The letter syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell received from a Michigan 5th grader that prompted him to go off on the boy’s teacher and the education system at large was not even a school assignment.
A debate in the comments section of this blog on the merits of having students write letter to prominent people–the practice blasted by Sowell–prompted me to put in a call to Jennifer Murphy, the principal of Sayre Elementary School, the Michigan school Sowell cited in his column. I wanted to ask a simple question: “What was the assignment?”
Two surprising facts emerged: No one at the school was aware that Sowell had singled them out in his column as as an example of how “our children are frittering away time on trivia, other children in other countries are acquiring the skills in math, science, or other fields.” Even more interesting: The letter in question was not even a school assignment.
Ms. Murphy sent the following email explaining how the letter arrived in Thomas Sowell’s mailbox:
There appears to have been some misinformation concerning the letter written by a Sayre Elementary student to Dr. Sowell.
At Sayre Elementary, the Habits of Mind, developed by Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick, are part of our district curriculum. Students work on strengthening those habits both at school and at home. A Habit of Mind is knowing how to behave intelligently when you DON’T know the answer to question or problem. As a school, we highlight one or more of the habits each month, and students are given an optional list of activities that they can do at home to practice those featured habits. In September, students worked on questioning skills. One of the optional activities directed students to “Think of an important person you would like to meet. If you could ask them to try to solve a problem, what problem would you choose? What questions might they ask when trying to solve the problem? Make a sign with the name of your person, the problem you chose, and the questions they might ask.”
Writing a letter to that expert was not a part of the assigned task, although one particular student chose to extend the activity and do so on his own. The “important person” was kid language for a successful person they admired (in this case, Dr. Sowell) and was meant to have students learn how such a person used this “habit” to help him/her succeed. In this way, the student can see that habits of mind have a place in the world beyond school.
I wish to make it clear that no instructional time was used for the writing of this letter; it was completed independently of the school, with parent guidance, at home.
I encourage you to learn more about the Habits through a simple Google search or specifically at http://www.habits-of-mind.net/ . I have also attached an evaluation tool that can be used as a self-assessment of the habits.
Jennifer Murphy
Sayre Elementary Principal
(248) 573-8500
murphyj@slcs.us
You go, Robert! Would that more education journalists would take the initiative you just took!
So, Sowell basically dumped on a fifth grader who was advanced enough to admire a PhD economist and took the initiative to write that “important person” on his own. He assumes all the students at Sayre spend their time “in classrooms chit-chatting about how everyone ‘feels’ about things on television or in their personal lives” and then chooses this enterprising fifth grader as his case in point? And he calls himself a social scientist?
Your next message should be to Dr. Sowell–to see if he’ll eat crow. I have my doubts. Perhaps he’ll devote another column to the evils of “habits of mind” and their pernicious effect on students who write to intellectual role models they admire.
Now I *REALLY* feel sorry for the poor kid. I hope Dr. Sowell is good enough to extend him an apology.
It has become a habit of so many to both on the right and the left to demonize the education system here in the USA. One can observe that effort is sometimes made based on a petty desire to “find” any evidence that might support a position. This is common human failing to which Dr. Sowell has clearly succumbed. I would suggest to Mr. Sowell that he can continue to maintain his position on education but yet spare the feelings of this school child and do so without personal injury. Like Mr. Sowell, I’ll take this opportunity to make clear my own position on an issue even though only distantly related to the issue at hand – Some one show me an educational system that has done so much for the least and greatest in its system.
Fantastic work, Robert. It sure does seem that Sowell jumped to a lot of conclusions.
I am still a bit confused, though. If the kid happened to know and admire Sowell’s work, why didn’t he make this clear in the letter? Why did he make it sound like something he had to do?
Is it possible that the school didn’t give the assignment, but the teacher did? And what role did the parents play in this? Did someone suggest Sowell to the kid, or did he choose Sowell himself?
I still suspect that an adult was behind some of this–not because a kid wouldn’t think of writing to Sowell on his own, but because his letter would have reflected this if he had.
