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Is Public Education Making the Grade?

An Interdisciplinary Exploration…

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Wolves Cull ThemselvesBACKGROUND INFORMATION: UNDERSTANDING THE SOCIAL WOLF

In their years living with and observing the Sawtooth Pack, the Dutchers came to see wolves as individuals, each with its own distinct personality. Intensely social creatures, the wolves exhibited extreme devotion to their family or pack. The Dutchers observed them as animals that are capable of emotion—they care for one another and demonstrate this on a daily basis. The Dutchers captured a unique and

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close-up view and they, like many wolf scientists, offer a perspective of the gray wolf that is neither demon nor deity, nor merely biological statistics. It is an animal that is both intelligent and social. It is an animal that cares for its sick and injured and protects its family. A wolf pack usually consists of parents and their offspring of various years. In a wolf family, each wolf communicates with one another according to their familial roles. The parents are in charge, with the older siblings next in order, followed by the pups of the current year. Wolf packs have members that may become dispersers. A wolf disperses by leaving the pack to seek another pack to join or to create a new pack. The social hierarchy of a pack is similar to that of a family unit, with parents (founding pack members) making decisions like who eats first and who gets more food. Wolves frequently communicate, regularly employing a complex mix of vocal and physical communications to express their needs and emotions. For example, a pup may solicit adults for regurgitated food by licking their muzzles. If there is food around, the adult male and female may growl at pack members to keep them away until they are finished eating. Mistakenly, people often interpret this language as being vicious and evil, but it is simply one of the many ways wolves communicate. A wolf pack is an exceedingly complex social unit—an extended family of parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and sometimes dispersers from other packs. Wolf families can include old wolves that need to be cared for, pups that need to be educated, and young adults that are beginning to assert themselves—all altering the dynamics of the pack. The job of maintaining order and cohesion in the pack falls largely to the parents or breeding pair, also known as the alphas. They, especially the alpha female (the mother of the pack), keep the pack together.

THE PACK

The alphas bear the responsibility for the welfare of the entire pack. Typically, one of the two will act as its decision maker and alert others of signs of danger. The alpha female is the dominant female of the pack, and is mated to the alpha male. Often there is a beta wolf, second in rank. Betas may serve as peacemakers and puppy-sitters or guardians. The lowest ranking wolves in a pack are the omegas, often both a male and female. The omegas must constantly submit to their fellow pack members, as they are often dominated by them or treated as scapegoats. But, omegas are often the instigator of play, helping to alleviate pack tension, thus filling an important role within the family group. No other position requires as

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much skill in diplomacy and appeasement. Both mid- and low-ranking positions are somewhat fluid. Although an omega, for example, may hold that position for many years, its not unheard of for the pack to pick a new omega and let the other retire. Sometimes young, sexually-maturing males and females may become dispersers. A wolf disperses by leaving the pack to seek out another disperser of the opposite sex to create their own pack or family or to join another pack. They’ve even been known to return to their original family after spending time in another pack. Vocalizations such as growls, barks, whines, yips, and whimpers are equally important to the non-vocal body language of baring teeth in a warning of pending aggression or the tucking of the tail in submission. Whines and whimpers indicate friendly interaction but also show frustration or nervousness. Growls and snarls are threatening or defensive. Barking is rare and is usually used as an alarm signal. Howls seem to be about togetherness, whether the wolves are gathering for a hunt, after making a kill and after feeding, mourning a lost pack mate, or announcing territorial or mating intentions. A wolf’s posture when encountering other wolves says a lot about its status in the pack. Subordinates crouch and often lick at the dominant wolf’s muzzle like a puppy, while higher-ranking wolves, like alphas, sometimes bite at the muzzles of subordinates and are readily identifiable by their stiff-legged gaits and high tails.

from National Geographic

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Study in William Blake by Francis Bacon

Excerpt from Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

What is true of one man, said the judge, is true of many. The people who once lived here are called the Anasazi. The old ones. They quit these parts, routed by drought or disease or by murdering band of marauders, quit these parts ages since and of them there is no memory. They are rumors and ghosts in this land and they are much revered. The tools, the art, the building—these things stand in judgement on the latter races. Yet there is nothing for them to grapple with. The old ones are gone like phantoms and the savages wander these canyons to the sound of an

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ancient laughter. In their crude huts they crouch in darkness and listen to the fear seeping out of the rock. All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage. So. Here are the dead fathers. Their spirit is entombed in the stone. It lies upon the land with the same weight and the same ubiquity. For whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny of creatures and he will subside back into the primal mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe and so it was with these masons however primitive their works may seem to us.

