Carrol Cox wrote: > This is a tangled area, but I think I'm mostly with Michael in this > exchange. Anecdote: My mother, an elementary school teacher, once > mentioned that over the years she had had one experience repeated > several times. In the break room another teacher would ask, how are you > getting along with so & so, who gives so much trouble. Fine, she would > say: probable cause was that she _never_ looked at the student records > from past years, hence never had her eye fixed on any given student as a > potential cause of trouble. > > I think the burden of proof is on anyone who claims it is of pedagogical > utility to know the past record of students, including records of their > intelligence(s). Such information is more apt to mislead than to guide.
_of course_ each teaching experience should be independent of previous ones. For example, checking out a student's SATs (if it's possible) would bias my teaching in an inappropriate way. However, colleges do have to make admissions decisions. If high schools used a variant of the 7-fold grading scheme I sketched in my previous missive, the job would be easier and would be done better than is done now. (The college could decide _what kind_ of good high school grades they liked.) Also, if a student repeatedly gets bad grades in one category (such as linguistic or analytical intelligence) that gives teachers information on what kinds of remediation is needed. > On limits of theory. Any obvious case: theory would not help me or > anyone else understand the distribution of papers, books, coffee cups, > etc about my residence. Pure empirical guessing would be best here. sounds like my house. Of course, it's all my wife's fault. ;-) > REALLY MAJOR CASE IF TRUE: I don't think there can be a theory of > revolution. Capitalism is capitalism is capitalism in very profound > ways: i.e., there is a fundamental identity between the capitalism of > 1750 and the capitalism of 2007, and that is why at a deep level of > abstraction Volume I of Capital needs no alterations to describe the > capitalism of 2007. I agree and disagree. The "deep level of abstraction" of CAPITAL doesn't say much about today's capitalism if it's not complemented by concrete (specific) analysis of how the abstract story differs from that which Marx sketched in 1867. Luckily -- or unluckily -- the capitalism of 1867 isn't that different from that of 2007. But the capitalism of 1867 differed in many ways -- some of them quite significant -- from that of the period between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s in the advanced capitalist countries (and the world as a whole). As a description, the books produced by Baran & Sweezy or Galbraith were pretty good for that time, since there were a lot of era-specific institutional structures that changed the manifestation of Marx's laws of motion. Those structures need to be considered. > But Lenin's "theory" of revolution was not a theory of revolution; it > was a process of shrewd thought in response to the concrete conditions > of Russia 1895-1917. That can't be treated like the theory of > relativity, the theory of evolution, or the theory of surplus value. > Conditions _at the relevant level of abstraction_ change too profoundly > for any "theory of revolution" (aside from mere tautologies or rules of > thumb) to hold as the world changes. as I said, both the concrete and abstract aspects of reality must be considered. Theory is no substitute for concrete analysis of concrete conditions (of the sort that Lenin did). Nor is concrete analysis a substitute for having an abstract theory. The two levels are complementary. -- Jim Devine / "The trick for radicals has been and will be to make of earth a heaven, but without blind faith." -- Mike Yates.
