these forms for quite a while. This encouraged me to begin to re-read ‘familiar texts’ such as Carnival, or rather what Minshall calls “the mas” pedagogically. Learning to read is liberating.

"The reader...has to read differently, to read backwards and forwards, even more importantly forwards and backwards" (WH, UGotI, p.252)

This semester, as a mathematics teacher educator, I have selected Reading and Writing the World with Mathematics by Eric Gutstein as a text to be read by my final year students. Gutstein reacquaints me with Freire, who uses “reading the world” to mean “understanding the sociopolitical, cultural-historical conditions of one’s life, community, society and world” as a gateway into reading the word (textual/functional literacy), and as a position from which to Write and re-write the world, that is, to positively transform the world. It is my hope that these teachers will come, as did Gutstein’s students, to “use mathematics to understand relations of power, resource inequities, and disparate opportunities between different social groups and to understand explicit discrimination based on race, class, gender, language, and other differences…[as well as] dissect and deconstruct media and other forms of representation.”

Learning to “read” media is of urgent importance. We must teach children to read their “massively multimedia mashup” world. Unfortunately their world is less understood and frequently feared by adults. We must however encourage them to draw on and share their funds of knowledge. We must be especially concerned with teaching our children to critically read (resist and transform) what Benjamin Barber, author of Consumed, calls consumer culture’s “seductive infantilist ethos,” which threatens our (and our children’s) liberty, citizenship, health, and well-being and undermines democracy’s foundations worldwide.

To other bibliophiles out there: draw deeply from your funds of knowledge, learn for the purpose of reading the world. Read across boundaries, anywhere, everywhere. Be promiscuous readers…change the world.

Rumpelstiltskin Revisited

2009-06-01T08:09:00.000-07:00

In June 2008, I gave my very first graduation address to the educational community of Malabar RC Primary School. I decided to tell a story—a simple fairy tale, “Rumpeltstiltskin.” I hoped, though, to challenge them to think more critically about what this story about a poor miller’s daughter, whose father boasted to the King that she could spin straw into gold, might really be about, and draw out some implications for how they might choose to live their lives.

As I told the audience, typically, this story is read to children as a warning against boasting, and was meant as a cautionary tale for young women. The little man, Rumpelstiltskin, is cast as a villain or demon for wanting a human child and for having what is seen as unnatural abilities—alchemy—the ability to turn base material (straw) into something of value (gold). But reading the story in this way is easy; it fits with the way many people see and construct the worlds in which they choose to live—worlds that often imprison their imaginations as well as their bodies and spirits. Our challenge in this century is to learn to read the stories that we have received in our childhood differently, to ask new and more challenging questions, and to seek answers that are not going to be found in textbooks. Another challenge is to write new stories—better, more hopeful stories. I sought to illustrate this in the remainder of the address.

Consider two questions about this story: 1) Who acts ethically? and 2) What are the values espoused? These are not questions about right or wrong, about rules, or about villains or demons. They are not about picking a character to follow but about learning about and from each character.

Let’s start with the miller, whose boastfulness and pride place his daughter in harm’s way. Does he act ethically? He is irresponsible with his daughter’s reputation and this irresponsibility places her at risk of being taken advantage of by the King, the symbol of nobility and justice. Does the King act ethically? Or does his greed drive him to the very brink of committing murder? And what of the miller’s daughter? She has the power to put a stop to the lie initiated by her father. However, she chooses to enter into an arrangement with the little man whose name she does not even know, but who promises and delivers what she is unable to do. She becomes indebted, reaps the rewards of her deceit, and places her future, and that of her child, at risk. Through her thoughtless and self-preserving actions, she promises away her future and that of the kingdom. She later reneges on this promise.

All three are complicit. All three have the power at every instant to transform the situation into one where their actions can create opportunities for others to acknowledge their responsibilities to each other and act more ethically. The miller can go to the King and admit his lie; the King can be satisfied with less gold and choose not to kill the miller’s daughter; the daughter can admit that she is unable to do what is asked of her. All of these require courage and strength of character. Sadly, in this story, and in those we hear, read, and enact most commonly today, these do not appear to be virtues that are widely practised. Instead, the values exhibited are boastfulness, deceit, greed, thoughtlessness, forgetfulness, and cowardice.

Rumpeltstiltskin seems less a villain now and more a victim. His skills have been used and he does not receive the agreed upon payment. He offers several opportunities for the daughter to take responsibility for what she can and cannot do, and to face any consequences. He offers her opportunities to act ethically and responsibly towards herself and the King. He pities her, but he cannot choose for her; it is she who chooses to keep silent and benefit from the lie, fraudulently taking credit for what is not her work.

The educable moment always presents a gift – the opportunity for the enactment of an ethical practice. It presents opportunities to choose and model how to be unconditionally responsible for another and so build an ethically responsible society. In education, politics, and the public service, we are blessed every day to be offered opportunities to come clean, to take up our responsibilities, and face the consequences courageously. Sadly, many, following the examples of the King, the miller, and his daughter, choose not to do so.

Apart from an allegory of moral virtue and the necessary conditions for building an ethical society, what else might Rumpelstiltskin be about? Consider the central metaphor of the story, alchemy, the spinning of straw into gold. A substance that has many domestic and indigenous uses, but which does not have high economic value, is converted, on a large scale, into one with a more limited set of uses. For a King, these uses would include ornamentation, commerce, and the financing of political powows, military or industrial campaigns. This transubstantiation can be read as a metaphor for our (mis)use of nature to create wealth. The King seems unconcerned with how his wealth is created and what has to be promised or must be traded in order to pay for the currency of development and measures of prosperity. This is in sharp contrast to Rumpeltstiltskin’s values, which have an ecological, biophilic, flavour as he proclaims to the Miller’s daughter who tries to buy her way out of her promise, that something alive is dearer to him than all the treasures in the world.

Economic prosperity can buy a certain type of life. However, there is no value that can be placed on life itself and we are fast running out of life-sustaining spaces. Do we care where our food, toys, and clothes come from and where they will go when we are finished with them? Do we care how they come to be available to us? Do we teach those for whom we are responsible how to care for that which gives life, or are we only concerned with possessing, like the King, more and more at any cost? In this area, too, we have opportunities to act more responsibly than we have been and to cease from creating more and more of what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman refers to as Wasted Lives – the inevitable and disastrous consequences of our modern appetites – marked by fear, anxiety, deprivation, un-belonging and homelessness.

There is also the leitmotif of the power of one’s name and the power that other people have in naming us. Words and labels can be cages placed around us, restricting physical and psychological mobility or they can be heralds that go before us proclaiming our virtues and guiding our vision. An exercise I use with teenagers is to ask them, If your life were to be summarized in one word, what would that one word be? From a group of Form 5 Holy Faith Convent students at a recent retreat, I got examples like, “Love,” “Friend,” “Compassionate,” and “Generous.” How truly wonderful if one’s entire life could be oriented by and towards words such as these. On another occasion, I placed it before a group of Form 3 students of Fatima College, in a context where their Principal had just labelled the entire class “a Shame.” As he buffed them, re-naming them as “shameful,” I could see the defiance in these young men’s eyes grow as the playful light of youth left to be replaced by a mature anger. After he left, I implored them to work so that some other word, not shame, would define their lives. I saw something change in their eyes and body language—it looked like the beginning of sorrow.

Through re-naming we sometimes position others as less than human or self, an action that continues to underlie our justifications for committing atrocities (slavery, genocide, terracide) against other living beings. We must be very careful whom and how we name, and who we allow to name us in this century. We must not forget the painful lessons of human history.

As I ended, I placed the following question before the students, which I now place before us all, What is the word, the name by which you wish to be called, the name that is a true reflection of the life and person that you are and want to be? On that day, I proudly joined with their families in welcoming those students as Graduates, and reminded them that in the years to come it would be they who would decide what they would be called by their actions/inactions. They alone would determine whether they would create a wasted life or a life of waste for themselves. “Remember,” I told them, “you have the power at every instant to change the direction and course of your life and that of others. You have the power to author a better world. Choose wisely and responsibly.”

The Emperor's New Costume

2009-06-01T08:06:00.000-07:00

Once upon this time, in a land not so far away, there lived a carefree Emperor with few official duties and whose chief concern in life was to preside over and participate in costumed parades. He loved playing d mas and putting on colourful carnival costumes. Unfortunately the Emperor was sometimes a little careless in his decision making and had twice now made serious miscalculations in his recruitment of masqueraders. His wounded subjects began to wonder what sorts of malfeasance might be afoot. Knowledge of the Emperor’s personal preferences, relaxed disposition and problems spread across the networked kingdoms of the common world. His subjects’ distressing concerns found their way to him also, interrupting his deserved vacation.

A cunning mass-(media)-man who was on vacation at the same and had heard of the goings on approached the morose Monarch. “Sir, I believe I can make you merry again, I have recently acquired a magical costume. It is imbued with Old World colonial magic and can deflect criticism away from you onto other individuals and structures making them seem incompetent and less than honorable. It can give the wearer the appearance of honesty, respectability and culpability and soothe your spirits so that you can enjoy the remainder of your vacation in peace. It will also make your critics appear unsophisticated and unintelligent, unable to move on and enemies of the empire and of democracy.” The monarch’s spirits rose, excitedly he demanded, “Give me this costume. I will pay whatever you ask.” They agreed to terms and the man removed from a pouch he carried a small cloth loin covering. “Simply utter the magical incantation, “I accept responsibility” and you will never have to explain your actions or be held accountable or answerable to anyone” the man instructed and went on his way. Putting on his new costume and repeating the magic words to himself the Monarch began to write a letter to his subjects which began…“The occasion arose in February of this year for the appointment of an entirely new membership of Commissioners to the Integrity Commission…” Afterwards he was very pleased with his apology and was able to enjoy the rest of his vacation in peace without further distraction.