None spoke. The judge sat half naked and sweating for the night was cool. At length the expriest Tobin looked up.

It strikes me, he said, that either son is equal in the way of disadvantage. So what is the way of raising a child?

At a young age, said the judge, they should be put in a pit with wild dogs. They should be set to puzzle out from the proper clues the one of the three doors that does not harbor wild lions. They should be made to run naked in the desert until...

Hold now, said Tobin. The question was put in all earnestness.

And the answer, said the judge. If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind, would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to blossom and to flower and die but in the affairs of man there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes. This you see here, these ruins wondered at by the tribes of savages, do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons.

What is the central idea of the Judge's diatribe? Do you agree or disagree? Respond with an exceptional argument.

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Trophic cascadeEcologyWritten by: Stephen Carpenter

1. Introduction

2. Effects on aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems

3. Ecosystems without top predators

4. Biomanipulation in lakes

Trophic cascade, an ecological phenomenon triggered by the addition or removal of top predators and involving reciprocal changes in the relative populations of predator and prey through a food chain, which often results in dramatic changes in ecosystem structure and nutrient cycling. In a three-level food chain, an increase (or decrease) in carnivores causes a decrease (or increase) in herbivores and an increase (or decrease) in primary producers such as plants and phytoplankton. For example, in eastern North America the removal of wolves (Canis lupus) has been associated with an increase in white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) and a decline in plants eaten by the deer. American zoologist Robert Paine coined the term trophic cascade in 1980 to describe reciprocal changes in food webs caused by experimental manipulations of top predators. In the 1980s others used the term to describe changes in aquatic ecosystems arising from factors such as sudden increases in predatory fish populations from stocking or dramatic declines in predatory fishes caused by overfishing.

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Effects on aquatic and terrestrial ecosystemsDuring the 1980s and ’90s a series of experiments demonstrated trophic cascades by adding or removing top carnivores, such as bass (Micropterus) and yellow perch (Perca flavescens), to or from freshwater lakes. Those experiments showed that trophic cascades controlledbiomass and production of phytoplankton, recycling rates of nutrients, the ratio of nitrogen to phosphorus available to phytoplankton, activity of bacteria, and sedimentation rates. Because trophic cascades affected the rates of primary production and respiration by the lake as a whole, they affected rates of exchange of carbon dioxide and oxygen between the lake and the atmosphere.Research in a wide variety of terrestrial and aquatic environments has shown that trophic cascades control species composition, biomass, and production of herbivores and plants. For example, overfishing of cod (Gadus morhua) and other commercially exploited fishes such as haddock (Melanogrammus) and hake (Urophycis, Raniceps, and Phycis) in the North Atlantic Ocean led to an increase in small pelagic (open ocean) fish consumed by cod, snow crab (Chionoecetes opilio), and shrimp. As a result, populations of large-bodied herbivorouszooplankton, which are consumed by small pelagic fishes, decreased, which in turn led to an increase in the phytoplankton. Restoration of wolves to the Bow Valley of Alberta, Can., decreased the population of elk (Cervus elaphus) and increased the growth of aspen(Populus) and willow (Salix). In another example, the commercial harvesting of sea otters (Enhydra lutris) for the fur trade off the west coast of North America triggered an increase in sea urchins and a decline in kelp forests in nearby marine environments.Traditionally, plant production and nutrient cycling were thought to be controlled by physical or chemical factors, such as solar radiation, climate, and nutrient supply. While physical and chemical factors are important, producer communities and their metabolic rates are also influenced by trophic cascades.

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Ecosystems without top predatorsIn many instances, trophic cascades have been initiated by human persecution and harvesting of top carnivores, such as wolves and big cats in terrestrial ecosystems andsharks, tunas, and game fish in aquatic ecosystems. The removal of top carnivores triggers significant effects on prey populations, primary producers, and ecosystem processes. Therefore, the conservation of top carnivores helps to preserve the structure and processes of ecosystems in which these predators live. The normal functioning of ecosystems provides many services used by people, including food, fibre, and freshwater supplies as well as processes that maintain the quality of air, water, and soil. The preservation or restoration of top carnivores, however, is sometimes controversial because of the risk such predators pose to people, livestock, or pets.

