THINKER'S ALMANAC - March 2

How can the story of a mythological sculptor help us raise student achievement?

Subject:  Expectations - Pygmalion Effect

Event: Birthday of psychologist Robert Rosenthal, 1933

The visions we offer our children shape the future. It matters what those visions are. Often they become self-fulfilling prophecies. Dreams are maps. -Carl Sagan

An experiment was conducted in the 1960s that reveals the power of teacher expectations.  Harvard psychologist Robert Rosenthal -- who was born on this day in 1933 -- divided a group of elementary students into two evenly matched groups, based on age, sex, ethnic background, and IQ.  One-half of the students were assigned to teachers who were told that their pupils were above-average students and fast learners.  The other half were assigned to teachers who were told that their pupils were an average group.  One year later, when the students were assessed, the results showed that the students labeled “fast learners'' far surpassed the performance of the students who were labeled as “average.” 

Rosenthal’s study provided new insight into how the expectations of others affect us and how our own subjective perceptions can influence our behavior.  Furthermore, the research revealed that beliefs, biases, and expectations are much more than just abstractions that live in the mind; instead, they can be powerful forces that influence actual outcomes.

To name his discovery -- the Pygmalion effect -- Rosenthal turned to an ancient story told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses about a sculptor named Pygmalion who carved an ivory statue of his ideal woman.  After completing his work of art and naming her Galatea, Pygmalion fell deeply in love with his own creation. The sculptor then appealed to Venus, the goddess of love, to bring him a maiden as perfect as his Galatea.  Hearing the supplication, Venus transformed the statue into a living woman, who then married Pygmalion and bore him a daughter.

                                                        Image by Markus Baumeler from Pixabay 

To help teachers better understand the power of their teaching and their expectations of their students, Rosenthal published a book in 1968 called Pygmalion in the Classroom: Teacher Expectation and Pupils’ Intellectual Development.

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason: Who was Pygmalion? How does the Pygmalion Effect relate to learning? 

Challenge - It’s “Golem,” Not “Gollum”:  Do some research on the Golem effect.  What’s the origin of the effect’s name, and what exactly is the effect?  Hint: It’s not from the character in Lord of the Rings; that’s “Gollum.”

ALSO ON THIS DAY:

-March 2, 1904:  Today is the birthday of Theodore Geisel -- better known as Dr. Seuss, who said, “You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.”

-March 2, 1955:  On this day, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. This happened nine months before Civil Rights icon Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat.

Sources:

1-Goldberg, Philip.  The Babinski Reflex.  Tarcher, 1990.

THINKER'S ALMANAC - March 1

What does the mythological character Medusa have to do with television, and how can this comparison help us understand how to improve literacy?

Subject:  Schema Theory - Cultural Literacy

Event:  E.D Hirsh’s book Cultural Literacy:  What Every American Needs To Know published, 1987

The achievement of high universal literacy is the key to all other fundamental improvements in American education.  -E.D. Hirsh

On this day in 1987, the book Cultural Literacy:  What Every American Needs To Know was published by American educator E.D. Hirsch.  The basic premise of Hirsch’s bestselling book was that in order to be literate, students need fundamental background knowledge in a range of disciplines, including literature, geography, history, math, science, art, and music.  Hirsch argues that reading is more than just decoding words; comprehension requires a reader to possess knowledge of a shared body of cultural references.  

For example, imagine a student read the following sentence from Ray Bradbury:

The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.

                                                            Image by Marc Pascual from Pixabay 

To catch Bradbury’s full meaning and his negative attitude towards television, the reader needs to understand the mythological allusions -- or cultural references -- he makes to “Medusa” and “Siren.”  The mere ability to pronounce or read the words is not enough to capture the meaning and tone of the sentence.

Cultural literacy, then, is the body of core, essential knowledge of the people, places, ideas, and concepts that form the collective memory of our culture.  Hirsch’s cultural literacy is based on a concept from cognitive science known as “schema theory,” which attempts to understand how we learn and store knowledge.  According to this theory, new learning becomes integrated into mental learning webs, called “schemas.”  More than just storing a new idea in our memory, we integrate the new learning by connecting it to existing learning.  In addition to our own unique individual schemas, there are also shared schemas based on common experiences.  These shared schemas are the basis of Hirsch’s cultural literacy. For Hirsch, an essential element of education should be paying attention to building students’ cultural literacy:

We have ignored cultural literacy in thinking about education.  We ignore the air we breathe until it is thin or foul.  Cultural literacy is the oxygen of social intercourse. 

