Syllabus (the book)

I just read Syllabus by Lynda Barry. It is a set of syllabi and daily in-class instructions, along with some reflections, from a few years of teaching cartooning and writing at Wisconsin. It is a combination of hilarious and insightful, both about learning to draw and cartoon, but also about the practice of teaching.

A page from Lynda Barry's Syllabus.

The syllabi and daily exercises include many great practices. For example, when students are listening to something (being read or previously recorded), she has them either draw tight spirals in their notebooks or else color in a line drawing. She has the students sketch in non-photo blue pencil and ink in later; it reduces inhibitions. She has simple forms for students to write daily diary or journal entries so that they make close observations of the world, in words and pictures. She loves most the students who have never drawn (since childhood), and she makes exercises that capitalize on their newness (and defeat those who are more experienced at rendering), like forcing them to do drawings in increasingly short time intervals.

The book is hilarious in part because she shows lots of great student work (it is not clear she has proper permissions here, because she does not individually credit each student drawing), and because the whole book is a collage of drawings, writings, and found objects, in the Lynda Barry style. I doubt there is another book out there on teaching that makes you laugh out loud all the way through.

A great question for me is what of Barry's practices could carry over to a class in Physics?

college: what's the point?

In the State of the Union address of 2011 January 25, Obama raised one of his standard themes, which is the great importance of college education:

If we take these steps—if we raise expectations for every child, and give them the best possible chance at an education, from the day they are born until the last job they take—we will reach the goal that I set two years ago: By the end of the decade, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.

Though I don't disagree that we need to give all Americans great opportunities, I disagree that the best way to achieve that is through universal college attendance.

First of all, as pointed out here and many other places, though employers want to see college degrees, they do not really look for many of the things in a potential employee that college brings. That is, it is not clear that college is delivering useful things to employers. A good example is math skills; even high-tech employers do not look for math skills among potential employees.

Second, since most of the important skills for employers are communication skills, flexibility, problem-solving, and ability to learn (rather than specific content knowledge), employees ought to be well prepared by the end of high school. How can (more than) full-time work for twelve years not be enough to teach 18-year-olds the communication and common-sense skills they need to do most jobs? I realize that schools face huge challenges, but why not make helping the schools the top priority?

Third, and related to the second, the reason Obama and other politicians focus on sending students to college instead of improving K–12 is that college is private. Fixing schools takes public money; sending kids to college takes private money. Even state schools in America charge tens of thousands in tuition, and they don't have the capacity to take up Obama's slack. So requiring all kids to go to college is like levying an enormous quasi-voluntary tax on parents, relieving society of the responsibility of providing opportunity to the less fortunate. If a kid has trouble, in this vision, it is because his parents didn't do right by him.

Indeed, this ties it all together: Abandon the public schools, because improvements there would reduce disparity and improve the public sphere. Require (effectively) all potential employees to go to expensive colleges, because that is tax-neutral and increases disparity! What happened to the common good?