Mesopredator release, a phenomenon in which the populations of medium-sized predators rapidly increase and play greater roles in the ecosystems they inhabit, is caused by the removal of top carnivores. Mesopredators compete poorly with and may be consumed by top carnivores and thus tend to avoid them. The systematic decline of cougars (Puma concolor) and wolves in the conterminous United States and other parts of North America during the 20th century allowed populations of mesopredators such as coyotes (Canis latrans), red foxes (Vulpes vulpes), and raccoons (Procyon lotor) to increase, as food sources, hunting grounds, den sites, and other resources once controlled by top carnivores became available. The decline of leopards (Panthera pardus) in some parts of Africa allowed baboon(Papio) populations to increase. The loss of large sharks in the oceans allowed smaller-bodied sharks and rays to increase. In each case, mesopredator release caused a decline in species consumed by the mesopredator.In addition, some mesopredators have become nuisance species. Foraging raccoons plunder trash cans and gardens in many urban areas and are noted carriers of the rabies virus. Baboons can invade homes, break into cars to steal food, and in some cases pose a threat to children.

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Biomanipulation in lakesIn lakes, trophic cascades are used to improve water quality through biomanipulation, a management practice in which humans intentionally remove whole species from ecosystems. The goal of biomanipulation is to reduce the concentration of harmful phytoplankton, such as toxic blue-green algae. The most direct method to control harmful phytoplankton blooms is to reduce inputs of nutrients such as phosphorus that drive their growth. In cases where the arrival of nutrients to the ecosystem is delayed or slow to develop, biomanipulation can be used to hasten the decline of harmful phytoplankton. The stocking of game fish (or their protection from harvest using special regulations) triggers a trophic cascade with decreases in the biomass of smaller-bodied fish, increases in the biomass of herbivorous zooplankton, and decreases in the biomass of harmful phytoplankton. In some cases plankton-eating fish have been removed directly by lake managers. In addition, the removal of bottom-feeding fish from shallow lakes leads to increases in rooted vegetation and increased water clarity as the rooted plants stabilize the sediments. This transition involves a trophic cascade, as herbivorous zooplankton increase in biomass and consume phytoplankton, but also involves the direct effects of rooted vegetation on sediment stability and nutrient cycling.

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I can hear you muttering already: he’s completely lost it this time. He’s written a 2,000-word article on whale poo. I admit that at first it might be hard to see the relevance to your life. But I hope that by the time you have finished this article you will have become as obsessed with marine faecal plumes as I am. What greater incentive could there be to read on?

In truth it’s not just about whale poo, though that’s an important component. It’s about the remarkable connectivity, on this small and spherical planet, of living processes. Nothing human beings do, and nothing that takes place in the natural world, occurs in isolation.

When I was a student, back in the days when mammoths roamed the earth, ecologists tended to believe that the character of living systems was largely determined by abiotic factors. This means influences such as local climate, geology or the availability of nutrients. But it now seems that this belief arose from the study of depleted ecosystems. The rules they derived now appear to have described not the world in its natural state, but the world of our creation. We now know that living systems which retain their large carnivores and large herbivores often behave in radically different ways from those which have lost them.

Large carnivores can transform both the populations and the behaviour of large herbivores. In turn this can change the nature and structure of the plant community, which in turn affects processes such as soil erosion, river movements and carbon storage. The availability of nutrients, the physical geography of the land, even the composition of the atmosphere: all now turn out to be affected by animals. Living systems exert far more powerful impacts on the planet and its processes than we suspected.

I’m talking about trophic cascades: ecological processes that tumble from the top of an ecosystem to the bottom. (Trophic means relating to food and feeding.) It turns out that many living processes work from the top down, rather than the bottom up.

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Trophic cascades have often been detected in places in which large carnivores still exist or have been reintroduced. But what has been discovered so far is likely to underestimate their natural prevalence. For what we now describe as top predators are often – from the perspective of palaeoecology, nothing of the kind.

Species such as wolves and lynx, for example, would be more accurately described as mesopredators: belonging to the second rank. They would once have had to contend with lions, hyaenas, scimitar cats, sabretooths, bear dogs and other such monsters, throughout their ranges. Even the giant lions and giant sabretooths that lived in North America until the first humans arrived could not unequivocally be considered the kings of the jungle. The short-faced bear, which stood 13 feet in its hind socks, appears to have been a specialist scavenger: specialising in driving giant lions and giant sabretooths off their prey.