In addition to defining and arguing for cultural literacy in his book, Hirsch also included a 63-page appendix where he listed 5,000 subjects and concepts to illustrate the kind of specific cultural references that every literate person should know.  Below is a sample of some of the terms:

ad hoc, Adam and Eve, Battle of the Bulge, Beatniks, capital punishment, Camelot, Emily Dickinson, The Divine Comedy, elementary particles, Epicureanism, The Federalist Papers, free will, Lady Godiva, gerrymander, hyperbole, Edward Hopper, isolationism, Irish potato famine, Jakarta, Judas Iscariot, King Lear, kitsch, Robert E. Lee, Lilliput, Ferdinand Magellan, Magna Carta, Neptune, Nineteen Eighty-Four, oxymoron, Oedipus, paranoid schizophrenia, pasteurization, beg the question, quod erat demonstrandum (Q.E.D.), The Red Badge of Courage, rank and file, sarcasm, Scylla and Charybdis, Tower of Babel, twin paradox, Ursa Minor, unilateralism, Venus de Milo, Voltaire, white elephant, Woodstock, X-chromosome, xenophobia, yellow journalism, yin and yang, Zeus, Zionism

In 1989, Hirsch published The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, a book that gives a brief definition of each cultural reference (1).

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  How do we learn new ideas according to Hirsch’s cultural literacy (schema theory)? What metaphor did Hirsch use to illustrate how important cultural literacy is to human interactions and learning.

Challenge - Allusion Alphabet:  What would you say are allusions – cultural references from history, religion, mythology, or literature – that everyone should know?  Create an Allusion Alphabet that includes people, places, and ideas that you think are essential elements of cultural literacy; include at least one reference for each of the 26 letters of the alphabet.  Once you have your alphabet, write a report on one of your allusions.  Imagine you are writing to a person who is unfamiliar with the term.  In addition to giving essential background details on the who, what, when, and where of your term, give the reader some explanation on why this concept is so important. 

ALSO ON THIS DAY:

-March 1 (Every Year):  Today is National Pig Day, established on this day in 1972 to raise awareness and appreciation of pigs.  It’s the perfect day to contemplate the following quotation from John Stuart Mill:  

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.

-March 1, 1984:  On this day the book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion was published by Robert Cialdini who said, “We all fool ourselves from time to time in order to keep our thoughts and beliefs consistent with what we have already done or decided.”

-March 1, 1988:  The book Brief History of Time was published on this day in 1988 by Stephen Hawking, who said, "In my opinion, there is no aspect of reality beyond the reach of the human mind."

Sources:

1-Hirsh, E.D. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know.  New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. 

THINKER'S ALMANAC - February 28

What powerful new form of writing did a man invent on his birthday in 1571?

Subject: Thinking and Writing - Montaigne’s Essays

Event:  Montaigne begins writing essays, 1571

The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.  –William H. Gass

On this day in 1571 in Bordeaux, France, a nobleman named Michel de Montaigne sat down to write.  It was his 38th birthday, and he had just retired from public life, where he held a seat in the Bordeaux parliament.  What Montaigne wrote that day and what he would write for the next twenty years influenced countless future thinkers and writers.

                                                                    Image by Blue_Fire from Pixabay 

Montaigne wrote essays, but he wasn’t just writing essays, he was inventing the genre.  He called his compositions “essais” from the French verb “essayer” meaning “to try.”  An essay, therefore, is an “attempt” or a “trial” where the writer attempts to address a question and figure it out (1).  Unlike the concept we have today of beginning an essay with a thesis – a claim or statement of belief – the original idea of the essay was instead to begin with a question.  The attempt to answer this question in writing then becomes the process by which a writer explores his or her thinking, getting ideas down on paper so that they can be examined.  The act of writing, then, becomes the act of forming ideas and exploring those ideas so that the writer knows what he or she really thinks.  In this sense the essay becomes a form of metacognition -- thinking about your own thinking.  The abstract thoughts of a writer are transformed into visible words on paper.  This allows writers to see what they know and what they don’t know.  By further rumination, examination, and revision of those thoughts, they can crystallize their thoughts, making them more clear to themselves and to an audience.

Montaigne’s essays were intensely personal.  He wrote about sleep, smells, idleness, anger, repentance, and thumbs, but his main subject was always himself.  By expressing and exploring ideas about himself in writing, he 

discovered that he not only understood himself better, but also understood his own thoughts and his own thoughts about the world.

