‘M’ and ‘R’ rated: Conversations with the ‘data’ generation

by Terry Hayes, VATE Council

This is essentially an argument about the potency of anecdotes as data, despite what Markus Manmheim says about ‘anecdata’ (quoted in Mary Mason’s earlier article). So I’d like to begin with some anecdotes involving children I know well and have observed over several years: Claudia (now thirteen) and Ellen (now eight).

Anecdote 1: ‘M and ‘R’ rated

When Claudia was about eight she looked at a picture of her father and his lifelong, somewhat roguish, friend, both called Michael (Figure 1). She pointed to her dad (Michael V) and said ‘M’, and then to his friend (Michael S) and said ‘R rated’. Recently, her father and his friend flew to New Zealand for a brief holiday. Claudia said to me just before the trip, ‘I’m going to give Michael S a pep talk. I’m going to say I want you to think about a library. You know what a library is, don’t you? My dad is like a library book. We’re lending him to you and, like a library, we want him returned undamaged …and on time’.

Anecdote 2: A letter to Frankie

Several Easters ago, Claudia, then ten, came in from an Easter egg hunt at my place, sat down at the computer, and wrote this impromptu letter to her sister Frankie, aged five.

Dear Frankie

I understand that lately you have been feeling upset because I have been teasing you but I have a few issues also. First of all whenever you hurt my feelings and I try to tell you this you block your ears and the other day you said and I quote ‘Claudia if you just give me what I want it will be all over’ and when I giggled you shut the door in my face screaming ‘your crazy’. Also you think that just because you want it it’s your’s. You think it’s your way or the highway. For example today (Good Friday) at grandmas the limit for eggs were two but you found four. The rule was if you found an egg you put them in the basket and it would be spit evenly but you refused. I tried explaining to you that some people wouldn’t get very much eggs but you replied ‘that’s there problem’ and ‘I found it I get to keep it’. Resulting in…

Claudia: none

Josef : 2

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Figure 1

Anecdote 3: ‘You know the White Rabbit?’

Walking to school with me one day Ellen, then six, began a conversation with, ‘You know the White Rabbit?’

Me: You mean the one in Alice in Wonderland?

Ellen: Yes (she had been watching the Disney version of the story) …Well, you know when he says ‘No time to say hello, goodbye. I’m late, I’m late, I’m late’? That’s not really true.

Me: (wondering where this was going): Yesssss. Why not?

Ellen: Well, he’s already saying it.

Anecdote 3: ‘Reasoning’…starring Elle Woods Another walking to school conversation with Ellen (now eight):

‘I think I might like to be a lawyer because you can help refugees and it’s a good job for “dishing out the cash”. I also like reasoning.’

I believe what she says about reasoning because she likes analysing and working out why things are as they are. She is also, for her age, worldly. The two worst things that happened in 2016, according to her, were that Labor lost and Donald Trump won.

Ellen’s inspiration for being a lawyer is Elle Woods, the Reese Witherspoon character, in Legally Blonde . She particularly likes the trial scene where Elle, using her prodigious knowledge of cosmetics and grooming, deduces that Chutney, the daughter, is the real murderer of her father, not the stepmother. Elle argues that Chutney could not have possibly been in the shower at the time of the murder, as she said she was, because it would have ruined her recent perm.

The cumulative point about these anecdotes is that both these children enjoy arguing, debating, and expressing their opinions. They are, in embryonic ways, attuned to the building blocks of persuasion – the use of analogy, logical consequences, reasonableness, etc.

Both attend(ed) primary schools that gave them plenty of opportunities to not only argue, debate and express their opinions, but to do so in creative and engaging ways. Figure 2 (Appendix) shows an example of Ellen’s work in a Maths unit of work on chance, which allowed her to think about argument and reasoning in nuanced ways, and to draw examples from her own experiences. The rubric for the task read: ‘Students have been using the language of chance to discuss familiar events. In this task students were asked to record five events with each event correlating to one of the following chance terms: likely, unlikely, possible, certain and impossible. Students were asked to explain their reasoning, to show why each event matched a specific chance.’ At her primary school, Claudia was a captain of the Environment and often found herself at school assemblies arguing for one environmental cause or another. She has continued that interest in environmental issues into secondary school where she

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has joined the school’s Years 7–12 environment group. She also read I Am Malala as research for giving an oral presentation to her class, then to all of Year 7, on why education is important for all girls.