One hypothesis which might help to explain the sudden disappearance from many parts of the world of the megafauna, following the first arrival of human beings, is that we triggered trophic cascades of destruction.

For example, before humans reached Australia, the continent teemed with great beasts. There was a spiny anteater the size of a pig; a giant herbivore a bit like a wombat, which weighed two tonnes; a marsupial tapir as big as a horse; a 10-foot kangaroo; a marsupial lion with opposable thumbs and a stronger bite than any other known mammal, which I believe was a specialist carnivore of giant kangaroos; a horned tortoise eight feet long; a monitor lizard bigger than the Nile crocodile. Most of them, and many other marvellous creatures, disappeared between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago. At roughly the same time, the dense rainforests which covered much of that continent began to be replaced by the grass and scrubby trees which populate much of the outback today.

One paper suggests that the first humans in Australia hunted some of the large animals to extinction, and that this caused the destruction of the rainforests, which in turn wiped out much of the remaining fauna. How? It postulates that when the giant herbivores disappeared, the leaves and twigs that would otherwise have been

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browsed began to build up on the forest floor, creating a fuel supply that allowed wildfires to rage unhindered through the rainforests. This catalysed the shift to grass and scrub.

In Europe, ecologists are beginning to wake up to the fact that our ecosystems were and remain shaped by elephants, rhinos, hippos and the other great beasts that lived here during the last interglacial period, when the climate was similar to today’s. You can still see evidence of co-evolution with elephants and rhinos in the way that our deciduous trees respond to attack.

In other words, the natural world is even more fascinating and complex than we had imagined. And we are only just beginning to understand just how rich and strange ecological processes might be.

I promised whale poo, and whale poo you shall have. Studies in the 1970s proposed that the great reduction in the large whales of the southern oceans would lead to an increase in the population of krill, their major prey. It never materialised. Instead there has been a long-term decline. How could that be true? It now turns out that whales maintain the populations of their prey.

They often feed at depth, but they seldom defecate there, because when they dive the stress this exerts on the body requires the shutdown of some of its functions. So they perform their ablutions when they come up to breathe. What they are doing, in other words, is transporting nutrients from the depths, including waters too dark for photosynthesis to occur, into the photic zone, where plants can live.

Late spring and summer weather brings blooms of color to the Atlantic Ocean off of South America, at least from a satellite view. The Patagonian Shelf Break is a biologically rich patch of ocean where airborne dust from the land, iron-rich currents from the south, and upwelling currents from the depths provide a bounty of nutrients for the grass of the sea phytoplankton. In turn, those floating sunlight harvesters become food for some of the richest fisheries in the world.

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In the southern oceans, iron is a limiting nutrient, without which the plant plankton at the bottom of the food chain cannot reproduce and grow. By producing their poonamis – sorry, faecal plumes – in the surface waters, the whales fertilise the plant plankton on which the krill and fish depend. This effect, known as the “whale pump” has been hypothesised for several years. But now there is some experimental evidence to support it. A team of scientists at the University of Tasmania collected some pygmy blue whale poo (who knew that marine biology was so rich with possibility?) and grew plankton in water containing varying concentrations of it. They found that the richer the mix, the greater the productivity. No surprises there.

Separate research, in the Gulf of Maine, estimates that whales and seals, by defecating at the surface and recycling nutrients there, would, before their numbers were reduced by hunting, have been responsible for releasing three times as much nitrogen into those waters as the sea absorbed directly from the atmosphere. The volume of plant plankton has declined across much of the world over the past century, probably as a result of rising global temperatures. But the decline appears to have been been steepest where whales and seals have been most heavily hunted. The fishermen who have insisted that predators such as seals should be killed might have been reducing, not enhancing, their catch.

But it doesn’t end there. Plant plankton, when they die, slowly descend into the abyss, taking with them the carbon they have absorbed from the atmosphere. It is hard to quantify, but when they were at their historical populations, whales are likely to have made a small but significant contribution to the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The recovery of the great whales, which were reduced by between two-thirds and 90%, but whose numbers are slowly climbing again in some parts of the oceans, could be seen as a benign form of geoengineering.

This should not be the only, or even the main, reason why we should wish them to return, but the way in which whales change the composition of the atmosphere

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provides yet another refutation of the idea that we can manipulate the living world with simple, predictable results.

With the Sustainable Human team, I’ve just produced a second trophic cascades video, about the whale pump. The first – about the unexpected impact of wolves in Yellowstone national park – has been watched 13m times. The belief that people cannot handle complexity is a myth. There is a tremendous public appetite to understand the world in all its fascinating detail.