For example, in the following excerpt from his essay entitled “On the Inconstancy of Our Actions,” notice how Montaigne explores the idea of inconsistent human behavior by honestly confronting his own character and actions:

For my part, the puff of every accident not only carries me along with it according to its own proclivity, but moreover I discompose and trouble myself by the instability of my own posture; and whoever will look narrowly into his own bosom, will hardly find himself twice in the same condition. I give to my soul sometimes one face and sometimes another, according to the side I turn her to. If I speak variously of myself, it is because I consider myself variously; all the contrarieties are there to be found in one corner or another; after one fashion or another: bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful; prating, silent; laborious, delicate; ingenious, heavy; melancholic, pleasant; lying, true; knowing, ignorant; liberal, covetous, and prodigal: I find all this in myself, more or less, according as I turn myself about; and whoever will sift himself to the bottom, will find in himself, and even in his own judgment, this volubility and discordance. I have nothing to say of myself entirely, simply, and solidly without mixture and confusion. (2)

Montaigne reminds us of the power of writing not just as a way of expressing what we know, but also of discovering what we know by getting our thinking down on paper.  When we write, therefore, we aren’t just learning how to write, we are writing to learn.

Read the four quotations below, noting how each of the writers vividly illustrates the connection between thinking and writing:

Writers take thoughts from the invisible mind and make them visible on paper.  They can then contemplate this objectified thought and revise it until it becomes the best thinking of which they are capable.  -R.D. Walshe

Writing is a way of freezing our thinking, of slowing down the thoughts that pass through our consciousness at lightning speed, so that we can examine our views and alter them if appropriate.  Writing enables us to note inconsistencies, logical flaws, and areas that would benefit from additional clarity. -Dennis Sparks

Writing enables us to find out what we know — and what we don’t know — about whatever we’re trying to learn.  Putting an idea into written words is like defrosting the windshield:  the idea, so vague out there in the murk, slowly begins to gather itself into shape. -William Zinsser

Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well. So it does matter to have an audience. The things I’ve written just for myself are no good. They tend to peter out. When I run into difficulties, I find I conclude with a few vague questions and then drift off to get a cup of tea.  -Paul Graham

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  What kind of essays did Montaigne write, and what can we learn from him about the power of writing?

Challenge - Thinking in Ink:  What is a question that you have about some aspect of universal human experience, such as anger, happiness, love, lying, or marriage?  Select a universal human theme and form a question about that theme that you do not have a definitive answer to.  Explore that question in a personal essay by writing about different ways the question might be answered and by answering it based on your own memory, observations, and experiences. Don’t commit yourself to supporting a single thesis; instead, try to truly explore your own ideas in writing to see what new thinking emerges.

Sources:

1-”Michel de Montaigne.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

2-Montaigne, Michel de. “On the Inconstancy of Our Actions.” Quotidiana.org

Reading Check:

-When Montaigne first invented it, what was the purpose of an essay?

-What is the key benefit of writing, according to Dennis Sparks?

THINKER'S ALMANAC - February 27

What is the most ironic thing about Alanis Morissette’s 1996 hit “Ironic”?

Subject:  Irony - The Song “Ironic”

Event:  Alanis Morissette releases the song “Ironic,” 1996

On this day in 1996, singer-songwriter Alanis Morissette released her song “Ironic,” a song from her album Jagged Little Pill.  Although the song was a hit, reaching number 4 on the Billboard Top 100, the song’s title “Ironic” is a misnomer.  As you can see by the lyrics of  the song’s chorus, for example, the situations described may be unfortunate, but they are not ironic:

It’s like rain on your wedding day

It’s a free ride when you’ve already paid

It’s the good advice that you just didn’t take

Who would’ve thought, it figures

                                                                Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay 

To understand the concept of irony, it’s necessary to understand its various forms, forms that relate to spoken language (Verbal Irony), to real life situations (Situational Irony), and to literary situations (Dramatic Irony):

Verbal Irony:  A type of figurative language where someone intentionally says one thing while meaning another thing, usually the exact opposite.  This usually involves the use of overstatement or understatement, as in “I can’t wait to get home and get to work on my 10 hours of homework” or “Yeah, Michael Jordan is a pretty good basketball player.”  One specific subclass of verbal irony is sarcasm, which is irony that is used to insult or to cause harm.

Situational Irony:  Irony that involves a situation in which actions have an effect that is opposite from what was intended or when there is a discrepancy between what is expected to happen and what actually happens.  For example, rain on your wedding day is not ironic but a fire station that burns down is.

Dramatic Irony:  This type of irony occurs in fiction and involves events in a story where the audience is aware of something that the characters in the story are not.  For example, in Romeo and Juliet this occurs when Juliet’s father and mother are planning her marriage to Paris.  The audience knows that Juliet is already married to Romeo, but the Capulets are clueless. 

Based on these definitions we can conclude that the only thing ironic about Morissette’s song is that a song that is entitled “Ironic” contains nothing ironic.

