To the Moon, Winston

March 22, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

One-third of British kids surveyed said that Winston Churchill was the first man to walk on the moon. The British press is having a field day with this colorful item. (I mean, “The British press are having a field day with this colourful bit.”). Here’s how the Times played it:

March 20, 2008

Winston Churchill was first to walk on the Moon, say children

Lucy Bannerman

Winston Churchill: leader, victor, and, according to a third of schoolchildren, astronaut. The most celebrated British Prime Minister of the 20th century was the first man to walk on the Moon, one in three young people told a survey.

The black hole in their knowledge was revealed after an online poll asked 1,400 children, aged from 6 to 14, some basic astronomical questions.

Not only did a significant number confuse Neil Armstrong with the statesman who led the Allies to victory . . . .

Seems like there’s less here than meets the eye. An online survey doesn’t give you a representative sample, nor do we know how many of these kids were in the younger side of the distribution. Would we wring our hands if a lot of US 6-10 year olds didn’t know who FDR was?

I also wonder how the question was asked. Was it “Who was Winston Churchill?” with moonwalker as one of the distractors? Since the survey was mostly about astronomy, this would be a reasonable choice for those younger kids who didn’t know who he was. What would a 1940s PM be doing in an astronomy quiz anyway?

Or was it “Who was the first man to walk on the moon?” with Churchill as one of the choices. If you’re eight years old and you don’t know the answer, you might go for a name that sounds vaguely familiar.

The story also reveals some interesting things about what Times writers “know.” They know, for instance, that a black hole is a gap or an absence of matter and not a powerful magnetic gravitational field that sucks in everything.*

They also know for a fact that Churchill was the person who “led the Allies to victory.” No ethnocentrism here, right? But my schoolteachers told me that Ike played that role. And Russians no doubt were taught that it was Stalin.

*I once heard a Boston Celtic, in a post-game offhand comment, say that Kevin McHale in the low post was “a black hole – once the ball goes in there, it never comes back out.” Apparently, Times writers know less about astronomy than do NBA jocks.

Mi Casa But Not Su Casa

March 21, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Not exactly “it depends on what the meaning of is is,” but relevant to the problem of constructing questions. Andrew Gelman posted this a few days ago.

When preparing our GSS survey questions on social and political polarization, one of our questions was, “How many people do you know who have a second home?” This was supposed to help us measure social stratification by wealth– we figured people might know if their friends had a second home, even if they didn’t know the values of their friends’ assets. But we had a problem – a lot of the positive responses seemed to be coming from people who knew immigrants who had a home back in their original countries.

Put that in your pipe and use it in your methods class.

I’ve been phone-surveyed (not by the GSS), and several times I have asked the interviewer what some part of a question meant. The response was usually, in so many words, “Hey, I didn’t write these questions. I just get paid $6.50 an hour to read ’em.” OK, I would think, but I know that my answer doesn’t mean what your employers think it means.

Ivan Dixon

March 20, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

A few years ago, I was stuck in a motel room one morning. My son,14, was flipping through the TV channels and hit upon a Twilight Zone marathon on F/X or Sci-Fi. The episode when we turned on the TV had only about ten minutes left, but at once I realized, in some Twilight Zonish dejà vu way, that I had seen this episode long ago when I was fourteen. It was about a small-time boxer at the end of his career, a man facing the reality of the limitations of his life. Not the sort of thing that a kid would understand, certainly not a kid like me. The twilight of a career was not the “twilight” that the the show had in mind. On the contrary, the message of this episode, delivered by a young boy who looks up to the fighter, is that he should believe in the impossible and keep boxing.

But there was something about the performance, the way the actor conveyed the sense of exhaustion and acceptance. Here was a man, a real grown-up, coming to grips with the realities of his life and his situation. That was the message that came through, not the call to ignore reality and live in the fictional Zone. The actor’s performance transcended the silliness of the scripted plot, making the character so real that I still remembered him decades later.*

BOLIE: You know, a fighter don’t need a scrapbook, Henry. You want to know what he’s done and where he’s fought? You read it in his face. He's got the whole story cut into his flesh. St. Louis, 1949. Guy named Sailor Leavitt. A real fast boy. And this, Memorial Stadium. Syracuse, New York. Italian boy. Fought like Henry Armstrong. All hands and arms, just like a windmill on the wind. . . .

The actor was Ivan Dixon, who died Sunday.

I never saw him in Hogan’s Heros, but I did see “Nothing But a Man” when it was released. I didn’t recognize him then as the boxer I had seen on The Twilight Zone just a few years earlier. That realization didn't happen until decades later in a motel room in western Massachusetts.

If you haven’t seen “Nothing But a Man,” you should rent and watch it immediately. If you teach sociology, you should use it in class – for what it says about race in the US, for what it says about how social arrangements affect the interior life of marriages and of individuals. You should watch it for the performances by Dixon, Abbey Lincoln (who doesn't sing a note), Yaphet Kotto and others.

When I first saw “Nothing But a Man,” I thought it was the best black-themed film I’d ever seen. I still do.

* Another blogger has linked to the Twilight Zone episode on YouTube. If you want to see it, you can find it here.

Hooked on Uniformity

March 20, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Where are we on phonics now?” I asked Steve, a quasi-relative (he’s a sort of step in-law) who I rarely see. We were having dinner with family down here in Sarasota (it's spring break). He teaches school and does research on primary education. Lately, he’s been digging through historical materials on one-room schools. It turns out in the nineteenth century too, the teaching of reading was subject to changes in fashion, and some of those fashions were remarkably similar to what we find today under labels like “phonics” and “whole language.”

Which teaching system works best? It depends on the kid, of course. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that kids are not all alike and that some learn better with one system while others do better with another.

Then what’s the problem, I asked.

“Texas,” he said, “California.”

In these states, a central committee decides on the book to be used for each subject in all public schools. Their preferences have a huge impact on publishers, whose fortunes may depend on an “adoption” in these states. (California accounts for more than 10% of the US population, Texas nearly 8%.) So decisions in these large, centralized states affect what is available even in other states. The structure of choosing textbooks shapes the content of the books.

But there’s a cultural component as well. “We have this strange assumption that the way to go about it is to figure out what’s the best, and then make everybody use it,” Steve said.

I wondered out loud if this way of thinking is peculiarly American, this uncomfortable amalgam of individualism and uniformity. We think each person should be free to make his own choices. But we also want everyone to choose the same thing, and we get upset when someone chooses something else. (Visitors to these shores since deTocqueville have remarked on the narrow range of political views in the US compared to those in other countries, which are apparently more tolerant of political diversity.)

So we have all these competitions to determine which book or movie or singer is best. Then, once we know what’s best, that’s the one we all freely and independently choose. Or, in the case of textbook committees, we assume that this is the book that will be best for all our schoolchildren.