Two posts ago, I talked about one big change I made to my Introduction to the New Testament class last summer, choosing to take the students through the Synoptic Gospels before teaching the Synoptic Problem itself. That change seemed immensely helpful, as it took an important (but typically uninteresting to the students) subject and forced the students to see the problem before the theoretical solutions. Another change I made was more administrative and took some time to set up but will now be a feature of all my future Introduction to New Testament courses: using Respondus, I established a test bank of around 1,500 questions that I can import into any course management system out there (Blackboard, Sakai, etc.). I used this test bank to create regular online (timed) quizzes on Blackboard to accompany the reading, quizzes that auto graded and instantly gave me what percentage of students got a given question right or wrong, giving some insight into whether I should spend a little extra time on a given point in class.

These questions are largely multiple-choice, but they also include matching, fill-in-the-blank, and other objective question structures. Although in most subjects I am something of a critic of multiple-choice questions, I think they can actually be very effective in New Testament (and Hebrew Bible) introductory courses if written properly. For example, I am a big proponent of “verse identification” questions, which ask students to identify which book a given verse is from. If a student can identify that the verse including “thus he made all things clean” is from the Gospel of Mark, it indicates that the student has actually processed some important thematic issues within the Gospels. Essentially, my goal is to force “essay level reflection for multiple choice questions,” asking questions that force students to think about why a given verse must be from a given book rather than another. I also do thematic questions (e.g. “which Gospel portrays Jesus as especially concerned with the poor?”) and other similar objective questions that require students to have understood the essence of what has been covered in the class. Then of course there are actual historical/data questions, asking about, say, the Pharisees or Alexander the Great. These sorts of questions, taken together, can really give a good picture of whether a student has grasped the material necessary for the course. (That the students came out to an average in the low “B” range with a median in the B+ range—which is about where I as an opponent of grade inflation would generally like them to wind up—was also a pleasant surprise.)

I also used these question banks—which included a pool of essay questions—to construct the midterm and final examinations, which (aside from the essays) auto graded and again gave instant access to student performance data on a per-question basis. Using automated tests both reduced my time grading and gave easier access to better assessment data, a win-win proposition. The students also generally found this arrangement preferable to other testing and assessment options. They did request that the essay portion of the exam be separate from the rest of the questions for the final exam, as the randomized question structure had thrown the essays into the mix at awkward times on the midterm. To address this issue, I simply created two separate exams—one essay, one with objective questions—that together made up the final exam.

The other advantage to putting in the extra time to create these test pools is the reduction in future test and quiz creation time for future courses. Because the test pools are so large and include a range of questions for each section of the course (and because the exams can be randomized), I can give different exams every semester with very little prep time. I do still have some additional work left to polish the pools (I’d like to group and keyword them for adaptive testing in the future), but the time I’ll have to spend on assessment in the future has been greatly reduced. As I teach Hebrew Bible as well, I intend to do the same for that class and ultimately all the introductory courses I teach, effectively automating the bulk of assessment for my introductory courses. This should afford me more time to research and focus on the actual pedagogy in the classroom while also giving better data on student performance. Sometimes the move to computers really does make things smoother.

A few caviats: UNC requires students to have a notebook computer, meaning I could require students to bring a computer to class for these assessments (the quizzes were generally timed quizzes to be taken at home). At institutions where this is not the case, this approach would naturally be more difficult to execute. Learning disabled students also present a special problem in this approach, as separate exams with different timing requirements must typically be created for those students, and it’s a little bit of extra work to get those exams to feed into the right grade column if you use the online gradebook on Blackboard (Sakai’s online assessment and gradebook functions are still pretty limited as well, making this even more difficult on Sakai). Finally, the other potential pitfall is that if you don’t have access to a tool like LockDown Browser (Carolina does not have access, for example), students can potentially use Google or other online tools to cheat rather easily. That’s why I put a time limit on the at-home quizzes (but this is problematic given the advantage LD students have with double the time—typically plenty of time to cheat on these quizzes). In the classroom, I simply require that they keep their browser maximized and open to the test window, while I sit in the back of the classroom—any change of screen should thus stick out pretty clearly. It’s not a perfect system, but I think it’s at least preferable to the old pen-and-paper method.

No related posts.

