Bad reasons to go to graduate school

Bad reasons to go to graduate school

1. Real life is scary

There are a billion choices out there (which is good) and few of them are tagged with a name that matches your degree. Graduate school can seem much less frightening by comparison -- a set path, set course work -- you'll know where you will be and what you will be doing for the next 5, 10, 15 years. However, you can only delay the complexity of choices, you can't really avoid it -- believe me if you take a job at age 23 and wonder if this is what you should be doing, you'll have plenty of support from your friends and peers. The problem is that life is complex because people are complex -- there are a million options because we are all different. You might be the one in a million that can only be happy in an academic career, but chances are low, and it represents a pretty narrow option.

2. Trying to prove that you're smart

There are a lot of reasons why we feel we have to prove we are smart. Graduate school has to be one of the dumbest ways to assuage that worry. The problem is that you're self-selecting to hang out with some of the brightest people around -- no matter how smart you are, in your program, in your field, you are going to be working with certifiable geniuses. They are great people to work with -- it's nice to have competent help. But the company you keep in graduate school is not going to make you feel good by comparison.

3. It's not only the clothing that is antiquated

During graduation the faculty put on their academic regalia -- clothing that originated in unheated German universities in 1200. When you are struck by the charm of this long standing custom, it would be good to remember there are many other things about graduate school that are mired in the dark ages. This includes the cannon -- classes you take which are almost completely irrelevant to the field, the fact that graduate-level teachers and advisors distinguish themselves from their secondary counterparts by having absolutely no qualifications or training to advise or teach, and that with your thesis committee, much like the inquisition, has no court of appeals. This list could go on but hold this thought -- if you go to graduate school you will have to suffer through traditions more pointless (and much less charming) than wearing floor-length black-velvet robes on a 90 degree graduation day in May.

4. Who should be selective here?

It is easy to get caught up in the application process for graduate school (then postdocs, then faculty positions) with an eye on whether you will be selected by an appropriately selective body. However this can shift the burden of choices from you to the institutions you apply to. There's a sense that the process is so selective, that if you can do it, of course you should do it. After all, who would turn down a winning lottery ticket or an opportunity to go into space? But is this what you should invest seven years in between 23 and 30?

The morbidity of difference

"High quality" schools these days, public and private, seem to agree. Any kid who is not in perfect step with her peers must be tested and evaluated.

Let me describe the cycle of horror -- first a message goes home to the parents "Jamie, when you get a chance, could you stop by. I'd like to talk to you about Ruth." Stress spike! Then the delivery: "We've noticed that Ruthie is a little different than her peers". Choose one of the following: "She's still reversing her S's" or "She has an especially hard time holding still" or "She doesn't look at the teacher when she's talking" or "She's not as coordinated as the other kids". "We would like your permission to test her for" followed by some extremely scary words. Major stress spike. Sleepless nights for the parents. They worry that they've loved the kid so much that they've overlooked something terrible. There there's the waiting...a week, three weeks, to see a specialist (and in private school the expense). Then the test, will your child be so afraid of the specialist they won't cooperate? Will he actually sleep during the sleep study? Then waiting for the results, then the results.

The results are at first scary, then disappointing, then enraging. First it's scary, because it does turn out that Ruthie is a little different. She's at the 35th percentile dyslexia-wise. Which means she may have slight tendencies in that direction but doesn't qualify for the label. (What were we hoping for? Exactly 50th? Plus or minus what? 5%? By that definition, 10% of kids are "normal" and 90% of kids are abnormal).

Then disappointment. For all the fear and stress raised, there is to be no consequence. No specialist doctors, no support group, no books to order from Amazon. No antibiotics for this diagnosis. There has been two to six weeks of stress and waiting...and now nothing...

Then anger...two weeks of sleepless nights...a thousand dollars worth of tests and what do we have? We've proven that the kid is a little different from normal. Something that the kid's grandmother could have told you (with love and affection).

There's no doubt that testing has it's place -- screening for hearing loss has saved many a school career. Some extreme examples do benefit from a diagnosis and attention. But testing has gotten way out of hand, especially when the "solution" to a diagnose is exactly what a child should be getting out of his small, individually tailored classroom anyway.

In my mind, the point of a good school, private or public, is that they know the children as individuals. They have the room and time to address children individually. For teachers to practice "defensive teaching" and refer every quirk over to a specialist is a waste of money and time. It causes great stress for the parents, and while it is intended to allow the system to prescribe remedies for specific diagnoses, in fact many of these diagnoses have common sense recommendations.

The first step for mild cases of left/right hemisphere processing, ADD, ADHD, Aspergers syndrome, and dyslexia are all treated the same way: children need to be presented with information in more than one format (visual, oral, kinesthetic). They need to have sitting time broken up time for physical play. They need to have their personal achievements recognised, without comparison to the group (this is true of gifted children as well!). Teaching is not like watering plants -- each child doesn't get the same dose, with the same effect. Any good teacher treats children differently because they are different.