But many of his royal court were not convinced and demanded an explanation from him upon his return. Finding himself troubled, under fire once again and growing angry, he turned to his sycophantic sorcerers of the air. After some time they counseled him, “Sire, you relied only upon Old World magic in your first address, you must also use New World magic if you are to be successful in besting your critics. We have concocted a magic glitter dust that we believe will complement your loin covering. Simply rub it over your body before you make a mas of your Office on the airwaves and your words will shine with brilliance and erudition, you will appear an honorable man, luminous in integrity, unafraid of challenge, and someone whose opinion while not infallible inspires confidence and trust. The dust will also lull your fixated detractors into a restful and forgetful slumber.” Agreeing with them he put his faith in the protective magic of his loin covering and the persuasive magic of the shiny dust and sitting under the spotlight addressed his kingdom…“I do not share the opinion held by some that I have brought the office…into disrepute and accordingly, see no reason to resign or to engage in further debate on the matter.”

A poor child who was awaiting her SEA results, and knew little of old or new world magic, watched the broadcast. After it was over she turned and said, “Mammie, look ah mas!” The child wondered…Soon however she would be in secondary school, relieved of the unnecessary burdens and luxuries of thinking, questioning, investigating and learning to act responsibly for oneself on behalf of others. In time she too might become a good masquerader for d band. The Emperor, still spellbound by his new costume continued to preside, pronounce, primp and prance fully believing in the power of magical incantations, that to utter something often enough, or in the right way, the right place/time, somehow made it necessarily true.

Personal opinion without a requirement to make publicly available and accessible evidence or the structure, sequence, and source of one’s reasoning apparently provides sufficient justification for publicly ineffectual and aconsequential policies and polities. In the meantime the child’s observation would take root, grow and work its way towards the summit.

Parable of Integrity

2009-06-01T08:05:00.000-07:00

With regards to the ongoing Integrity Commission fiasco, consider the following re-telling of Jesus’ parable of the talents. Once a citizen of a small, talented, but troubled nation called together his servants, representatives of his estates, and entrusted certain responsibilities to them. Then he went about his other business. After some time, the citizen returned and asked his servants to account for themselves and their actions in his absence. The first, an investigator, who had been tasked with the responsibility for investigating corrupt activities in the management of the citizen’s monies, said, “Sir, I have worked with the tools and resources at my disposal and have found evidence of illegal practices and intent to deceive and defraud you, citizen, of your money.” The man replied, “Well done, good and faithful servant! You have done your duty and your findings and recommendations will be evaluated forthwith without fear or favor. The second, man, a journalist who had been entrusted with the duty of watching over the other estates, said, “I have found evidence of misdeeds and malpractice by members of your other estates, indeed as a consequence one of your estates has come into disrepute. The man replied to the reporter, “Well done, good and faithful servant! You have done your duty and you have brought to light things that might otherwise have remained hidden. You will be entrusted with even greater responsibilities.” The citizen called for his final representative, the most elevated and prestigious of them all, but was forced to wait patiently for this servant was on sabbatical. Receiving word that the citizen wanted audience with him regarding the less than satisfactory performance of his duties, the servant hastily penned an explanation in which he indicated that “despite the many affordances of my position and Office, I find an insufficient endowment incapacitating.” The citizen became angry with the response and replied, “You wicked and lazy servant! You knew that your task was of integral importance and yet you treated serious matters with scant regard. Why were you not more conscientious when you found that you could not adequately perform the tasks assigned to you? Why did you do nothing to transform this situation which has brought dishonor to all of my estates? Take his Office and entitlements away from him and give it to another. Throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness where there is much weeping, bloodshed and gnashing of teeth.”
It is indeed a sad state of affairs that we don’t actually live in a country where this parable has more meaning than merely an entertaining story.

Letters to the Editor - Integrity Fiasco

2009-06-01T08:04:00.000-07:00

The Editor:
Like many other members of the public and the intellectual community in Trinidad and Tobago I am deeply disappointed by the reported statements of President Richards in apparently treating so dismissively the knowledge of Fr. Charles' academic misconduct and broach of public trust and patiently await Prof. Richard's eventual statement on the matter. in the meantime, in addition to questions about whether or not he or someone should resign over what is clearly a dereliction of duty, serious questions are raised in my mind as to the integrity of his own professional record including supervision of students. In the departments in the University with which I am familiar such behaviour regarding scholarship is not treated lightly.

Les Damnes et Les Douens

2009-05-22T22:34:00.000-07:00

[Excerpt from Disability Studies talk at UWI, 2009]
I want to turn now to one of our most cherished folkloric metaphors for disability and our ability to disable our selves in Trinidad & Tobago, the tragedy and fear of the return of the souls of Caliban’s neglected and rejected, dead, un-baptized children, Fanon’s damnes de la terre, dis-embodied in the form of the “deformed”, “twisted” and “obzocky” Douens that haunt and hunt us. Douens, those deformed liminal “creatures” with feet pointing “backwards” the embodied receptacles of our collective fears and failures. Why do we say that their/our feet point ‘backwards’, who says that the head points the way ‘forward’? Who says that they are deformed and obzocky? Why are they monsters and not men? They/we are the result of a different, parallel, developmental pathway to that which took place in the European hinterland, the other, ‘dark’ side of the modernity-colonialism project (Mignolo) in which man was given value based on hue/hew and Wynter’s Man rose to rule. Our/their difference is not deviance or abnormal. It is part of a continuum of global capitalism’s imperial evolution and development that began over 500 years ago.

We Douens perform our disability daily. We refuse to learn new ways to walk, more than this we continue to refuse to be taught by the relationships, the ongoing, unfolding conversations among our differently designed bodies (biology), our environments (eco-geography), and our hys-stories . We attempt to mimic the gaits of bodies not our own, to walk as if on lands not separated by seas and suffering and silences. Seduced, we continuously stumble into each other, gyre (gaia) hating, reducing the truth, beauty and wisdom of the statement, ‘the movement is the mas, the mas is the movement’; the moment is the mas, the mas is the moment, to mono-manic-monument – mere masturbation.

Can we claim our othering other, our ‘obzockiness’ as our own beautiful, differently, not-half, made, whole selves? How can we learn to walk when our feet point and carry us away from the future that our eyes and heart bring us a longing for? A culture cannot escape itself! There is nothing and nowhere for it to escape to. Indeed, a culture cannot escape itself it can only dynamically transform itself, moment by moment in a developmental timescale, and in doing so, transforms itself, its context, and its knowledge about the relations between itself and its context. How can it do so? A philosopher will answer that he needs new concepts…
......
In the society of Douens which now admits a historical global dimension of wasted lives (Bauman, 2004) and waste-as-way-of-life, an awareness of intervulnerability and interdependence is one way for all to move forward. One keeps an eye firmly on the future, the other leads in the choreography, the mas, moving the two together in a direction which one cannot see, except perhaps in glimpses and glances, seashells of amnesia, but who must trust the fidelity of the one who describes the course, the, Curriculum Vitae, the course of Life, that they both take, negotiating the terrain, their roles and each other through dialogue. Both teaching and learning from and with each other and from the journey undertaken.

Caramel Maroon - defining my self.

2009-05-22T22:31:00.000-07:00

And so I begin…
My blue ballpoint pen rests uncomfortably upon the blue lined notebook paper. Its broken clip leaves a scar like a soldier’s shattered helmet. It cuts a cross, crucifying lines, point extruded, ready, quivering with every shallow breath and nervous shake of restless feet, betraying the throbbing in my left cheek that comes from holding tongue and thought in check. She sits, waiting for me to pick her up, pull sword from stone, and press into memory of forgotten trees. No ink will spill past that meatus today. I can no more be unfaithful to my muse as to myself.

“The pen that moves and the tongue that speaks, without examined piety, authors ruin.”
“Silence scribes those who suffer under institution’s indigent gaze into memory’s shadow.”

I am brown, and yellow and red, dirty proud blood – rhizome of memory of Eastern caravans and caravels – caramel maroon – residue of sugar’s ménage with fire, oil, and iron.

I, inheritor of dust and salt and coral fragment, scratch a comma in this world, by downing tool, leaving white gaping wound to ponder abscess of flesh’s future – abject history…

A Kumbla Consciousness

2009-05-22T22:24:00.000-07:00

Earlier this year I was writing a poem to deal with my outrage and sense of powerlessness at the abuses of power and privilege in Trinidad and Tobago (T&T). It began, “Our stories are our Gourds,/Womb of generations’ pain.” But “pain” was not quite the right word. I asked Shalini for help. I needed a word to encapsulate ideas of dynamic change, infectious entanglements, metamorphosis, amnesia, and the claustrophobia of a world held in tension. Kumbla, a word held in tension.

This is how Erna Broder, Jamaican novelist, describes it in her 1980 novel Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home:
“A kumbla is like a beach ball. It bounces with the sea but never goes down. …But the kumbla is not just a beach ball. The kumbla is an egg shell, not a chicken's egg or a bird's egg shell. …It does not crack if it is hit. It is pliable as sail cloth. Your kumbla will not open unless you rip its seams open. It is a round seamless calabash that protects you without caring. Your kumbla is a parachute. You, only you, pull the cord to rip its seams. From the inside. For you.”

