Humanities: 26 Years On

18 Tuesday Jun 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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A.B. Davis Middle School, Academic Competition, College Access and Success, College Retention, Gifted, Graduating, High-Stakes Testing, Humanities, Humanities Program, Talented, Well-Rounded Students

Leonardo di Vinci's Human Body sketch, June 18, 2013. (Wikipedia).

Leonardo di Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (human body sketch, 1485-90), June 18, 2013. (Flickr.com).

Today marks anniversary number twenty-six since the Class of ’87 spent two hours sweating in our polyester caps and gowns on a triple-H summer evening at Memorial Field in Mount Vernon, New York. Oh yeah – and graduated from Mount Vernon High School. Not a big year to mark an anniversary, for sure. But still important for me to remember. After all, I’ve just published a book in which I spend a significant amount of time talking about myself and my former classmates whom help comprise this Class of ’87.

Today I want to say a few positive things about this class, particularly the Humanities Program members of this class. Not that this isn’t in Boy @ The Window as well. But it does help me to reiterate both the obvious and the hidden. Without Humanities, I wouldn’t have taken the path that led me to become the writer, historian, thinker or man that I am today, good, bad and occasionally even ugly. Period.

Not that every high-achieving student in A.B. Davis Middle School or Mount Vernon High School was in Humanities. Some of the more creative and musically-talented folks I’d either met or knew of were in what what I call “gen pop” and not in Humanities. But being someone who on his best days can barely hold a baritone tune (in the same way that an experimental fusion reactor produces energy for only a few seconds), Humanities gave me a chance to do some of what I did best on a platform that could occasionally allow me to maximize my academic gifts.

After ten years of undergrad and grad school at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon, and years of teaching at places as different as Pitt, CMU, Duquesne University School of Education and George Washington University GSEHD, my former classmates remain among the highest academic achievers I’ve ever met. As a group, that is. I’ve met many super-talented and highly creative individuals since ’87. Some of whom were literal geniuses as musicians, actors, studio artists or writers. Students whose academic and athletic prowess would’ve made their peers think about how unfair life can be.

But the one boon (and one criticism too) of Humanities for me was the competition it inadvertently sanctioned. That competition made me a better student, one who could actually focus on the long-term implications for any course I took and how it would apply to what I’d need to do in college. Some of my classes I realized were bullshit (see Andy Butler’s eleventh grade “Higher Math” as prima facie evidence), but I found something useful in most of my courses for my years at Carnegie Mellon, if not at Pitt.

Mount Vernon High School graduation ceremony, June 24, 2009. (http//education.lohudblogs.com).

Mount Vernon High School graduation ceremony, June 24, 2009. (Carucha L. Meuse/The Journal News; http//education.lohudblogs.com).

I think that this competition made us all better students, even as it often didn’t make us better human beings. After all, out of my immediate circle of the top twenty students in the Class of ’87, three of us have doctorates (history, psychology and mathematics education), two have medical degrees, and seventeen of us have earned at least a bachelor’s degree. I’m sure that some of us would’ve done well in college, grad school and our careers even without Humanities. But I’m also sure that the poorest among us – yours truly included – would’ve struggled mightily in college (even if we found a way to graduate) without such a focus on the academic in the first place.

I’ve taught high school students whose skills readily approached my own and those of my classmates from a quarter-century ago, particularly in versions of the AP US History course I taught at Princeton in ’08 and ’09. I’ve also served on the curriculum committee at my son’s school here in Montgomery County, Maryland for the past three years. These students – some more talented than anyone I knew in Humanities – have one thing in common. For the most part, they aren’t challenged by their schools, teachers or curriculum to be competitive, to be well-rounded academically, to strive to be both better students and develop creative talent simultaneously.

Many of these students already feel a sense of academic fatigue, partly because of constant yet meaningless testing, and partly because of a concentration on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields. Both have led to the near-total exclusion of extensive work on reading and writing skills (even though picking apart STEM field problems requires good reading and analysis skills). Not to mention the slashing of budgets for physical education and art, music and chorus, theater and so many other things that would push them to be better students, to be competitive – in a healthy way, that is.

There are nearly 120,000 words in Boy @ The Window, about 60,000 of them dedicated to my years between the end of sixth grade and the beginning of my junior year at Pitt. Many of them describe all that I remember about being in Humanities. It’s not a pretty picture overall. Despite this, without the likes of Laurell and Sam, Brandie and Bobby, Alex and Allison, Dahlia and Dara, Phyllis and Wendy and JD, Joe and Danny, Suzanne and Denise and Mandume and Rhonda and Kim and so many others, I’d still be living in Mount Vernon right now. I’d be lucky to have a minimum-wage job and a one-room flat in someone’s dilapidated house on the South Side. It’s just that simple.

When Will Apple Come Out With Its iCollege App?