The second step is to give the kid time and space. The bell curve exists for a good reason -- 20% of us fall into the 20% percentile. We walk late, we talk early, we write with our left hands. It's always comforting for the parents to know that "All the Smith side of the family crawled for an extra six months" but that only affirms what we should know already -- that our child does things in his own time, in his own way. You might be surprised at how kids compensate. Some of us will be rotten spellers for our entire lives, some of us will discover in high school (from Latin class!) that you really can sound out a word.

Which brings me back to my childhood -- when children weren't expected to be the same. Some of us needed extra attention, some needed extra practice. Some children "marched to the beat of a different drummer". This wasn't labeled, granted special allowances, or diagnosed. We got more drill, or new drills if the old ones weren't working. Our parents were told which things we did really well, and which things required more practice.

I know a loving Catholic family with seven children. One of the middle children struggled through the college-prep Catholic school that every single kid in the family attended. The mother confessed she probably should have had him tested, but she was opposed to the idea that you can use a label to excuse lack of achievement -- that solution in life came in the form of a pill. So she didn't get him tested. The family loved him, they honored his achievements (A C in math? That's awesome! We can tell you really worked hard.), they acknowledged he was different. During high school he moved from college-prep to a large public school with a wider variety of classes -- he eagerly enrolled in pre-nursing, woodworking and a technology class. When I first heard this story I was appalled...what if a dose of Ritalin could have turned him into a scholar? Then I realized that he, more than most kids, has everything he needs to succeed in life. He's loved, he is accepted. He's eagerly pursuing his interests, and he's learned how to work hard, both at things that come easily and things that don't. Ritalin might have made him a B rather than a C student. Instead he will become excellent at something he's uniquely good at.

Keep in mind that we are not done discovering "illnesses" and "syndromes" we can test our children for. Twenty years from now, people will be horrified that we didn't screen for certain conditions, we didn't provide special teaching techniques for children with needs. What can we do for those kids, who's condition isn't yet diagnosed? Let's give them time and space to develop. Let's show them, tell them, ask them to act it out. Let's recognise them for their personal progress and let's allow them to be different.

I hate Science Fairs

I find it deeply disturbing that people point to the success of students in science fairs, as a measure of local science education. I've been a judge at several science fairs, and I've come to the conclusion that science fairs are an anti-education tool -- they represent the worst of the American educational system.

First of all, there is nothing democratic about science fairs. Some schools (very few) require every student in a particular grade to develop and submit a science fair project. However the majority of the entrants at a science fair are selected by their teachers, or self-selected. The kids who already like science, already know they are good at it, choose to participate. I'm glad they have an outlet for their interests, but the existence of a science fair does nothing for the scientific education of the majority.

Second, science fair prizes are in reality awarded to the parents of the student. During the science fair, as a judge I get to interview the students about their projects. One science fair project involved shooting arrows from different distances into a target and measuring how far they penetrated. "How did you come up with the idea for using arrows?" "My dad bow hunts". Pity the kids whose fathers don't have interesting hobbies. At another fair a student showed the results of running ketchup through a centrifuge. How did she get access to a centrifuge (something most elementary schools don't have on hand)? Her mother works at a national lab, with, guess what, centrifuges. Another student wrote software to analyze images from astronomy. Guess what his father does -- right, he works at a national lab writing software for astronomy. In none of these cases am I actually accusing the parent of doing the work -- I merely point out that the child of the janitor, the secretary, the farmer, is laboring under an enormous handicap. When they cast about in their daily life for an experiment, it is unlikely they will come up with anything so dramatic. Odyssey of The Mind (some states have s sister program Destination ImagiNation), a very different science enrichment program, has gone to great lengths to even the playing field. Teams have a strict budget, and even if the parents can give the team equipment, the fair-market cost of "free" items is required to be included in the budget. Judges question the students intensely, and evidence that a parent, rather than children, shaped a project results in demotions. Science fair makes no attempt to level the playing field. One year I partnered with an elementary school teacher. She picked a few bright kids who were not children of scientists, and I matched them with (childless) volunteer scientists, whose job was to play the role of the scientific parent, suggesting error bars, negotiating equipment loans, helping with library research.

