Teach your children well
We always start with what we know. We know Matt Gaetz is guilty of something. We know that he played up the Q conspiracy on his own ends and for his own ends. We know that he is likely guilty of the same things that he was accusing others of doing. It makes no sense to write an entire post about these things we know. We already know it.
These things are troubling and yet it is not these things that trouble me. Eventually we get to the point where we recognize that evil exists in the world. We may even get to the point where we recognize evil in certain people before the world acknowledges it. In fact, psychologists tell us that most sexual assault victims had an uneasy feeling about their attacker before the attack. For whatever reason, they chose to ignore that feeling. I can only assume that same intuition exists beyond immediate predators and those we just see on television.
The fact is that most people are better judges of character than what they think. Reports have come out now that even Republicans refused to have their picture taken with Gaetz. They knew something like this was coming. Of course, when he’s busy showing off naked pictures of girls he knows and playing Harry Potter inspired sex games then it isn’t difficult to see something horrible coming down the pike.
The question for today is how we teach all of our children these important life lessons. I promise we try to teach students about the importance of choosing good sources for information. I’ve sat in the room when teachers have gone over the difference between heavily biased sources and sources that are more reliable. I’ve watched as we have identified left leaning sources and right leaning sources. Wikipedia and YouTube were never suggested as reliable sources.
Yet, years later you see many of these same people quoting these same dubious sources when they talk about the widespread sex trafficking problem. Some of that is to be expected. I still remember getting my sources from the card catalog. Our English teachers made us write down the quotes from each source onto index cards and then wrote down all of the pertinent information about the source as well so we could build a bibliography from scratch. It’s easy to imagine people from this generation propagating crap from the internet.
Unfortunately, we are still far too busy teaching the STAAR test to spend time making sure kids understand the differences between biased and unbiased sources. In science classes we don’t spend nearly enough time helping students be on the lookout for junk science. Not enough students take basic statistics. Don’t even get me started on social studies and what we are doing in there. Yet, conservatives have the audacity to accuse of us indoctrinating students. Again, we accuse others of what we do ourselves.
The state curriculum is built on what the test tests for. The test doesn’t test students based on these skills. So, these skills only get taught if teachers are determined to teach it on their own. Many of the teachers I know do that, but I certainly can’t speak for everyone and I won’t even try to vouch for the majority. I can only hope each generation becomes more internet savvy than the last. Otherwise we are in a lot of trouble.
The larger problem is that performance metrics are often selected based on how easy it will be to collect the measurement data. Example: If your school’s funding and your salary depend upon how well one’s students do on the STAAR test, one is motivated to teach to the test.
I see this all the time in industry – people choose an easy-to-measure metric, and are then surprised when people behave in ways to maximize that metric. If, for example, a claims adjuster is judged on claims processed per hour, regardless of accuracy, don’t be surprised when the claims processed per hour soar, as does the error rate.
This is a larger problem for society – if a news show is judged based on its advertising revenue, that metric rewards news shows featuring click-bait level events and “confirmation bias” slanted coverage. If all one cares about is profits, fine – but news programs used to be more about informing the public rather than profitability.
1It gets worse. A number of years ago, a Tampa-area TV station (Fox outlet, I think), got into a spat with the on-air talent having to do with Accuracy of reporting IIRC. Somehow, this all ended up at either the FCC or FTC, which proclaimed that TV news need not be accurate. IOW, TV news can be a pack of lies, and still call itself news. If they will lie about anything – they will lie about everything.
2Some of that is due to the fairness doctrine. However, your point is certainly more than valid. Essentially, some have mastered the idea of marketing. If I know that at any point that five percent will buy my drivel then my number one objective is to energize that base of support somehow. If I can write a book that even one percent will buy then I’m a millionaire.
Sadly, there may be one percent that agrees with my baseball takes, but they aren’t energized because I don’t say it with a salacious enough style. I’ve unwisely prioritized accuracy over entertainment. Silly me.
Confirmation bias is a huge problem. Unfortunately, there is enough bad information out there that I can find “proof” of any hypothesis I have if I look hard enough. Unfortunately, as the internet becomes more and more powerful and accessible, it has become less and less difficult to find “information” that will support my opinion.