27 Thursday Oct 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture

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Apple, Apps, College Access and Success, College Education, Colleges & Universities, For-Profit Colleges, Future of Higher Education, Higher Education, iCollege, iUniversity, Online Classroom, Postsecondary Education, Postsecondary Education Access and Success, Public Colleges, Virtual Classroom

Modified image of Apple iPad 2 with college cap, tassle and diploma, October 27, 2011. (http://digitaltrends.com/Donald Earl Collins). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of the low resolution, alterations and subject of this blog post.

When I attended the Center for American Progress’ two-hour conference on Anya Kamenetz’s Gates Foundation-funded ebook The Edupunks Guide to a DIY Credential last month (see my recent post “Education Incorporated“), there was one thing that the experts on the panel kept bringing up. All of them agreed that the Information Age and the possibilities of online education are so great that the days of the traditional university are numbered. Like the dismantling of the traditional newsroom model of newspapers and magazines over the past fifteen years, the traditional university model was within ten years of becoming obsolete, at least according to this not-so-objective group of commentators.

Student loan debt the equivalent of an American house in 1980, questions about the usefulness of a four-year degree in the world of work, and the relevance of academic coursework to the “real world” will be the biggest reasons for why hundreds of higher education institutions could be out of business by the 2020s.

Despite my background, I am not some apologist for the state of American higher education today. There are quite a few things wrong with the current model, especially for standard state and regional public institutions, historically-Black colleges and universities, and most two- and four-year community colleges. But, for a variety of reasons, I’m not completely sold on the brave-new world of online education, currently dominated by for-profit colleges and technical postsecondary schools either. Like University of Phoenix, most charge as much for tuition as traditional four-year institutions, minus the academic and social supports necessary to retain and graduate students.

Still, this doesn’t mean that there won’t be a new kind of higher education for those millions of us who won’t have the grades and/or can’t afford to attend an elite or near elite institution. You know, somewhere between

Apple iPhone 3G, January 13, 2009. (Apple via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use via Creative Commons 3.0.

Harvard, UC Berkeley and the University of Pittsburgh. I think, ultimately, that ten years from now, going to college will be as simple as clicking on the iCollege or iUniversity app on your iPhone, iPad, iTV, or whatever Apple, Inc. comes up with next.

Of University of Phoenix, DeVry Institute, Kaplan University, Capella University and ITT Technical Institute, and I picked Apple? Why, pray tell? Because, believe it or not, Apple has the history of collaboration, technical expertise, and innovative vision — even without the great Steve Jobs — to pull off the moving of the higher education platform to an accredited application that even Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Oxford couldn’t thumb their noses at (though they may have to hold their noses, at least at first). After all, Apple has moved into the mainstream music arena and into the land of Hollywood and made it work to their advantage. Not to mention, to our advantage as consumers. Why not higher education?

How would this work? For starters, Apple could work with a slew of professors and teachers in fields as varied as astronomy, construction engineering, history, medicine, psychology and theater arts to put together adaptive virtual classrooms. The key word here is adaptive. It would be like EA Sports’ Madden NFL ’12,where each teacher or professor would be put in a lab with sensors attached to them and a classroom full of students asking every possible question and providing every possible answer to a given topic or series of topics that would add up to a course. And Apple would do this over and over again for, say, the 3,000 or so possible courses that an undergraduate student would take, not only in the US, but anywhere in the world.

That alone would make this a decent idea. But combining it with Apple’s ability to negotiate contracts and agreements — in this case, with accrediting agencies and with major universities across the country — will make iCollege or iUniversity a great idea. Because of these deals, iCollege or iUniversity students could transfer their credits to a UC Berkeley, Harvard or University of Maryland if they so chose. More

Star Trek: TNG Holodeck Screen Shot, October 26, 2011. The ultimate expression of a virtual classroom (Donald Earl Collins).

importantly, since acting in a play, shooting film projects or doing a laser light show can’t necessarily be done online, deals with schools, technical institutes and even major corporations would make it possible for any student’s iCollege or iUniversity experience to be well-rounded and tailored to their needs.

What’s more, once Apple makes the $100 or $200 million investment to set this up, they can put up reasonable prices for postsecondary credentials. For an industry or job-related certificate: $5,000. For a two-year or associate’s degree: $10,000. For a four-year degree: $30,000. The extra costs for the degrees would cover technical changes, the consulting fees for using professors and teachers as part of the iCollege or iUniversity app, and to cover the costs of students taking face-to-face courses as part of the process. But with five million, ten million, even a hundred million students enrolled around the world, Apple could make $50 billion in profits from such an app. Every single year.

Yet I know there are numerous faculty and administrators in academia who’d throw a fit upon reading this (or any similar) idea. The fact is, we’ve had a corporatized sort of education at the college level for at least fifty years now. Our scientific and engineering communities are fully entrenched in the military-industrial complex. Even history professors fight for endowed chairs. Between capital campaigns, as well as corporations and dying CEOs investing in schools and having buildings named after them, we’re past the point of no return. We in higher education need to get ahead of the tide before being drowned by it. For once.