I liked its rhythm. “Our stories are our Gourds,/Womb of generations’ kumblas,/Vessels for collecting and reflecting.” It fit. The word itself was a kumbla for the ideas and images in the rest of the poem. For me, a kumbla has become a metaphor for a mutating contested space, nurturing but potentially imprisoning—like school, like education…like T&T. Structures implicated in each other’s becoming, inviting in, offering safe space, respite, but easily becoming another Euclidean prison. A friend pointed out that kumbla was a Maroon word, a remnant of the languages of slaves, who survived by pulling the cord for themselves, taking their own freedom. A kumbla is about survival.

Brodber prefaces her description of the concept of the kumbla with the story of Anansi and Dryhead, the King of the Sea (note the irony). Facing starvation and death, Anansi and Tucuma, his eldest son, take a risk and fish in Dryhead’s waters. After being caught, he negotiates with Dryhead to let him leave with one of his children. He tells his son, Tucuma, repeatedly to “Go eena kumbla,” which acts as a code for him to change his disguise. In this way Anansi tricks Dryhead and saves himself and his son. Rhonda Cobham, a Trinbagonian Professor at Amherst College, suggests that kumbla is a metaphor for the strategies and sometimes disfiguring devices used by New World blacks to protect their children as they struggled to survive in this New World. She also uncovers another aspect of the story. Tucuma, she learns, means “the one born away from home,” and suggests that although we may not have known it, through these stories we have passed on narratives of survival, “naming ourselves as survivors in the process.”

I am working with the concept now, aiming to loosen the word from its moorings within Caribbean and literary discourse so that it might drift into contested waters and help me to articulate a theory for a Caribbean curriculum. Who, what, and where are our kumblas in education in the Caribbean? I see them in our mas camps, panyards, kitchens, gardens, gayelles, rum shops, and, occasionally, even in that space called school; cosmogenic calabashes, wombs of space, that we have anesthetised and tried to sterilise, unsuccessfully. As Brodber writes later, “the trouble with the kumbla is the getting out of the kumbla. It is a protective device. If you dwell too long in it, it makes you delicate.. skin white…Vision extra-sensitive to the sun…Weak, thin, tired like a breach baby.” I fear we have remained too long in ours, given birth to too many delicate douens.

We must embrace all of our ancestral heritages, learn from them, but be prepared to pull the cords that bind, for ourselves. We must develop our Caribbean consciousness, a kumbla consciousness, part of our maroon heritage, a sense of the possibilities for becoming already inherent in the world around and within us. Jane and Louisa ends with the line, “We are getting ready,” which had been preceded by images of hopeful expectancy. Indeed the idea, image and metaphor of womb spaces is a central motif in the work of Caribbean artists such as Leroy Clarke and as Guyanese writer Wilson Harris notes with hope at the end of the womb of space, “To convert rooted deprivations into complex parables of freedom and truth is a formidable but not impossible task." It is time. Time to buss open dem Gourds. From the inside. For you. For us.

Fear of Queer

2009-05-22T22:11:00.000-07:00

“If it were only that people have diversities of taste, that is reason enough for not attempting to shape them after all one model. But different persons also require different conditions for their spiritual development; and can no more exist healthily in the same moral, than all the variety of plants can exist in the same physical atmosphere and climate. The same things which are helps to one person towards the cultivation of his higher nature, are hindrances to another…Unless there is a corresponding diversity in their modes of life, they neither obtain their fair share of happiness, nor grow up to the mental, moral, and aesthetic stature of which their nature is capable.”
(John Stuart Mill- On Liberty)

“We do not really see through our eyes or hear through our ears, but through our beliefs. To put our beliefs on hold is to cease to exist as ourselves for a moment” (Lisa Delpit – The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in educating other people’s children).

Whether you agree or disagree with J.K. Rowling’s decision to ‘out’ Albus Dumbeldore, the late Headmaster of Hogwarts, and one of the most beloved characters from the children’s literary phenomenon and cultural marketing machine that is Harry Potter, the fact remains that she continues to make historical and courageous strides that few educators are capable of making. What Rowling, and the celebrity media circus around all things Potter, have done is interrupt our ‘normal’ unquestioning and uncritical state of being by challenging us to put our beliefs on hold and to think! Though literary and cultural critics point to the absence of explicit text in which the character himself confirms this disposition, there is also no evidence that Dumbeldore was straight. Rowling’s interruption then forces us to ask how and why is it that we automatically assumed that he must have been heterosexual?

Interruption is a common theme/meme in critiques of the privilege given to oppressive narratives in education and society that go by any number of “isms,” such as chauvinism, sexism, racism, nepotism, and elitism. The word ‘interruption’ derives from the Latin interruptus, inter – between and rumpere – to break. Literally, an interruption is a “breaking in between,” a speaking out of turn, a queering/querying of established and entrenched habits of thinking, speaking, doing, and being. Queer here does not represent the identities of gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered; rather it marks work, like that of Rowling, Dumbeldore, Delpitt, Freire, Illich Butler, and many others, that refuses “the heterosexual bribe,” that is, the sociocultural rewards of power, prestige, and privilege offered to those who inscribe their behaviours, thinking, products, and performances within the range of normal heterosexual identities.

Dumbeldore’s ‘queerness’ is evident in the different ways that he directly challenges orthodox and oppressive conceptions of masculinity. In the realm of fashion, he flouts the standards of normative masculinity in his ‘gay’ attire. As a leader, his sensitivity, vulnerability, openness, respect, sense of justice and tolerance for the diversity of all creatures, both magical and Muggle, was often juxtaposed and in sharp contrast to the ignorant, intolerant, fearful, spiteful, hateful, cruel, unjust and abusive authority exhibited by characters like Cornelius Fudge, Minister of Magic or Defense Against the Dark Arts Teacher, Dolores Umbridge. His characteristics speak to the embodiment of a standard of Holy humanity founded on the simple yet powerful ideal of Love for difference. A standard that those, like Lord Voldemort and his Death Eaters, seduced and corrupted in the pursuit of the heterosexual bribe, and psychologically crippled by prescriptive, restrictive and normative forms of masculinity, are incapable of ever fully appreciating or realising.

Schools are notoriously conservative and heteronormative. The (at the time) recent decision by the Jamaican Ministry of Education to advise schools not to adopt a textbook that advocated a wider definition of family, functions as an act of political erasure and silencing that perpetuates a belief that, as Gerald Unks, editor of the Gay Teen writes, “homosexuals do not exist. They are 'non-persons' in the finest Stalinist sense. They have fought no battles, held no offices, explored nowhere, written no literature, built nothing, invented nothing and solved no equations.” Among students, queer and faggot are often labels applied to boys who do not aggressively pursue the opposite sex or spend much of their time alone or studying in order to regulate behaviour. Impugning sexual orientation is a strong form of peer control exerted by adolescents of all ages from primary school to parliament. Such bullying ought to be seen as intolerable as using epithets like {insert racist, sexist, ableist slur here} to position an individual as less than human. Unfortunately it is not.

Betty Anne Blaine writing in the Jamaica Observer (06 Nov) expresses concern about a “marching brigade of homosexual activism” seeking to capitalise on reneged parental responsibilities. She is right in advocating for healthy and balanced discussion and dialogue and for teachers and parents to be better educated on the issues. This will require courage to suspend our belief systems temporarily and to listen to each other with reverence and open hearts and minds. A starting point is to acknowledge the existence and contributions of persons of “difference” within our academic disciplines and societies. This is the road already traveled by women, ethnic and religious minorities and the differently enabled. Though, I might add, with insufficient frequency in the majority of schools’ curricula.

In mathematics for example most learn (hopefully) about the role of binary codes in computers. Fewer have learnt that the device was made possible by the work of English mathematician, Alan Turing, who during World War II played a significant part in deciphering German Enigma messages. Even fewer yet will learn that Alan Turing was gay. He first became aware of his homosexuality during adolescence, and, during the postwar period, suffered the ignominy of having the details of his private life dissected in the press. Forced to undergo hormone treatments to ‘cure’ his homosexual urges, and suffering from relentless public exposure, the shy genius committed suicide at the age of 41. Turing’s case, while not unique, is one of the more tragic, depriving humanity of one of its most beautiful and brilliant minds.

Educators, activists and policy-shapers must also confront homophobic rhetoric courageously armed with credible and trustworthy evidence and research drawn from anthropological, biological, psychological, and sociological sources. For example, the argument that homosexuality is rare or anomalous in nature is called into question by the observation and documentation of same sex couplings in more than 450 different vertebrate species and countless invertebrate species. Joan Roughgarden, a transgendered professor of Biology at Stanford, who conducted the research, argues in Evolution’s Rainbow that sex is not only for passing on genes as every science student learns, rather using co-operative game theory she builds a case that sex is an important aspect of social co-operation and suggests that homosexuality is a feature of advanced animal communities. These and other models in the natural and social sciences attempt to explain why homosexuality as a ‘trait’ occurs and persists in natural populations.