I had the opportunity to teach a five-week course of “Introduction to New Testament Literature” at UNC-Chapel Hill this summer, and I took the opportunity to reexamine and revamp a few aspects of how I’ve taught that course (or have seen others teach it) in the past. In addition to a lot of fine-tuning and a few things I didn’t think worked quite as well as they might, I was especially pleased with three primary “innovations” that I tried this summer, which I’ll be blogging about in my next few posts.

The first of these innovations stemmed from my overall dissatisfaction (shared by others ) with the way that the Synoptic Problem tends to be taught in introductory classes, namely that the Synoptic Problem tends to be taught “solution to plight,” leading off with the standard scholarly solution(s) and only later turning to the data to demonstrate the problem to be solved. (For those who are unfamiliar, the “Synoptic Problem” is the scholarly term for the difficulties involved in explaining the similarities and differences among the “Synoptic Gospels”: Matthew, Mark, and Luke.) Typically this amounts to teaching the 2-Source Hypothesis and then explaining why this theory makes the most sense of the Synoptic Problem, which has not yet become a “problem” in the minds of the students.

This solution-to-plight pedagogy amounts to reinforcing the consensus view from generation to generation, inasmuch as the next generation of scholars will have necessarily passed through Intro to NT classes, where their first major academic NT lesson is on the Two-Source Hypothesis for solving the Synoptic Problem, standing in contrast to our responsibility to train students to think critically and creatively through problems we ourselves may not have been able to fully solve (and even some we think we have already solved). As tends to be the case whenever the solution is taught before the problem is recognized, this sort of teaching leads to a weakening of the learners’ critical and creative faculties. Once a plausible solution has been presented (and with some authority, at that), trying to think through the problem is like watching/reading a murder mystery after having the ending spoiled. It’s next to impossible to put the solution one has learned far enough outside one’s head to be able to consider any other possible solutions. Of all people, biblical scholars should be aware of just how embedded a first solution or interpretation (regardless of how wrong!) can get; once a student has been told a given passage means this, that student tends to see only this whenever s/he sees that passage, rarely if ever actually reading the passage itself. (Students in my NT classes regularly express shock that, despite having read a given text numerous times, they didn’t know that was even in there!) Once a given solution is entrenched, it is terribly hard—no matter how good the evidence—to disabuse a person of his/her strongly held (from the very first time s/he learned given information) beliefs.

Given all this, I decided to try an experiment this summer: rather than beginning our studies of the Gospels with the Synoptic Problem, I decided to invert the usual order and start with the Gospels themselves, giving my students the opportunity to grapple with the data and see with the problem before introducing any solutions. To facilitate this, I constructed a few careful assignments to force them to engage with the data firsthand and begin to think through the problem. I also began with an “Introduction to the Gospels” lecture, the last ten minutes or so of which was dedicated to explaining that the first three gospels we would read would share a large amount of material and that we would begin with Mark since it was the shortest, while the other two had more material that Mark didn’t have. But this lecture did not address the dating, chronology, or redaction of the Gospels, as that would only come after going through the Synoptics themselves. So, my schedule looked like this (in the compressed summer format):

(After a few basic background lectures)
The Transmission of the NT & Introduction to the Gospels (w/underlining assignment & reflection paper)
Gospel of Mark
Gospel of Matthew
Gospel of Luke
The Synoptic Problem (w/another underlining assignment & reflection paper)
Gospel of John

Ideally I’d like two classes on the Synoptic Problem after going through the Synoptics themselves, but the compressed summer session didn’t allow for that this time. The underlining assignments required both underlining the passages in the standard red, green, yellow, and blue colors as well as a prompt asking the students to write one to two pages reflecting on the possible causes of the agreements and disagreements between the three gospels. As it turns out, I was quite pleased with the results of inverting the schedule. My students began to get restless about the similarities and differences right from the start. This short audio clip from the class meeting on the Gospel of Matthew illustrates how well they were wrestling with the problem before even getting to Luke:

Intro NT Students Wrestling with Synoptic Problem (mp3)

I was obviously pretty excited to hear this level of problem-solving and textual attentiveness among my introductory class. It’s precisely what I was hoping to stimulate by teaching the solutions after introducing the problem. As an added benefit, I think it helped keep the Synoptic Problem from seeming quite so tedious, since the students were invested in the problem by the time I was getting to introduce the various scholarly solutions. This approach did require that I not assign textbook readings for the three Synoptic lectures (thanks to introductory textbooks assuming the Two-Source Hypothesis from the start), but given my predilection for favoring primary text assignments over secondary texts, that wasn’t much of a problem. I did get complaints from a few students who went through the main textbook used for the course after we had gone through the Synoptic Problem lecture: they were disappointed/frustrated by the textbook’s dismissal of all but the Two-Source theory.

