Real Americans at Yale

Last week’s Washington Post had a great op-ed in which conservative sociologist Charles Murray accuses the meritocratic elite in this country of being un-American. Every Yale student should read it, as far as I’m concerned. We need to keep arguments like Murray’s in mind, especially as we all think about what the results of Tuesday’s election mean (and what they don’t mean):

Get into a conversation about television with members of the New Elite, and they can probably talk about a few trendy shows — “Mad Men” now, “The Sopranos” a few years ago. But they haven’t any idea who replaced Bob Barker on “The Price Is Right.” They know who Oprah is, but they’ve never watched one of her shows from beginning to end.

Talk to them about sports, and you may get an animated discussion of yoga, pilates, skiing or mountain biking, but they are unlikely to know who Jimmie Johnson is (the really famous Jimmie Johnson, not the former Dallas Cowboys coach), and the acronym MMA means nothing to them.

They can talk about books endlessly, but they’ve never read a “Left Behind” novel (65 million copies sold) or a Harlequin romance (part of a genre with a core readership of 29 million Americans). … They’ve never heard of Branson, MO.

There are so many quintessentially American things that few members of the New Elite have experienced.

Making Course Feedback Surveys Work

TAYLOR DUNN: We are officially one week past the point in the term when one can drop a course without any consequences. That was also the point where we should have had an official route for giving feedback to professors.

Yale encourages students to give feedback to their professors after the course is over via an anonymous online form. The form asks questions such as “How would you summarize this course for a fellow student?” and “Overall, how would you rate the workload of this course in comparison to other Yale courses you have taken?” and “Would you recommend Economics 116 01 to another student? Why or why not?” These questions are aimed at helping other students decide whether they want to take the course in the future. But this doesn’t always help professors improve their teaching.

The problem with giving feedback after the end of the course is since students are unlikely to have more contact with the professor unless they liked the course, they have no incentive to be productive, constructive, and specific in their critiques. In turn, there’s no pressure for professors to respond to students’ suggestions.

Under the current system, students feel comfortable being incredibly harsh.

One professor I spoke with said some of her students made sweeping generalizations that she had difficulty reconciling with the course she thought she taught. She mentioned that some of her criticism had felt so harsh and so ungrounded one year, that she has rarely read any of her feedback since. This makes the process entirely counterproductive.

The Art of Reading a Picture Book

REBECCA SCHULTZ: Apparently, picture book sales are down as parents are pushing chapter books on preschool-age children:

Publishers cite pressures from parents who are mindful of increasingly rigorous standardized testing in schools. “Parents are saying, ‘My kid doesn’t need books with pictures anymore,’” said Justin Chanda, the publisher of Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers.

This is sad for several reasons.

First, means-to-an-end education is always sad. If picture books are a mere stepping-stone – a road to chapter books and a way to learn how to read – then the delight that children take in them becomes secondary and skippable. After chapter books, presumably, comes something else, and the possibility of reading as an end in itself is continually postponed. Education becomes an uphill battle, whose final reward is abstract, untenable, and probably doesn’t exist. Meanwhile, “Goodnight moon, Goodnight cow jumping over the moon, Goodnight light, and the red balloon” loses its poetry.

Second, picture books are just better than children’s chapter books anyhow.