None of this justifies how Sowell handled it. But I question the judgment of the person who encouraged or told the kid to do this, assuming there was someone.
Even the school’s official assignment does not sit well with me: “Think of an important person you would like to meet. If you could ask them to try to solve a problem, what problem would you choose? What questions might they ask when trying to solve the problem? Make a sign with the name of your person, the problem you chose, and the questions they might ask.”
Wouldn’t it make more sense to have the students look into a problem that the person did solve or work on, and the questions that he or she did ask (if they were known)? The kind of speculation encouraged in the assignment is not conducive to precision; the the important person “might” ask just about anything.
So even if the letter was not assigned by the school or the teacher, the official assignment was in a similarly vague vein. Sowell’s irritation was a bit over the top but not baseless. I am skeptical of a school that gets its “habits of mind” from consultants.
Of course Sowell could have been more gracious. But I have met adults who lack patience for anything much below their level of knowledge or prowess. At age 10 or 11 I auditioned for lessons with a cellist who was supposed to be the best in the area. He tore my playing apart; he seemed insulted that I had even come.
There are many like this. And such a disposition has its reasons. Some have worked hard to get to where they are, and they have no tolerance for anything short of hard work. Not every accomplished person will be gentle towards children (or toward the adults who rear and educate them). Many are not.
Sounds like an educative experience has popped up for the child, his or her family, the school, and Sowell. I don’t have enough info to weigh in on the original intent behind the letter, but I can see that the authentic act of engaging another person outside the controlled environment of the classroom seems to have borne fruit…for any of those actors willing to watch and listen and (most importantly) reflect.
(In my opinion: had Sowell reflected a bit more before attempting to snap off the school’s head he might have had a more measured response, less news foofaraw, and, ironically, less of an education for us all. But a better model of responsible discourse. Win some, lose some….)
Congrats, Sherlock, on getting to the bottom of this nefarious affair (laughing)…
As I began to read the blog, noting that there were five comments, I thought: there will be commenters reiterating their disapproval of the way Sowell handled this (he was crushingly rude), there will be people who note that it’s become de rigeur to blast public schools for everything these days–and there will be people who say “doesn’t matter–Thomas Sowell had a good point: schools do silly things.” And I was right!
Ironically, it was the habits of mind of all the commenters that made this range of comments possible. I don’t know much about Costa and Kallick’s framework, but I used Deborah Meier’s “Habits of Mind” questions in my classroom for years:
-The question of evidence, or “How do we know what we know?”
-The question of viewpoint in all its multiplicity, or “Who’s speaking?”
-The search for connection and patterns, or “What causes what?”
-Supposition, or “How might things have been different?”
-Why any of it matters, or “Who cares?”
They’re very handy questions in studying anything, from scientific discovery, to young adult novels, to historical events. They let you go deeper into curricular themes, in fact. And they were used, to varying effect and with varying skill, by commenters in both blogs.
Here’s what made me laugh: a 5th grader admired Thomas Sowell enough to want to write him a letter (and perhaps that’s where the parent influence does come in…)! This could be the life-changing event that makes the kid turn liberal. You never know.
i have to question an assumption made in another comment:
unless i am much mistaken, this kid’s letter was never fully published. so i can’t be sure of this… but i’m fairly sure.
when i was 11 years old, there was writer whose work i greatly admired. i wanted to write him a letter… but adults are weird creatures to an 11-year-old. i was pretty sure if i wrote to this writer, he would (at best!) pat me on the head and tell me i was cute. he would not take *ME* seriously.
but, i was pretty sure he would take *education* seriously.
so, i wrote a letter that was a “school assignment” (it was not, in any way), and i was proven at least somewhat correct – he mentioned that he was surprised i was “allowed” to read his adult novels, but greatly flattered by my knowledge and understanding of them, and further flattered that i would want to write to him and pin my grade on what his reaction would be.
no, i have no way of knowing how he would have responsed if i *hadn’t* told him that it was a school assignment. but… you expect to be, maybe not ignored, but definately not taken seriously, by most adults. and the less an adult has to interact with you, in general, the less seriously they will take you (with some exceptions, of course – but an important note here is that most of the adults that take a child seriously are *paid* to do so – i like to think they drift to jobs of that sort because they take children seriously, in a self-selected sort of group, but that isn’t the point. the point is, most people who are not paid to pay attention to a child won’t).
is it really hard to imagine a kid really liking the guy, or more likely, knows *adults*, whose positive attention he wants, who really like the guy, and that the kid then wrote a letter under the guise of “school assignment” hoping to score some points?