Five Ingredients to Higher Education Access and Success

11 Friday Mar 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Politics, race, Youth

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Academic Preparation, College Access and Success, Disadvantaged Students, Education Reform, Financial Aid, Higher Education Access and Success, K-16 Education, Low-Income Students, Parental Engagement, Postsecondary Education Access and Success, Race, Social Class, Social Preparation, Student Development, Student Engagement, Students of Color, Underrepresented Students, Will to Power

Five Ingredients for Cream of Mushroom Gravy with Bell Peppers, Soy Sauce, Chicken Broth and More Mushrooms, March 10, 2011. Donald Earl Collins

There should be five pillars to college access and success, similar to the Five Pillars of Islam, essential for the successful and lifelong practice of Islam. For all students, but especially for disadvantaged and underrepresented students, having a guide to the five most necessary ingredients for college entrance, matriculation and graduation is long overdue.

I should know. Between six years of Humanities in Mount Vernon, New York’s public schools in the ’80s, twenty years off and on as an instructor and professor, and a decade’s worth of nonprofit work in fields like civic education and K-16 education reform. So many students — especially those without the financial means and the academic preparation necessary to be successful at the college level — fail for lack of knowledge and lack of access to such knowledge as well.

Based on reports like the Pathways to College Network‘s A Shared Agenda (2004) and the Social Science

Questions That Matter Report Cover, June 15, 2006. Social Science Research Council

Research Council’s Questions That Matter (2006), the book Double the Numbers (2004) edited by staff from Jobs for the Future, as well as the work of innovative organizations like The Posse Foundation, below are what I believe are the five ingredients of higher education access and success, in order of their importance.

1. Social Preparation: Students must be prepared for the world outside of their towns, cities, neighborhoods, blocks, apartment buildings, homes and individual families. Most disadvantaged and underrepresented students are inadequately prepared for the cultural, social class, philosophical, ideological and spiritual differences between them and most traditional college and college-age students. Leadership development, critical thinking (and not just for academic purposes), a sense of belonging, a passion for active learning are all the seasonings needed to help students become socially comfortable in a postsecondary setting. Academic preparation is one important aspect of a student’s social preparation for college, but it’s not the only one.

2. Academic Preparation: This is of obvious importance, but in terms of higher education access and success, it’s actually overemphasized. Or at least, the acquisition of facts and the assessments used to determine how successful students were at assimilating these facts has been overdone. This high-stakes testing phase in the history of American education has also put too much of the task of preparation on individual teachers, and not enough on the students themselves. Academic preparation for college requires broad knowledge. But it also requires students to be able to analyzes and interpret facts, to begin to put facts together in combinations that cannot be derived by simply reading a textbook or from a teacher’s lesson plan. That requires good-to-great teachers, administrators, and students.

3. Parent, Family and Community Engagement: This aspect of K-16 educational success never gets the attention it deserves. Active parents and adults in schools can and does create the atmosphere necessary for students’ academic and social preparation in the college access and success process. There are times, of course, in which parental engagement can evolve into abuse of staff and teachers, particularly with parents and families who have unrealistic expectations of their children and their children’s teachers. For disadvantaged and underrepresented students, however, it’s of the utmost importance for parents and other concerned adults to be engaged in this process, to apply pressure on schools and students when necessary.

4. Financial Means and Aid: This is a nice phrase, but the fact is, student loans account for nearly three-fifths of the funds for a four-year degree for most students. The real issue here is to not only take advantage of scholarships, application fee-waivers and need-based aid like the Pell Grant and SEOG grants. It’s also to use social preparation and engaged parents to find additional funds and to agitate for more need-based state and federal aid. Or to use academic preparation to obtain the substantial private and state-level merit-based scholarships to cover the skyrocketing costs of college.

5. Will to Power: Researchers and practitioners rarely discuss this aspect of postsecondary access and success. But the bottom line is, the difference between success and failure for any student really is how much pain they are willing to endure to be successful in finishing a college degrees. Even with the proper academic preparation, excellent social preparation, solid financial aid and consistent parental and community engagement, it’s ultimately up to each student to decide to overcome whatever obstacles they face, especially once they become a college student. While willpower alone isn’t enough, it’s still a necessary ingredient to make the other four ingredients jell.

Columns In The Inner Court of The Baal Temple, December 4, 2007. Ddxc. Already in the public domain.

Had I known even half of this back in the day, I wouldn’t have been homeless my sophomore year at Pitt, struggling financially most of my time as an undergrad, or reluctant to take on leadership roles prior to my senior year. But my will to realize success and graduate overcame all of that, making the difference between where I am now and where I was so long ago.