TED Talk Tuesday: Part 2

I don’t usually stray into poetry and literature here at No Longer Normal, but this was an interesting exploration of visual and poetry. Also, Billy Collins has an amazingly entertaining delivery, and the poem about an adolescent girl at the end is hilarious. It is worth the whole thing just for that!

An Impressive Word of Encouragement

Thanks to several of my Messiah friends and the Messiah College Facebook page for pointing out this video this morning from Joni and Friends. In the video, Joni Eareckson Tada speaks about the work of the Collaboratory, and how they’ve partnered with her ministry to reach out to people with disabilities around the world. Check it out!

The Power of Introverts

This is an amazing and powerful talk from Susan Cain at TED this year about the power of introverts. She suggests that our current education and work environments have shifted from catered toward introverts to heavily favoring extroverts. She asks for us to provide space for both. This is worth the listen, and consideration for everyone, especially those in management or education. Can’t help but think about some of my favorite introverts, like my dad the pastor, my friend, blogger, and writing cabin fan John Fea, and funny and creative mom and blogger Cindy King.

We’ve Got Great Alumni

Here is the latest example of our great alumni in the Department of Information and Mathematical Sciences here at Messiah College. In the controversial rankings of 4th through 8th grade teachers in New York City, class of 2005 alumna Kelly (Toolan) Hudson is listed as the 10th best mathematics teacher in the city. She’s also the second 8th grade teacher listed. Like all rankings, the methodology is fair to discuss. The methods seemed to be an attempt to model the benefit a teacher gave their students on standardized testing. Other variables were controlled for. While I’m not a fan of basing everything on standardized tests, I do think that this methodology does not take away from the honor that this ranking bestows. Congratulations, Kelly!

How to Bomb the AP Stats Test

To those of us who grade AP Stats, this is hilarious. If you are not one of those, you might learn something about how not to do statistics.

Math Humor from Frazz

If you don’t read Frazz daily, I really think that you are missing out. Here is a particularly good one from a few days ago:

At Least He Had a Sense of Humor …

An image I had to share from grading Calculus II exams this morning. (The student did not do well.)

Honestly, I Didn't Make This Up

Advice on Parenting: Let Your Kids Fail

Tim Elmore with Students Who Have Learned to Dress the Part

Thought I’d come back from a somewhat extended paternity leave (more on that at some point) with a post about good and bad parenting. Over at the Huffington Post’s parenthood portal, Mickey Goodman asks if we are raising a generation of kids who are essentially helpless. As a professor here at Messiah College (and even when teaching in graduate school at Virginia Tech) I have experienced helicopter parents firsthand. My parents almost never stepped in to side with me against a professor or teacher. The only exception I can recall was when they got a teacher in junior high or early high school to bump my negative(!) quiz score up to a zero. I still managed an A for the marking period, so I wasn’t too scarred. Some of my students, however, seem to expect that either they or their parents can make any bad grade disappear. This doesn’t work with me, nor is that attitude likely to go over well on the job once they leave the academic world.

Goodman quotes Tim Elmore, who heads a company that attempts to help students self-motivate and prepare mentally for the “real world”, a world where success rarely comes overnight, they are not rewarded for showing up, and they are not excused for mistakes. Here are some of what Elmore thinks we get wrong, and how he suggests we fix it:

Where did we go wrong?

• We’ve told our kids to dream big – and now any small act seems insignificant. In the great scheme of things, kids can’t instantly change the world. They have to take small, first steps – which seem like no progress at all to them. Nothing short of instant fame is good enough. “It’s time we tell them that doing great things starts with accomplishing small goals,” he says.

• We’ve told our kids that they are special – for no reason, even though they didn’t display excellent character or skill, and now they demand special treatment. The problem is that kids assumed they didn’t have to do anything special in order to be special.

• We gave our kids every comfort – and now they can’t delay gratification. And we heard the message loud and clear. We, too, pace in front of the microwave, become angry when things don’t go our way at work, rage at traffic. “Now it’s time to relay the importance of waiting for the things we want, deferring to the wishes of others and surrendering personal desires in the pursuit of something bigger than ‘me,’” Elmore says.

• We made our kid’s happiness a central goal – and now it’s difficult for them to generate happiness — the by-product of living a meaningful life. “It’s time we tell them that our goal is to enable them to discover their gifts, passions and purposes in life so they can help others. Happiness comes as a result.”