Excellent insight in the 11-year-old mind, Denelian. Very plausible indeed. I sent an email to Dr. Sowell Friday offering him the opportunity to respond. For now, the comment that resonates is Carl’s: the authentic act of engaging another person outside the controlled environment of the classroom seems to have borne fruit.
Indeed.
while it’s interesting to find out that the letter was not actually an assignment. Would it have been so terrible if it were? Writing a formal letter is an important skill that 5th graders need to practice. This can be done by having the students practice writing fake letters about nothing of significance to no one in particular. Why not encourage the students to write a real letter about a subject of interest to someone who actually knows something about the subject? The would hardly be a huge waste of time. It would only take 15-20 minutes at most, about the same amount of time that it takes to practice writing a fake letter. It is hard to see how this would stop a student from researching a subject on their own or making up their own mind. Assuming they got a letter back from the individual they contacted, that letter would simply be one additional source of information. My parents and teachers encouraged me to write letters to children’s magazines, to authors that I admired, to correspond with several international pen pals, and even to write a letter to the president. None of this has seemed particularly harmful or even unusual.
With Sox swept and Pats losing, I’m almost as grumpy as Sowell.
What are the odds he writes the kid?
Diana is on to something. Note what the assignment was:
In September, students worked on questioning skills. One of the optional activities directed students to “Think of an important person you would like to meet. If you could ask them to try to solve a problem, what problem would you choose? What questions might they ask when trying to solve the problem? Make a sign with the name of your person, the problem you chose, and the questions they might ask.”
Sorry, but this all seems a bit bogus to me. What I needed as a child was not an official instruction to imagine how a famous person might solve a hypothetical problem I was interested in (I could do that kind of imagining on my own). What I needed was a lot of content knowledge (a familiar term . . .) about how famous people DID, in fact, solve real problems — how radium was discovered, how DNA was discovered, how Darwin came up with his ideas, how vaccines and the germ theory came about, how plate tectonics was originally rejected but won the day, and hundreds of other examples.
And “make a sign”? Maybe I’m wrong, but I can just see this being another one of the endless school projects that involve about 10 times as much arts-and-crafts busywork as actual intellectual content.
So yeah, Sowell was a curmudgeon, but I’m not convinced that the original school exercise was a useful idea to begin with. Without a deep base of content knowledge, this kind of imagining exercise is just that: imaginary. Kids don’t have any idea how to imagine how a famous person might solve a problem.
If you stopped at high school level math, would you have any idea how to answer this question: “Imagine some difficult and heretofore unsolved math problem, and then make a sign about how a famous mathematician might go about solving the problem.” Of course not. You wouldn’t know enough about how top mathematicians think — you wouldn’t even have a faint glimmering of how to understand their basic terms — to begin imagining how they would address a real problem.
So, Sowell basically dumped on a fifth grader who was advanced enough to admire a PhD economist and took the initiative to write that “important person” on his own.
But the response Sowell posted was aimed at the school and the parents. Nothing in there about criticising the fifth grader, just the hypothesised assignment. We don’t know what response Sowell made to the fifth grader personally.
And “make a sign”?
I had the same reaction….’make a sign’?
I’d rather my child wrote a letter.
@Stuart Buck: “Without a deep base of content knowledge, this kind of imagining exercise is just that: imaginary. Kids don’t have any idea how to imagine how a famous person might solve a problem.”