Here in the Caribbean, confronting the consequences of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, homophobia, and socially sanctioned sexual violence, we have interrupting work to do with our children and communities. Sexuality education, it is argued, must move beyond providing mere information about sex and become more involved in probing questions around the production of knowledge about sexuality. Unlike its coital counterpart, ‘curriculum interruptus’ is less concerned with preventing procreative potentialities, interrupting the continuity of life and dependent on patriarchal responsibilities that are often reneged upon in our Caribbean contexts, rather it is more concerned with re-establishing those obscured connections between those acts of disruption that have left individuals and groups with no connection to their futures, pasts or presents. Interrupting our sometimes corrupt and bankrupt visions of Curriculum may cause an eruption. Educators might consider structuring curriculum events that juxtapose ideas, identities, and experiences that are not normally associated with one another to create structures and occasions which facilitate a loosening of language/thinking, “to become more elastic, more able to collect new interpretations and announce new possibilities,” as this piece has attempted to do. Perhaps, by loosening the stranglehold of the singularity of sameness we may become freer to imagine and create newer, more just possibilities of what education and our societies might become.

First Kiss - A metaphor for beginning to teach

2009-05-22T22:06:00.000-07:00

Do you remember your first kiss? For me it was an awkward teenage experience: fumbling, figuring out the physics of suction, marvelling at the neurochemistry of pleasure and swimming in a synaesthetic ocean of sensations - tastes, touches, smells and sounds. If you were anything like me, your first kiss was an amateurish affair, messy and ill-structured, satisfying in the way that leaves you not quite filled and certainly not empty, but rather desiring to know if it could indeed be better—the desire that leads to experimentation and variation with the second and third kisses, which indeed were better. In school nobody teaches you about kissing; this type of learning is one that has to take place in dialogic communion with another—it is an intimate act of social learning, one that can only take place in a relationship of mutual trust and intervulnerability. It is the type of learning where one learns both from and with an Other; where one is simultaneously teacher and student, never master but always learner. One’s first kiss sometimes leads to many other fulfilling firsts.

The first years of teaching are very much like one’s first kiss. One has finally worked up the courage to stand in front of a group of strangers and ask them to enter into an intimate relationship with you, to lower their natural barriers and allow you to enter into their sacred space. Apprehension and expectation; vulnerability faces vulnerability; the possibility of rejection palpable. These first years are often just as messy, awkward, and ill-structured as one’s first kiss, but if they are indeed satisfying in the way that neither fills nor drains you, the desire to do better that can emerge provides the impetus for really learning what it means to honour the gift of vulnerability offered to you, and how to care for your own vulnerability as a teacher/educator. One learns that one learns with and from one’s students and that one’s vulnerability as a teacher is intertwined with one’s students, as are their and your successes. Learning becomes an attractor of a classroom whose evolution is no longer constrained by concerns about teacher-centredness versus student-centredness. Learning as a process of ongoing experimentation and gradual imperceptible refinements of knowledge (content and pedagogical), technique, disposition, and philosophy moves the beginning teacher to the recognition of the privilege of inhabiting a space that is ever constituted, transformed, and maintained through ethical and loving relationships with others.

This type of learning, especially for novice teachers, is never easy as valued identities necessarily mutate over time. The first years of teaching are a problematic, confusing, conflicting, and sometimes painful space from which to operate as “one is already” even while “one is becoming” a teacher. Even with teacher preparation and experience there is a beautiful terror that teachers feel standing in front of their charges on the first day. For others there is the gradual realisation that the intellectual, emotional, and physical commitments that are required to teach are not quite aligned with their own competencies, expectations, or values, nor are the commitments demanded of teachers often commensurate with the financial reimbursement. This is valuable learning nevertheless. Not every person you kiss you end up marrying!

The first year of marriage is much like the first year of teaching—future husbands be warned! A lot of difficult and necessary learning has to take place as one learns to live sustainably in a relationship that is always both interdependent and intervulnerable. What helps a marriage or any committed relationship, including didactic ones, to survive is the nurturing of conditions for the ongoing emergence and deepening of relationships of mutual learning—learning from and with another: sometimes teacher, sometimes student, but never master. These learning relationships, though, are founded on mutual trust and respect for difference, funded by an ongoing commitment to dialogue and meaningful conversation, and fuelled by the ever-emerging desire to know, do, and become better learners. In time, my wife and I will place our first kisses on our own children and we will smile knowing that, we, and they, have a lifetime of learning and awkward first kiss experiences ahead of us.

The memory of a first kiss experience is a blessing, reminding us that meaningful learning is often the product of intimate social interaction. In the gift of a first kiss we awaken to the potential of a life filled with love through learning with and from others, and we are roused to a deep compassion and concern for their well-being. Teachers, remember your first kiss.

Some thoughts on Faith and Reason

2009-05-22T22:03:00.000-07:00

We have faculties of both reason and faith which are not antagonistic. Faith begets a Hope which may at times prompt us to act in ways that seem to undermine bloodless reason. But a faith completely unemcumbered, freed from the necessity of and for reason risks idolatry, inhospitability and inhumanity, and likewise for a reason which fails to acknowledge its indebtedness and continued dependence on the generous germ that is embodied in the grace-fullness of faith. Independent reason alone cannot give rise to Hope, it can however give force and direction to purpose, but purpose itself is a child of Hope.

One of the most important lessons that those who are positioned as impoverished, marginalized, oppressed, the liminal, les damnes, have taught me is the value of patience. To be patient is not to be idle, but to work with joy towards a hope that is made more manifest and meaningful moment by moment. In this and other issues I will be patient as I and others continue to advocate in faith for a better, more hospitable, Trinidad and Tobago, for all, every creed and race, via reason.

I just don't get it...?

2009-05-14T22:07:00.000-07:00

I held my tongue on the GCE debacle but here comes this article out of the Express that just gets my blood boiling...is it just me? Can someome explain the logic of it to me or am I just too old and stupid to understand?
[I've had to edit this post and remove the industrial strength language].
SEA results get more high-techAnna Ramdass aramdass@trinidadexpress.com
Friday, May 15th 2009
"Government has invested $100,000 in a system by which students would be able to get their SEA examination results by text messages this year, says Education Minister Esther Le Gendre.

Speaking at the post-Cabinet press conference at the Diplomatic Centre, St Ann's, Le Gendre said that Cabinet approved that some $30,000 would be spent to put the required enhancements in place within the Ministry and another $70,000 would be paid to the telecommunications providers for the service.

She said the SEA results could be easily accessed by these mobile SMS messages as well as on the Education Ministry's website.

The Minister stressed, however, that the actual exam result slip remains the official document. She noted that in 2007 the Ministry launched its website and SEA results were also available on this site.

She said from next month parents and students would be able to register for the service by texting the student's ID to a particular number during the period June 1 to 23.

Le Gendre said students would also receive text messages as to the date of registration for the secondary school they passed for."

Okay here are my concerns.
1) Nowhere is an acceptable educational rationale given for why it was necessary to invest in this system. I am willing to believe that there is some justification behind the decision to invest 100,000 dollars on this system. What problem is it meant to solve? What is it supposed to do better or more effeciently given that the hardcopy result paper remains the legal and official result? How is it an improvement? None of these important questions are addressed by the Minister

2) I don't mean to be prophetic but given the less than stellar track receord of the Ministry I feel reasonably confident in saying that there is likely to be a mix up somewhere with persons receiving the wrong texts...with the accompanying emotional trauma or joy and subsequent anger and Ministerial apologia...we've played that track this week already. Notice dey done cover dey @$$ already with the disclaimer about the paper being the official result. Being a completely automated system no one will be able to be held accountable far less answerable for these mistakes...ay yes sweet T& T, SNAFU.

3) Now onto economic concerns. Do students or their parents have to pay to access their results via SMS or is it a free service? I see $$$ $igns in the eyes of some telecom executives if this is the case as every body and dey mudder and dey fadder and dey aunty checks the chile result for themself. Basically we are paying for something that it appears that we have no need for, since no reason is given as yet. Or in reality we are paying so that a few people would not be inconveniened to go spend some time at an important moment in their child's life. And I wonder who those people are and where they work?

4) How much of this investment will be a recurrent expenditure for the MoE and consequently for the people of Trinidad and Tobago? According to the article this seems like TSTT and Digicel can now count on sharing $70,000 each year, that should be good news for them in these lean economic times. And of course if the costs of texts go up (though they should be going down according to some basic economic pricniples)... I really would like to see this agreement between the MoE and the telecoms

5) This investment serves to further entrench the Common Entrance/SEA making it less likely that it will be removed any time in the near future despite repeated calls by myself and others to rethink the design and purpose of this assessment instrument as a selection tool given the real negative consequences that it has wrought on our children and nation's psyche...but that argument is a dead horse by now the amount of time it get beat to no avail.

Dear Prime Minister can we please get a competent and sensible Minister of Education at least once during your term in office?
Okay I feel better now, I think my BP is back to normal.
TGFB...Thank God For Blogging!

Crisis in Mathematics Education

2009-04-26T12:02:00.001-07:00

I rarely speak authoritatively, but I am fairly confident in asserting that Trinidad and Tobago will not and cannot become the financial hub of the Caribbean without a more mathematically literate, i.e. numerate, population. The report on the performance of students of Trinidad and Tobago on the 2008 CSEC Mathematics examination, which is disaggregated from the rest of the region’s because of the compromised examination of last year, makes for interesting and alarming reading. The report, downloadable from CXC’s website, states on its first page that of the 20,000 or so T&T students writing the General Proficiency exam in mathematics last year, 47 percent of the candidates ‘passed’, i.e. achieved Grades I – III and 40 percent of the candidates scored at least half the available marks. First interesting mathematical fact – of the students who passed there exist a small but not insubstantial minority, 7%, who scored less than 50% on the examination. This is significantly better than the rest of the region where the overall pass rate is an abysmal 37 percent with only 28 percent scoring more than half of the marks. However, for a nation whose leader hopes to develop it into a serious destination for financial services, it is far from satisfactory.

