Critical Reading

With the exception of informed ones, opinions have little use as supporting evidence. – Critically Evaluating the Logic and Validity of Information from Cuesta College.

Cuesta College has a nice but fairly dense webpage on, “Critically Evaluating the Logic and Validity of Information“.

It starts with distinguishing between facts and opinions, goes into evaluating arguments and rounds up with asking critical questions. There’s lots of good information, but it needs to be parsed, broken apart, and condensed for middle school students.

Facts are statements that can be verified or proven to be true or false. Factual statements from reliable sources can be accepted and used in drawing conclusions, building arguments, and supporting ideas.

Opinions are statements that express feelings, attitudes, or beliefs and are neither true nor false. Opinions must be considered as one person’s point of view that you are free to accept or reject. With the exception of informed ones, opinions have little use as supporting evidence, but they are useful in shaping and evaluating your own thinking. [My emphasis]
– Critically Evaluating the Logic and Validity of Information from Cuesta College.

This can be tied in with my previous notes on Paul Graham’s Hierarchy of Disagreement to create a set of lessons on critical thinking and evaluation.

How to disagree

Faced with the rapidity at which anonymous conversations on the internet deteriorate, Paul Graham’s broken things down into six levels of argument. It starts with name-calling at the bottom and ends with the Refutation of the Central Point at the top.

This is a wonderful model. I especially like the diagram because it’s really easy to pick out which level your argument is on. I’m going to make a poster sized version of this and post it on the wall. And, there’ll be a lesson.

Committees

We’ve discovered committees. Yesterday, after spending half an hour discussing the brand new bread bag prototype that one of the students came up with, they decided that maybe just the people interested in working on them should work on them. So we just, organically, created a committee.

As with all new discoveries we’re now using them for everything. Today the students decided on a committee to run Dinner and a Show. We’ll see where this goes.

What’s the difference between humans and animals?

In the field of cognition, the march towards continuity between human and animal has been inexorable — one misconduct case won’t make a difference. True, humanity never runs out of claims of what sets it apart, but it is a rare uniqueness claim that holds up for over a decade. This is why we don’t hear anymore that only humans make tools, imitate, think ahead, have culture, are self-aware, or adopt another’s point of view. – Frans De Waal (2010).

My students studied the question, what is life, last cycle, and through their readings and Socratic dialogue I’ve been trying to approach the question of what is sentience and what distinguishes humanity from other organisms (or robots for that matter).

We’ve found that the lines between us and them are very hard to draw.

Pushing the discussion into questions of morality, primatologist Frans De Waal has a wonderful post on where it comes from, and if there is any clear distinction between humans and other animals. He argues that morality is innate, a product of evolution, and there aren’t clear distinctions.

The full article is a worthy read, with good writing and well constructed arguments. It’s a bit too long for a Socratic Dialogue but might be of interest to the more advanced student, particularly those going through religious, coming-of-age, rites of passage, like preparations for confirmations and Bar Mitzvahs. While De Waal’s evolutionary reasoning has been used to argue against religion, he takes a much more subtle approach:

Our societies are steeped in it: everything we have accomplished over the centuries, even science, developed either hand in hand with or in opposition to religion, but never separately. It is impossible to know what morality would look like without religion. It would require a visit to a human culture that is not now and never was religious. That such cultures do not exist should give us pause. – Frans De Waal (2010).

Memories in the fire

1

I decided that we would read our memoirs, the ones my students had been working on for the last five weeks, on our immersion trip down to Mississippi. The idea of sitting around the fire, sharing memories was just too enticing to pass up.

I was a little surprised that no one objected, or even hesitated, when I made the suggestion the week before. We’d just come in from soccer and I was trying to figure out how we’d fit the projects, the tests and the presentations into the time we had left. There was a precedent. They’d read their first stories, the ones from the orientation cycle, on our first immersion and that had worked out well because it had given us an entire afternoon to have a great discussion. They seem actually to look forward to, what’s come to be called, “Teatime with Doctor.”

“What if,” I asked, a little quietly to one of the 8th graders, who’d been on the challenge course immersion the year before and happened to be walking by, “you read your memoirs around the campfire on immersion?”

“Yes.” Declarative and succinct. I raised an eyebrow, but he just continued on his way. I was a little surprised he did not have more to say. I’m always surprised when my students don’t have more to say. My students can be quite loquacious given any opportunity, and this one in particular tended to have strong opinions that he was usually more that willing to share.

The discussion with the rest of the class took barely longer. The larger the group, the more likely you are to have people who need to think out loud, but there were unanimous thumbs up in less than two minutes.

I think that there’s some primal need that gets stirred up by even the thought of sitting around a fire and sharing stories. Of course this plan of action also fulfilled that other fundamental need of the adolescent, the need to procrastinate.

II

We get to Camp H., have lunch, and an afternoon of community building games. Lamplighter’s been working with the camp leader here for years and Ms. A’s impressed by how well this group works together. No surreptitious sabotage, no subtle denigration, no stubborn unwillingness to participate.

We talk about the group, she and I, as we walk back to the cabin, red gravel crunching under our feet, oak leaves turning color overhead, and myself getting slightly out of breath on the last climb. I’m perhaps a little more impressed than she is because I can see the conflict in those by now familiar faces; glimpses of of baser instincts being overruled by the prefrontal cortex. It is a sight that is ambrosia to the middle school teacher.

I get back to our cabin and I find V., one of the two students I’d promised they could get the campfire going.

“Are you guys getting the fire started?” I ask.

“We’re just going to play football for a little while, then start on the fire,” he replies. V’s been our main supervisor for Student Run Business this cycle and it shows. He’s been breaking out his calm, clear, confident, supervisor voice on the challenges all afternoon.

“We have half an hour until dinner and it will probably be dark afterward,” I say.

