Tag Archives: critical thinking

election post-game

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I’ve had a few days to process the election now. I’ve heard and pondered a variety of explanations for why it went so decisively in Trump’s favor. Here are a few thoughts.

  1. “A referendum on the Biden administration.” The economic pain felt by a large majority of voters is real. The root cause, somewhat obviously, is inequality. The inequality in turn is the result of decades of poor policy choices resulting in erosion in real wages for working people, regressive taxation, lack of government services and benefits that citizens of other developed countries take for granted, and destabilization of our planet’s biophysical life support system which allows us to grow food and live near coast lines. The thing is, people don’t react strongly to gradual changes. A complex system like the economy can be under stress for a long time and then break when subjected to an extreme event. The extreme event in this case was Covid-19 and the worldwide inflation that followed. This caused a very real and painful reduction in peoples’ disposable income, and they are understandably pissed off. Trump offers simple (but wrong) explanations and people to blame: Biden. Harris. Democrats. Immigrants. China. Then he offers simple (but wrong and counter-productive) fixes like tariffs and mass deportation of foreigners.
  2. Lack of critical thinking. I think there is something to this. The simplistic answers are wrong, and intelligent people should be able to see this but they are not. There is at least some possibility that Covid or testicle-shrinking chemicals in our food/air/water have made us all stupider than we used to be. But I don’t really believe this. So it is clearly a failure of the education system if a large majority of the people, most of whom are perfectly intelligent, are not able to see through obvious illogical claims and false promises.
  3. Democrats’ lack of a clear alternative. The Democrats did not offer any easy to understand, coherent counter-narrative, and they do not have a track record they can point to suggesting they can reverse the decline in disposable income. I’ll let Bernie Sanders say it: “it should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”
  4. Lack of talented leaders in politics. I loathe Trump and everything he stands for. But I went to the polls on Tuesday feeling like I was voting for the less bad of the two very limited options being offered to me. I did not find Harris to be visionary or inspiring. I can say the same about Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and George W. Bush. Barrack Obama was a talented, visionary, inspiring leader even though his policies were status quo in many ways. I find Bernie Sanders inspiring. I personally found Bill Clinton inspiring, although again his policies were quite conservative on any rational spectrum. And that’s it for the last three decades or so! But I see talented leaders at the state and local level, in corporations and non-profit organizations and universities all the time. In a nation of 350 million odd people, there have to be thousands if not tens of thousands of people with leadership potential. Our political system is not identifying these people, inspiring them to pursue a political career, and bringing them to the forefront for the electorate to choose from.

more on homework

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NPR has a roundup of recent research on homework. One near-consensus seems to be that about 10 minutes per grade level is kind of sweet spot. This is the U.S. system we’re talking about, which goes up to 12 grades so therefore two hours. I did a lot more homework than this in high school.

Let’s start with something called the spacing effect. Say a child has to do a vocabulary worksheet. The next week, it’s a new worksheet with different words and so on. Well, research shows that the brain is better at remembering when we repeat with consistency, not when we study in long, isolated chunks of time. Do a little bit of vocabulary each night, repeating the same words night after night.

Similarly, a professor of psychology at Washington University in St. Louis, Henry “Roddy” Roediger III, recommends that teachers give students lots and lots of little quizzes, which he says strengthen the brain’s ability to remember. Don’t fret. They can be low-stakes or no-stakes, says Roediger, it’s the steady recall and repetition that matter. He also recommends, as homework, that students try testing themselves instead of simply re-reading the text or class notes.

There’s also something known as interleaving… there’s evidence that students learn more when homework requires them to choose among multiple strategies — new and old — when solving problems. In other words, kids learn when they have to draw not just from what they learned in class that day but that week, that month, that year.

One last note: Experts agree that homework should generally be about reinforcing what students learned in class (this is especially true in math). Sometimes it can — and should — be used to introduce new material, but here’s where so many horror stories begin.