Education

We Need to Teach Our White Kids about White Supremacy

/ Andrew Tatusko / Leave a comment

We do not accept Jews, because they reject Christ, and through machinations of their International Banking Cartel, are at the root center of what we call “communism” today.

We do not accept Papists, because they bow to a Roman dictator, in direct violation of the First Commandment and the true American Spirit of Responsible, Individual, Liberty.

We do not accept Turks, Mongols, Tarters, Orientals, Negroes, nor any other person whose native background of culture is foreign to the Anglo-Saxon system of government by responsible FREE, Individual citizens.

If you are a Christian, American Anglo-Saxon who can understand the simple truth of this Philosophy, you belong in the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi. Get your Bible out and pray!

1964 Recruiting leaflet for the Ku Klux Klan

I can remember learning about the plight of black Americans as told by the approved histories written by well-meaning white people. Back in junior high we learned how bad slavery was, that black Americans were forced to use separate (but equal) public facilities, and could not vote after the terms of their theft and purchase were lifted. I remember Rosa Parks on the bus and how horribly she was treated for simply sitting down after a hard day of work. Then came Martin Luther King, Jr. and “I Have a Dream” which was quickly followed by laws written by white people to right the wrongs of their parents who had created and enforced Jim Crow laws and whose grandparents may have even owned a slave or two. The message was pretty clear: white people treated black people badly, but they fixed it! Good white people joined forces with good black people and solved racism. Malcolm X was militant, the Black Panthers were terrorists, and MLK was a “good” black guy who loved Jesus and nonviolence. We’d remember this sanitized history every winter for Black History Month, feel content about fixing the problem, and move forward with our lives as the good guys. In the midst of this self-congratulatory posture we never detected the virus of white supremacy that was still very much alive in our systems.

We would have conversations wondering why there was no White History Month and would question the fairness of policies like “affirmative action.” We had just learned that racism was one race unfairly favoring itself over another race and that our white parents had fixed the racist policies of their parents, so why are black people allowed to unfairly favor their race? To thousands of “well-meaning” and “nice” suburban white kids in the 80s, from what we had just learned from our nice white teachers reading from texts written by nice white scholars, it seemed that angry black people were re-litigating a problem other nice white people fixed and were now being racist themselves. We saw emerge a new fascination with Malcolm X, a romanticization of Africa, and a new holiday called Kwanzaa. None of this made sense with what we had just been taught. Racism was fixed and we were all supposed to be homogeneous and nice Americans. It seemed that racism was being brought back not by white people, but ironically by black people. As Morgan Freeman would later say in a comment that got plenty of traction in white supremacist circles, “Stop talking about it.” Why do we have to relive something that no longer exists? The nice white people heard MLK’s dream and made it happen!

In junior high school, I learned the mechanisms of white supremacy as an aspiring friend of white power skinhead ideology. I was a scared, lonely kid from a dysfunctional home and desperately in need of purpose and meaning. Friends were hard to come by as introverted and different I felt. I found a small group of fellow misfits who listened to heavy music and rooted their identity in the idea that white America fixed racism, built a great society, and the genetically inferior black people, immigrants, and Jews were here to take that from us. My soundtrack became the words of Skrewdriver singing “White power for Britain, before it gets too late” and S.O.D. singing “Speak English or Die.” The natural consequences for failing to assimilate into our nice, white nation were permanent separation. “Find a new place to live” was the mantra. If you can’t assimilate, feel free to carve out a little place of your own to be savages who can’t accept this white, “Judeo-Christian” nation. The USA was meant to be a white, ethno state and others were welcome here as long as they submitted to white authority. The black cities were violent hellscapes for the same reason. They needed to fix their problems and it was time to stop asking white people to bail them out. Maybe Plessy v. Ferguson was right all along. Those black people and savage immigrants who fail to assimilate and submit to civilized, nice white people should find a place to live apart from us.

As a kid in search of identity and meaning I had truly found a place I could live. I learned the intimate and violent mechanisms of white supremacy not in a classroom, but from peers who had caught the disease and were sharing it like junkies with a needle. People and races were categorized by genetics and intelligence. Evolution seemed to show that the darker the skin, the more savage the creature. There were a few, rare exceptions of black people who sounded “white” and there was a rational separation between a black person and a “n***er” rooted in how “white” that person seemed to speak and behave. Like any animal, they could be tamed. Those that were tamed, civilized, and fully assimilated to the white way of life should be grateful that they were a genetic anomaly which escaped the clutches of savagery. Inside this white supremacist bubble, black people only contributed to society what white people had given them and Hitler had the right idea about cleansing the bloodlines even if he was a little crazy in his audacity to commit genocide. I would later come to understand that this was a complex system of purity that separated matter into distinct categories and there was a rationale for disposing of that material which was dirty and infected. Whiteness was the only cure and assimilation through submission was the delivery mechanism.