3Nick I see why this post is marked “uncategorized.” It started out with Gaetz and then media and then marketing and ended up with education somehow.
As an employee/employer of some half century experience I have become convinced that the lack in the vast majority of people is not education but critical reasoning skills. People can learn almost anything else more readily. I can’t say if that is a failure of the educational system or people are just born that way.
That’s the soil in which Q and right-wing propaganda survives.
4Speaking of a good example of a dubious source of information, alex jones is the poster child. And congratulations to Mark Bankston:
Alex Jones’s last-ditch bid to overturn Sandy Hook defamation ruling goes down in flames – Raw Story
https://www.rawstory.com/alex-joness-last-ditch-bid-to-overturn-sandy-hook-defamation-ruling-goes-down-in-flames/
5“The fact is that most people are better judges of character than what they think.” Sorry, but that does NOT include Trump voters and supporters, unless character simply does not matter to them.
6“… spend time making sure kids understand the differences between biased and unbiased sources.”
Unfortunately, many members of school boards don’t understand there’s a difference, or worse, won’t recognize it as a problem because they call it freedom, not propaganda.
7Edit ~ DJT ~ Matt Gaetz ~ Brett Kavanaugh,
~ Jim Jordan ~ Joel Greenburg,
A GOP child’s metaphor ~
Edit: “My father used to say that the there were little creatures that lived in closets and sewers and other dark places. He said that all they were was hair and teeth and fast little legs, Oh, those little legs had to be fast so they could catch up to all the bad little boys, no matter how quickly they scampered. When My Daddy said someone was bad, he meant they were lazy and a lazy person couldn’t be part of the big picture, because at my house, you were part of the big picture or you were lying down on the job. He said there had to be thousands of them because there were millions of bad little boys scampering all over the world. He said you’d be lying in bed one night and you could hear them coming towards you, crunching and chomping and smacking…”
~ Greg Toomey: The Langoliers ~ Stephen King
https://www.ranker.com/list/republican-sex-scandals/web-infoguy
8As a former teacher of argumentation and public speaking, I buy the notion that many fall into the easier path of trusting those they’ve trusted before.
Teaching traditional college students, I found one approach that worked as an introduction to the need for critical thinking. Asking them to tell me if their parents’ sense of “risk” was something they trusted and accepted, I sparked a number of people to think about how they decided their parents were not “right” all the time. Broadening from that example, we could talk about what were better and worse sources of information and a host of other elements of rhetoric.
Such subversion would probably NOT be appreciated in public high schools.
9It’s not so much a question of subversion but a question of time. Social studies is by far the worst. When I started teaching (I started as a government teacher) one could go at their own pace and emphasize what they wanted to within the curriculum. Now, at larger high schools you can walk by multiple classrooms and see the same power point presentation on the projector.
I understand it perfectly. If I’m doing what everyone else is doing then I can’t be criticized when my students don’t perform well on benchmark tests. That’s the real driver here. No one cares whether you are conservative or liberal. They care whether your students perform on standardized tests.
I remember I was supporting a World History class once. The teacher simply gave the students a computerized assignment every day without doing any genuine teaching. Except, the internet went down that day. He looked at me with a confused look and asked me what we were supposed to do. I said you teach. That didn’t compute, so I took over. We were talking about the Great Silk road and I began discussing salt and other spices. I discussed all of the everyday uses for those items and why they would be so valuable back then. One of my students came up to me after class and told me he learned more that day than the rest of the year combined. The teacher only told me that I shouldn’t have taught them about salt and spices because they weren’t in the state curriculum. I asked him how you could discuss the Great Silk Road without discussing what merchants were actually trading for on that road. He had no answer. Thankfully I didn’t have to support that class for long because I would have gone nuts.
10Nick states, among other dubious things: “…Wikipedia and YouTube were never suggested as reliable sources.
Yet, years later you see many of these same people quoting these same dubious sources…”
This slagging of Wikipedia is a recurring theme of certain folks on both right and left [mostly the rightwrongers].
This is completely specious, wrong, and harmful to the very premise Nick seems to be advocating for.
Wikipedia has become perhaps the world’s most accessible, extensive, accurate, and authoritive source of knowledge, period; a gigantic self-improving encyclopedia and beyond.