At any rate, I think I’ll continue teaching along these lines in the future, beginning by letting students see the Synoptic Problem before I try to explain the Synoptic Solution(s).

Related posts:

1. Paper Accepted for Synoptic Gospels Section at 2010 SBL
2. A Few Notes on Matthew and Luke from My Students

In “Parents Caught Spanking Children on Audiotape Real Time,” what should have been a straightforward report on the somewhat surprising (to the researchers) results of placing audio recorders in families’ homes to study “Real Life Mother-Child Interaction in the Home” was somehow transformed into a piece against corporal punishment chock full of misinformation. Susan Donaldson James didn’t do her homework, and ABC News should be embarrassed at the end results. Just a few highlights:

James includes the following loaded non-sequitur:

Spanking is universally condemned among most child development and parenting experts …

Huh? “Universally condemned among most” means exactly nothing. “Universally” and “most” are incompatible terms. Either “most child development and parenting experts condemn spanking” or “spanking is universally condemned among child development and parenting experts” could work, but you can’t have both at the same time. This kind of nonsense wording does serve to make it sound much worse, however, simply because of the use of “universally condemned.” But if that weren’t bad enough by itself, James finishes the sentence with this doozie:

… although some fundamentalist Christian groups disagree, citing the Biblical passage, “Spare the rod and spoil the child.”

Amazing. Maybe if James had read the recent CNN piece, “Actually, That’s Not in the Bible,” she might have been spared quoting a phantom passage that never occurs in the Bible (actually coming from Hudibras). Granted, we could be especially gracious and concede that many Christians may indeed cite that quotation as though it were in the Bible, but one would think it would still be the reporter’s job to note that such a passage doesn’t exist.

So, if you’re keeping score at home, that’s two major errors in one paragraph. How about we go for three? The use of the phrase, “although some fundamentalist Christian groups disagree,” implies that only fundamentalist Christians disagree with what is “universally condemned among most.” First of all, I can guarantee that fundamentalist Christians aren’t the only group that disagrees (nor are they the only group that points to the Bible as backing for corporal punishment). Secondly, this kind of pejorative use of “fundamentalist” is often used as a weapon, effectively serving as a code-word for “backwoods, uneducated, and ignorant.”Alvin Plantinga has memorably summarized this function of “fundamentalist”:

On the most common contemporary academic use of the term, it is a term of abuse or disapprobation, rather like ‘son of a bitch’, more exactly ‘sonovabitch’, or perhaps still more exactly (at least according to those authorities who look to the Old West as normative on matters of pronunciation) ‘sumbitch’. When the term is used in this way, no definition of it is ordinarily given. (If you called someone a sumbitch, would you feel obliged first to define the term?) Still, there is a bit more to the meaning of ‘fundamentalist’ (in this widely current use): it isn’t simply a term of abuse. In addition to its emotive force, it does have some cognitive content, and ordinarily denotes relatively conservative theological views. That makes it more like ‘stupid sumbitch’ (or maybe ‘fascist sumbitch’?) than ‘sumbitch’ simpliciter. It isn’t exactly like that term either, however, because its cognitive content can expand and contract on demand; its content seems to depend on who is using it. In the mouths of certain liberal theologians, for example, it tends to denote any who accept traditional Christianity, including Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Barth; in the mouths of devout secularists like Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, it tends to denote anyone who believes there is such a person as God. The explanation is that the term has a certain indexical element: its cognitive content is given by the phrase ‘considerably to the right, theologically speaking, of me and my enlightened friends.’ The full meaning of the term, therefore (in this use), can be given by something like ‘stupid sumbitch whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of mine’. (Warranted Christian Belief [Oxford: OUP, 2000], 245; as cited in the delightfully playful and incisive, “A Lexical Analysis of ‘Fundamentalist’ in Bart Ehrman’s HoPo Piece“)

This appears to be exactly the function “fundamentalist” serves in this case, serving only as a foil to pejoratively label as ignorant anyone who would argue against the “universal” conclusion by “most” reasonable people that corporal punishment is bad. By lumping any Christians who might spank their children under the “fundamentalist” label, James has effectively marginalized all who disagree with her perspective, ignoring the fact that many “conservative” Christians are not fundamentalists.

