Your “genius IQ” does not make you interesting, or smart

The whole IQ business is a sham. I’m not much of a ranter but it really annoys me when “smart” people, when backed into a corner, pretend their “genius IQ” makes them right and worthy of passing judgment on the foolish masses. If they were intelligent, they wouldn’t need to defend themselves with this particular fig leaf, the de facto “caste system” of the mind. I got annoyed with the last one that pulled this shtick, possibly having put at risk the blowjob she had been talking about just before. Oh well.

Alfred Binet, the creator of what became the IQ test, was himself aware of the risks of intelligence testing in order to classify people intellectually. It became a tool of the “progressive” education movement that used it to justify only vocational training for minorities and the poor. As time went on, the biases in the test became more and more apparent. At this present moment, it is considered absolutely useless as a measure or predictor of intelligence by most social scientists. What does having a high IQ tell you then? You can probably recognize patterns in test settings very well. You may not necessarily have high reading skills, but you might. You have some conceptual grasp of math. That means fuck-all though in terms of value, coherence, or articulation of your views. It doesn’t make you a good negotiator. It doesn’t mean you can think your way out of a paper bag. If you can, then it isn’t because of your IQ. Your intelligence does not give you license to be a total prick. See: Adams, Scott, the creator of the comic strip Dilbert and his “high IQ.”

I took the damn thing when I was a kid. I don’t remember my score but what I remember was how this girl who had been crying because her IQ test results weren’t as good as she’d hoped kicked my ass in the school debate. A (presumably) higher score didn’t make my ideas or delivery better. I told her afterwards that she could take it again and do better. The following year, she did. The local foundation that facilitated these tests also had a little separate branch staffed by a really sweet Indian woman who promised to train test-takers to be more intelligent. Apparently, she got results. So, fuck your fucking caste system.

This sort of testing is actively dangerous for children. Alfred Binet could have told you that in fucking 1910. I’m vehemently opposed to the education reform movement’s desire to quantify kids in this way. Just as I’m opposed to many of their ideas, which they hold unquestionable, simply because they’re “smart.”

Spannungsbogen

Defined in my favorite novel ever, Dune, as the self-imposed delay between thought and action.

It just occurred to me, poring over student data, that essays written immediately after reading a text were of lower quality than of essays written after they’d read the text, discussed it and then wrote it. Here I was thinking in-class essay scores would bump up averages. Turns out it’s formal essay scores that drive up the scores. Also, midterms and finals but that’s purely on account of my soft-heartedness, which I have rightly been called to task for.

Get out

This post is wholly unscientific but I plan to study this phenomenon in a more systematic manner this semester.

Education reform is such a complicated debate, if only because an easy solution eludes us. Why do the richest students tend to do better than the poorest students? All reasonable answers seem to point to parental involvement in the students’ lives. Poor students have to deal with parents who work multiple jobs, living in areas where being part of a gang is a safety mechanism, submerged under the the soft bigotry of low expectations. The only reasoned mainstream solution seems to be a more comprehensive approach that aims for higher living standards so the poor don’t have apathy and neglect of their children’s future forced upon them.

A recent study indicates that the recession, terrible as it is, is much more pronounced among those without a college degree. The unemployment rate among college graduates is 1/3 that of non-college graduates and, shockingly, the college graduate unemployment rate is not alarmingly high. I suspect this is because those students who graduate college share a particular trait that enables them to cope with life better.

I polled some of my undergraduate freshmen the last few semesters for openness to new experience. I asked them how far they’d travelled, whether they would like to, whether they grew up in a small closed community, what their parents did for a living, and so forth. Do they like to try unfamiliar food? Do their parents? How long had they lived in the same town? Then I compared this data to my class’ final grades and it seems, with only one exception, those students who lived in an isolated system scored the lowest grades. Now, mind you, the low achievers work extremely hard, certainly as hard in most cases as the achievers, more in some cases, but they invariably lived without seeing themselves as part of a cosmopolitan society, which is one of the aims of liberal education. Many of those kids expected to live in the same town as their parents. They weren’t disdainful of new experiences but they did not think they would like them. They preferred safety, a constant constantness, if you will, over the joyous rough and tumble of the modern world. It is this attitude, I suspect, that keeps them down. It has much to do with lack of parental involvement. Their parents are trapped not knowing the outside world and are unable to provide these students with a sense of their possibilities, even as they view college education as an unalloyed good.

What is the solution then? Surely, we can’t fix parents’ work environments for them. We can’t make them care. We can’t stop them from being alcoholics or addicts. We can’t make them not get divorced. We can’t change the circumstances that created them.

So can there be a solution?

Mine is a simple one. Incentivize every student going to school outside their school district. Outside of the net positives this will bring in re: property values, it will force ghettoized children (not in the urban sense but in terms of ethnic enclaves that exist even in small towns) to eat food they would not otherwise eat, to learn that there is life, fulfilling, stimulating life, outside their little bubbles. When they get to college, they’ll be more equipped than they are now. After all, my unscientific poll revealed what is common sense: the rich have more opportunity to travel, to expose their children to various things, to set aside time for them. Therein lies a key part of the achievement gap.

So go on, get out of your small towns, your enclaves, your narrow circle of 16 blocks. Go! Get out!

Staged learning 1

I teach English Composition at Rutgers-Newark. I enjoy it a great deal but I didn’t always. In fact, in my first semester last year, I can honestly say I taught my students nothing.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks for new instructors tends to be where students are in the Perry cognitive development scheme. This is true especially as they arrive via the New Jersey public school system, where for some strange reason, students are taught how to summarize an argument they don’t agree with without calling into question why they don’t agree.

How can you personally support racial profiling while at the same time, write a paper opposing it simply because it was asked (as some of my students did)? Of course, these papers weren’t ever any good, which could be because of the dissonance set up between what they were asked to do and their own unquestioned beliefs. Grading these papers were hard for me as well. My students couldn’t articulate why the author chose an opposing position so they summarized the reading but not before letting some of their prior beliefs reduce the effectiveness of the analytical portion of the paper. My students did good work. I can’t fault them too much. They read. They followed instructions. They didn’t care though.

I had to wonder if my students were really so blase and unaffected by a non-fiction reading that takes an opposing point of view. I questioned them afterwards about this. I asked them if their point of view had shifted at all after writing an argumentative paper against racial profiling. They said no. Clearly, something was wrong. Perhaps, I reasoned, it was because of some allegiance to a heirarchy of authority.