In the late 1980s when black people through their music and art told a counter-narrative that the “Dream” had been deferred and white America had become complacent if not violently oppressive, it sounded like militants who were causing the problem. Insistent in reclaiming their African ethnicity, it felt like they didn’t appreciate what good white people had done for them and they now wanted to unfairly tip the beautifully balanced scales in their favor. What they called injustice was the real inequality. Maybe it was time for all the white people who at this point had all fixed slavery and racism to reassert their niceness by reminding black people racism was over. They shouldn’t mess it up by asserting un-American, un-Christian ideas. After all, “we” begrudgingly gave them an entire month to celebrate nonviolence and their marches.

It’s easy to see how the narrative of civil rights as it was taught became a carrier of white supremacy. We of the white suburbs never learned its mechanisms and philosophies further than a few simple ideas: Plessy v. Ferguson wasn’t all that great, slavery was really bad, something about the KKK and lynch mobs, and to be grateful all of this stuff had been eradicated from our now unified and content nation. White Generation X grew up with these beliefs and had a childhood shaped by them. White kids became “nice” adults who didn’t recognize white supremacy because they weren’t aware of what it was so they got infected by it in subtle ways. Our schools didn’t vaccinate them out of fear that teaching the subtle mechanisms of white supremacy would somehow transmit the virus. Like any vaccine, you need a little bit of the virus so the body can learn to defend itself against infection. Instead our schools, armed with the history that nice white people ended racism towards nice black people, transmitted the disease itself.

Those nice white kids became carriers of the virus and just needed the right environment to activate it. They needed a tiny stimulus to get these ideas to replicate and spread. Without understanding its symptoms, white kids became white adults who carried and spread the virus to their family, friends, and their own kids. White kids today learn that same history of nice white people and other nice people who live in suburbs and rural places and can’t understand why cities are so violent and so black.

struthers

Sally Struthers for Christian Children’s Fund

A cornerstone of white supremacy is a belief that the genetic composition of white people is fundamentally superior. Those genes made them smarter and more civilized. I grew up with that philosophy. When Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder talked about the superiority of the black athlete, it triggered the idea that their physical prowess is why they were such capable slaves. There was something alluring and romantic in white supremacy about the idea that slavery became a means to rescue black people from their unintelligently designed African governments that could only be characterized as savage. Live Aid and USA for Africa were sufficient evidence to see how horrible that place was. Even Little Steven’s protest of Sun City seemed to reflect the horrors of these savages. Apartheid was the symptom of an untamed continent that just needed more nice, civilized white people of superior, European genes who could fix the problems like they did in America. Africa was an untamed land of lions, hyenas, and genetically-deficient people who weren’t smart enough to fix their own problems. The idea that white America and white Europe would have to fix that too, even at the expense of their own wealth, created a narrative of resentment and hostility. But white kids didn’t understand that this same narrative was the scaffolding of white supremacy because they never learned it. It was up to them to tame the wild world they saw on their televisions that beamed images of poor, emaciated, and bloated Ethiopian kids and a tearful Sally Struthers begging for white money to feed them. “Happy birthday,” she said. White suburban kids made jokes about it. It was funny how and sad how African kids didn’t have supermarkets and didn’t have bread or a nice President like Mr. Reagan. Being poor and black was stupid and white America shouldn’t have to pay for it.

Eventually I literally found Jesus and a new group identity in the church leaving behind the strange white fantasies as juvenile relics. I had thought it was just a bunch of dumb kids doing dumb things and seeking out dumb beliefs in a thwarted effort to look cool to peers. That was true, at least for me. The Rodney King verdict, the words from Public Enemy, and the music of Fishbone ended any latent racism that may have lingered in my brain. I joined a gospel choir in college and got intimate with the black church. I invested myself over the following years to listening to and spending time with the people I had at one time absurdly believed to be inferior in every way except for what Jimmy the Greek told me. I was making amends. Those racist ideas seemed to be anachronistic yearnings of an immature and insecure kid that had since been relegated to racist and homophobic messages trapped in men’s bathroom stalls. I would see swastikas and racist epithets scratched above toilet paper dispensers in gas stations as messages some teenaged white boy was sending me from my past hidden behind a curtain of anonymity.

In 2008, when I saw an older white man holding up a Curious George monkey he called “Little Hussein” at a rally for Sarah Palin, I was disgusted. The monkey was there to see “real Americans” as he put it. In one instant, those anonymous messages from bathroom stalls were activated on a public platform that would only get amplified throughout the Obama years finding an apex in Trump. From the language of the “forgotten” people of America, to the “very fine people” who must be among white supremacist Charlottesville protesters, to Steve King’s (Rep, I) questioning of the contributions others have made to the world outside of “Western” people, to the idea that immigrants coming from Mexico are riddled with disease, all are part of a complex of white supremacist language its advocates have used for decades, often in quiet forums no one knew existed or cared about until now. The very notion of a giant wall to keep people out is a staple of the so-called white “ethnonationalist” state. These ideas and the people who spread them have all been given permission to be out in the open like an airborne disease.