On the Paper 2, which requires students to demonstrate solutions not merely shade answers, only 33 percent of candidates in T&T scored at least half of the marks. The scale of the tragedy becomes apparent as you read through the rest of the report detailing the errors, mistakes and lack of mathematical understanding. On the very first question which assesses fundamental mathematical skills such as students’ ability to perform basic operations on mixed numbers, solve problems associated with income tax, calculate a percentage of a derived quantity and write as a percentage the ratio of two quantities, only 15 percent of students were able to get a full score, the most for any question, yet the overall mean score of which was less than half of the total. In fact only for 3 out of the 14 questions on the paper is the mean score more than half of the total available for the problem, and in exactly one case does it cross 60% of the total for the problem, and this for an optional question attempted by 46% of students. Further, in the optional section the mean score is less than 30% of the total score for 4 out of the 6 problems.

As part of their regular cycle of curriculum renewal and in response to regional concerns and demands, especially CSME, CXC is set for a major revision of its CSEC examinations in 2010. The Basic proficiency certification will be eliminated in all subjects. This will add an additional four to five thousand students annually to the pool of students taking the General and Technical proficiency examinations. In mathematics, the structure of the Paper 2 will change ever so slightly but in a way that will have significant consequences. In the optional section students’ choices will be reduced to picking two questions from four where they now have a choice from six. This will make the paper more psychometrically sound in that having to match fewer items for difficulty will improve the assessment instrument’s reliability. It will simultaneously make the paper more difficult for many students who will have to learn more mathematics than they have had to in the past in order to get a good grade. From the perspective of mathematics education that’s a good thing.

Content wise however the mathematics syllabus resembles very much ones from the late 80’s and early 90’s. The syllabus is heavily weighted in favour of students with good algebraic manipulation skills, note, not necessarily mathematical understanding, while items relating to geometrical reasoning, quantitative literacy and statistical decision making continue to be under-represented. There are no objectives at CSEC level related to topics in discrete mathematics which together with the calculus provide the foundations for work in all computer related and many statistical disciplines, especially those related to finance, industry, and manufacturing. The rationale for this omission is based on the generally accepted belief that the majority of teachers across the region, many without sufficient training in mathematics or mathematics education, would not feel competent to teach these topics.

Further, the syllabus content will not help to resolve what has become an annual complaint of CAPE mathematics teachers in T&T and regionally: that a great many students experience significant difficulty in smoothly and successfully level-jumping and making the transition from CSEC to CAPE mathematics. It is as if their performance on CSEC math was not a sufficiently good predictor of their ability to cope with CAPE mathematics, much as students’ CAPE results do not seem to be a reliable indicator of students’ ability to cope with mathematics in post-secondary institutions. CXC comments on the former in their 2007 CAPE report, recommending that schools need to institute “a more effective screening process…to reduce the number of ill-prepared candidates.” It seems like they are attempting to pass the buck and the blame back on to schools, who indeed appear to be relying too heavily, if not in some cases exclusively, on candidate’s CSEC scores for admittance to their CAPE programmes. Indeed, the research literature consistently shows that when assessments of students’ learning are frequently, closely and clearly aligned with instruction, students’ collective prior performances on these teacher-made instruments are often better indicators and predictors of students’ future achievement and accomplishment than one-off assessments for certification or admission purposes administered by external agencies unless these are directly related to tasks that students will be performing in the future.

After 30 years of CXC’s existence and in today’s hypercompetitive globalized markets to have a regional pass rate in a critical gate-keeping discipline such as mathematics of 37 percent with only 28 percent making more than half of the marks is almost inconceivable. Certainly some of the blame lies in our inability to willingly move beyond our colonial heritage and the damaging legacies of its education system, some with the crises of Caribbean family life, the unavailability, under and ill-timed preparation of mathematics teachers at all levels, and some with students themselves. None belongs to CXC whose ‘business’ is neither teaching nor learning but the assessment and certification of educational accomplishment, or lack thereof. The changes in the mathematics syllabus, effective from next year, are not likely to improve the dismal statistic cited above. It is very likely that the regional pass rate figure will fall in 2010, largely due to the influx of candidates who previously would have written the Basic examination and as teachers and students adapt to the new requirements. Numerically however more students will likely achieve passing grades. This rate however will paint a clearer picture of the state of mathematics education among students in T&T and the wider Caribbean.

So how do we get there? How do we become the financial hub of the region? Firstly we’ve got to set the bar high…“One hundred percent pass rate in mathematics by 2020 (without cheating)!” It only sounds impossible now. Next we’ve got to recruit new and promising talent into mathematics education, inspire, nurture, train and retrain our mathematics education fraternity and address the ways mathematics is taught to every type of student and assessed at all educational levels. Perhaps we need to examine our national curriculum, not to create a new assessment or certification system, but to put into place a sustainable framework for guiding mathematics educators’ thinking about mathematics beyond the sometimes limiting if not disabling constraints of the CXC curriculum. Perhaps we need to imaginatively re-construct a mathematics curriculum that is more appropriate to the needs, desires, realities, and often painful contradictions of life in Trinidad and Tobago. We will need money, ideas, innovation, people, prayer, persistence, and perseverance. Can we get there by 2020? Can we afford not to? You do the math…

Liberating Hope from SEA selection

2009-04-26T10:21:00.000-07:00

This article is a response to but one aspect of Ms. Robyn Gillezeau’s commentary published in the online version of the Guardian on Friday January 2nd 2009 in which she opens the Pandora’s box of the 20% selection in the SEA with the concept of beneficence. I want to see what comes out. In the opening to a poem, Majestic on its Verdant Hill, about one of my alma maters, I placed the following question to a fictional form one student, “Yuh think you choose Pres. or Pres. choose you?” The answer in some sense has always been both and neither. In Trinidad and Tobago at present, and for close to half a century, some students choose their secondary schools while others are chosen by their schools, however this selection/non-selection is symptomatic of a much larger, deeply rooted ideology, indeed pathology, of our educational system and social imagination.

Let me be clear and direct. In my opinion selecting the 20% is neither arbitrary nor benign and where this selection is concerned, both charity and injustice begin at home. From an insider’s perspective I write about what I saw and remember about how the 20% was chosen having accompanied school officials to the Ministry to perform this exercise. I saw students relegated to begin at their third choice school because they didn’t make the 80% cut-off for their first choice school. Such students had already been by-passed in that school’s 20% intake and had the ‘impudence’ to place our school as their second choice. Such impudence was met with bypassing, a glancing further down the list for others with less marks who desired us and so merited more consideration. I also saw students with good grades from rural primary schools whose names were not on ‘the Principal’s list’ of elect, bypassed with the sleight-of- reasoning that perhaps it might be better that they go to school closer to where they lived. I remember one instance of a discussion about a student who, should he be on the 20% list would be selected in the hope that his father, a former national cricketer might assist the College team. Quid pro quo? Alas, I do not know.

I have also seen instances where it works as Robyn suggests – when the logic of beneficence rationalizes the selection of individuals with siblings already attending the same school, or the children of staff members, or some other truly exceptional circumstance. However in the years that I participated in this practice, these were never more than 3 or 4 students. Indeed, I would argue that Principals probably could annually make a successful case, a written submission, for the inclusion of about 5-6 students in such exceptional circumstances, 5% as opposed to 20%. This would be more transparent and lend some accountability, making the process appear to be, if not actually be, more just. The logic of beneficence, however, contradicts Robyn’s argument regarding parental choice and student fit since it problematically assumes that all siblings would necessarily ‘fit’ as well within the same institution.

I am very much against the practice of legacy preferences, a form of nepotism, in the public and private spheres, especially where public funds and public goods are involved, as is the case with education and which Robyn suggests “leaves precious few places for any new benefactors.” Such closed and exclusive systems for the movement and transfer of power and privilege worry me greatly. In any one year, for those denominational schools which have been around for a while, there are always vastly more individuals seeking backdoor admission than there are places. Which legacy child is to be chosen and how the benefactors are ranked ought to concern not only alumni but all of us. One of my especial concerns, as a former teacher, is the phenomenon of the culture of entitlement that seems to be associated with that of legacy children. Indeed I’ve heard of cases where students have declared that they would be attending a particular prestigious secondary school long before marking would have been completed.

To be fair however I must also critique the systems of fiscal management at the level of the board or school Principal and the Ministry of Education that might necessitate denominational schools turning to the benefits of legacy admissions to make ends meet or achieve their strategic goals. In this regard perhaps the Ministry needs to be more timely in its release of sufficient funds to schools and in demanding accountability and answerability on how these monies are used. In addition, the denominational schools must become more judicious about how the funds that they do receive are spent, especially in the present climate of belt-tightening. I note with sadness the financial difficulty of another alma mater, the TML school, and that of the other privileged institutions at elementary, secondary and tertiary levels in Trinidad & Tobago, the Caribbean and abroad who engage in hypercompetitive one-upmanship educational arms-races. As any mathematician, philosopher, biologist, economist or social scientist will point out all arms races are materially expensive, unsustainable and end in failure, poverty and misery for a majority. The academic arms-race that has characterized education in Trinidad and Tobago post-Independence, of which the SEA and associated practices are a part, but which has intensified in the last two decades in the form of unnecessary extra-lessons, purchased exam papers and other forms of cheating and intellectual dishonesty must end. How it will end remains to be seen, though the current trajectory is not hopeful.

