Tryangulation

Schools around the world are earthquake death traps

A lot of the news about the earthquake this week in China emphasized the tragedy of students trapped and dying in poorly built schools. Unfortunately, outrageously, perversely, school buildings around the world are potential earthquake death traps. Remember Pakistan, where 7000-plus schools killed 17,000 students?

On Thursday the New York Times published an article by Andrew Revkin on this global threat. Revkin writes:

Experts on earthquake dangers have warned for years that tens of millions of students in thousands of schools, from Asia to the Americas, face similar risks, yet programs to reinforce existing schools or require that new ones be built to extra-sturdy standards are inconsistent, slow and inadequately financed.

Revkin cited an OECD report that states "schools 'routinely collapsed in earthquakes around the world because of avoidable design or construction errors, or because existing laws and building codes were not enforced." That last bit was a polite way of saying "corruption" -- the allowance of poor design and pathetic construction in exchange for personal favors. Here in Turkey, construction contractors have a nasty habit of fleeing the country when their buildings kill people, so the system apparently works --for them.

The reports by Revkin reminded me again of the latest such tragedy we witnessed here in Turkey. Five years ago this month, an earthquake in the Southeast killed nearly 170 people. Half of those killed were public boarding school students in a single dormitory building (click here for the CNN report). More than 90% of the schools in the area were affected by that quake.

Revkin has also published a background story (click here) and links the Coalition for Global School Safety (COGSS). It's horrible to think about, I know, but is your children's school earthquake/ tornado/ disaster safe? How do you know? As the COGSS Turkey case study says,

It is better to be ten years too early than one day too late.

The photo was taken by Chen Jianli, Xinhua/Reuters, and is titled A rescuer held the hand of  a trapped student at Wudu Primary School. (image link)

Don't just sing along

I found out about this song today by way of CC Long on the Classroom 2.0 social network. It's Tom Chapin singing Not on the Test. One stanza goes like this:

Thinking's important. It's good to know how.
And someday youll learn to, but someday's not now.
Go on to sleep now. You need your rest.
Don't think about thinking. it's not on the test.

CC had a link to this NPR broadcast clip (link here), but I dug a little deeper and found that the song has its own website, Notonthetest.com, with additional lyrics that include a stanza about the US education policy package called No Child Left Behind. The website is actually advocating for more art and other programs to stimulate creativity, which are being wedged out of education that targets test performance rather than knowledge.

The website also provides suggestions for parents on how to lobby for change, although education policy out here in the rest of the world might be far less  susceptible to parental influence. Here, for example, the system is highly centralized with a rigid national curriculum that shackles students to test scores even though its leaders know it shouldn't (here's something I wrote recently about that unfortunate irony). Still, pressing for change is always better than just singing along.

Whether we work together or apart

Last week when I shared our little flower's survival of winter and good intentions, I prefaced my post with a line from a Robert Frost poem, Mending Wall. While I was setting up the previous post just now about a local newspaper covering the reappearance of the flowers in the wild, I sorted through my own old photographs, too impatient to hold out for this year's crop of photos.

I found this one, which I had taken a couple miles from where we collected seeds. This image is perfect for another of my favorite Frost poems, The Tuft of Flowers, which, in its own way, is also fitting for all kinds of virtual co-labor.

The poem relates the melancholy of a field worker alone on a beautiful morning, after his co-laborer has moved on:

But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must be, as he had been,--alone,
`As all must be,' I said within my heart,
`Whether they work together or apart.'

The laborer is then surprised that his unseen partner has  left uncut a  tuft of flowers growing among the hay:

A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.
I left my place to know them by their name,
Finding them butterfly weed when I came.

The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
By leaving them to flourish, not for us,
Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him.
But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.

Even though his coworker is still out of sight and earshot, this shared beauty unites their spirits and joins their separate tasks into one labor. We too can find things of beauty and leave them for our co-laborers in the next field, or across time.

... and feel a spirit kindred to my own;
So that henceforth I worked no more alone;
But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;

And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.
`Men work together,' I told him from the heart,
`Whether they work together or apart.'

They noticed!

It was encouraging to see in the Today's Zaman online edition that our little flowers --or rather their still wild cousins-- got some press. Last year I didn't go out to the meadow where we collect seeds, so I didn't realize until reading this new article by Zaman that they were down to an area of only 30 square meters. I'm going to use that news article to do some campaigning!