Like viruses we thought were long gone until the anti-vax movement gained momentum, this philosophy has been activated as a failure of our education system and of “nice” white people everywhere. It’s not like “just a little bit of smallpox” won’t hurt anyone. Of course it would. It is the same when we repeat racist language and pass it off as meaningless or irrelevant. Couched in the persistent lie that racism was solved, this might make sense. But that narrative is a lie. It’s toxic, dangerous, and has infected our public discourse and behavior to its worst degree perhaps since the 1960’s. Alongside teaching civil rights, we avoid teaching white supremacy, what it is, what it looks like, and how to inoculate ourselves against its spread. Until white people recognize the hot zone of white supremacy in their ranks and teach its features to their children, it will continue to infect the world. Our kids need to be exposed to white supremacy just enough that they can build their own antibodies and join the fight against it. This is how we can help stop its spread.

A Banner Day for Yoga but Not Satan in School

/ Andrew Tatusko / Leave a comment

satanology

Two cases dance on the fence between a protected expression of religion, and a government endorsement of religion. One has to do with a school’s inclusion of yoga practice in the curriculum. The other surrounds controversy that erupted from a fake “Satanology” student club. Both demonstrate how the courts take religious establishment on a case-by-case basis.

Previous cases that have worked through the legality of religious displays on government property by arguing context. In short, it’s fine to display Santa or a nativity if Rudolph, Happy Holidays, or a Menorah is nearby. Display a nativity with “Happy Birthday Jesus” and it won’t be there for long. The Ten Commandments are acceptable as a general moral document on a courthouse. To convey a specific religious idea like God is the source of wisdom for government, again, it’s probably coming down. With that said, if your locality allows religious displays that have religious intent, the real problem comes when you forbid the presence of a competing religious display near it.

The first case asks when the practice of yoga is religious in its context and goals versus when it’s a secular practice adopted by Americans in general. When a California public school was given a grant to teach yoga to its students, conservative Christians challenged it as a religious practice. Those concerned Christian parents lawyered up, and the evangelical Alliance Defending Freedom took up the case. The court decided the case with a peculiar ruling saying that in the case of the class, yoga was not religious secular in nature. However, at the same time, yoga is indeed a religious practice. Light is both particle and wave; General Tso’s chicken is both Chinese food, and yet definitely not Chinese. Like displays of the Ten Commandments on public property, the context matters. Where students were practicing yoga and the purpose of it had nothing to do with its various religious purposes found in numerous traditions. A practice’s historical association with religion does not mean that the practice is inherently religious.

In the second case, an activist requested to post a banner for the “Church of Satanology and Satanic Activism” club along a fence on school grounds. This followed an English teacher at Boca Raton Middle school who erected a 10 foot pentagram display next to a nativity scene in a local park. The reason was not to begin an actual club, but to test the school’s approval of banners for an organization promoting Christianity. The location where the “Satanology” banner was to be placed was a place where churches and synagogues had posted their banners for a fee paid to the district. As soon as Chaz Stevens, an atheist activist, proposed the banner, the school instituted a ban on all banners until further notice. After pressure from the Freedom from Religion Foundation to change the policy permanently, the Palm Beach County School District capitulated. The site for Satanology is part of a campaign by The Religious Liberty Project which “is an advocacy organization dedicated to protecting and promoting freedom of speech and religion, especially the separation of Church and State.” The use of Satan as a polarizing figure to raise awareness on church/state entanglement is not new, but it is a recent strategy by secularists to clarify separation and how it is applied through the 1st Amendment norm.

The issue that connects both of these cases has to do with the ramifications of insisting on the superiority of one religion or group of religions over other faith claims in any context that is a publicly-funded entity. Evangelical legal groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom hide their true intent of reintroducing Christianity as a distinctly superior, American religion behind language of religious freedom. Would they not also seek to defend the equality of other religions’ not-specifically-Christian concerns? The evidence of their case load is an emphatic “no.”

Whenever an activist group insists on the superiority of its religion rooted in whatever jurisprudence that argues for that superiority, it opens up an interpretation of the 1st Amendment as protecting religions through “equal regard” in which religion is not given any particular favored position in these decisions, but it is neither viewed with any disproportionate contempt. As the demographics of society are trending less religious, the idea that religion ought to have some favored status according to the 1st Amendment could fall out of favor. This means that when activists encourage the debate now, they open up their own interests to a deeper secularizing effect in the future. They could allow people to enjoy local favoritism towards the dominant religion while they still can, but outside organizations such as the Freedom from Religion Foundation and Alliance Defending Freedom are on opposing missions to change the ways that the 1st Amendment is interpreted everywhere. So, before that happens small town America, please enjoy your live nativity this Christmas before the giant Baphomet statue comes to peer over your shoulders to judge whether you’ve been bad or good this year.