Amazingly, after such strong (and misleading) rhetoric, the very researchers discussed in the article immediately contradict James’ assertion:

[Study author George] Holden agrees that an “occasional spank” might not have a long-term negative effect on a child, “unless it was so hard it resulted in child abuse or injury. The problem is when parents rely on physical punishment, they are more likely to escalate when the kids misbehave if they do not stop,” he said. “They come back and they hit harder and are indeed more at risk to abuse them.”

And again:

Robert Larzelere, a psychologist in the department of human development and family science at Oklahoma State University, argues that “conditional spanking” — two swats with an open hand on the bottom — is not detrimental to a child.

One of the most vocal opponents of spanking bans, Larzelere said non-abusive spanking is more effective on 2- to 6-year-olds than a dozen other tactics, including reasoning, verbal threats, privilege removal, ignoring, bribes, restraint and diversionary tactics.

“When you look at all the studies, conditional spanking led to less disobedience and less aggression,” he said.

Wow, I had no idea fundamentalist Christians were so prevalent within the field of child development and family science. I mean, if these guys are going against what “most” have “universally condemned,” they must be fundamentalist Christians thumping their Bibles and quoting a verse that’s not even in the book, right?

After all this, James manages to finish her article with yet more rhetoric advocating raising “kids without physical punishment,” ensuring to give extra space to the researcher who muses about the continuing practice of corporal punishment,

The belief in American society is hard to shake. But parents believe in their heart of hearts that spanking works when others things don’t.

Perhaps that’s because the research (as was acknowledged by all the experts in the article) suggests that this may in fact be true.

I should add that I do agree that what was recorded on the audio was inappropriate. But I actually have at least as big of a problem with the recorded verbal abuse as I do with the physical contact on the recordings. Verbal scars can last a whole lot longer than the sting of a spanking, and that’s something that gets too little attention in this discussion. A distinction should also be made between a slap and “spanking,” which are not necessarily the same thing (for example, the first soundbite on the ABC sample is likely a hand getting smacked, and a child getting slapped across the face is pretty different from getting spanked on the bottom).

(Go here for more discussion on the data linking spanking to bullying and aggression—and the correlation/causation problems overlooked by many who uncritically cite this research. As for myself, I don’t think spanking—provided it is not overdone or performed while angry—is inherently worse than any other form of punishment, though, as with many other punishments, it is prone to abuse. Punishment itself is about the exercise of authority and power and necessarily involves a violation of the so-called “right of physical inviolability,” whether via direct application to the body or preventing the body from going wherever the person wills. I would have thought Foucault’s Discipline and Punish made that clear enough. Much like the recent academic discussions of the humaneness of flogging versus imprisonment, I would rather have been spanked as a child than put into “timeout” for hours on end.)

Related posts:

1. Bad Science: Spanking Kids Leads to More Aggressive Behavior—Or Does It?

The NYTimes has published a piece focusing on 100 New York schools experimenting with different approaches towards achieving the “Common Core” standards that attempt to shore up problems with the “No Child Left Behind” standards.

In general, I agree with clearer standardization of minimum standards (though it must be clear that these are minimums and not norms) than what the NCLB legislation provides for, but a couple things in the article stuck out to me in a negative fashion. Firstly, the stepped progression away from “literary” reading towards more nonfiction:

While English classes will still include healthy amounts of fiction, the standards say that students should be reading more nonfiction texts as they get older, to prepare them for the kinds of material they will read in college and careers. In the fourth grade, students should be reading about the same amount from “literary” and “informational” texts, according to the standards; in the eighth grade, 45 percent should be literary and 55 percent informational, and by 12th grade, the split should be 30/70.

Let's not continue to manufacture Eustaces. We need more emphasis on classic literature, not less.

All I could hear in my head at this point in the article is  C.S. Lewis’ critique in the The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, where Eustace’s problem is that “[he] had read all the wrong books. They had a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons.” Instead, his preferred books were “books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.” That is not to say that “informational” reading should be avoided, but I think it’s especially important that students raised in this information-drenched civilization be even more immersed in classic literature, lest they become miles wide but only an inch deep.