He just nods, seething competence.

It’s 5:45 and they’re still playing football. I look at my watch more and more frequently. I’m not going to remind them of what they have to do. We’re Montessori after all.

Two of the girls start working on the fire pit. Aha, I think to myself, this is going to get interesting. I saunter outside and my path nonchalantly takes me down to the fire pit. I suggest more kindling, they never get enough kindling. The boys realize other people are working on “their” fire.

Dissension in the ranks. Conflict. I tell them they should work together. Harsh words are spoken. A covenant broken. The poignant cry of impassioned idealism, “injustice”. Things fall apart; the center does not hold; Bethlehem is apparently somewhere on the other side of the playing field.

Ten minutes later it’s time to go to dinner, but first it’s time to rebuild, time to remind them of the covenant they came up with that very afternoon, time to have a short, quiet talk about the use of language.

Over dinner the laughter starts up again. I’m at the other table with Ms. A and her family, all of whom work at the camp in some degree or the other. After the last fifteen minutes I’m extra impressed by the calmness of her teenagers.

When we get back to the fire pit the laughter is perhaps a bit too loud, but the group seems back together again. The fire is started without recrimination (eventually because they did not have enough kindling).

We sit around the fire, reading stories, finding issues, being helpful writing partners, and learning how important it is to be critical, brutal even, to our own work. There are some really good writers in the group, and there’s nothing better than learning from your peers.

“Can we put our memoirs in the fire when we’re done?”

“Sure,” I say. Sharing our writing is supposed to be a celebration. Something strikes me as just about right about liberating these memories in flame, letting them take on a new, ethereal life. Burning pages in dancing flame, marking the putting away of cherished, childhood things; an adolescent rite of passage.

As the last few stragglers work on putting out the fire I sit there, on a cool fall night, thinking about cycles and the seasons. I wish I was on the beach, watching the tide come in, small waves advancing and retreating, bigger waves pushing them farther from time to time, every time a little closer to where they need to be.

Montessori, cooperation and the Tragedy of the Commons

The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.
— Whitehead (1948) via Hardin (1968)

One of the greatest challenges in designing a cooperative environment is dealing with the potential for free-riding and abuse of shared resources. When dinner needs to be made but one member of the group will not participate everyone suffers, even those who contribute fully. Often, someone else or the rest of the group will step up and do the job of the free-rider, who has then achieved their objective. But what is the appropriate consequence? The social opprobrium of their peers is enough for some, others though seem unfazed.

Overuse of resources is a similar problem, which economists refer to as the tragedy of the commons (Hardin, 1968). When the extra-large bag of M&M’s is full, everyone can grab as many as they desire and everyone is happy. When resources are scarce, however, everyone grabbing is a recipe for disaster. Scarce resources need to be rationed in a way that everyone views as fair. Yet the rational behavior of the individual is to try to maximize their utility by taking as many as they need, regardless of the desires of everyone else, and especially if they’re first in line and no-one else is counting.

Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all. … The individual benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of which he is a part, suffers.
— Hardin (1968)

The market solution to the commons problems is to make them not commons. This is usually done by assigning property rights to the previously common resource and allowing the owners to trade. This puts a price on what was once a “free” resource. Of course the price was always there; someone or someones had to go without when the M&M’s ran out (resource depletion). Unfortunately this is particularly difficult when you dealing with a non-currency economy, though I’m sure it could be done.

Reading through Hardin’s original Tragedy of the Commons article it seem that if the embarrassment of violating social norms is insufficient incentive for temperance then some sort of mutually agreed form of coercion is necessary. Interestingly, Hardin was arguing for population control, but the point still stands.

We’re due to have the small groups discuss how the worked together over the last cycle so we’ll see how that goes, but I think we’ll have to discuss the issue of the commons as a whole group when we next have our discussion of classroom issues. I’d like to raise the point that what happens in the classroom is a microcosm of larger society and get in a little environmental economics at the same time.

Education can counteract the natural tendency to do the wrong thing, but the inexorable succession of generations requires that the basis for this knowledge be constantly refreshed.
— Hardin (1968)

Fractured thinking – How the internet affects how you think

While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress.

And scientists are discovering that even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist. In other words, this is also your brain off computers. Richtel, 2010

Matt Richtel has an intriguing article in the New York Times on how multitasking on computers is affecting the way people think. I don’t have a whole lot of time to get into it is a well resourced article citing work from researchers such as Clifford Nass, Eyal Ophir and Melina Uncapher at Stanford, Steven Yantis at Johns Hopkins, Daphne Bavelier at the University of Rochester, Gary Small at UCLA and Adam Gazzaley at UCSF.

Other choice quotes:

[Multi-taskers] had trouble filtering out … the irrelevant information.

multitaskers tended to search for new information rather than accept a reward for putting older, more valuable information to work.

that people interrupted by e-mail reported significantly increased stress compared with those left to focus. Stress hormones have been shown to reduce short-term memory

Finally, the article ends with a thought about how technology use affects our ability to relate to others.

Mr. Nass at Stanford thinks the ultimate risk of heavy technology use is that it diminishes empathy by limiting how much people engage with one another, even in the same room.

“The way we become more human is by paying attention to each other,” he said. “It shows how much you care.”

That empathy, Mr. Nass said, is essential to the human condition. “We are at an inflection point,” he said. “A significant fraction of people’s experiences are now fragmented.”

This work of course ties in with Nicholas Carr’s thesis that asks the question, “Is Google Making Us Stupid“. Carr’s book, “The Shallows” takes up the argument that we should spend less time online. While I tend to agree with Carr that we would benefit from more time offline, I really think his explanation that the invention of the press, and cheap books, lead to more deeper concentration (and that’s what we’re loosing now) needs a lot more evidence to back it up.