The uncomfortable solutions:

“We need to let our kids fail at 12 – which is far better than at 42,” he says. “We need to tell them the truth (with grace) that the notion of ‘you can do anything you want’ is not necessarily true.”

Kids need to align their dreams with their gifts. Every girl with a lovely voice won’t sing at the Met; every Little League baseball star won’t play for the major leagues.

• Allow them to get into trouble and accept the consequences. It’s okay to make a “C-.” Next time, they’ll try harder to make an “A”.

• Balance autonomy with responsibility. If your son borrows the car, he also has to re-fill the tank.

• Collaborate with the teacher, but don’t do the work for your child. If he fails a test, let him take the consequences.

“We need to become velvet bricks,” Elmore says, “soft on the outside and hard on the inside and allow children to fail while they are young in order to succeed when they are adults.”

You can read the whole post here.

It Is Exam Day Again …

In honor of the Intro Stat exam I gave from 1:00-2:00 or so today:

Messiah College Students Can Think, Really!

Frances Fox Piven Speaks at Messiah College

A few weeks ago Messiah College hosted Frances Fox Piven on our campus. While I had nothing to do with her appearance, and can’t even tell you definitely who invited her, I’ve certainly heard a lot of reaction to her appearance, including in the comments section of my piece about Dr. Peter Kerry Powers defense of her appearance in the Harrisburg Patriot-News. In light of the uproar, I wanted to post two additional responses from the Messiah community that counter misconceptions I have heard. Later today I’ll post a response to accusations that the liberal establishment at Messiah (which begs the question of whether there is such a thing here) forced the cancellation of a conservative speaker. This post is to highlight a letter to the editor posted on Lancaster Online (affiliated with several Lancaster, PA newpapers, so I am not sure which print editions it may have appeared in). Here is the letter from Messiah College trustee Kim Smith (find the original here):

TO THE EDITORS:

As a trustee of Messiah College, I wanted to publicly affirm the respectful manner in which Messiah students, educators and community guests demonstrated a core principle of a free society — the civil and active exchange of ideas — during the college’s American Democracy Lecture with Frances Fox Piven on Oct. 11.

Despite the intense controversy surrounding Piven, the audience engaged in spirited, thoughtful conversation with both Piven and each other — even in the midst of clear and passionate disagreement. Refuting the premise that college students are empty, easily influenced vessels, the Messiah students who attended asked well-informed, critical questions of Piven regarding her views.

This modeling of effective public engagement and civil discourse is central to preparing students to fulfill Messiah’s mission “to educate men and women toward maturity of intellect, character and Christian faith in preparation for lives of service, leadership and reconciliation in church and society.”

Students and parents who do their homework on Messiah College will find that it is an authentically Christian campus community that is effectively educating and equipping future leaders who will bring respect and discernment to all corners of our increasingly polarized society.

Kim Smith

Manheim Township

Personally, I think this characterizes well what I would hope for. Students can think and engage ideas without being indoctrinated. They can ask speakers hard questions and disagree strongly with someone without becoming hateful. The irony here is that the outcry about Fox Piven speaking at Messiah has given her way more press than the talk itself would normally have received. Thanks to the many voices speaking vehemently against her appearance, she gained more press and notoriety than someone who has been out of the spotlight for so long should probably have received. Had there been no uproar, students would have engaged her, challenged her views, and walked away with a potentially valuable educational experience. As it is, students likely still got that part, but much time and energy has been wasted defending the very idea of listening to someone who has said some rather radical things.

Thanks to Ms. Smith for standing up for the ability of our students to think. I really think that Messiah does something much, much better here by offering these chances to engage the other than we would should we choose to shelter our students away from the reality that such views exist. Maybe some students will be persuaded by her views, or those of others like her. If they are so easily persuaded, I would say that these students were never doing anything other than pretending to be conservative in the first place, so she has not won converts, she would simply have revealed the true views of our students. In that case, wouldn’t having her here have done the students, and all of us, the service of having the truth come out?

Long story short, if anyone (including parents) really think our students are that naive and gullible, I feel insulted. I give our students much more credit than that, and certainly hope that my kids are able to think well enough for themselves that I don’t feel threatened by them engaging new ideas with a critical mind.