Goverment says too many exams harmful; gives more exams

Dear US educators: for a hard look at the logical extreme of teaching to the test, watch the news from here.

We've been too hard on the dears...

Stating that the current exam system in Turkey is turning students into workaholics, The Minister of Education Hüseyin Çelik said this week that (roughly translated)

of course we are preparing our children for higher education, but our goal is also an education that prepares them for life, provides opportunity for play, and ensures their happiness (literally, love and kindness).

He asserted that the Ministry's Counseling Research Center is researching exam trauma to find solutions to the problems that, admittedly, the education system itself has created. He added that the Ministry intends to improve the quality of education, which means introducing new educational methods, since "wrong methods don't bring right results."

... but they can't ALL go to university, you know

I suppose the reporters at that press conference forgot to ask the Minister about the news from two weeks ago, that reported an alarming increase in the enrollment at after-school exam prep courses. Traditionally, exam anxiety becomes a marketable commodity during 7th grade, as students get prepared for the post-8th grade OKS exam that determines their options for high school. This mania accelerates during high school as students prepare for the dreaded ÖSS university entrance exam (more precisely the university elimination exam), which I've written about here, here, and here.

The notorious 8th grade exam has been abolished, but in its place are new exams given over three years, whose average will be just as weighty as the old OKS. Enrollment at weekend exam prep courses has nearly doubled as students from 4th, 5th and 6th grades are now being registered by nervous parents. Word is spreading that many schools are still teaching to the old test, and that without outside help, unprepared 4th graders might miss their chance for the right university and specialization.

The increasingly detrimental exam system here is an administrative --not educational-- solution for the university openings available for only a fraction of the number of students who want to continue their studies. The purpose of the exams may be different from the US, but from here we can see the how 12 years of teaching to the test takes its toll on curiosity, creativity, and learning skills for self-directed learning. Take heed.

Türkçe haberlerini okumak için linkleri tıklayınız;

Radikal: Çocuklar 'sınavkolik' oldu 

Radikal: Milli Eğitim ne yapsa dershanelere yarıyor

World Malaria Day

My wife brought to my attention just a few hours ago that today is World Malaria Day. I am a malaria survivor, and since my personal ordeal I need to do my part to promote more awareness of this disease.

Each year malaria infects more than half a billion people and kills more than a million. Most of those who die did not have what I had going for me: general good health and adequate body weight prior to the disease, and access to medical care and medicine.

Like so many preventable diseases that continue to ravage the underdeveloped world, malaria is so devastating because of poverty and powerlessness. Access to basic resources and information goes a long way to fighting malaria, dysentery, tuberculosis and other killers of millions each year.

For more information, you can see the officlal World Malaria Day website, or this excellent article on Wikipedia. The world needs young people who are inspired to put their knowledge and creativity to work to change the world. We can all help fan the flame.

Something there is that doesn't love a row

Newer readers might not be aware of my contentious school project to protect the beautiful and critically endangered Centaurea tchihattcheffi (yanardöner in Turkish). The natural habitat of this nearly extinct species of the cornflower family is in the vicinity of our school, and for the past few years two of our science teachers and I have bravely fought to propagate seeds on our campus  (click here for photos and text from a happier time).

The flower's habitat is threatened by large scale agriculture, Ankara's urban sprawl and, ironically, its failure to be noticed (behavior which I have commented on before). After first collecting seeds in the wild (natural habitat pix here), we carefully prepared a plot close enough to be observed, but just out of the school bus and recess commotion. For a couple years following, we (that is, I) collected seeds, cleaned and sorted them, and then recruited students and colleagues to get a little dirty in the name of species diversity, sowing the seeds in our gradually increasing garden.

Who would have thought three years ago that we ourselves were a threat to our centaurea's survival?

Like I wrote recently concerning the local aversion to disorder, straight lines and right angles are the norm for flower gardens, and our nonconformist self-seeding weeds were a threat to that system. Our well meaning grounds crews and I were constantly in a race, they to restore order, and I to protect disheveled nature. As soon as I got one crew and crew chief on board with the project, they would be reassigned and new workers would show up, hustling to clean up the mess their predecessors apparently had left behind.

I was away for the entire fall semester this year, a critical time for fending off welldoers. When I returned to school in February I was disheartened to see that orderliness had finally won out: the garden was neatly hoed and planted with shrubs in straight little rows.  The notion of death by PBL crossed my mind.