I remain convinced that exposure to truly great literature—narrative that sucks a student into a different world, into a different way of thinking, forcing students to engage with deeper questions (but in an allusive manner)—is critical to developing better minds. Additionally, students who read (and learn to enjoy) classic, immersive literature are more likely to grow into regular readers than those who simply learn to read and digest information for classes. At these early levels, I’m convinced that should be the primary aim, not moving towards “informational” reading, which will come soon enough. I also think that students who learn to critically engage with classic literature are better able to analyze data and digest informational material once they have to deal with it—but it doesn’t work the same way in reverse.

The second point is less related to the standards themselves than a statement made by one of the common core’s framers:

Timothy Shanahan, a professor of urban education at the University of Illinois at Chicago who helped write the common core standards for how to incorporate reading into science instruction, said that as a whole, the standards make no adjustments for students who are learning English or for children who might enter kindergarten without having been exposed to books.

“If I’m teaching fifth grade and I have a youngster in my class who reads as a first grader, throwing him a grade-level text is not going to do him any good, no matter what the standards say,” he said.

Yikes. My thinking runs the opposite way: if you’re giving a fifth-grader who reads below grade-level material written for first-graders, that’s going to be even more detrimental than giving him fifth-grade material and helping him work through it. The last thing we should be doing is trying to assign “grade-level” material to students. Rather, we should be encouraging students to find good, classic literature that they find engaging and interesting and then help them through it where it’s above them—teach them how to look up the words they don’t know (easier today than ever), how to boost their reading level to match these classic books.

This is partly a reaction not only to Shanahan’s statement but to those who I have encountered who try to limit children from reading books “above their level” because it would be “too much for them,” despite the fact that the children are interested in those books. That kind of limitation is infuriating and illustrates an important point in the discussion of standards:  grade level standards for children should be understood as minimums, not as “norms.”

Back to the example of the fifth-grader reading way below grade level, the biggest effort needs to help that kid find literature that connects with him, something that he can become immersed in, something that she is interested in. Once the curiosity and interest levels are there, kids are capable of learning quickly—the trick is to find ways to get them motivated to learn (as I’ve said before, in our soft and prosperous culture, motivation is the real problem). They’re capable of a lot more than we think they are.

Related posts:

1. Participation Grades

Vote Quimby!

LZ Granderson has put forward quite a provocative proposal: before anyone can register to vote, they should be required to take and pass a test modeled off of the citizenship test required of immigrants. He roots this in the (true) observation that the founding fathers weren’t exactly “a bunch of average Joes with gripes about England; they were elite thinkers and philosophers.” It is also true that the framers initially restricted the franchise to land owners, effectively ruling out the uncultured and uneducated masses (Granderson doesn’t mention this). He’s also right that our national political situation is presently a lowest-common-denominator affair ruled by soundbites geared towards gaining the support of the ignorant (such is the state of democracy in its “purer” forms).

Actually, as I read Granderson’s piece, I couldn’t help think of the 1996 Simpsons‘ episode “Much Apu About Nothing,” in which Indian-immigrant Apu must take the citizenship test to avoid getting deported (due to a law that would deport all illegal immigrants as a way of protecting the citizens from wild bears). Homer agrees to tutor Apu for the citizenship test, but it quickly becomes obvious that Apu knows far more about American civics than his native-born friend. (The entire episode can be seen online here.) As usual, satire reveals the sad state of affairs in American government, with our apathetic, ignorant voter base and politicians who take advantage of this ignorance for their own political gain.

Granderson’s idea would likely help matters somewhat, but the problem is implementation (especially if there were no grandfather clause for current voters). I have considered this sort of thing before, but the problem really starts with how something like this could be implemented—and implemented fairly. I’m just not sure we could do such a thing, so the idea isn’t really a good one in the end.

But there is one thing we could do that we absolutely should do: strengthen our American “civics” curriculum across the board and require that students have a reasonable understanding of the US Government before they receive their high school diploma. That—increased educational standards—is something we could implement that would have a potentially positive impact, though it would take quite some time to see the effects.

Another thing I’d like to see: I think our elected officials should be required to take and pass a government test (or, say, memorize the US Constitution and recite or write it down as an examination) before being permitted to undertake their elected responsibilities. I continue to be amazed by some of the people we have managed to elect as national representatives, people like infamous geniuses Michele Bachmann, Corrine Brown, and Hank Johnson . I don’t think a civics test for voters is a viable option, but I certainly think it might be a good idea for our elected officials.

No related posts.