Since leaving teaching at the secondary level I have reflected often about those 20 odd names from each year belonging to real 11 and 12 year old boys and girls who didn’t get chosen on the 20% but whose marks in a truly meritocratic system would entitle them by right to a place in the school of their choosing. I wonder where they are and what they are doing now? No one has spoken for those disenfranchised in the process and it disappoints me greatly to read Robyn’s commentary, another graduate and disciple of a privileged but unjust institutional framework, seeking to maintain the oppressive status quo. Imagine instead of an academic competition an international beauty or sporting competition say (or an election), in which after a top-ten were ranked based on performance alone, 20%, a mere 2 representatives, were replaced with others based on their relationships or familiarity with the sponsors, judges or other powerful and dominant interests or their country’s previous history in the competition. In order to make it more real, imagine that one of those replaced was a relatively small, perhaps little known island competitor. We would rightly be outraged. We would not accept it and we would be vocal in our denouncement of the injustice. Yet we work so hard at maintaining our current system of institutionalized disenfranchisement that does just this annually to hundreds of our children – sons, daughters, brothers and sisters. Why is this?

On the other hand, imagine that you were one of those ‘lucky’ enough to have been selected, either in the original ten or as a result of the system of unjust replacement. It would not be in your interest to speak out or against the system or institution (or its leaders), no matter how oppressive to others, from which your benefits and privileges, or those of your associates or desired associates, are derived, especially if you were still deriving benefits, desired to derive benefits for yourself in the future, or if you knew that someone coming after you, might require access to those benefits and privileges. Such a system would set up a scenario of inter-generational public silences around the issue. This code of silence would be strictly enforced. It would take an extraordinarily ‘foolish’ person to speak against such a system.

This discussion of injustice and disenfranchisement depends critically however on the knowledge that one has been or is being disenfranchised or is oneself responsible or complicit in the disenfranchisement of others. Where and from whom is this knowledge to come? Students (or their guardians) who are disenfranchised do not generally know what goes on outside the writing of the examination and the announcement of the results and in those cases where they knowingly benefit they do not consciously or publicly announce this fact. Principals, board members and staff members of denominational schools who do the choosing have no obligations at present to account or be answerable to the publics they proclaim to serve nor to the Ministry of Education on those they have selected/not selected and why. Indeed, unless you’ve sat in that bright cold fluorescent air-conditioned backroom in the Ministry of Education and held the continuous ream of computer paper, pencil, and boys and girls’ hopes and futures in your hands, one cannot really know how the 20% is chosen beyond the anecdotes and guarded whispers we share and hear. While under no obligation to account for their choices publicly, neither, to my knowledge, are those who know prevented from doing so by any legal mechanism such as a non-disclosure agreement. Indeed, what has perpetuated this unnatural silence, around what is sure to be an inflammatory issue, are the vested interests and the interest of maintaining those interests of the parties in the know and partly our own desires not to know too much about from whence our benefits our own and others’ oppressions derive. Continued silence however in this context renews our unholy covenant and complicity with a socially unjust regime.

Though I am not always on the same page, I endorse Pope Benedict XVI, and a myriad of others who have called for the overhaul and creation of more just alternatives to any and all unjust economic and social structures. In his message for the World Day of Peace he says, “sooner or later, the distortions produced by unjust systems have to be paid for by everyone." It is already later and we have already paid dearly for the distorted logics we have built our educational systems upon. We have already been given “permission to mash up d place” – to begin the process of deconstructing, decolonising and as necessary dis-mantling those aspects of our unjust institutions, our douendoms, that de-humanise and hide our fully human identities – as a prelude to remaking something better, for all of us, every creed and race, together. The current debate around the practice of school selection which took off in early December last year and the earlier public outrage at the Culture Ministry’s lack of transparency in its award of scholarships are healthy signs of a maturing public dialogue. However, it will be our continued individual and collective willingness and courage to open the other Pandora’s boxes in our midst and confront what lies therein that will determine how long our Hope must yet slumber.

Winner-Take-All

2009-04-26T10:14:00.000-07:00

What do the Olympic Games, the recent ‘leaking’ of the CAPE 2008 examinations and admissions to ‘prestige,’ or more accurately, ‘privileged,’ educational institutions in Trinidad and Tobago (and elsewhere) have in common? They are all instances where ‘cheating’ – defined here as the use of an agent for enhancement of performance or public perception of performance that is not potentially available to all competitors – can be extremely beneficial to the individual, socially, politically and especially economically. Indeed, it is that the differential rewards between the few winners (and many losers), for what are often relatively minor (though by no means insignificant) differences in effort, ability and performance, are so staggeringly disparate – multimillion dollar endorsements, elite academic credentials and concomitant access to lifelong higher earning potential and further social and cultural capital that can in turn be exchanged and translated into economic capital – that drives the intense, unproductive, wasteful and in some cases illegal and dangerous competition that is a defining characteristic of “winner take all markets.”

Winner-take-all markets are characterised by Robert H. Frank and Phillip J. Cook, Professors of Economics, Ethics and Public Policy at Cornell and Duke Universities respectively, as markets in which rewards are allocated primarily (if not solely) by relative performance, rather than by absolute performance, and, in which butterfly-like effects translate initial small differences in performance, like a hundredth of a second or a fraction of a mark, into substantial differences in opportunities to earn and learn. In the case of professional athletes, such as David Beckham, Tiger Woods and Kobe Bryant, the economic rewards and opportunities of being at the top of their fields are hundreds of times greater than an ‘average’ player and provide even greater opportunities to earn. For students seeking entry to elite, prestigious and high status universities the rewards are not only greater earning potential over their lifetime, but include access to networks of peers and associates who are tied into local and global networks of power and influence, and increased likelihood of gaining entry into prestigious, or high status graduate schools and higher starting salaries. At the local secondary level the same is (largely) true for students admitted to ‘prestige/privileged’ schools in that they increase the probability that they will successfully translate their relatively small performance differences on the SEA into substantial social and economic rewards and be connected to networks of powerfully placed peers. Prior success breeds later success via self-reinforcing, re-inscribing, positive feedback loops. What could possibly be wrong with this?

Winner-take-all markets arise in corporate and consumer (as opposed to producer) capitalist arenas where profit maximization logic and policies that place no restrictions on greed encourage individuation. When (free) markets work they (generally) allow the most talented people to meet the needs of the widest possible audience/consumers and to be commensurably compensated for their services. Participants compete, succeed, and are rewarded based on their absolute differences on performance standards. Winner-take-all markets however encourage and contribute to the growing disparity between the wealthy and the poor by hyper-compensating its top individuals, creating a self-reinforcing culture with increasingly higher and more difficult to obtain benchmarks with only minimal if any increases in value. Executive compensation packages and the outrageous salaries of elite sporting players, models, authors, actors, actresses, directors, lawyers and even academics follow the same pattern. The incentives to participate in these markets and the rewards of success are extremely attractive and psychologically motivating.

The reward structures of winner-take-all markets encourage competition. Such competition is important in attracting and retaining the best, brightest and most productive workers. The opportunity costs of this competition however are wasteful and unproductive patterns of consumption and investment which have serious social implications. According to Frank and Cook, winner-take-all markets attract too many individuals who over-estimate their abilities, competencies and chances of occupying top spots. They thus forego opportunities to make contributions and lead successful and productive careers in other fields/disciplines. The over-subscription of applications to business, medical, law and engineering schools and the shortage of teachers, nurses, agriculturalists and workers in the construction and hospitality industries are important examples. The long lists of students seeking entry to or consideration by elite primary and secondary schools, gatekeepers of cultural and social capital, are another. In all hierarchies, there is limited room in the upper echelons, and failure is more common and more likely than success. Failure in such competitive arenas often fosters feelings of inadequacy, frustration, regret and anger.

At every stage in a winner-take-all hyper-competitive ecosystem participants are subjected to increasingly challenging selection/elimination contests. The successful survivors of these successive sieving processes move on to the finer meshes, and potentially greater rewards. This situation of increasingly demanding selection tasks and substantial difference in rewards for small differences in performance creates conditions for sustaining an escalating arms race. Competitors must make ever increasing investments of time, energy and resources in order to achieve even marginal improvements in performance, most will not achieve the highest levels of success and will have lost valuable opportunities and resources that could have been utilized more productively elsewhere. The cultish and expensive phenomenon of extra-lessons is an illustrative example. Such investments are ultimately unsustainable and wasteful. However, in a system that rewards proximal relative performance, these marginal differences are significant and the unsustainability overlooked or ignored. Those who are able to invest in this way are usually those who already have advantages in other areas, namely economic, social and cultural capital. Such arms races in social spheres are exclusionary and re-inscribe, re-produce and further widen and deepen the pervasive inequalities between those with and those without. Other participants seek out alternative strategies to give them competitive advantages and keep them from falling even further behind.

Cheating, in one form or another, occurs in all markets, but is endemic in winner-take-all markets where the potential payoff for not being caught more than mitigates against the risk. Athletes seek out novel means to increase their competitive edge without being caught, often at some risk to their personal health. In the case of CXC, cheating is also endemic from the perennial problem of the leakage of examination papers/questions, the compromised integrity of the School Based Assessments, Internal Assessments and oral examinations to the attempted use of other student strategies such as copying or crib sheets. Small differences in performance however can mean the difference between a scholarship, studying regionally or internationally and completely different sets of opportunities.

