Links for 2012-04-03

We grow beans and basil in class, edible stuff from the breath they exhale–at first they resist the idea, as any reasonable creature would, and I don’t give them any particular reason to believe it, but some do anyway. Kids like this. Many of the hypotheses generated in class are as good as mine. A few are better. Now and again a child develops a spectacularly good idea, beyond anything I’d likely generate. Their ideas, crafted within the nature of science, count as much as mine. Kids like this. I am wrong a lot. Science teachers in general are wrong a lot. What we “knew” not so long ago is less true than it used to be. Kids like this.

I have long fantasized about sneaking into the admissions office and swapping 50 randomly selected applications from the accept pile with an equal number from the reject list. I would then secretly follow those students to see if going (or not) to NYU made much difference in the lives of the students on a range of measures like knowledge and skill acquisition, postcollege income, and indirect outcomes like health and general well-being. The idea of a lottery has certainly been suggested on numerous occasions (indeed, the psychologist Barry Schwartz offered a proposal along these lines in these pages in 2005), but no one has jumped on it. I’m sure that the Dukes, Harvards, or Berkeleys are probably no more keen than the makers of the SAT to explicitly test their value added. Still, no one else seems to be clamoring for change either. Why?

The findings come from a study of 199 middle school students who struggle with reading and who participated in a reading improvement class that included Amazon’s Kindle e-reader, said one of the study’s authors, Dara Williams-Rossi, Southern Methodist University, Dallas. The researchers found that boys consistently had a higher self-concept of their reading skill than girls both before and after using the e-readers. After use of the e-readers, boys’ attitudes about the value of reading improved, while girls’ attitudes declined, said Williams-Rossi, an assistant clinical professor in the Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development at SMU.

You may laugh — in fact, one sign of the genre’s decay is how completely it has devolved into a universal joke. (It’s now just as easy, and twice as pleasurable, to quote McBain from “The Simpsons” mocking Arnold Schwarzenegger as it is to quote Arnold Schwarzenegger.) But as a genre, the American action film featured hallmark stars (Schwarzenegger! Stallone! Willis!) and identifiable tropes (kill villain; make pun about method in which you killed villain), and it produced at least one bona fide masterpiece, “Die Hard.” (If you can’t get behind “Die Hard” as a great American movie, then I’d argue that you hate greatness, movies and America.) And the action movie carried, briefly, as all good genre movies do, the cultural weight of metaphorical significance. Action films meant something.

The paradigm is shifting under their feet, and the people running the NCAA know it. It’s not just Branch. It’s Joe Nocera in the New York Times. It’s Frank Martin, the coach who just jumped from Kansas State to South Carolina, admitting on television that he slipped money to some of his former players. It’s John Calipari (!), who’s now presuming to redesign the entire infrastructure of college basketball, bringing what is now an underground economy to the surface. It’s even the NCAA seriously discussing stipends, and trying to pretend that stipends are not pay for play. (I swear, the NCAA uses a dictionary from beyond the stars.) It’s taken longer than it did for golf and tennis, and even longer than it took for the Olympics, but the amateur burlesque in American college sports is on its way to crashing and the only remaining question is how hard it will fall. The farce is becoming unsupportable.