Probably the best thing about Morissette’s song is that it spawned a website devoted entirely to the topic of irony called IsItIronic.com.  Founded by Paul Lowton in 2006, the mission of IsItIronic.com is to provide a writer’s resource for definitions and examples of irony.  At the site, readers can submit their own questions, such as “Is it ironic that there was a hotdog eating contest to raise money for obesity awareness?”  Readers at the website are also invited to calibrate their own sense of true irony by voting on the questions submitted.  

The following are irony questions submitted by readers.  Each is followed by the percentage of readers who answered, “Yes, it is ironic.”:

-Is it ironic if you have a phobia of long words you have to tell people that you have hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia?  (91%)

-Is it ironic that: It takes sadness to know what happiness is. It takes noise to appreciate silence, and absence to value presence”? (63%)

-Is it ironic that a student spells every word on a spelling test wrong except for the word illiterate? (85%)

-Is it ironic that I cut myself on a first aid box? (84%)

-Is it ironic that a tree dedicated to George Harrison has been killed by Beetles? (65%) (1)

  

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  What are three different kinds of irony, and how is each distinctly different?

Challenge - Truly Ironic Truisms:  Often some of the most profound statements have a twinge of irony that makes the reader stop and think.  Notice the irony in the following three quotations by three philosophers:

Common sense is the most widely shared commodity in the world, for every man is convinced that he is well supplied with it. -Rene Descartes

The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.  -Socrates

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. -Voltaire

Research quotations that contain irony.  Find one that you like, and quote it.  Then, explain why you like it.

ALSO ON THIS DAY:  

-February 27, 1861:  Philosopher and educator Rudolf Steiner was born, 1861.  He once said, “It is important that we discover an educational method where people learn to learn and go on learning their whole lives.”

-February 27, 2004:  The New York Times published an article documenting that of the 3,250 walk buttons at crosswalks in the Big Apple, more than 2,500 do not function, making them, in effect, mechanical placebo buttons.

Sources:

1-”Ironic Alanis Morissette - The Song Has No Irony” Is It Ironic website.

Reading Check:

-How is verbal irony different from dramatic irony?

-What is the most ironic thing about Alanis Morissette’s song “Ironic”?

THINKER'S ALMANAC - February 26

How can the closing argument of O.J. Simpson’s attorney in his 1995 murder trial help us to understand how to be more persuasive?

Subject:  Fallacy of the Single Cause - “Give Me One Reason”

Event:  Tracy Chapman wins Best Rock Song, 1997 

What song won the Grammy for Best Rock song on this day in 1997?  The answer to this question has a single right answer:  “Give Me One Reason” by Tracy Chapman.

Simple factual questions like this have a single right answer; however, life is full of questions that are much more complex, such as the following ones:

-Why did Rome fall?

-Why did a serial killer like Ted Bundy become such an evil person?

-Why has there been an increase in the number of school shootings over the past 20 years in the United States?

Despite the fact that these questions cannot be answered with a single, straightforward reason, we nevertheless instinctively tend to oversimplify our complex world by satisfying ourselves with a single root cause.  

                                                            Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay 

As Tracy Chapman reminds us, we are too often fixated and satisfied with “one reason” or cause when we should realize that most “effects” come about from multiple “causes.”  In the world of logic, this error is known as the fallacy of the single cause (also known as causal reductionism or causal oversimplification).

One classic example of where the fallacy of the single cause might have come into play is the murder trial of O.J. Simpson in 1995. On September 28, 1995, Simpson’s trial was finally wrapping up after 11 months.  Of the millions of words presented to the jury, it was just seven words proclaimed on that September day that stood out.  Defense Attorney Johnnie Cochran was speaking to the jury about a key piece of evidence, a pair of gloves found at the scene of the crime.  Earlier in the trial when the prosecution requested that Simpson put on the gloves, it appeared that the gloves were too small for Simpson’s hands.  Cochran was reminding the jury of this fact during his closing argument, saying “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”  A few days later, as the entire nation watched, the jury announced their verdict:  not guilty.

Jurors might have looked at the whole range of evidence and testimony that was presented to them over the eleven months of the trial; nevertheless, Cochran’s closing argument opened the door for them to acquit Simpson based on a single reason: the glove didn't fit (1).

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  What does the fallacy of the single cause tell us about how our thinking can go wrong?

Challenge - When Less is Not More:  What is an example of a complex question that people might try to oversimplify by identifying a single cause?  Explain why the question is too complex to be answered with a single cause.

Sources:

Dobelli, Rolf.  The Art of Thinking Clearly New York:  Harper Paperback, 2014. 

Reading Check:

-What error in thinking is revealed by the “fallacy of the single cause”?

-How did Defense Attorney Johnnie Cochran capitalize on the “fallacy of the single cause” in his final argument at the murder trial of O.J. Simpson?