A few weeks ago I finally went out to see if anything had survived, and felt the faintest whisper of hope when I found that there were, in fact, a few buds creeping out of the ground. I went back today and saw that quite a few more were popping up at the edges of the plot. I found the newest commander of the gardeners (the 4th in the lifetime of this project) and together we assessed the state of the plot and agreed on a plan and a compromise: once the centaurea were in bloom and easy to spot, workers could go in among them and pull up the other less desirable weeds.

While we were examining the grounds, we found that two had bloomed. I took some quick shots with my mobile phone, as evidence that our project had survived all our best efforts at project based learning.

The title of this post is adapted from the poem Mending Wall, by Robert Frost. The photo is unretouched, taken under heavily overcast skies.

homophily self exam

...another serendipitous step between ancient and new paradigms, and one more flat earth story.

I've been following a blog by Ethan Zuckerman called ...My heart's in Acra, where he writes about international development and using the disruptive quality of the web in global activism. Zuckerman just posted a link yesterday to Amy Gahran's Contentious blog, where she picks up on an interview  Zuckerman did where he brought up the notion of homophily.

Wikipedia defines homophily as "the tendency of individuals to associate and bond with similar others." These similarities could be based on ethnic identity, socioeconomic status, political views or religious beliefs. Whatever the bond, the result is easier communication between like individuals, and more difficult communication between unlike individuals. As Zuckerman says, "homophily makes you stupid."

Gahran's post Breaking out of the echo chamber does an excellent job of  bringing together Zuckerman's and her own ideas, along with some other resources on the topic. What's on my mind, though, is how to check whether I am homophily positive.

I just did a quick check and saw that, of nearly 120 feeds in my aggregator, about one-third are about education, and half of those are about ed tech.  Several, but not many, are about politics, and an equal number are about underdevelopment and changing the world.  I gravitate toward one Turkish newspaper, two English language cable news channels, and generally choose the documentaries and books that reinforce what I already believe and know. In previous jobs and in previous places I experienced more --sometimes continuous-- challenges to my "knowledge."  "Knowing more" now has possibly resulted in learning less.

The photo here shows don Benjamín Ortiz, one of a select group of people who taught me how my "knowledge" had shielded me from the truth. Benjamín is Guatemalan, a native speaker of the Mayan language Takaneko, and a coworker during the three years we did ethnolinguistic research and assessed the viability of mother tongue literacy.

Family and national circumstances being against him, Benjamín attended school for only two years before going to work. As an adult, he was recruited into a rural health promoter program, which inspired him to finish primary school by correspondence. During our first year together he successfully finished 6th grade. Sometimes we went through his textbooks together, and one day we looked at a geography lesson that explained that the earth is round.

This concept was completely outside his experience and reasoning. "If the world is round," he said, "then why are all pictures of the world flat?" Challenged, I tried to draw the continents on an orange, but at that scale Guatemala was just a speck. It was outrageous that this rugged, mountainous country, where 200 miles makes for a 12-hour journey, counted for nothing.

I wrote about this conversation in a letter to a friend in the US, who kindly sent back a beach ball globe. Benjamín and I spent a lot of time studying it, playing with a flashlight to figure out night and day, pondering imponderables such as why were my in-laws in Morocco going to bed when we in Guatemala were just having breakfast.

Benjamín's willingness to let me challenge such a commonly held belief stood in sharp contrast to my own inflexibility. I had dual degrees in Spanish language and Latin American studies, trained for ethnolinguistic fieldwork, and armed with the weapon that laid all knowledge captive at my feet: literacy. I showed up on the scene equipped with an understanding of the geographic, economic, and historical reasons for poverty, and ready to use demographics and dialectology to decide the fate of a language.

I was ashamed that these tools did not prepare me for life with no electricity, no bathroom, and nearly no water. Hamlets wiped out by measles. Legitimate crops destroyed instead of poppies in the US' war on drugs. Aching, crushing poverty that forced families to pull children from school because they couldn't afford pencils. The arrogance of the government doctor who showed up for two days every two weeks and let Benjamín's sister die without treatment. An entire society that functioned without the printed word. The truth was, all my learning did not prepare me for knowing people whose lives were so different from my own.

The only way out then, as now, was to start over, discarding the assumptions that kept me from seeing what I needed to see.  I still need to accept that I might be wrong, or at least that others can be right, suppress the arguments in my head, and learn things over.
 

