Teacher Elizabeth Collins found a way. She calls it “modeling a speech.”

Read about it in Best of the Web Today, in an article titled, “Those Who Can’t Teach, Blog“

More important determinants are parental support…

and

Your editorial really should be about “No Parent Left Behind.” Why are the parents not being held responsible for their children’s lack of will and motivation in wanting to learn? If we go back half a century and review why schools were effective, we see that the majority of parents supported the schools in their quest to educate future generations. … Get the parents on the ball as they were in the past.

and

at the minimum, parents also need to receive the baton their children’s teachers pass them every day after school, and work to return eager, prepared learners to the classroom the next morning.

Good points, all of them. But if the parental role is so important, why is it that we have removed schools further and further from the control of parents over the past several decades? We used to have local control of schools. Then we consolidated into bigger districts where the parents’ voice counted for little. Then we went to state control voice where it counted for even less. And now we’re moving to federal control, where the Governor of Michigan is spending her time, not looking at how schools can help children learn, but with what’s wrong with the state’s application for federal funds. Is it any wonder that parents join in expecting ever more centralized governmental authorities to do something about the lack of learning?

My response (posted as a comment on the BCE site):

Squabble? Why do you use that word? It disrespects the democratic processes of disagreement, debate, and deliberation.

And if Andy Dillon says the Republican plan has provisions that would cost us federal matching funds, couldn’t some intrepid reporter have asked him just what provisions those are? They may or may not be something that speaks well of the federal funding. We need to know.

He was one of the best public university presidents, ever — certainly the best one I’ve known of. He never stopped being a professor and a man of learning when he became an administrator. I don’t work at his university, but Haenicke’s influence has benefited us all.

We don’t live in Kalamazoo, but for a few years I picked up a copy of the Kalamazoo Gazette once a week — on the day his column was published. I now just went to my bookshelf and took down his published collection of columns, “Wednesdays with Diether,” so I can re-read it.

Here is the opening paragraph of an article titled, “Revisiting books of youth may lead to a rediscovery of self.”

One of the great luxuries which I currently enjoy is having time to read for pleasure. For over twenty-five years, I held academic positions which forced me, day in and day out, to peruse financial statements, office memos, funding requests, general office correspondence, or accreditation reports. Although their respective authors undoubtedly put great effort into these communications to the president, none remain memorable or trigger the wish to re-read them. These days I read exclusively what I want to read, not what I must read, and the treasure trove of history, biography, poetry, and novels again lies open before me.

In “Musings on bans, censorship, and biased rationale,” he gave twenty examples of things that people requested to have banned on his campus. He ended with:

Finally, for good measure, my all time favorites:

19. Do away with the outdoor sculptures on campus. They are so abstract, no rational being can figure out what they represent. This is not art.

20. Do away with the Bronco sculpture in front of Athletics. It is so representational, everyone can see immediately what it is. This is not art.

If one ponders the list, one will no doubt find one or more items that meet one’s own biases. But who would still want to be on our beautiful campus and in our intellectually rich university if all the above requests had been granted? Certainly not I.

Immediately following that article in the book is one titled, “A tenured radical visits Kalamazoo.” It was Bill Ayers. Haenicke responded to Ayers’ self-justification:

I beg to differ. While I strongly support political protest and free speech, I fail to see any “merit” in throwing bombs, no matter how itsy-bitsy they are. And the argument that America’s alleged violence abroad deserves to be countered with bombing federal buildings sounds too much like the hollow justifications of our radical Muslim attackers.

And just now I found the most memorable paragraph in all of his articles. I’m not sure why it was so hard to find. Perhaps it’s because I couldn’t make myself just scan titles and paragraphs — I had to stop and re-read. But my copy has an orange sticky-note at the location of this one, so it shouldn’t have been hard to miss. It’s in an article titled, “Indoctrination is a crime against children.”

I was deeply affected. Just a few weeks earlier, I had come across a class photo taken in my elementary school in Germany in 1941. My first grade teacher smiles benevolently at her forty little charges, all of them with soft, beautiful children’s faces. I took a long look at myself, a nice, pleasant looking little boy sitting in the front row right under the big photograph of a stern, watchful Adolf Hitler on the wall above me. The classmate behind me, slightly mentally retarded, later unexpectedly died of pneumonia. Actually, he had been murdered through the euthanasia program for the ‘eradication of unworthy life.’ What a class photo!

I never met Dr. Haenicke. I once sent him an e-mail, and he responded. He had written about his trepidation at driving through Alabama to get back to Michigan, which matched some of my feelings about preparing a bicycle ride to Alabama.

Only once did I see him in person. A few years ago he was at the opening of a history exhibit at the WMU library, milling around with the other attendees. It seemed that he was an accessible enough person that I could have walked up and introduced myself, but I didn’t know of anything worthwhile to say to contribute to his evening. He has had much to say to us, though.

Here is the Kalamazoo Gazette news article about his death.

There are some excellent points, pro-and-con, that apply to a lot more than just pre-med education. I’ve been involved in some of these same arguments in debates about curriculum change in our local K-12 school district.

My antenna picked up a bad signal when I saw these words from the academic dean of Harvard’s med school: “[The curriculum] could be more focused on hypothesis generation and solving problems rather than doing the rote exercises that were there in the old textbook.” Whenever educators start talking about rote learning vs problem solving and critical thinking, you can be pretty sure they’re getting ready to dumb down the curriculum and that if they have their way, students will be less equipped to solve problems than before.

Most of those commenting are MDs. The closest I came to their profession was when I took microbiology in a class full of pre-med students 30-some years ago. I am not a person who can say whether the full year of organic chemistry should be replaced with something else. Times and academic disciplines do change and curricula need to adjust. It could well be that the year of organic chem should change. But if the reason for making the change is to replace rote learning with problem solving, I’m pretty sure I’m against it.

Not that I’m against problem solving, but because I’m in favor of equipping students to do it. And the way you do it is usually NOT by sitting down and teaching students how to solve problems as an isolated skill, isolated from the drudgery of obtaining basic knowledge.

So I stuck my nose in and commented:

Nah. Every profession needs a good, old-fashioned flunk-out course with marginal relevance to the profession. If nothing else, it weeds out those people who have no patience for irrelevance.

I was hoping to get people to think about the nature of “relevance.” The person who is interested only in what’s obviously relevant to getting the job done is not the person who is going to pick up on the seemingly irrelevant clues that are needed in dealing with difficult problems. (I heard way too much about “relevance” back in the 1960s, and could go on and on about it.)

And rote learning is never mere rote learning. But opposition to rote learning is usually anti-intellectualism in thin disguise.

Well, I don’t know if any of these MDs were responding to me, but there are certainly a lot of them who have great insights on what it really takes to learn how to solve problems. There are discussions on medicine as a profession vs medicine as a trade, and much more. Their comments are worth reading and re-reading by anyone who cares about education.