Another paper proposes that as the great whales declined, killer whales, some of which would have specialised in feeding on them, switched their diet to animals such as seals and sea lions. This is likely to have had major effects on fish populations.

But now, in the Aleutian archipelago, the reduction of seals by human hunters appears to have caused the killer whales to switch their diet again, in this case to sea otters. A large part of the diet of sea otters consists of sea urchins. As the otters have declined, the number of urchins has risen, to the point that in some places they have grazed the vast kelp forests that once thronged the coastal waters of the western seaboard of the Americas until almost nothing remains. Not only has this caused the collapse of the coastal ecosystem, but it has also caused the release of more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, as the carbon stored in the kelp has been oxidised.

And even that is not the end of the story. It now seems that whaling may have been a leading cause of the decline of the Californian condor. Condors appear to have specialised in scavenging the carcasses of stranded whales. As whales were destroyed, the condors were deprived of a major food source, and were forced to feed on dead terrestrial animals. Some of these carcasses are of animals that die after being shot and then lost by human hunters. The ingestion of lead from bullets and shot has been one of the reasons for the fragility of the condors’ grip on existence.

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Who would have guessed that the impacts of whaling would cascade through so many living systems?

(Incidentally, until humans arrived in the Americas, the condor was one of the smaller scavenging birds. The North American roc (Aiolornis incredibilis), had a wingspan of 16 feet and a hooked bill the length of a man’s foot. No skull of another predatory bird, the Argentine roc (Argentavis magnificens) has yet been found, but the available bones suggest that its wings were 26 feet across and that it weighed 12 stone.)

And it’s not just whales. When plant plankton are attacked by the small animals that eat them, some of them release a chemical called dimethyl sulphide. This compound attracts predators, that feed on the animals eating the plants. It appears that the tube-nosed birds, such as albatrosses, fulmars, shearwaters and petrels, which have a highly developed sense of smell, can detect dimethyl sulphide, and use its presence to find their prey. Not only might this help to protect the plant plankton from some of the animals grazing on them, but by defecating in the feeding zone, the birds help to fertilise the plants that brought them there.

There’s one more twist. Dimethyl sulphide seems to have a powerful role in the formation of clouds at sea. Because the sea has a dark surface, and clouds are white, the greater the cloud cover, the more sunlight is reflected back into space. So as plant plankton are attacked, they might help to cool the planet.

There are similar effects on land. Before serious conservation efforts began in the 1960s, wildebeest numbers in the Serengeti fell from about 1.2 million to 300,000. The result was similar to the hypothesised mechanism for the destruction of much of the Australian rainforest. As dry grass and other vegetation that the wildebeest would otherwise have eaten accumulated, wildfires ravaged around 80% of the Serengeti every year.

As wildebeest numbers have recovered, the frequency of fires has fallen and more dung is incorporated into the soil. The Serengeti has been transformed from a net

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carbon source to a net carbon sink: a shift equivalent to the entire current emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels in east Africa.

But it’s important not to generalise from one example. In other parts of the world, grazing animals can increase the production of greenhouse gases. Domestic livestock are a major cause of global warming. So are some wild herbivores. As moose numbers in Canada have risen, partly due to the destruction of their predators by people, through a series of complicated impacts on both vegetation and soil they have sharply reduced the storage of carbon in the boreal forests. One estimate suggests that the difference in carbon storage between high and low moose numbers is the equivalent of between 42 and 95% of the carbon dioxide Canada produces through the burning of fossil fuels. Allowing wolves to return to their historical levels could make a massive difference to Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Nor should we imagine that wolves and whales and wildebeest and plant plankton and sea otters alone can prevent the climate breakdown that the unchecked consumption of fossil fuels will cause. Annual plant growth cannot match the burning of fossil fuels, which mobilises the stored remains of many centuries of accumulated plant carbon every year. But these first inklings of the unexpected impacts of our destruction should provide yet another reason for treating the living planet gently. Everything is connected.

I would hate to see the protection of wildlife reduced to a calculation about greenhouse gases. For me, there are powerful intrinsic reasons for defending the natural world: because it is wonderful; because it enriches and enchants our lives; because to understand how these magnificent and complex systems work is to pass through a portal to an enchanted kingdom.

But the little we now know of trophic cascades and the unexpected complexities they reveal, which doubtless presages a much deeper and richer understanding in the years to come, enhances for me the awe with which I contemplate our world of wonders. It makes me all the more determined to protect it from destruction.