Caught Between Should and Am: Fixing My Writing Problem

/ Andrew Tatusko / 3 Comments
shoes beside word lux

Running and light

Ever since I finished my dissertation, almost 5 years ago, I have been caught in a weird head space where I haven’t figured out my identity as an academic, a professional, and even as a person. I’ve had a few starts on blogging that usually stops after a couple of months. I get distracted by something else and totally lose interest. Why?

At first I thought it had to do with marathon training. Doing this is so time consuming and tiring that I would usually post about starting the process and then do nothing until the result. The fiction that I convinced myself was true is that I can’t write and train at the same time. If I am going to perform at my job, maintain my relationships, and be mentally healthy, I can either run, or write. I have told myself this even though I knew it was total bullshit. Great writers all have parallel obsessive habits from drinking and smoking to running. Telling myself lies to avoid doing something is a deep-seated character flaw. I’ve learned much about how this mechanism works, but this time it had me caught. The real question is not why I stopped writing, but what I was avoiding.

It was last night when I was catching up on Supergirl that a little sisterly advice hit me that freshly out of the closet Alex Danvers gave her sister Kara (Supergirl):

Look… sometimes, you know, in our life, when one part is really confusing, we will pour way more attention than necessary into another.

I started running for very good reasons that still hold. It was to improve mental and physical health. It is still the single best tool I have in my toolkit to maintain mental and physical health and stability and I can’t ever see myself stopping. However, I have poured a lot into it. Challenges are really effective to have in front of you to stay motivated. But at what point do you become obsessed with it to the point that you are avoiding something else? I went from at most running one marathon a year, and last year that was enough. This year I am not only running two marathons, but running 2017 miles which is about 700 more than the previous year, and I want to train to get a Boston Qualifying time which would shave about 5% off of my finishing time this past May. Have I crossed the tipping point where running has gone from healthy activity to obsession I am using to avoid something? I might be there.

I have struggled with my identity as an academic and as a professional since finishing my dissertation in 2013. For a very long time, my religious identity as a person of faith was my central obsession academically, emotionally, and socially. At the time I gave that up, a story I have not yet fully told, running filled the void. I traded one preoccupation with another. But my life as an academic sat hollow. If faith is no longer what I want to be doing, what should I be doing?

I have this theory that confidence in what we do is not something we are born with, but something we learn over time. As we become more competent in something we become more confident in our abilities and that alone builds our desire and drive to do it more. So, if I could just find out what I should be doing and become more competent in it, then I would resolve my confusion.

Well, it didn’t work. The experiment failed because my fundamentals beliefs were wrong. I believed I needed to become competent in what I believed others wanted to read. I focused on what others might find helpful like focusing on life hacks and self-help that I think works. How about something in my professional field that others find interesting? What about lessons I have learned in life that others might find useful? After a few tries, I got bored and stopped. None of that was very fulfilling. That material is all out there written by people who are singularly passionate about it. I am not one of those people. The entire theory of becoming competent got derailed by the one thing that all of these ideas has in common: doing what I think I should do based on what I believe others want. It’s like all that advice from successful writers went right through my head – do what inspires you, not what you think will inspire others.

If I should’t do what I believe I should do, what is it that inspires me or consistently interests me? That’s the real question. My answer has been that no one is interested in any of the stuff that interests me, so who cares? Another lie. Keep running. Today I’d rather run on truth than the bullshit I tell myself. Walking the dog last night, after that little moment from a cheesy TV show that struck me, I found an answer. The question was how these things were related. And they absolutely are.

My academic interests have always been first, in how to teach the whole human subject based on an understanding that it is the relationship between teacher and student that is the most revolutionary and fundamental aspect of human learning and progress. The second is related to it. My dissertation focused on secularization and higher education which is tied to patterns of belief in American society, the policies that both respond to and shape those patterns, and how historians tell that story. Both of these are looking at the dynamic relationship between faith, belief, and knowledge in society and in the student.

My professional interests are about how we can help college and university teachers be better teachers. What habits, programs, and behaviors can we improve as teachers to help students learn more effectively? Right now this is about designing a program of teacher formation through critical reflection to find areas of improvement and to experiment with different online classroom behaviors to help students learn more effectively.

My personal interests have to do with the connection between physical and mental health and supporting pragmatic behaviors that help improve health with scientific evidence. I have many friends who have been in long term recovery from addiction who have thrown themselves into physical activity as an integral part of how they manage their sobriety. I know of runners and other athletes who have traded their obsession for drugs, sex, and body dysmorphia for clean living, even without the aid of prescription drugs.

