Short Things Written During Warmups for the Counties

So let me get back to the County Swim Championships. They are run like such a festive event, between the Playland tickets that participants randomly win at different points during the day, dress up contests among coaches, and programs like their canned food collection. Yesterday, at a break in the action on another dripping with sweat day, Mr. McClintock, the man who runs things, fills the space by inviting anyone who wants to cool off to jump into the pool. At one point during the four or five minute break, with all these swimmers just splashing and jumping around in the Playland Pool, he remarked about how nice it was to see kids acting like kids.

From where I stand, the character of the even makes the whole thing a great experience rather than an uber-competitive championship.

But despite the character of the organizers, certain folks at events like this, and other dual meets we’ve participated in (look at me saying “we” as if I’m on the team), reinforce my belief that I was not created to be a country club kind of guy. It has dawned on me this summer that social life at country clubs reminds me a lot of high school. It’s funny the way most people feel liberated from the stratification of high school social life only to replicate it a decade or two later based on the same criteria (money) that is used for high school status.

Now I’m not saying that the dominant feature of high schools is social cliquification. But I would say that this is the most harmful thing in schools where the threat of physical violence isn’t apparent. Yes, many people in high schools and country clubs choose not to participate in clique-ish and exclusive social interaction; these people are known as cool people. But oh the cattiness among the in-crowd! The comments about the interlopers from distinctly middle class clubs in places where we should be parking cars (as far as they’re concerned), the raised eyebrows about outfits worn by the women they’ve just spoken with, the tearing down of other people’s children based on whatever accident of fate made them finish faster than little Jason, child born of in-crowd parents. I am reminded of the opinion piece that Grace Atchue wrote a couple of years ago when she lamented the divided between the rich and the super-rich in New Canaan, a piece that predated a similar New York Times piece by about a week.

I was never cool enough to be in the in-crowd, so I haven’t tasted the forbidden fruits of judgmentalism and elitism. My middle class pool, where it would be just way too embarrassing to be pretentious, fits me perfectly. After all, you probably can’t hang out on a lawn in ten-dollar beach chairs swilling PBRs with Peter Shortall at any country club.

And another thing….Plagiarism

Whenever the Times runs a piece about plagiarism this summer, it ends up number one on their Most Read or Most Emailed list. Twice this summer, the problem of plagiarism has been an article focus, and the pattern seems to be to focus on the problem of copy and paste, as well as the knowledge of what is intellectual property and what isn’t. Experts say that file-sharing culture has blurred lines, but much of file-sharing culture is intellectual-property stealing culture – downloading music illegally; downloading movies without paying for them; in other words, knowingly using “sharing” as a euphemism for “stealing” to justify an action that computer people feel is contrary to their character. Why Wikipedia even comes up in discussions of college cheating baffles me – at what point were college professors allowing students to use Encyclopedia Brittanica as a source? Do we believe that students don’t know the difference between a primary source, a secondary source, and an encyclopedia?

I think we might. Because nowhere have I read anything about improving approaches to instructing students in the research process. If colleges are taking for granted the idea that students have been trained in source selection, in research reading, in moving highlighting and marginalia into an outline or other intermediate form before the paper itself, they may want to rethink their assumptions.

Even in my school, which is pretty darn competitive in every area of scholastic endeavor, we expect kids to have a certain kind of reading skill because they can read. But this is like saying that because you know how to run, you’ll do equally well in a 1500 meter race and a 100 meter race. Just as the athlete who goes from playing on the football team one week to playing on the basketball the next needs time to recalibrate the different muscles used for the different sports, so does the reader need to recalibrate the brain to go from knowledge acquisition in the content areas and constructivist meaning-making in literature study to the kind of critical thinking that needs to be practiced by the researcher. The first two kinds of reading are single source-based and typically are based on immediate interactions between reader and text. Research reading is based on taking in information from one source, and then putting it into a place where that new knowledge can be informed by information from other texts. It is a much more complicated process.

If our job in schools is to teach, then we need to give value to the things kids are supposed to learn. This means providing clear instruction and feedback on the way kids read for research. If the reading itself is graded, there’s no point in plagiarizing, because the student has already done the work. But if you don’t give time to give feedback on this particular kind of reading, then you send the message that it isn’t important. After all, as Coach K has said, You know what you value by the time you give it. You don’t give the time to research reading instruction, then you don’t value it.

I guess a thousand words isn’t really a short post.