Neither of them, however, are big fans of the NAPLAN’s ‘persuasive genre’ (yes, they are both up on the linguistic jargon) and their respective schools, to their credit do not make a big deal about it. They certainly did not teach to the test. Both children are blasé, even satirical, about NAPLAN tests. Claudia’s attitude is based on the actual experience of doing them, though she is not blasé about sitting them: such tests make her anxious, especially when the teacher starts noting, on the whiteboard, the time left until ‘pens down’.

Ellen has not sat a NAPLAN test yet, but parrots Claudia. When I asked Claudia about the persuasive writing task she replied: ‘Firstly, I strongly believe… Secondly, I strongly believe… Thirdly, I strongly believe… blah, blah, blah… (Shades of Groucho Marx’s ‘party of the first part’ here.)

I was reminded of the power of anecdote as ‘data’ when reviewing Amanda Ripley’s The Smartest Kids in the World and how they got that way for VATE eNEWS No 1 2016 (‘The Finnish obsession’). The ‘provocation’ in this case was not NAPLAN but its international ‘sister’, PISA. What follows are some (amended) extracts from that review.

Ripley’s ‘smartest kids’ are those fifteen year old students in Finland, Korea and Poland who do well on a barrage of PISA tests. How ‘smart’ that might be is a moot point, but they are certainly smarter than their American cousins when it comes to the higher order critical thinking skills PISA assesses. Ripley set out to discover why.

Ripley is not an educational academic. She is a journalist interested in educational issues. Her raw ‘data’ consists of hours of observations, interviews and speculations with over one hundred ‘researchers, teachers, translators, fixers, politicians, business people, diplomats, students and parents’. She relied especially on ‘Kim, Eric, Tom (and Jenny), the young people who took me inside their schools and homes on three continents and patiently explained what they knew – again and again. Without them, I never would have glimpsed the ordinary lives of kids and families, the scenes that make it possible to understand why policy works, or more often, misses the mark totally.’ Her ‘methodology’ weaves together the interrelated narratives of Kim, Eric and Tom, three very enterprising American students, all, in varying degrees, dissatisfied with the quality of their schooling in America. The narrative draws heavily on anecdote and opinion to argue its case. As with all good narratives, as D. H. Lawrence reminds us, the telling of the tales reveals more than the teller probably intended.

In recounting one year in the life of Kim (from Sallisaw, Oklahoma) in Pietarsaari, a small town on the west coast of Finland 300 miles from Helsinki, bleak enough at the best of times but even bleaker in winter when it was five degrees and windy, and the sun did not rise until nine o’clock. Ripley ticks all the boxes that we have become familiar with about the admirable qualities of the Finnish education system. Teaching is a prestigious profession on a par with medicine and law. Entry to Finland’s limited number of education institutes is highly contested. The education of those who are chosen is rigorous. Teachers are respected for their professionalism as reflected in the autonomy they are given to develop and deliver the curriculum. They are not being constantly asked to ‘perform’ or ‘measure up’. Teachers’ discipline knowledge is especially valued, and is reflected in the effectiveness of the teaching as she

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ruefully reflects on the difference between her passionate and knowledgeable Finnish language teacher and her affable, boofy American Maths teacher. The latter taught Maths as an afterthought to his real passion, coaching school sporting teams.

As well as these familiar attributes of the Finnish education system, Ripley identifies others she thinks important in any quality education system. She is particularly keen on what she refers to as ‘authoritative parents’ and ‘joyful rigour’. By ‘authoritative parents’ Ripley means those who are warm, responsive and close to their kids but ‘as (the kids) grow older allow them freedom to explore and to fail and to make their own choices … Throughout their kids’ upbringing, authoritative parents also had clear bright limits, rules they did not negotiate.’ As for ‘joyful rigour’ she finds manifestations of that both in Finland and in some schools in the USA where young kids spend a lot of time reading and discussing books, learn science from an early age, and get plenty of access to music, art and dance.