Could we please, please not re-characterize Thomas “Nasty” Sowell as spokesmodel for All Thing Content? And turn even this discussion into yet another pointless rant involving the utterly false dichotomy between content and skills?
As it happens, I live right next door to our young letter-writer’s school district. It’s a fine school. I am mystified by the ardent insistence of so many commenters that schools don’t teach content. Of course, they teach content–in South Lyon and elsewhere. I can only speak with certainty about my home state–but Michigan has rigorous content expectations in place for all grade levels. And the kids in South Lyon are achieving at high levels. Here’s proof: https://oeaa.state.mi.us/oeaa/directory/meap.asp?dCode=63240&bCode=-99&gCode=111&aCode=MEAP
Ironically, their weakest scores are in writing (largely because the MI standards are admirably high, and the State Board didn’t caved when the first scores returned were low).
So–how might we strengthen writing in 5th graders? Well, perhaps we could use some of the Economics content in our social studies curriculum as a prompt for a writing exercise. How would you get kids to determine the most critical content nuggets in a reading about the economy? You could ask them to devise a sign to condense ideas into a few words. How could they expand on those ideas? A letter?
Finally–don’t we actually want kids to have many ideas about how famous people solve problems? Isn’t that the reason we study great figures in history–to understand their thinking, in historical context, about solving the most critical problems of their day?
How might we strengthen writing in 5th graders? Teach them to write longer essays, not how to make signs. Just a suggestion.
Finally–don’t we actually want kids to have many ideas about how famous people solve problems? I
Yes. So teach them hundreds of examples of how famous people solved actual problems. Then if you’ve built a solid base of how geneticists solve actual genetics problems (just to take an example), ask them to think about how they would approach another specific genetics problem. In a particular context, that could be very useful. But just telling kids to imagine some hypothetical problem on their own is probably a waste of time.
Nancy, is right. Schools do try to teach content. They just don’t teach it very well. That’s because they try to teach it using the ideas like in Nancy’s examples. And, that’s the wrong way to teach content. Stuart’s examples are far better. That educators don’t understand the difference is, well, the problem.
Excuse me. I gave “examples?” And they were bad? And Stuart’s lone example (”write longer essays”) was far better?
This discussion has pretty much hit a rock bottom (or rock-flinging) stage, where commenters are taking sides to make unfounded assertions about what imaginary fifth graders “need,” while using the opportunity to make still more unfounded assertions about the failures of imaginary public schools to teach content. NONE of us was there in that classroom, nobody knows what or how the teacher taught. The only thing we can judge is what Thomas Sowell wrote–and guess what? He wasn’t there either.
OK. Here’s your assignment: Make a sign, condensing the most important content of the existing 17 comments, and reflecting your beliefs. Make a second sign, condensing the content of an opposing viewpoint. No more than 10 words per sign.
Extra credit: Write me or another bona fide teacher a letter, asking us to compare the relative importance of skills and content in teaching 5th graders what they need to know. Be sure to mention that wrestling this problem takes up hours and hours of adult time.
I was referring to the last paragraph in Stuart’s post immediately above mine.
NONE of us was there in that classroom, nobody knows what or how the teacher taught.
Sure, that’s right. I’m just criticizing the “optional activity” that was the subject of discussion. For all I know, this particular school could be doing a wonderful job of teaching students how to write essays on difficult topics, of teaching students how famous scientists actually did their work, etc., etc., and the fluffy imaginary arts-and-crafts stuff is reserved for the “optional activities.”
Hummm, interesting that this seems to have turned into a rather snippy discussion of education philosophy.
I believe the point was Mr. Sowell, without doing his homework, took private correspondence of a child and turned it into a cudgel to beat up on the child’s teacher, school, and education in general in a public forum. In doing so, Sowell demonstrated sloppy journalism in blasting away without doing any investigative background work. He demonstrated less than professional ethical behavior by exposing a private source without permission. He demonstrated breathtaking rudeness that borders on cruelty toward a child. He demonstrated a hypocrtical concern about
Too many pundits posture their concern about education when they demonstrate, that they care very little about children.