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Study Question

Watch the Youtube video “How Wolves Change Rivers” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q and explain how the trophic cascade theory applies to the wolves at Yellowstone National Park. Be sure to cite evidence in your assertion.__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

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When Tempers Flare

Do you lose your temper and wonder why? Are there days when you feel like you

just wake up angry?

Some of it may be the changes your body's going through: All those hormones you

hear so much about can cause mood swings and confused emotions. Some of it

may be stress: People who are under a lot of pressure tend to get angry more easily.

Part of it may be your personality: You may be someone who feels your emotions

intensely or tends to act impulsively or lose control. And part of it may be your

role models: Maybe you've seen other people in your family blow a fuse when

they're mad.

No matter what pushes your buttons, one thing is certain — you're sure to get

angry sometimes. Everyone does. Anger is a normal emotion, and there's nothing

wrong with feeling mad. What counts is how we handle it (and ourselves) when

we're angry.

Tools to Tame a Temper: Self-Awareness & Self-Control

Because anger can be powerful, managing it is sometimes challenging. It takes

plenty of self-awareness and self-control to manage angry feelings. And these

skills take time to develop.

Self-awareness is the ability to notice what you're feeling and thinking, and why.

Little kids aren't very aware of what they feel, they just act it out in their behavior.

That's why you see them having tantrums when they're mad. But teens have the

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mental ability to be self-aware. When you get angry, take a moment to notice what

you're feeling and thinking.

Self-control is all about thinking before you act. It puts some precious seconds or

minutes between feeling a strong emotion and taking an action you'll regret.

Together, self-awareness and self-control allow you to have more choice about

how to act when you're feeling an intense emotion like anger.

Getting Ready to Make a Change

Deciding to get control of your anger — rather than letting it control you — means

taking a good hard look at the ways you've been reacting when you get mad. Do

you tend to yell and scream or say hurtful, mean, disrespectful things? Do you

throw things, kick or punch walls, break stuff? Hit someone, hurt yourself, or push

and shove others around?

For most people who have trouble harnessing a hot temper, reacting like this is not

what they want. They feel ashamed by their behavior and don't think it reflects the

real them, their best selves.

Everyone can change — but only when they want to. If you want to make a big

change in how you're handling your anger, think about what you'll gain from that

change. More self-respect? More respect from other people? Less time feeling

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annoyed and frustrated? A more relaxed approach to life? Remembering why you

want to make the change can help.

It can also help to remind yourself that making a change takes time, practice, and

patience. It won't happen all at once. Managing anger is about developing new

skills and new responses. As with any skill, like playing basketball or learning the

piano, it helps to practice over and over again.

The Five-Step Approach to Managing Anger

If something happens that makes you feel angry, this approach can help you

manage your reaction. It's called a problem-solving approach because you start

with the problem you're mad about. Then you weigh your choices and decide what

you'll do.

Each step involves asking yourself a couple of questions, then answering them

based on your particular situation.

Let's take this example: There's a party you're planning to go to, but your mom just

told you to clean your room or stay home. The red-hot anger starts building.

Here's what to do:

1) Identify the problem (self-awareness). Start by noticing what you're angry

about and why. Put into words what's making you upset so you can act rather than

react.

Ask yourself: What's got me angry? What am I feeling and why? You can do this

either in your mind or out loud, but it needs to be clear and specific. For example:

"I'm really angry at Mom because she won't let me go to the party until I clean my

room. It's not fair!" Your feeling is anger, and you're feeling angry because you

might not get to go to the party.

Notice that this is not the same as saying, "Mom's so unfair to me." That statement

doesn't identify the specific problem (that you can't go to the party until you clean

your room) and it doesn't say how you're feeling (angry).

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2) Think of potential solutions before responding (self-control). This is where

you stop for a minute to give yourself time to manage your anger. It's also where

you start thinking of how you might react — but without reacting yet.

Ask yourself: What can I do? Think of at least three things. For example, in this

situation you might think:

(a) I could yell at Mom and throw a fit.

(b) I could clean my room and then ask if I could go to the party.

(c) I could sneak out to the party anyway.

3) Consider the consequences of each solution (think it through). This is where

you think about what is likely to result from each of the different reactions you

came up with.

Ask yourself: What will happen for each one of these options? For example:

(a) Yelling at your mom may get you in worse trouble or even grounded.