The one project within reach of most children is what I will call "the out of control collection". Students in need of a project pick something they think they would like to study. Bugs, plants, coins, etc. They start small, then the project gets rolling, and they are sucked in by their interests. It is the persistence and enthusiasm of a child (rather than the Ph.D. level of the parent) which determines the difference between a sloppy notebook with five dead plants and six beautifully indexed three-ring binders with pressed flowers. Sadly, none of these child-scale projects are eligible to win. Science fairs require projects to be run according to deductive reasoning. The child is supposed to come up with a hypothesis, design an experiment to test it, and then prove or disprove the hypothesis. I was taught myself that "this is what real scientists do". Only, a Ph.D. and many successful research projects later, I have to say, the emperor has no clothes. There are times in my research, in famous Nobel Prize winners research, when one poses a hypothesis, and tests that hypothesis. However, many extremely important discoveries depended on the existence of the "out of control collection". Kepler discovered the true motions of the planets around the sun because he had Tycho Brae's wonderful, precise, collection of planetary motions. The HR diagram, which describes the life cycle of stars, was created by Henry Norris Russel. However Henrietta Swan Leavitt and the other Harvard Observatory "computers" (most of them women) laid the ground work by analyzing thousands of stars. In the process of creating this magnificent collection Leavitt realized that the sorting of stars (ABCDEF...) was out of order. She re-ordered them (giving astronomy students a headache trying to remember OBAFGKM), which led directly to the HR diagram. In my experience, interest and passion drives scientists to collect data. Familiarity and an analytic approach to the collected data suggests a hypothesis (more often several), and only then can "experiments" be run to tease out the scientific fundamentals. Dmitri Mendeleev did not invent the periodic table by coming up with a hypothesis that elements should be laid out in rows and then testing it. He collected information about known elements on notecards. He became very familiar with them and sorting them out one day, like setting up a game of solitaire, he realized there was a graphical pattern, which allowed one to predict the qualities of an element by it's position in the graph. This realizing, discovering, the "light bulb going off", is the core of science, and it is built on a careful collection and an easy familiarity with the collection. "Out of control collections" following their interests are an excellent way for children to enter the world of science.

Finally, when average students are exposed to science fairs, they receive a strong message that science is not for them. It reminds me very much of stock-picking contests. In a stock picking contest each member of a class "invests" a set amount of money, then they follow the stock market for a few weeks or month (the amount of time available during the semester). The students whose portfolios do the best are not the highest quality stocks, or the best balanced portfolios, but the outliers -- 100% invested in penny stocks which through a stroke of luck doubled. In a similar manner, the average middle school student wandering through a science fair sees only very complex projects, projects they would never be able to come up with (not having those PhD parents). These projects are highly polished, often they are the work, not of a month, but several years, being presented for the second or third time. The science is presented as if the hypothesis dropped out of the blue, and funny that, the hypothesis is almost always true -- science fair projects that disprove a hypothesis are unlikely to get prizes. "I guessed that when I dropped the rock, it would fall straight up". This serves as a poor introduction to scientific thought, a poor example of how science is actually done -- it is an anti-education in science for 99% of students.

I will say I have seen one science fair project that gave me hope for the future. The student (him or her, names were concealed for judging) had gone to the grocery store and purchased food coloring and food flavorings. He or she had then cross-mixed the food flavoring and colors with water, so that lemon-flavored water was red, and strawberry-flavored water was blue. The student then gave the water to friends and family to taste and asked them to identify the flavor. Data was kept carefully, with age and sex noted. The hypothesis sprung from the first few "experiments" -- Which is stronger, flavor or color? (Oh right, not a hypothesis, cannot be falsified). It turns out that red is a dominate color -- red things, regardless of actual flavor, are identified as cherry/strawberry. Citrus (lemon/orange) is the strongest flavor -- people can identify it even if it is blue or purple. But when citrus flavored liquids are red, the red wins. People still call it cherry or strawberry. This project was the correct scale for an elementary school science fair -- it was low cost, required no equipment or expertise the average child couldn't get their hands on. The student had clearly learned a lot, and followed a very standard scientific thought process: play, collect, suspect, develop hypothesis, test. And that carefully collected data contained another surprise: Children under the age of five are much better at detecting mis-colored flavors -- but even they are thrown off by red.

Can science fairs be saved?

• Science fair projects need to be judged on the distance the student has traveled rather than the shoulders of giants the child has to stand on.
• Second and third year projects should be forbidden. Middle school and high school are not appropriate times to specialize and polish a paper for publication -- students who place one year should be required to find a totally different field of study the next year -- maybe the child of the engineer will LOVE biology.
• When science fairs are part of classroom enrichment, children should be formally assigned scientist partners -- this gets childless scientists into the classroom, provides mentors for kids, and opens everyone's horizons.
• Rather than being "winner take all", there should be a threshold for science fair prizes, after which everyone takes a blue ribbon. Every student should be capable, with support, diligence, and hard work, of taking a blue ribbon.
• "Collections gone wild" should be an approved and awarded option -- developmentally appropriate for not only children, but fully grown scientists.
• Correct scientific thought goes like this: interest, collect, play, suspect, hypothesize (more than one), experiment. To which I would add, fail, rebound, and take advantage of limitations. Odyssey of the Mind gives out an award for the best idea that totally bombed. It is named Ranatra Fusca after a team that tried to build a water skating insect -- which sank like rock.