The practice of local government assisted secondary schools selecting “the twenty percent” that they are legally entitled to under the Concordat is another form of cheating in the winner-take-all market for secondary education. Annually, advocates make the pilgrimage to these quasi-religious, quasi-educational institutions to perform the ritual of offering the child’s name and number, hoping to give them even some small advantage in the exam that would measure their value and secure their future. Principals and boards offer sometimes complicated justifications for choosing the 20 or so students (out of lists exceeding 300!) based on the principle of “maintaining the individual (read religious) characters” of the school. Some choices are perhaps easier than others, some candidates luckier.

This practice is outdated, unjust, wasteful, unethical and discriminatory. This particular aspect of our winner-take-all educational economy does more real harm to our students, our educational system and our society than any perceived potential good. It unfairly denies those with legitimate claims to secondary school places in the schools that they have chosen and qualified for while simultaneously privileging a select subset of the national community for receiving a critical social good in disproportionate relation to their own performance. Like the leaked CAPE papers offered for sale, this practice subverts and undermines the confidence in the integrity of the examination process, sustains and reinforces educational and social inequalities and implicates adults in facilitating the unfair practice. For those who don’t know the rules of this perennial game; those who have no advocates who speak on their behalf in order to access these cultures of power, privilege and prestige; who are conditioned to implicitly trust that the system is completely ‘meritocratic’, just enough ‘earn’ their places on merit alone, to be grateful enough never to ask embarrassing questions, to speak for those for whom no one speaks.

Another consequence of winner-take-all markets in education is the concentration of talent in a few elite institutions. As I have journeyed across Trinidad over the last eighteen months or so, visiting, observing and evaluating secondary teachers (and their students, administrators and school cultures) I have come to appreciate that the quality of teachers and teaching is relatively consistent across the island (though student performance is another matter). In all schools I have found ‘good’ teachers and ‘not quite so good’ teachers. What is striking though is that in all cases the government assisted schools that I have visited have classes that are too large or overcrowded to easily and meaningfully support the type of teaching and learning experiences being advocated by professional and teacher educators and supported by the overwhelming research in the Learning Sciences. In every government assisted school I have visited the learning environment is designed to support teacher dominated transmission and modeling as the primary day-to-day instructional strategy. Many of the government schools on the other hand are not the criminal breeding grounds that they are often made out to be in the media. Rather, many students and teachers work extremely hard under better (classroom and administrative) conditions for learning and have achieved the highest degrees of success. Graduates of these secondary schools sometimes have had richer more diverse educational experiences than their privileged peers. I often wonder what would happen if our educational talent was more evenly and fairly distributed across schools?

The practice of chronological age grouping combined with increasingly challenging and consequential competitions for high status social goods in a winner-take-all economy also wastes talent by narrowing and reducing opportunities for those who develop at different rates through rewarding precocity and punitively punishing children with slower maturation cycles. As Alan Gregg argues, “…once you have most of your students the same age, the academic rewards…go to those who are uncommonly bright for their age…in effect, you have unwittingly belittled man’s cardinal educational capital – time to mature.” The research literature is clear that for students from low socioeconomic status backgrounds, the challenges associated with being a late bloomer become almost insurmountable. Furthermore, early ability is not always a good nor necessarily the best indicator of future accomplishment and success. Our practices by which we choose winners in the educational marketplace and reward precocity mean that annually for several decades we have been wasting the talent and potentials of an untold number of students, placing them at a severe social disadvantage and consigning them to futures filled with unnecessary anxiety, insecurity and uncertainty, those for whom being ‘bright’ enough simply isn’t good enough. The National Open School initiative is a step in the right direction as are any attempts to loosen chronology’s collar in schools by integrating the grouping of students by age and subject matter with a grouping by interest and proficiency within the formal curriculum. Unfortunately I know of no such attempts being made in Trinidad or Tobago at present.

Contests have always been a means of demonstrating prowess and proficiency. They have also always been political too in the sense that to the winners went a disproportionate share of valued social goods including power, prestige and influence. At present the rewards are disproportionately concentrated in so few heads and hands as to be obscene. Never has the incentive to circumvent the traditional routes of disciplined hard work, ethical investment and continuous moderate gains through cheating been greater. In the ancient world, sporting contests allowed warriors/soldiers to simulate and demonstrate skills that would be valuable in defending their community. Cheating could place a community at risk for conquest. The same applies to educational arenas, except that the risk of conquest comes from within the society itself in addition to the reduced ability to successfully manage external threats. As educational psychologist Jerome Bruner reminds us “when any group is robbed of its legitimate aspiration, it will aspire desperately and by means that outrage the broader society, though they are efforts to sustain or regain dignity.” Winner-take-all markets, hyper-competition and cheating all work in different ways to deny many their fullest dignity. Educational discourse in Trinidad and Tobago often seems to vacillate between periods of crisis, moral panic and indifference, much of what passes for analysis is shallow, vacuous, self-serving and uncritical, some of it downright dangerous. As Princeton philosopher Kwame Appiah writes “What makes oppression possible is that there are people who profit as well as people who suffer. Robbing Peter to pay Paul, as George Bernard Shaw observed shrewdly, is a policy that will, at least guarantee you the vigorous support of Paul.” In Trinidad and Tobago, many Paul’s are powerful advocates for their own self-interest over and above the interests of the society. It is extremely difficult and psychologically painful to acknowledge one’s privileged position(s) from which one’s benefits derive and then to have it called into question, to acknowledge one’s complicity in the oppression and sufferings of others. It is almost impossible to work to transform a system of oppression from which one or one’s close associates derive important benefits to a more pantisocratic system in which power and the benefits that derive are shared more equally. Nevertheless, it is a task in which we cannot afford to fail. If we are to tackle the problems and tasks placed before us as participants in history’s future unfolding rather than as mere spectators or tourists (or worse), we must choose to engage with questions such as those posed by Lloyd Best’s Moses’ conundrum, where he asks, “How does a nation revise the perspectives of the desert so as to form fertile empirical judgments of what is required by the Promised Land?” It is a task that will raise many uncomfortable, unsettling, disturbing and perhaps dangerous questions. But this is a conversation for all of us. The dialogue has been opened…

Hypocrisy and Culpability: Considering Karen’s Conflict

2009-04-18T09:08:00.000-07:00

Part 1
The etymology of the word “hypocrite” is instructive. Its Greek origins point to an actor on a stage, a pretender who interprets the playwright’s script and director’s instructions in order to evoke a convincing performance. Another reading, one more closely aligned with our modern understanding of the word as a contradiction or lack of correlation between professed belief and enacted behavior, derives from the conjunction of the prefix hypo, meaning under, and the verb krinein, meaning to sift, separate, judge or decide. Thus, a hypocrite is one in which there exists some deficiency (not necessarily intellectual or moral) or compromise of the integrity in one’s ability to sift, decide, or weigh objectively and impartially, especially in critical matters. It is this latter sense in which the circumstances of duty and opportunity afforded Finance Minister Karen Nunez-Tesheira by virtue of her office, bring into sharp relief a contrast, if not an alarming discontinuity, between her professional and personal identities and the associated loci of her concomitant responsibilities. Just as the two aspects of hypocrisy are difficult to tease apart from one another in discourse and practice, so too is it difficult to disentangle any of one’s substantive identities from any other, except perhaps as a consequence of some underlying psychopathology or singularity of narcissistic self-deception. These might appropriately be termed hubris by some and do not magically absolve one of culpability and responsibility for one’s actions.

One of the central philosophical issues that the current situation raises, and one which has not yet been adequately addressed in the discussion around conflict of interest is the nature of the self and the ability to partition identity and thus action and responsibility. The model of the self that seems to be dominating the discussion thus far is one in which an individual’s identity is seen as being not more than the sum of his/her independent parts/roles. In this framing, Karen the Minister of Finance is independent and acts independently and mutually exclusively of any interests held by Karen the shareholder and thus partial owner of CL, Karen the lawyer, Karen the widow and heiress, Karen the daughter, Karen the PNM representative and Karen the woman. Only within such a framing is it possible for Karen the Minister of Finance to be able to claim no hypocrisy in her participation in the decision making process regarding CL.

Unfortunately for all of these Karens, our selves, the different roles we play that go into making up our (seemingly) coherent identity are neither independent nor mutually exclusive, they are not discrete or separable, indeed, they are networked and nested. That is to say that all of our roles and relationships are implicated relationally in our identity, we do not cease to be or have interest in one of our other selves when we are performing actions within the discursive boundaries that define another self nor is it only Karen the Minister of Finance who may suffer the consequences of having charges brought against her. While at times we may often foreground or privilege one role over others, this is only temporary, and it does not mean that any other roles and identities that we have in the background do not exert effects on the foreground, only that the likelihood that we will be aware, conscious of these effects, is reduced. Indeed, we are not aware of the causes or consequences of the majority of our embodied neurological and physiological activities that produce behavior, only that tiny fraction that bubbles up to the surface of our conscious awareness and only that to which we deliberately orient our self, or are called to attend to. Even then our consciousness is limited by the extent to which we are able to locate or create suitable concepts upon which to frame and articulate our experience of our consciousness, much of which is shaped by our prior personal experiences, collective knowledge and personal values, viz. our conscience. If the idea of individual and independent selves appear separate in Law and legal theory at present, it is only because the Law and public policy have not yet caught up and dealt with the full implications of the findings and advances in the theory, Science, and Philosophy of mind, self, action and identity. Indeed, one of the central findings of this research is that we are always already responsible for more than we intended and that all of our actions have unanticipated and unintended consequences. Such research suggests that we need to demonstrate a greater level of care, caution, compassion and personal and collective responsibility (ethics) in all of our actions that greatly surpass the minima that are codified in laws and public policy at present. Those who seek to lead and govern must perhaps exceed even this.