How are these tied together? Anyone can look at these three areas and find things in common: human progress, the nature of belief, evidence-based living, etc. But those aren’t what hit me as interesting. Instead, it’s this idea:

I am fundamentally interested in how groups of people form relationships that support and cultivate healthy patterns of belief, knowing, and action, and in relationships and ideas that do exactly the opposite.

So… that’s what really interests me and the three ways I look at it. With that, it’s time to stop thinking about what I should write for an imagined group of others out there, and just do what I find interesting. Someone out there has to be interested in this stuff too, right?

Sickness and the School

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image

I set out to write a post every day this year. Then I got a nasty flu bug. For a couple of weeks I have been foggy, tired, and unwilling to probe my mind for an idea worth writing about. That’s because whatever resources I might normally use to think and write have been sucked up by resting and exhaustion. As a result, I’ve missed a few weeks already.

If there is one theme on my mind these days it is what it looks like if I understand the primary function of my body and brain as survival. How I learn, love, and relate to others is rooted in my primary instinct to survive in this world. If sickness does anything, it sends one’s focus inward. I become less observant and less aware of the things around me. This is partially out of a conscious choice. I need to do things like rest to get my body well. But I also think it is more of an automatic defense mechanism that sets in motion. When I’m sick, I’m less aware of the world outside of my body.

The self as an idea our brains create as part of the most complex set of mechanisms that work for the survival of an animal species becomes most clear when the human system is in danger. Whether it’s a flu, a home invader, losing a job, or breaking up with a lover, the shift of focus inward is both automatic and sudden. Maslow understood this in his famous hierarchy of needs.

If we are considering learning, until we meet the basic survival needs of a student, we cannot expect much in the way of mastery of much of anything. The same goes for the general health and progress of a society. We cannot expect hungry and insecure people to make much progress because all of their resources are being used to see that they will simply stay alive. If we are to make progress as a society, we must feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, and heal the sick. To expect more out of people such as these is to demand that they go against their nature which is an affordance the privileged never have to imagine in their lives.

Are Natural Scientists Smarter and Therefore, Less Religious?

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According to one study, the answer is yes.

In a survey of IQ measures in “elite” institutions, researchers argue that physical scientists (biology, physics, chemistry, etc.) have overall higher IQ’s than their social scientist counterparts. They then argue that the kind of reasoning in physical science is superior because of its reduced emotional influence.

“[Physical] scientists are overwhelmingly atheist,” Dutton said. “This is predicted by their high IQ, which allows you to rise above emotion and see through the fallacious, emotional arguments.” Arguments about God are all emotional arguments, he added.

There are very obvious problems in the research. First, it focuses on a particular sample of scholars where even if the data is true, science demands the method be tested to see if the conclusions are even valid. Second, the use of IQ as a measure of intelligence is suspect. Numerous papers have been published arguing the validity of IQ as a measure of intelligence or aptitude.

Finally, the claim that arguments about God are all emotional is made with no evidence to support it. It is hard to imagine that massive works of logic and reasoning about God such as St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, or Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, or the centuries of theological thinking are all emotional in nature. In fact, at one point theology was called “the mother of all sciences.” Therefore, this assumption perhaps reveals a hidden agenda that is ironically rooted in emotion. Similarly, Richard Dawkins likens theology to the study of leprechauns and that it has no business as a university discipline.

Research probes the truth, no matter how uncomfortable. It may be true that scholars of physical science have high IQ’s. However, it is an unscientific stretch to say that their reasoning is superior and such superior reasoning is why they are correlated with atheism. Good science means that we cannot confuse a correlation with causation. Thus, the research conducted here is unscientific and shoddy at best.

Creationism Will Never Be Science

/ Andrew Tatusko / 3 Comments

Texas is back in the news as parties clash over teaching creationism along side of evolution in the science classroom. The creationism debate is not new for Texas. This goes hand-in-hand with the notion that we should teach the controversy. In principle this is a good idea. Science is not without controversies, nor is any academic endeavor. The goal in academic study is to propose ideas, test those ideas, and then allow your conclusions to go under the microscope of public scrutiny.

But there are certain facts about the world that are no longer under as much scrutiny because they are continually proven to be correct. That is to say, they continue to be powerful predictors of events. The speed of light is one constant as is the way the heart pumps or specific vaccines fight disease. There may be some controversy if you want to call it that, but that discussion is just the way science works. In science ideas are refined even if the basic principles are essentially the same.

Evolution works this way. Time and time again it has been one of the most powerful models to predict how populations of organisms develop and mutate. These are large populations over very long periods of time. Apes did not one day become Homo sapiens. This was a long process with different species and the genes that make us human beings “won out” in the end. The controversy in biology is as small as those who argue for a flat earth. Yes, there are those who still insist that the earth is flat.