(b) Cleaning your room takes work and you may get to the party late (but maybe

that adds to your mystique). With this option, you get to go to the party and your

room's clean so you don't have to worry about it for a while.

(c) Sneaking out may seem like a real option in the heat of anger. But when you

really think it through, it's pretty unlikely you'd get away with being gone for hours

with no one noticing. And when you do get caught — look out!

4) Make a decision (pick one of your options). This is where you take action by

choosing one of the three things you could do. Look at the list and pick the one that

is likely to be most effective.

Ask yourself: What's my best choice? By the time you've thought it through, you're

probably past yelling at your mom, which is a knee-jerk response. You may have

also decided that sneaking out is too risky. Neither of these options is likely to get

you to the party. So option (b) probably seems like the best choice.

Once you choose your solution, then it's time to act.

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5) Check your progress. After you've acted and the situation is over, spend some

time thinking about how it went.

Ask yourself: How did I do? Did things work out as I expected? If not, why not?

Am I satisfied with the choice I made? Taking some time to reflect on how things

worked out after it's all over is a very important step. It helps you learn about

yourself and it allows you to test which problem-solving approaches work best in

different situations.

Give yourself a pat on the back if the solution you chose worked out well. If it

didn't, go back through the five steps and see if you can figure out why.

These five steps are pretty simple when you're calm, but are much tougher to work

through when you're angry or sad (kind of like in basketball practice when making

baskets is much easier than in a real game when the pressure is on!). So it helps to

practice over and over again.

Other Ways to Manage Anger

The five-step approach is good when you're in a particular situation that's got you

mad and you need to decide what action to take. But other things can help you

manage anger too.

Try these things even if you're not mad right now to help prevent angry feelings

from building up inside.

Exercise. Go for a walk/run, work out, or go play a sport. Lots of research

has shown that exercise is a great way to improve your mood and decrease

negative feelings.

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Listen to music (with your headphones on). Music has also been shown to

change a person's mood pretty quickly. And if you dance, then you're

exercising and it's a two-for-one.

Write down your thoughts and emotions. You can write things in lots of

ways; for example, in a journal or as your own poetry or song lyrics. After

you've written it down, you can keep it or throw it away — it doesn't matter.

The important thing is, writing down your thoughts and feelings can improve

how you feel. When you notice, label, and release feelings as they show up in

smaller portions, they don't have a chance to build up inside.

Draw. Scribbling, doodling, or sketching your thoughts or feelings might

help too.

Meditate or practice deep breathing. This one works best if you do it

regularly, as it's more of an overall stress management technique that can help

you use self-control when you're mad. If you do this regularly, you'll find that

anger is less likely to build up.

Talk about your feelings with someone you trust. Lots of times there are

other emotions, such as fear or sadness, beneath anger. Talking about them can

help.

Distract yourself. If you find yourself stewing about something and just

can't seem to let go, it can help to do something that will get your mind past

what's bugging you — watch TV, read, or go to the movies.

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These ideas can be helpful for two reasons:

1. They help you cool down when you feel like your anger might

explode. When you need to cool down, do one or more of the activities in the

list above. Think of these as alternatives to taking an action you'll regret, such

as yelling at someone. Some of them, like writing down feelings, can help you

release tension and begin the thinking process at the same time.

2. They help you manage anger in general. What if there's no immediate

problem to solve — you simply need to shift into a better mood? Sometimes

when you're angry, you just need to stop dwelling on how mad you are.

When to Ask for Extra Help

Sometimes anger is a sign that more is going on. People who have frequent trouble

with anger, who get in fights or arguments, who get punished, who have life

situations that give them reason to often be angry may need special help to get a

problem with anger under control.

Tell your parents, a teacher, a counselor, or another adult you trust if any of these

things have been happening:

You have a lasting feeling of anger over things that have either happened to

you in the past or are going on now.

You feel irritable, grumpy, or in a bad mood more often than not.

You feel consistent anger or rage at yourself.

You feel anger that lasts for days or makes you want to hurt yourself or

someone else.

You're often getting into fights or arguments.

These could be signs of depression or something else — and you shouldn't have to

handle that alone.

Anger is a strong emotion. It can feel overwhelming at times. Learning how to deal

with strong emotions — without losing control — is part of becoming more

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mature. It takes a little effort, a little practice, and a little patience, but you can get

there if you want to.