Hypocrisy and Culpability: Considering Karen’s Conflict

2009-04-18T09:06:00.000-07:00

Part 2
Hypocrisy, in general, and under most circumstances, is not illegal, and is oftentimes tolerated with amusement and forgiven. Celebrities, executives, judges, pastors, academics, and all custodians of public trust, confidence, office, and purse, however, now more than ever, are the subject of intense, ongoing, and damning scrutiny both for the degree of fit between what they say and do and their fitness, not merely finesse, for the tasks entrusted to them. Consider the glocal financial meltdown, some of the blame for which is being placed on David Li’s Gaussian copula function, a correlational model, which was widely adopted on Wall Street. As Felix Salmon notes in the February Wired magazine cover story, “the real danger was created not because any given trader adopted it but because every trader did. In financial markets, everybody doing the same thing is the classic recipe for a bubble and inevitable bust.” Another part of the problem Salmon notes is that “the quants, who should have been more aware of the copula's weaknesses, weren't the ones making the big asset-allocation decisions. Their managers, who made the actual calls, lacked the math skills to understand what the models were doing or how they worked. They could, however, understand something as simple as a single correlation number.” Finally, early and serious warnings were ignored, “partly because the managers empowered to apply the brakes didn't understand the arguments between various arms of the quant universe. Besides, they were making too much money to stop.” All of this was coupled with a lack of sufficient and appropriate financial oversight, regulation and timely accountability by policy makers in Washington.

What is clear from the above is that managers and decision makers, especially in the area of Finance need much more sophisticated mathematical understandings than many may currently possess. They need to improve their fitness. Additionally, us “quants” who do “get this math” need to be much more vocal and forceful in having our voices and concerns heard and listened to by the public and those who make decisions on the public’s behalf. Indeed, we need to find suitable “quants” from among the ranks to occupy those positions of power and responsibility. This will probably require a little more finesse and clarity of communication than most mathematicians are used to or comfortable with. Finally, we need to find fecund financial stewards who demonstrate fitness, finesse as well as an unwavering commitment to fairness – individuals with meticulous, not mercurial, moral mettle. Greed is a strong attractor. It must not be given license with indifference to social injustice which corrupts the body politic.

Unfortunately for Karen she seems to be demonstrating a decided lack of fitness where financial matters are concerned. In addition, her finesse is slowly sublimating, diffusing what credibility and force of moral, legal or political suasion she has left. I think I understand fully her defensive strategy, a dictum that good lawyers always advise their clients to follow: never admit guilt or liability as the burden of proof always rests with the prosecution. Her pre-emptive maneuvers however are interesting since she has not (yet) been formally charged with any crime, though she is working hard to influence and change the tenor of the conversation in the unforgiving court of public opinion at present.

The Lenten period in which this political drama unfolded is one of wandering, reflection, repentance and renewed commitment to life-giving principles from the source from which Life issues. In the Christian tradition this manifests itself in the repeated and prolonged examination of conscience, given voice via the mea culpa – “through my own fault” and ultimately manifested in a change in personal behavior and character. The culpa here refers to an act of commission or omission and the Minister appears to be doubly culpable. I continue to pray that Karen and her Cabinet colleagues retreat and receive the blessing of one pair of big C’s that lie at the heart of the Christian journey towards and during Easter – a Contrite Conscience – and that they remember that of the two thieves crucified with Jesus at Golgotha, only one was promised paradise…

Caring for Our selves

2009-04-17T08:58:00.000-07:00

“Advanced industrial society is sick-making because it disables people from coping with their environment and, when they break down, substitutes a "clinical," or therapeutic, prosthesis for the broken relationships.” Ivan Illich - Medical Nemesis.

I always knew I wanted to be a teacher. Unlike my friends who tell me of their earliest teaching experiences, which involved lining up their dolls or siblings and lecturing them before scolding and beating them with rulers, I don’t recall ever playing school. I remember being responsible for my first set of students when I was 12 years old and had returned to my primary school to assist my former Standard 5 teacher, Mr. Ousman Ali, with his Saturday classes. The painting he did for me—a simple scene based on ones he had drawn many times in coloured chalk in class to stimulate our creative writing—still hangs in my parents’ home today. Even then people told me I was crazy to want to become a teacher: “It eh ha no future in dat.” “Yuh lacking ambition or what?” “Dah is all yuh want to be?” “Yuh know how hard dem chirren head does be?” “Like yuh like holidays?”

By the time I had finished secondary school, I had had numerous opportunities to try out didactic experiments on my peers. These experiences reinforced my desire to enter “the noblest profession.” Once again, this seemed like insanity to those around me: “Boy, why you doh become a doctor?” “How you going to provide for a wife an family an ting?” “If yuh think dem chirren head hard, wait till yuh meet dey parents.” “Yuh have too much talent to remain in teaching.” I am sure that I disappointed many people by following through on my desire to become a teacher.

I began teaching in May 1999. I was interviewed in October that year and received my first teacher’s salary in March the following year. By the second term of 2001, I was diagnosed with and was being treated for depression. Few of my friends or colleagues knew about it. I was prescribed a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), which had the effect of flattening out my emotional landscape. Thus, while I no longer had feelings of anxiety, despair, or hopelessness I also had difficulty experiencing feelings of pleasure and desire. During the treatment period, I decided that I did not want to exist in that state longer than I had to and began to analyse some of the potential causes of my depression. Next, I took steps to improve those relationships I felt would help me to be healthy in the long term—I exercised more frequently, and put aside more time for rest and socialization with friends. I also tried to limit and remove myself from those stressful occasions, persons, and situations that had precipitated the onset.

Depression is not something that I have gotten over; but I have gotten better at recognising the early warning signs in myself, such as fatigue, short temperedness, and insomnia, and to take evasive action early. In the period just before I left teaching, for example, I spent a lot more time outdoors taking nature photographs and re-discovering my artistic side. My experiences as a neophyte teacher have led me to the brink of depression and rage because of the violence and humiliation that one sometimes finds in school. But it has been Art and Love that have taught me how to re-connect and re-orient my relationships; to find my way back. Not everyone finds a way back.

Teacher burnout and attrition are problems the world over. While they are related to individual characteristics, they are also related to the institutionalised isolation, frustration, and anger that accompany “the loneliest profession,” and which are consequences of our increasingly anachronistic industrial and mechanical constructions and conceptions of schooling. As a teacher, one can always do/give more. Indeed, some teachers feel intense guilt when asked to give more but know they are unable. Machines can be pushed beyond their limit and can be replaced if they break. We can no longer continue to conceive of any human being in this instrumental manner. One has a responsibility to oneself to sometimes do less, do differently, but always work to do better. As teachers, we have a responsibility to care for ourselves and to teach our charges, by our own examples, how to care for themselves by nurturing healthy relationships. We might begin by opening up, and re-discovering, the value and vulnerability of our relationships with our (he)Arts.

Welcome

2009-04-17T08:02:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my first blog where I intend to make accessible some of my thoughts and writings that have appeared in the Trinidad Express on Education and Culture, especially in Trinidad & Tobago and the Caribbean. I probably won't do these in chronological order. In addition readers and subscribers can look forward to reading some of those that have NOT appeared for one reason or another or are parts of works in progress for publication.
I invite thoughful critical responses and constructive critique as well as comments, suggestions and ideas.
In time I hope to be able to comment in a more timely fashion on what's happening in education both in TT and in the wider world.
Enjoy

Curriculum Interruptus

In Defense of Men (but not Man)

Secret Criteria and the Medal

A Bad Romance: Hope and Heroism, not Heroes.

A design for sex-segregation research in T&T: A thought experiment

The Reader Bytes Back

Gift of a Growth-Mindset

Experiments and Education

‘After’ Gender: An Other Genre

TT Express News 2010 - Squandermania

TT Express Education News - CSEC January Exams & Vacation days

Architectural Megalomania

Our TT-DNA

And the rhythm section played on...

Intervulnerability in Education (3/3)

Football as Policy is Folly

PSA Football Email

More Education Articles

The human

Successful Teaching - More than a mouthful

Girls v Boys Nonsense Again & Other News Articles

Proof and Refutation

SEA What happens next

A parable for Education

Casting the Net

Learning to Read

Rumpelstiltskin Revisited

The Emperor's New Costume

Parable of Integrity

Letters to the Editor - Integrity Fiasco

Les Damnes et Les Douens

Caramel Maroon - defining my self.

A Kumbla Consciousness

Fear of Queer

First Kiss - A metaphor for beginning to teach

Some thoughts on Faith and Reason

I just don't get it...?

Crisis in Mathematics Education

Liberating Hope from SEA selection

Winner-Take-All

Hypocrisy and Culpability: Considering Karen’s Conflict

Hypocrisy and Culpability: Considering Karen’s Conflict

Caring for Our selves

Welcome