Paul Kimelman, a reader and sometimes inadvertent guest blogger over at Freakonomics, asks whether or not there’s a direct correlation between kicking ass academically and then going on to achieve success in the real world.

It’s a great post and it made me think about the tremendous value we tend to place on the paper measures of success, i.e., grades achieved or money earned. Rarely do we look at the whole person and quantify their levels of happiness and contentment, or how many of their own goals they’ve achieved to determine how successful they are in life.

I myself am a recovering overachiever, and I therefore try very hard to not put insane amounts of pressure on my kids. It’s a fine line and I’m still working out the kinks in the system. I have to somehow get it through to my first-grader that completing the homework assignments are expected and required, while allowing her to do said assignment in her own way.

I don’t want her to obsess about perfection, but I do need her to understand that no one gets to waltz through life avoiding the drudgery entirely and sticking with only the super-fun bits. As a human in the Race (be that Rat or Great) she’ll be expected to contribute. But I would very much like to avoid beating the coloring-outside-the-lines instinct out of her; I love it that she prefers to do things a little to the left or right of center.

How do you instill in a person a solid work ethic and the concept that her own goal of using every color in the crayon box is just as important as completing the illustration assigned in the homework? There’s no paper measure or value in society for turning in a meticulously colored homework assignment. Her Mom and her teacher may think it’s cool and may appreciate it, but it’s not like there’s an extra point column for enjoying the assignment and using every color. A correct and completed assignment and some stellar test scores are the only proof of success available to school kids.

So will thirteen years of primary and secondary education form her for her higher education career, in which GPAs and test scores will be her personal-value metric? And what happens after college? Will she do what most adults do and transfer her success-pursuing energies immediately from grades to money? How do I instill in my offspring the idea that doing one’s best in school and in the professional world is important, but that a 4.0 and a million dollars are by no means the be-all and end-all?

Dammit. This is one of the drawbacks to being a thinking higher mammal cursed with the ability to ponder oneself into oblivion: you can think yourself into a sucky little dark corner wherein false optimism and pure, unadulterated denial are the only way out.

Well, I think my work here is done. I’m sure I won’t screw my progeny up too badly and that they will have a higher-than-average chance of growing up happy and then blossoming into well-adjusted, deliriously happy adults who wake up every day just bursting with excitement for the day ahead.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

photo: bookgrl

It’s like a month of miracles! (The pessimist in me is concerned that a good month now will mean we’re all doomed come election month.)

First the Unigo.com thing, and now this. I’m too involved with doing my happy dance (similar to the Snoopy dance, only it’s much more cerebral when I do it) to write intelligently about the NACAC’s ass-kicking report on the backward-thinking, wretched evilness that is the use of standardized test scores as a means to measure high school students’ intelligence, aptitude, and whether they are deserving of admission to a particular college or university.

I’ve written several times about my intense hatred and disdain for the test prep industry, the misuse of standardized tests, and the high-pressure hoops high school students are forced to jump through (in an accelerated, advanced, and gifted manner) by their parents and the college admissions process.

The following are my favorite bits from the NY Times article about the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) and the commission they put together to research the effectiveness/worth of using the SAT and the ACT as sorting hats in the college admissions game.

The commission’s report, the culmination of a yearlong study led by William R. Fitzsimmons, the dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard, comes amid growing concerns that the frenzy over standardized college admissions tests is misshaping secondary education and feeding a billion-dollar test-prep industry that encourages students to try to game the tests.

“It would be much better for the country,” Mr. Fitzsimmons said in an interview, “to have students focusing on high school courses that, based on evidence, will prepare them well for college and also prepare them well for the real world beyond college, instead of their spending enormous amounts of time trying to game the SAT.”

Mr. Fitzsimmons’s group, which was convened by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, also expresses concerns “that test scores appear to calcify differences based on class, race/ethnicity and parental educational attainment.” The report calls on admissions officials to be aware of such differences and to ensure that differences not related to a student’s ability to succeed academically be “mitigated in the admission process.”

“Society likes to think that the SAT measures people’s ability or merit,” Mr. Fitzsimmons said. “But no one in college admissions who visits the range of secondary schools we visit, and goes to the communities we visit — where you see the contrast between opportunities and fancy suburbs and some of the high schools that aren’t so fancy — can come away thinking that standardized tests can be a measure of someone’s true worth or ability.”

Thank you! This is what I’ve been yammering on about for years. The tests began as equalizers and have been transmogrified into exactly the thing they were designed to plow through. They used to be a way for the financially challenged kid from the non-college-educated family to show he had what it took to attend college. Now the college admissions process is back to being a money game, and the kids with the most financial backing tend to win.