Where is the controversy in science with respect to evolution? It is coming from a source outside of the scientific community, namely, a specific thread of Christianity in America. This is the pocket that insists evolution is not true based on a specific theological worldview that also insists on a specific way of reading the bible. Yet though this group comprises about 30% of Christianity and in some research even less, it has been the loudest voice in the effort to change the science curricula to pit God against evolution. This is true in the debates over textbooks in Texas as it has been a source of friction in Kansas for years. Kansas standards have gone through several changes since 1999 both excluding and including evolution in its science standards. That debate has slowed down in the past couple of years. Ohio is also not without challenges.

Texas

“The conclusions and tenets of evolutionary theory, while not declared as being unimpeachable, are nevertheless offered without any suggestion that there are competing scientific theories,” said one reviewer. He did not specify what those theories are.

He complained that “the theory that life most definitely emerged [from primitive organisms] is simply a foregone conclusion.” – Dallas Morning News

Kansas

“Both evolution and human cause of global climate change are presented in these standards dogmatically,” Willard said. “This nonobjective, unscientific approach to education standards amounts to little more than indoctrination in political correctness.” – Fox News

Ohio

“What we’re looking for in the policy is to create an environment where we can identify and discuss and debate openly, honestly, sides of controversial issues and the strengths and weaknesses of scientific issues or debates,” said Kelly Kohls, School Board President. – WDTN

Louisiana

(Gov. Bobby) Jindal also said he has no problem with creationism being taught in public schools as long as a local school board OK’s it. Since the state is committed to national academic standards, he said, as long as schools are teaching evolution they should be allowed to teach other theories as well. “What are we scared of?” he said. “Let (students) debate and learn … give them critical thinking skills.” – Nola.com

Is creationism actually science? Science is about forming testable hypotheses. I make an educated guess and then I test it. I make conclusions and others will try to do the same thing to see if it works. Even if self-interest moves the data around, the end result is usually a solid theory that is reliable and flexible enough to account for other data about the world.

A theory is not a guess. It is a way to explain reality and understand new facts about it. Until a theory is debunked in the same way it was discovered, it will stick around for quite some time. If that happens enough and we get enough data, voila: the cure for polio, the invention of the microwave, the suspension bridge, rocket propulsion, and even nuclear weapons. We can’t test to see if creationism is an accurate predictor of biological events. We have to rely on an untestable premise of faith.

Hypotheses are not faith. This does not mean that faith is somehow “less than” hypothetical testing in science. What it means is that we cannot pit the two against each other in a classroom because they are two very different ways of looking at the world. Faith can predict true results as the lives of the saints and the presence of miracles over millennia suggest. I am not one to dismiss all of these events as hoaxes or delusions. But none of these are testable in the same way that evolution is.

This is why Texas and any other school board is leading us down a misguided and dangerous path that will confuse our kids. Our students will come out of science not understanding science and go to church without understanding the purpose of faith. Faith is vital to religion because it is not to prove facts about the world. It’s function is to grow in the love and likeness of God. This is my theological worldview through the lens of Eastern Orthodoxy. It is not the business of a public school to confuse a faith that is my responsibility to teach my kids.

3 Reasons You Shouldn’t Adjunct Full Time

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A well-known secret in higher education is that full-time tenure-track positions are dwindling. Many of the seats that we have filled with full-time faculty will not be re-filled when they are vacated in the next 20 years. What universities will need to do is hire more part-time faculty to fill that void. Currently, 38% of the teaching labor force in higher education is made of part-time professors. From the AAUP:

The growth of part-time faculty has often come at the cost of stable employment for those who seek full-time careers. Institutions which assign a significant percentage of instruction to faculty members in whom they make a minimal professional investment undercut their own commitment to quality. Academic programs and a tenure system are not stable when institutions rely heavily on non-tenure-track faculty who receive few, if any, opportunities for professional advancement, whose performance may not be regularly reviewed or rewarded, and who may be shut out of the governing structures of the departments and institutions that appoint them.

If you want to be an adjunct teacher at a university or college, make sure that you are prepared to understand what is involved. These are positions not designed to provide a full-time wage or anything in the way of benefits. Here are practical reasons not to avoid becoming a “full-time” adjunct or part-time professor.

You Are Expendable

Part-time faculty are cheap. Because of rank, the wages per credit-hour taught can be less. The institution does not need to pay out fringe benefits like health insurance or retirement matching. And because most adjunct work is based on course contracts, teachers don’t really have to be fired – they are simply not awarded a new contract. In other words: Do not expect stable employment; you are expendable.

You will get the lovely moniker of “second tier faculty” which is a nice pat on the back for all those hours you spend with students. You may find yourself isolated from the institution and connected mainly through email and learning management systems such as Blackboard or Canvass.

Welcome to flexible production of labor.

You Are Cheap

I can’t imagine doing adjunct work to make a living. I would have to pull about 50 credit hours a year to pull that off at $1,000 a credit hour. If we take that and subtract about $1,500 per month for private insurance and taxes that leaves me with $32,000 as a net wage or let’s say $2,600 for rent, gas, utilities, and in my case child support. Then I have to eat and I have no retirement or savings. I also have some loans I need to pay off. Forget car payments. My car had better be indestructible.

