The study of economics, I agree with the authors, currently looks a little like psychology years ago. Very esoteric, and difficult for the average citizen to access. Yet theories of correlation and causality, which may apply in economics, most surly apply to real life. These guys have my full attention!
I'm starving for strategies to tease out causality. Causality may drive everything we do in life, and mistaken causality can lead to a lot of waste. Mistaken causality, as the authors describe, might sound something like: "Gee, every time it rains, a lot of people use umbrellas. If we'd stop using our umbrellas, maybe the rain would fall less frequently." Or, again as the authors describe, for the Grinch who hates Christmas: "Gee, every time December rolls around, Christmas cards show up in my mailbox. Maybe if we could stop the cards, we would stop Christmas."
These are some of the authors' attempts at showing what a ridiculously significant roll correlation can play in our attempting to determine causality. They offer research that shows sumo wrestlers cheating, that the amount of money raised in a political campaign actually doesn't relate all that closely to election results, and even bring into question the effectiveness of child car seats over seatbelts.
This thinking is new for me, and very outside of the box. I love it for its very nature of challenging conventional "wisdom". It excites me because I often feel hedged in by conventional thinking, and yet we face real challenges every day that seem to elude solutions. When might "Freakonomics" be worth exploring?
Right now, today!
The first place that grabs my attention: academic achievement! Conventional wisdom might postulate that quality instruction causes higher test scores. Really? First of all, of course instruction impacts learning, but how so and how much? The more a teacher knows may only slightly show promise for how much a student learns, particularly if the teaching and learning style are mismatched. Academic research in this area is a multi-billion dollar industry, I'm guessing.
So, what makes a person learn? Our earliest learning happens well before babies talk. We learn to cry, feed ourselves, crawl, walk, and smile all with little to no intervetion for most. Some research make bold claims like: children can lie by the time they're two or three years old, and that as early as pre-school they know among themselves who will be an achiever and who will struggle in learning.
How do they do it? Caregivers and parents don't spend hours in professional development learning the nuances of teaching their babies to crawl. I remember Anne never really rolled over. It made me crazy with worry, and crazier still when doctors and expert grandparents reassured me: "Don't worry. She'll do it when she's ready." And you know what, at 11 years-old, she'll tell you herself: she just doesn't really like rolling. She was verbal at two months, could sit up at three, entered kindergarten reading, plays both the violin and the piano, and is enrolled in the gifted program at her school. Wow.
Everyone was right, and they were all wrong. She did do things on her own time, yet she's not fine. She's excellent. So let's take the part they were right about: She does things when she's ready.
Teachers don't really teach their students. They simply design learning opportunities, and look at assessments as indicators of acquisition. In fact, their job is to design assessments and let the learning happen through a variety of opportunities which the learner directs. Sure, quality instruction supports learning and higher test scores, yet what if that's only 50% of the equation?
What if learning is easily just as much about emotion as instruction? We know a lot about the amigdula. It controls the "fight or flight" response in the brain. Feel safe, and there's fight, which in the classroom might look like effort and risk-taking to reach understanding. Feel threatened, and there's flight, which in the classroom might look like checking out or using poor behavior choices to cover up fear of failing.
What might it cost school districts to run an experiment testing my 50% theory? If we as teachers were given a directive to open every academic interaction with students using reassuring words like: "I know you can do it, and I'm here to help if you need it.", how might that impact student achievement?
Just a thought.
And what's with the home school and charter school movement? Parents obviously want something different for their learners. Maybe they're worried their kids are miserable in school. We could spend a lot of money experimenting with new schools, or we could address a possible real cause: fear of misery.
Think about it. We're all more in touch with our feelings and their origins than ever. The pain and agony of some childhood memories can feel absolutely overwhelming. How natural might it be for some parents experiencing these feelings or bad memories, to pull their children out of potentially difficult school experiences, even if those children are truly loved and nurtured in school, because of parents' own negative experiences and assumptions?
A picture is worth a thousand words. Seeing is believing. Might we retain more families in our school system by simply placing a slide show full of happy students' pictures in the front lobby of schools?
Freakonomics frees up my thinking in a brand new way. This opportunity to turn conventional thinking upside down gives me a new angle from which to view, well, everything! More importantly, I hope it lets me recognize irrelevant assumptions, and ultimately makes me a more effective professional, and a more critical thinker.
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