And lest you think I’ve been doling out such vast quantities of ill will for the SAT and the ACT and their effed-up circus of college admissions pain because I blew it on said tests, let me reassure you that is not the case. I did nothing to prepare for either test and kicked ass on both of them because: (a) I’m white; (b) English is my first language; (c) my family are all educated bookworms; and (d) I went to public school, which, as far as I can tell, is the best training ground for excelling in the standardized test arena.

Previous Posts in Which I Express My Disdain:

College Admissions—Looking Good Only On Paper
Private College Counselors
Inequality In College Admissions
Media Frenzy Around High Pressure College Admissions
Acceptance
Testing Season Begins
Awesome Parent
Wake Forest University Drops SAT Requirement
The Newly Unfabulous SAT
The SAT Is Not Good
An Excellent Argument For Abolishing the SAT

Posted by Alexa Harrington

I was bitching about college rankings about a month ago, and although I do enjoy a good vent, I wish Sam Jackson had told me that soon my pleas would be answered. I understand that the lid had to be kept on the Unigo.com thing, so I’m willing to forgive him.

Because Mr. Jackson and the NY Times Magazine both do such a thorough job of explaining it all, I won’t go into great depth about Unigo.com. I will say that it’s a tremendous undertaking and that the founder, Jordan Goldman, should be commended for utilizing his powers for good.

I say again that annually published college rankings are crap, and have more basis in politics than in fact. This renders them useless for any real research on the part of college student hopefuls and their parents. Finding a college or university that’s the perfect fit is difficult, especially when faced with thousands of possibilities and a finite (or nonexistent) amount of funds available for campus visits.

Unigo.com is a huge step in the right direction toward collecting valuable information about particular colleges and universities and what type of experience a given student might realistically expect to find there. Knowing that this resource is available makes me incredibly happy and has helped to restore my faith in my fellow man.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Jeffrey Hart in the Dartmouth Review asks the question, “What is a College Education?” I’m going with the theory that it’s different things to different people. For some it’s the ladder they use to get themselves up and out of a place they don’t want to be. For others it’s more of a bridge that’ll get them from the comfortable-enough spot on this side if the river over to that much more interesting bit on the other side. College also makes a magnificently indefinite way station for anyone needing to maintain a safe holding pattern for a while.

I have always considered college to be the place and time in one’s life where the learning of both necessary and not-so-necessary information happens; where one learns to learn; and where one gets to grow up and figure oneself out a little in that half-baked time of life between being a teenager and being a full adult.

I read a post by Ben Casnocha a year or so ago that has always stuck with me. In it he ponders whether college is “worth it.” Four or more years of college is not a little thing, financially speaking. So does the entire experience make it worth the enormous expenditure?

I come from a family of education junkies, of both the formal, university-stamped variety and the self-taught Renaissance man version. The result of having been raised by educated wolves is that I have always been of the opinion that you can never learn enough, be that independently or in a lecture hall.

That being said, I am also of the firm opinion that college has more to offer than simply a book education; I would go so far as to say a good half of one’s college education has nothing whatsoever to do with lecture halls and textbooks. College is pretty much the only venue where a person can be allotted the socially acceptable time and space to ponder and grow.

Even if only as a means to a figuring-yourself-out end, I still maintain that college is worth it. Although, I did adore the book learning, and reading the course catalog every term like it was an exquisite menu created with exactly me in mind. And I loved the lab tables. And the libraries. And those gargantuan lecture halls, capable of imparting knowledge to multitudes. But now I’m all growed up, and should I ever return (eventually I’ll cave and allow myself to be pulled back) I’m sure that college for a fully-formed adult being is not at all the same as college is for a nineteen-year-old.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

In honor of Danica McKellar’s new book, Kiss My Math, I’m re-posting my thoughts on the hotness of smart girls below.

My daughter doesn’t have math homework yet, but I’ve already staked out helping her with it as my exclusive territory. Fortunately, my husband was a political science major, so he’s totally fine with “letting” me be in charge of all math and science-related aspects of our kids’ education. He will be in charge of teaching them how to turn boring discussions into heated debates, how to argue their way out of paper bags, and how to confuse the opposition using vocabulary words in lieu of logic.

I suck at debating—I’m more of an action girl. But I am good at math. It’s logical, it follows clearly laid-out rules, and when you do it right you can almost hear the little snick sound the universe makes when everything clicks into place.