All of this financial stress is for taking on at least twice the teaching load as a full-time, salaried member of the faculty.

It Can Kill You

This goes beyond the huge healthcare expenses that you will incur beyond your $900 premium if you are single without dependents. The amount of stress is astounding and stress kills.

What I just figured above, and I think it’s about right, is about a 40 hour work week if you spend 10 hours a week per course to be just over the poverty level in a town like Pittsburgh. This is the ideal. The reality is that adjunct work is contract based and there is no guarantee of any stable income source that will get you that many credit hours per year. You have to work between more than one institution where if you aren’t online, you will need even more transportation costs and higher auto insurance premiums among other things. Forget vacations too. That is 10 hours per week, every week, for 52 weeks out of the year.

This was the case for one woman’s situation in Pittsburgh. a 25 year teacher, Margaret Mary lost her below poverty wage job as an adjunct with Duquesne University. With no unionization and no security, there is no protection for labor:

While adjuncts at Duquesne overwhelmingly voted to join the United Steelworkers union a year ago, Duquesne has fought unionization, claiming that it should have a religious exemption. Duquesne has claimed that the unionization of adjuncts like Margaret Mary would somehow interfere with its mission to inculcate Catholic values among its students.

This would be news to Georgetown University — one of only two Catholic universities to make U.S. News & World Report’s list of top 25 universities — which just recognized its adjunct professors’ union, citing the Catholic Church’s social justice teachings, which favor labor unions.

The system is not set up for part-time faculty to be anywhere close to full-time faculty. However, this will increasingly become the primary teaching labor force in higher education among all institution types in the next 20 years.

Unless you have a job that will give you benefits, vacations, a retirement plan, and some security in your life, use that graduate degree to teach part-time as a part-time gig for fun, the experience, and another source of income. Until the system shakes out and labor has power, it looks bad to be a full-time, part-time college teacher.

The situation looks bad for education because it might just be that our part-time teachers are better teachers. But with the current labor practices as they are, stories like Margaret Mary’s and this will be more commonplace:

This, too, is part of the adjunct lifestyle:  even though I have theoretically landed work at two schools for this fall, I never stop looking.  I never am set. None of the jobs that I have are guaranteed to be there next year, and one of them is so far only for this coming fall.  I still hope and still peruse the sites for permanent jobs in my area of specialty.  Heck, I don’t even care if they’re tenure-track, but just permanent.  Something that I can plan my life around more than a nine-month academic year at a time!

How Not to Enforce a “No Technology” Rule in Class

/ Andrew Tatusko / Leave a comment

It is no secret that many professors are not big fans of distracted students. Even more so, some are deeply offended and can even get hostile.

Take this professor who uses laptop distraction as an object lesson for his lecture class.

He staged the event, by the way. Nevertheless, is that the right strategy to start off a semester and create a rapport with your students?

On the one hand, we can sympathize with the logic. It is one thing for a student not to pay attention and get caught in their own distractions. If that lack of attention is then distracting others, the problem is much larger.

On the other hand, with the way that students are using technology and communicating, it is not as cut and dry. While students may seem to be distracted, it may also be that they are not. If we expect a student to stay seated and pay attention to a lecture, distraction will reduce memory retention. But technology is also challenging teachers to be smarter about how to use time in the classroom.

One idea is to use “technology breaks” where you check your phone, the web, whatever, for a minute or two and then turn the phone to silent, the computer screen off and “focus” on work or conversation or any nontechnological activity for, say 15 minutes, and then take a 1-2 minute tech break followed by more focus times and more tech breaks.

Indeed, more frequent, shorter breaks during a class are beneficial for everyone involved. Forcing students to get up and get the blood moving will yield a more productive and attentive class.

These devices are part integrated into the social and psychological fabric of today’s undergraduate. Phones, tablets, iPods, and laptops are not simply ancillary devices. They are are the tools to create and maintain critical connections to peers and yes, even course content. Finding ways to validate and cultivate that central aspect of student identity is increasingly important in how we teach.

So where is the balance between distraction and integration to help students succeed?

Humanities: A Waste of Money?

/ Andrew Tatusko / 10 Comments

With the focus of higher education on jobs and income more than ever, it is a wonder why the liberal arts and the humanities are worth the investment. A history or philosophy class can’t deliver skills that the workforce requires, right?

A very small fraction of graduates will qualify for an MBA, law school, or medical school. A small fraction of undergraduate students in the sciences complete a biology or chemistry degree. More jobs simply require a bachelor’s degree as evidence of some set of competencies – from clerks to kitchen staff. James McGrath makes a point of this:

I wonder whether the question “Will this be on the final exam?”, and the sense many of today’s students have that core curriculum and general education courses are irrelevant to their chosen vocation, are not connected. Both reflect the belief that the future will follow a predictable path, and that all students need to do is gather up the answers now and then have them ready for the moments when they are needed.