Wikipedia is continually updated, corrected and expanded on a respected ‘peer group’ basis by millions of contributors [of which I am proud to be one for years].
Of course glitches, errors, and misinformation occur [some inadvertently, some maliciously], all of which get resolved sooner or later by Wikipedia’s millions of editors, and the many automated error bots.
Of course one still needs to verify and remain skeptical, as with all things.
Wikipedia is also available in many languages, and has various extremely useful adjuncts, like the Wiktionaries, and has a huge repository of images and graphics etc. in the Wiki Commons section.
As a rigorously peer reviewed entity, it continuously weeds out the trash; and expands, improves, the knowledge database and reference sources.
FYI– Every Wikipedia page has an attached complete “View History” and “Talk” page, revealing all edits and revisions to that page; a completely transparent source of information. Each entry and change is expected to have satisfactory sourcing or linkage. Wiki’s communal editors are constantly evaluated by their peers and automated algorithms, with troublemakers swiftly dealt with, thereby maintaining Wiki’s integrity as much as possible.
Read Wiki’s own entry, it covers nearly every facet of this great information source, far better than my brief defense of it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia#Accuracy_of_content
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia#Discouragement_in_education
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/specious
“Wikipedia (/ˌwɪkɪˈpiːdiə/ (About this soundlisten) wik-ih-PEE-dee-ə or /ˌwɪki-/ (About this soundlisten) wik-ee-) is a free, multilingual open-collaborative online encyclopedia created and maintained by a community of volunteer contributors using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest general reference work on the Internet,[3] and one of the 15 most popular websites as ranked by Alexa; in 2021, it was ranked as the 13th most-visited.[4][note 3] The project carries no advertisements and is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American non-profit organization funded mainly through donations.[6]
11…
The English Wikipedia, with 6.3 million articles as of April 2021, is the largest of the 321 language editions. Combined, Wikipedia’s editions comprise more than 56 million articles, and attract more than 17 million edits and more than 1.7 billion unique visitors per month.[9][10]”
We teach students that Wiki is a good jumping off point but since it often references other scholarly journals it’s better to source those anyway. While I respect their efforts I’m troubled by the fact that so many can edit posts at any time. I realize they can be corrected but that still troubles me.
12Nick, you blew your chance. That slam at Wikipedia is trash.
Just apologize, with out the non-apology.
Sandridge: thanks.
13I wasn’t apologizing. Our English department does not allow students to use Wikipedia as a source. So, when I made my statement in my article it was a statement based on what we teach our students. I respect Sandridge and certainly respect the desire to stick up for Wikipedia. I certainly will take that statement under advisement and discuss it further with my colleagues.
14Nick @12&14, Ormond Otvos @13, Thanks for discussing.
Not using Wiki as a primary “source”, OK, but it’s one of the best reference tools around for obtaining “sources” within its pages.
Nick, suggest that you look over some of the “View History” tabs on various Wiki pages of interest; see the evolutionary process of presenting hopefully accurate information.
As far as academia’s ‘hostility’, imo that’s just the usual institutional inertia and resistance to change.
Get more familiar with the processes [if not already done], it’s quite rigorous, complex, and effective. For most ‘hard’ topics especially, soft’ ones like political and social things, are a little different [and I spend much less time on those so do have a bias]. It can be fun to watch fool RW trolls/saboteurs get sliced and diced on a hot political page’s History tab [many Rethug staffers and pols have been caught jacking around].
Observe the usually rapid revision, refining and corrective editing sometimes occurring.
It’s patterned on the scientific method itself after all.
Become an editor yourself…I’ve found a tough skin helps, I’ve made missteps and gotten ripped to shreds. Of course there are a few ‘legal beagle’ type asshole types around who will quibble over nits and miss the point.
‘Ta ‘ueno
15Fair enough Sandridge. My wife is a scientist and reiterated many of the things I said. When she was in academia they were not allowed to use Wikipedia as a source. They could look something up on Wikipedia and go to one of the sources they used for their post and go from there. I have no issue with anyone doing that.
In that case you are using Wiki as a hub and jumping off point. I think anyone studying any particular issue would be wise to use a variety of sources anyway and Wiki can be a nice place to find those sources. Since it’s not really necessarily its own research center (relying on others to add research) it still might not be wise to use it as a primary source.
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