Thus far, according to my daughter, everything Mommy does is super cool. Mommy being good at math, Mommy coloring inside the lines in the Flower Fairies coloring book, and Mommy knowing the lyrics of every Social Distortion song all come in under my seven-year-old’s umbrella of My Mom Is Super Cool (Except When She Tells Me Princesses Are Helpless Pains In The Ass). Someday this bubble will burst and my daughter will drink the Math Is Hard Kool-Aid and see me not as a trigonometry badass, but as a supremely embarrassing dorky mom who likes math (how lame).

Before that happens (somewhere around middle school, I think) I have to convince her that being smart is hot and knowing how to kick algebra booty will not be detrimental to her future. I have less than eight years to instill in her a solid smart-girl ethic before she hits the teen years and never speaks to me again.

If worse comes to worst, I can always employ some cranky military tactics and make her watch The Wonder Years until she gets how hot Winnie Cooper is. Then I’ll show her this math proof and tell her the hot girl coauthored it. Then I’ll give her the book Math Doesn’t Suck by Danica McKellar (Winnie) and tell her to read it if she knows what’s good for her.

Or not. Sometimes you can lean so far to the left that you end up going to the right. Don’t worry, I won’t crush my good intentions with evil tactics. Between me telling her that Barbie was wrong and all of the positive attention girls, math and science are getting lately, it’s conceivable that my daughter’s relationship with math could be healthy and well-adjusted.

Good articles on girls, math and science:

For Some Girls, the Problem With Math Is That They’re Good at It

Approach to School Affects How Girls Compare With Boys in Math

Math, Science, and Girls: Can We Close the Gender Gap?

Girls’ Math Anxiety Undermines Performance in Other Subjects

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Armed with new technology, a new business model and the good karma that comes with using one’s powers for good instead of evil, Flat World Knowledge is hoping to begin the ending of the textbook-publishing racket. I’m on their side, and am hoping they succeed in crushing the money-sucking tyrants that are college textbook publishers. (It’s cranky thoughts like these that are always knocking my own karma out of whack.)

Check out their site, as well as Hack College’s interview with FWK’s co-founder Eric Frank. The site is informative, but the interview is a concise explanation of the Flat World Knowledge business model and how they plan on making money (because even the good guys can’t stay afloat giving away free lunches all the damn time).

Flat World Knowledge will be available starting January 2009. Until then, avoid buying new textbooks whenever possible (I know that it is sometimes not) and rent when you can.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Some of my vacation reading included How’d You Score That Gig? A Guide to the Coolest Jobs [and How to Get Them] by Alexandra Levit. I’m a girl who likes clear instructions that are as exact as possible when embarking on a new experience.

I’m a big fan of the informational interview, and back when I was a student I always always always (I couldn’t not, it seemed) read every page of my textbooks. This included the copyright page, which I was never once tested on. It’s a thing: I have to know as much information in advance so I will feel properly prepared for my mission. Oddly enough, I only feel that I must do this for work or academic situations; when I travel (sans children) I am perfectly content to just go.

From the perspective of someone who appreciates having new career situations described to her, I must say I found Levit’s book extremely helpful and well-researched. She describes in detail 60 careers and how one might go about landing a job in a particular field, including the education required and how the people she interviewed came to work at their current positions.

At the beginning of the book, before you jump into reading about the specific careers, there’s a smarter-than-Cosmo test to ascertain what personality type you are, as it relates to your professional life. The list includes: Adventurer, Creator, Data Head, Entrepreneur, Investigator, Networker, and Nurturer.

I fully admit to bending the test a little; Levit instructs you to choose the single best answer for any given question. For several of the questions I could honestly have chosen three or four answers that described me exactly; there was much pondering and I couldn’t find just one.

In the end I counted up all worthy answers, and saw which columns had the most answers that pertained to me at the end. I had a ’score’ of seven in the Creator column, and eight in the Investigator column, which makes me both. I agreed with that, and with the descriptions Levit writes about both types. I had never labeled myself as either of those before, but it made sense when I thought about it. And really, are any of us just one thing?

I can recommend the book as an excellent tool for figuring yourself out, as well as researching some career options prior to jumping into a particular career pool feet first, fully clothed and blindfolded.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

For anyone who might want to immerse themselves in the neuroscience of memory instead of actual memories, Jonah Lehrer at The Frontal Cortex has a science geek post up today about flashbulb memories.

My daughter was born on Sept. 11th 2001, four minutes before the first plane hit. This means I have more than enough good memories to focus on every year when 9/11 comes around. However, if I didn’t have those, I would need to fall back on my habit of turning to science to get me through.

Posted by Alexa Harrington