So far so good, all worthy objectives of any serious liberal progressive education, one might argue, though as one reads on with an eye to what things ‘Finnish’ might be achievable in the Australian context, an Australian reader might keep asking questions about the unspoken comparisons between a system which serves a largely homogeneous (with a few pockets of exception) society of five million and one where systems serve an increasingly diverse heterogeneous one of twenty three million.

So much about the system, but what about the actual students themselves who interact with it? Ripley speculates as to whether it is possible to talk of a ‘national character’, or ‘temperament’, or ‘attitude’. And, if so, are some ‘national characters’ more attuned that others to the requirements of testing regimens?

There was a word in Finish sisu (pronounced SEE-su). It meant strength in the face of great odds, but more than that, a sort of inner fire. … ‘It is a compound of bravado and bravery, of ferocity and tenacity’, Time magazine wrote in a story about Finland in 1940, ‘of the ability to keep fighting after most people would have quit, and to fight with the will to win.’ It may have been that one word that encapsulated the Finnish way more than any other. Sisu was what it took to coax potatoes out of the soil of the Arctic Circle; sisu helped Finland pull back from the brink of irrelevance to become an education superpower … Sisu was Finland’s version of drive, a quiet force that never quit. English has no such word for sisu, though the closest synonym might be grit.

I’m not quite sure what the Australian agricultural equivalent of coaxing potatoes out of the soil of the Arctic Circle might be as a metaphor for the Finnish national spirit but is our version of sisu, ‘ Have a go, ya mug’, with all the connotations that carries of ‘near enough is good enough’ and the consequences for success in high stakes testing. What chance Australian ‘laissez faire’ laid–backness against what a colleague of mine, teaching in Helsinki years ago, characterized as Finnish stolidity. A bit harsh perhaps, but certainly doggedness?

Ripley never mentions the words ‘solidity’ or ‘doggedness’ but in her observations and anecdotes notes qualities which evoke it – ‘compliance’, ‘conscientiousness’, ‘diligence’, ‘persistence’. Qualities she notes are foregrounded in a PISA study which tracked students’ diligence in filling out surveys about their families and other life circumstances. The thoroughness with which students answered the score were, she claimed, ‘more predictive of countries’ (PISA) scores than socio economic status or class size or any other factor that had been studied.’ The results of the survey led

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one of the researchers to wonder ‘if PISA and other international exams were measuring not skills but compliance; some countries had cultures in which kids just took all tests, and authority figures, more seriously.’

In a context where every new result sets off governmental, bureaucratic and media alarm bells about Australian results revealing a falling further down the league table of international competition, or a plateauing out of results from one NAPLAN year level to another, perhaps we need a more forensic investigation for why things are as they are before suggesting how they might improve. It’s a point tellingly made in a recent Age article (‘International tests don’t tell us about our schools’ 16/1/2017) reprinted in this Idiom. Alan Reid, Professor Emeritus of Education at The University of South Australia, queries too heavy a reliance on the figures – the ‘data’ – to tell us meaningful things about our schools or students, even the extent to which reasonably good results might reveal about the level of student engagement. He says of these international tests such as PISA and TIMMS: ‘…. treating the results of these tests as an objective truth about the standard of education in a country is a dangerous path to follow. We surely need more sophisticated ways to measure standards than simply reading off international league tables.’

I’m not sure that I’d call talking to students counts as a ‘sophisticated’ way to measure standards but perhaps some in–depth interviews with the Claudias and Ellens of our schools might go some way to helping us understand why the reasoning and arguing they practise in their daily school life engages them and why a NAPLAN persuasive text is such an unengaging ‘blah, blah, blah’ turn–off.

Appendix: Figure 2

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