Frederick Schmidt’s article, “Is it Time to Write the Eulogy? The Future of Seminary Education,” observes a number of problems with the present state of seminary education and suggested some sweeping changes to how M.Div. degrees are handled both by the church and by divinity schools.

In the quest for academic respectability, seminaries have not always remembered that preparing clergy was the mission and lifeblood of their institutional life. Some have focused on preparing scholars, which though essential, is secondary to its primary ministry of preparing new generations of spiritual leaders. Some have prepared students who lacked the practical skills to effectively lead a congregation. Others have produced students who were so poorly grounded in the Christian faith that they lacked the necessary spiritual formation to be effective.

He then points to a number of reasons for this and concludes that seminaries should become “leaner and meaner” by doing the following:

• Create a Master of Divinity that is lean and designed to do what it should do, covering a set of definable core competencies that were offered and taught—no more, no less. (The M.Div. is not a research degree; it is a professional degree analogous to the Juris Doctorate required of lawyers and it should be treated as such.)
• Educate and spiritually form the students sent to them.
• Enlist a faculty that is both willing and able to teach an essential body of knowledge and skills, as well as teach the faith.
• Communicate effectively and often with the church about the preparation of its candidates.

Schmidt has some points as pertains to the training of clergy. But on the other hand, not everyone who gets an M.Div. is envisioning a move into a pastorate, which further complicates the issue. If seminaries were indeed solely geared towards “preparing clergy,” Schmidt’s suggestions would likely be an improvement on the present situation. But a number of people go to seminary expecting to do other kinds of work when they get out: not-for-profit work, moving into a research degree, etc. Perhaps maintaining two separate tracks like an M.T.S. (Master of Theological Studies) degree and an M.Div. degree, as some div schools are now doing, can help the seminary simultaneously operate as a center of research and inquiry while also serving its purpose in training clergy. Either way, it’s a scary world out there for those of us going into academia hoping there’s a job out there for us to continue our research…

No related posts.

Slate has a nice piece up on why it’s totally, completely wrong to double-space after a period. I get this all the time in documents I edit—I usually just do a quick find/replace to eliminate all double-spaces from the document at the very start. I remain continually surprised at how many (even those who learned to type in the last decade) commit this typography foul, a holdover from the days of typewriters with monospaced fonts. Please, for the sake of humanity, stop doing this, people—at least eliminate the spaces via find/replace after you type the document! (FULL DISCLOSURE: I was taught to put two spaces after a period when I learned to type also; it was a real pain to unlearn it a few years back.)

Just say no to two spaces after a period.

Perhaps more interesting is how several teachers cited in the article explained that they teach/require their students to put two spaces after a period even though they know it’s wrong. Why? Because they learned it that way themselves. Remarkable. So not only are they showing themselves to be unwilling learners, they are willing to teach the wrong thing just because it’s more comfortable for them. That pretty nearly sums up the definition of an unwise person and bad teacher; unfortunately, it’s how many teachers (and parents) choose to educate the next generation.

Yes, I know it’s just typography, but the larger point is worth making. The capacity and willingness to receive correction is a first step to becoming competent and wise. Or, put differently, the first step in being correct is actively seeking and accepting correction. If we stubbornly stick to what’s comfortable or “the way we were [first] taught,” we’ll be on the wrong side of a lot of things over the course of our lives—and worse, we’ll pull others along with us. As the proverbs say: ‏הוֹכַח לְחָכָם וְיֶאֱהָבֶךָּ “correct a wise man and he will love you” and ‏אֹהֵב מוּסָר אֹהֵב דָּעַת וְשֹׂנֵא תוֹכַחַת בָּעַר “Whoever loves correction loves knowledge, but the one who hates rebuke is stupid.”

We should all make this a rule of life: rather than eschewing correction and resting comfortably in what (we think) we already know, we should actively and tirelessly seek correction so that we can truly know—and only then can we, as wise people, instruct others. And by no means should we ever teach the next generation to do what we know to be wrong, simply because it’s how we first learned it.

UPDATE: This subject has apparently hit a nerve across the web, including some pretty witty responses like the following: “everyone has a right to their [sic.] beliefs,” which (despite the number disagreement in its subject line) nicely critiques the Slate article for sloppy argumentation. (Yes, it would have been better had he mentioned more empirical arguments like the fact that double-spacing wastes precious space in print, etc.)

No related posts.