Flat worlds of all sorts

As a brief stop on the way from ancient information technologies to the problem of paradigm shifts,  I have to share this video my son pointed me to. The video is a clip of a televised debate from Iraq on whether the Koran permits belief in the round earth theory. The content is disturbing, but maybe not for the reasons you think. If you're reading this via email, click here to see the video.

This poor man is mistaken, but not because he is a Muslim.  Muslim scholars --in Baghdad, no less-- began to reason out a methodology for empirical observation a thousand years ago. Islamic astronomers proposed earth's heliocentric orbit starting from the 8th century, and earth's rotation by the 11th century. Muslim scholars of that period built upon the knowledge of the ancient Greeks, who already had theories about a spherical earth; in the 9th century Arab astronomers even calculated the earth's circumference (they missed it by a few thousand miles), and developed spherical trigonometry to calculate the direction of Mecca from any point on the globe.

Non-critical thinking is not the intent of any religion. All of the monotheist faiths see the intellect and the ability to reason as divine gifts. So what has happened to our poor man with the thick glasses and the anesthetized mind? Why does he hold his beliefs so tenaciously? Does he build arguments upon arguments to protect some hidden, vulnerable thought? Is this part of the famous clash of civilizations?

No, this is a clash of epistemologies. The poor man is mistaken because his paradigm leads him to believe that most knowledge necessary for a good life has already been "revealed" and we should not be worried too much about creating new knowledge. Observe how his feeble empiricism is affected by this grid: he believes a distant ship's narrow masts are easier to see in a blur than the bulky hull, and the eye sees the world with half of the iris at a time (when in fact he is describing very well how the world looks through bifocals).

The scientist, on the other hand, demonstrates an attitude that knowledge continues to be created as we observe and reason. I think he could have made some better arguments, but at least he showed --without attacking one's faith-- that although we still don't know it all, we have the divine gifts of intellect and reason to help us along. 

I love maps, (here's one of my faves) and I enjoy the paradox that maps, in order to represent certain features of the terrain, must distort or omit the representation of other features. Paradigms are like that: they only work when they block extraneous chunks from your view of the whole. Just as "the map is not the territory", so a single paradigm does not encompass the whole of our knowledge and experience. Your world is flat only if you ignore the spiky parts; my problem (actually, it's your problem) is that the spiky parts are what I notice most. Even contemporary, Western scientists have impeded the advance of science because certain things just "couldn't be true."

Some time ago I wrote about dolphins swimming through the center of Istanbul, and the total indifference of those around me to this marvel. I still wonder about that, and about us. What do we fail to see because we are unaware of our own biases and have already made up our minds?

reminder to self

   

The brief history of an idea

Brief note: I'll get back to the discussion on ancient and modern paradigms after a post or two to sort this out.

Once again I'm probably too slow, but that's one of the problems I've been thinking about. I hope some of the suggestions at the end can give a more positive and encouraging spin on some of the frustration.

Once upon a time several years ago our teenage son came home from school with this little guy. "Honest, he followed me home all by himself." Right. Never mind that Sam is a cat magnet (here's proof) and that he offered better prospects of a warm house, good food and lots of attention. 

We knew little Mutlu was not a street cat because he was so affectionate and so trusting.  And devastatingly cute. Still, for some reason he was apparently homeless. We already had a cat who wasn't fond of animals (she's never learned the brutal truth about herself), so Mutlu had to go.   I took this photo to deliberately tug at hearts and get people to think twice before saying no to offering a home.

Little Mutlu's story is very loosely an allegory for an experience I had a week or so ago. I wrote a post, and a phrase I used in passing was repeated by a very popular edublogger, who then added some of his own thoughts. Another very popular edublogger wrote a comment there, and then carried his version of the idea further on his own blog.

Having a pretty full work week and living in GMT+3, it easily takes me 2 or 3 days to read even the A list edublogs on my feed reader.  So some time after my post I had a pleasant surprise to see that I got mentioned. My emotions changed, though, as I saw how much commenting happened on those two popular blogs, while I didn't get any action on my own blog. It felt like my little half baked idea wandered off like Mutlu, looking for a better deal. 

My disappointment wasn't about getting enough credit, or drawing enough traffic to my sight, or getting a better rank. Rather, I missed out on a chance to interact more directly with people, put my ideas to the test more and feel more a part of "the conversation." Since then I've had some good correspondence with both of the bloggers involved, and they've been very generous with their thoughts and forgiving of my whining, but it's my lot in life to think too much about conversations and community and emotions.