I am finding the “final exam” rhetoric no more prevalent than in recent talks about higher education ratings and jobs. The final exam is employment and the outcome of employment is a return on investment in that degree. In the end, getting a job and money are why we go to school. This would mean that religious studies is superfluous unless wrapped in, say, an international business degree. Philosophy is pointless unless it might help you in, say, debating in a political or law career. Music, art, and literature? These are clearly wastes of money and time.

Once again liberal arts and humanities are on the chopping block in a revolving door of utilitarianism.

Not everyone in the business world would agree that a liberal education is superfluous. Learning how to think and acquire a diverse plasticity of the mind is valuable.

The people who succeed in more expensive labor markets like the U.S. will be those who can think creatively and generate the ideas that will propel economic growth. Such skills, (Vivek Ranadive, CEO of Palo Alto tech firm Tibco Software) said, are best fostered in a traditional liberal-arts environment.

Ironic how we keep coming back to a liberal education and the liberal arts to “reform” higher education when education takes a utilitarian route.

While outsourcing skills learned in a liberal arts education to the MOOC environment is debatable at best, dumping what seem to be “useless” courses will prove a bad investment in the economy and in society once again. Re-envisioning models for teaching students to think is always important. Cutting programs based on arbitrary return on investment data points has no long-term gains.

5 Things I Should Have Done Earlier to Finish My Ph.D.

/ Andrew Tatusko / Leave a comment

I began my Ph.D. with a big idea. I can’t even remember what that idea was. Regardless, it was amazing and fantastic! Which is why I don’t remember what it was. I completed my dissertation in the Fall of 2012 and defended in the Spring of 2013. The end product wasn’t exactly what I had planned and I basically wrote the entire thing in those few months.

I learned mostly what I would have done differently to make the process work more quickly, and more efficiently in my favor. Some of this is advice I received early on but failed to heed. Some of these are little bits that helped me solely out of necessity. The outcome is that I was able to completely rework the first three chapters, collect data, and write the rest of the dissertation – in one semester. Hope these help!

Skim through the tables of contents of dissertations from my program of study. I was thinking about inventing some new wheel or widget with my project. Very little is new in the world of academia. What is novel is usually a different angle on the same object. Those dissertations that go on for awards or get immediate book deals are not the norm. It all depends on your goal. Did I want to complete the degree for my professional career or did I want to shoot for a tenure track position? I wanted the professional goal. Once I accepted that I simplified my crazy mind and followed the same structure other dissertations in my program used. There is nothing wrong or unfair about this. I used a standard style. This was easier for my committee and was easier for me in the long run.

Read other dissertations in your field, especially those related in some way to your problem statement. These are both your peers and competition in the academic arena. If you are seeking tenure-track it is a cutthroat competition. There are likely people who write on certain things far better than you. Get humble enough early so that you can get your own argument laser-focused. Never be dismissive in your critiques of others’ work because these are likely your peers. Be respectful. This is a dialogue and your job is to share your unique contribution to it. Your work is part of a conversation much bigger than you. With humility as a corrective to confidence the process can be more constructive and fun. Yes…this can be fun if you want it to be.

Write often even if it sucks and won’t be part of your dissertation. I have pages of content that I did not use. I simply wrote. Just putting things down on the page gave me an object to work with rather than some abstract, shapeless thoughts jumping around like, well, squirrels in my mind. Once I put ideas on the page I found I had good content to include and ideas that were much clearer than I had previously thought. Jumping into writing is important and is an instant cure for writer’s block.

Listen to your committee and be open-minded and willing to make revisions. Then make those revisions reasonably quickly. Remember that your committee is a small group of faculty who are the gatekeepers to your entrance as a scholar into their field. What they pass is important to their own professional life as their names will be attached to your dissertation on the second page. Your work is also reflective of the institution granting the degree. Just do as they ask and seek clarification if you are not sure. Elect a committee that can make solid comments on your work and that will be responsive. I had a great committee but I chose a great committee. That choice is your political groundwork. Make a good choice and taking their advice will come almost naturally.

Be a human being. I mean this. People need to eat and sleep. People need to laugh and love. We need air and exercise. Without forcing yourself to do these basic requirements for human survival your work will suck, your mind will be less sharp, and you will be miserable. The more human you are in this process the happier you will be. Rather than go for that fifth cup of coffee, cigarette, and burrito, make a smoothie, go for a bike ride, take in a movie, go for a hike. The more human you are in the process the more human your writing will be.

I wish I had done these things from the beginning. My problem is that I don’t think of these practices until I have to practice them. Start early and get some structure around your work with these ideas. This experience may be more fun that you thought it could. The difference between fun and misery is a choice.

What ideas and advice would you give a stressed out doctoral student?