Not long after, and not at all because of my metaphorical Mutlu and me, there has been a surprising amount of buzz in the edublogosphere about blogging elites at cocktail parties, leaving a lot of people frustrated and feeling like outsiders.  Wow. That didn't exactly cheer me up, and although a lot of the popular (and very good) guys had very good arguments that there is no inside and that everyone gets lonely, that you've got to be true to yourself, regain some perspective, and not let the apparent imbalances get to you -- in spite of that, I've learned through the years that if a lot of people feel like something is wrong, it's probably because something is wrong.

One thing that bugged me --and I saw it happen again just last week with someone else-- is that the conversations keep drifting to the blogs everyone focuses on. It's not their fault, it's crowd behavior. We read those blogs first, we want to write our comments there (who wouldn't?), and then we've run out of time or interest to read other blogs and write more comments. With my time schedule and slow brain (and a peripheral time zone) -- most days the read/write web is the either you read or you write web.  It takes a lot of work to do both.

What to do? I have a few ideas for making the edublogosphere feel a little more encouraging, seasoned with a little doing unto others, and letting what goes around come around. You're free to add your own ideas.

1. Slow down. Take maybe 10% of the time you devote to your own blog, and use it to read a little more broadly, think a little longer, comment on some blogs you don't visit very much. Shifting gears is good for the brain, so you'll benefit, and your comments will leave some feedback that those bloggers have been craving (and I'm not talking about stats here, I'm talking about engagement).
2. Stop. As a variation on #1, let's all declare a blog holiday: everyone refrains from publishing blog posts for one day, and just comments, again preferably on blogs you haven't focused on lately. Face it, just about any blog --even the top 1000-- or its readership, would not suffer if it's volume were reduced by 5% or so. In return, more people will have a little more time to read what you've already got, and maybe give you some interesting feedback you otherwise would have missed. We slow thinkers actually have things to say now and then, so give us a chance.
3. Don't keep every kitten that comes to your door. Encourage threads to loop back to their starting place somehow. Jon cited a comment by Vicki (couldn't find a link) that the conversation doesn't belong to anyone in particular. She's probably right, to a point. But at the same time  we could gain more by giving a hearing to the new voice that goes with the new idea.
4. Give one another the benefit of the doubt. Overall, people have been very patient with each other through this discussion, even though comment writing is right down there with email for being a poor vehicle for communicating emotion and nuance. We don't really want all the buzz to be about this anyway, do we?
5. Cross over. Jon got a traffic spike by writing about swimwear. I thought about turning this into a cat blog, but since Mutlu left, this is all I have to work with (link).
6. #5 was a joke, OK? We're all working to make a difference and blogs are just one part of that. We can go a little easier on ourselves as we try to take in the bigger picture.
   

An apology: I have lost track of the connection among several of the comments, and comments on comments. If I've missed a link, please add it in the comments.

The Babylonian backup, 1500 B.C.

In Turkey we don't use file drawers very much. Instead we use clear sheet protectors (thousands of them) in big binders like the one you see here. Sometimes I'll include a CD with a backup of the files in the binder. Very useful, and apparently just a recent version of a very old idea.

After the discovery of inscriptions in Luwian Hittite hieroglyphs and Phoenician script at Aslantaş, and tens of thousands of multilingual cuneiform clay tablets at sites like Hattusa and Kültepe, archaeologists went to work to decipher the hieroglyphs. Since they already knew both Phoenecian writing and cuneiform in other languages, they could use them to triangulate (love that word!) the meanings of the Hittite symbols  and work out those thousands of Hittite tablets.

The Hittites borrowed cuneiform writing from neighboring Babylonians, Assyrians and other peoples, and they also borrowed the uses for such a versatile writing system. Invoices, prayers, business contracts, horoscopes, trial outcomes, even textbooks and student worksheets (similar to the one in the banner of this blog), have been found by the thousands. Bureaucracy especially  thrived with this new medium for tracking the minutiae of a world power.

Several world powers later and we're still pushing paper. That is to say, much of what we put on paper the ancients put on clay. One problem: while soft clay is great for writing cuneiform and wiping mistakes clean, once a tablet is dry you have the risk of breakage, or at least a chipped codicil.

Ancient Mesopotamians worked around this by making a clay envelope that completely covered the valuable document. Along the exterior of this still soft envelope a scribe would write a copy of the interior text. If anything happened to the envelope, the inner tablet would stay intact, at least long enough to make another copy.

Next: Where are the boundaries of a paradigm?