Reviewed by: D'Arcy Lyness, PhD

Date reviewed: October 2012

Originally reviewed by: Matthew K. Nock, PhD

from kidshealth.org

Study Question

Directions: Read the article entitled “Dealing with Anger.” Think of a situation that

made you angry. Analyze the situation by completing the Five Step Approach.

Answer ALL of the “Ask Yourself” questions regarding your individual situation.

Your assignment must be typed using Times New Roman 12-point font with the

proper heading. Do not use this form. Retype your assignment. Complete your

Five Step Approach using the following format:

Step 1: Identify the Problem (self-awareness)

Step 2: Think of potential solution before responding (self-control)

Step 3: Consider the consequences of each solution (think it through)

Step 4: Make a decision (pick one of your options)

Step 5: Check your progress

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Introduction to Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen

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"It would be better not to know so many things than to know so many things that are not so." -- Felix Okoye

"Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat the eleventh grade." -- James Loewen

"American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it." -- James Baldwin

"Concealment of the historical truth is a crime against the people." -- General Petro G.Grigorenko, samizdat letter to history journal, c. 1975, U.S.S.R.

High school students hate history. When they list their favorite subjects, history always comes in last. They consider it "the most irrelevant" of 21 school subjects, not applicable to life today. "Borr-r-ring" is the adjective they apply to it. When they can, they avoid it, even though most students get higher grades in history than in math, science, or English. Even when they are forced to take history, they repress it, so every year or two another study decries what our 17-year-olds don't know.

African American, Native American, and Latino students view history with a special dislike. They also learn it especially poorly. Students of color do only slightly worse than white students in mathematics. Pardoning my grammar, they do more worse in English and most worse in history. Something intriguing is going on here: surely history is not more difficult than trigonometry or Faulkner. I will argue later that high school history so alienates people of color that doing badly may be a sign of mental health! Students don't know they're alienated, only that they "don't like social studies" or "aren't any good at history." In college, most students of color give history departments a wide berth.

Many history teachers perceive the low morale in their classrooms. If they have lots of time, light family responsibilities, some resources, and a flexible principal, some teachers respond by abandoning the overstuffed textbooks and reinventing their American history courses. All too many teachers grow disheartened and settle for less. At least dimly aware that their students are not requiting their own love of history, they withdraw some of their energy from their courses. Gradually they

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settle for just staying ahead of their students in the books, teaching what will be on the test, and going through the motions.

College teachers in most disciplines are happy when their students have had more rather than less exposure to the subject before they reach college. Not in history. History professors in college routinely put down high school history courses. A colleague of mine calls his survey of American history "Iconoclasm I and II," because he sees his job as disabusing his charges of what they learned in high school. In no other field does this happen. Mathematics professors, for instance, know that non-Euclidean geometry is rarely taught in high school, but they don't assume that Euclidean geometry was mistaught. English literature courses don't presume that "Romeo and Juliet" was misunderstood in high school. Indeed, a later chapter will show that history is the only field in which the more courses students take, the stupider they become.

Perhaps I do not need to convince you that American history is important. More than any other topic, it is about us. Whether one deems our present society wondrous or awful or both, history reveals how we got to this point. Understanding our past is central to our ability to understand ourselves and the world around us. We need to know our history, and according to C. Wright Mills, we know we do. Outside of school, Americans do show great interest in history. Historical novels often become bestsellers, whether by Gore Vidal (Lincoln, Burr) or Dana Fuller Ross (Idaho! Utah! Nebraska! Oregon! Missouri! and on! and on!). The National Museum of American History is one of the three big draws of the Smithsonian Institution. The Civil War series attracted new audiences to public television. Movies tied to history have fascinated us from Birth of a Nation through Gone With the Wind to Dances With Wolves and JFK.

Our situation is this: American history is full of fantastic and important stories. These stories have the power to spellbind audiences, even audiences of difficult seventh graders. These same stories show what America has been about and have direct relevance to our present society. American audiences, even young ones, need and want to know about their national past. Yet they sleep through the classes that present it.

What has gone wrong?

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We begin to get a handle on that question by noting that textbooks dominate history teaching more than any other field. Students are right: the books are boring. The stories they tell are predictable because every problem is getting solved, if it has not been already. Textbooks exclude conflict or real suspense. They leave out anything that might reflect badly upon our national character. When they try for drama, they achieve only melodrama, because readers know that everything will turn out wonderful in the end. "Despite setbacks, the United States overcame these challenges," in the words of one of them. Most authors don't even try for melodrama. Instead, they write in a tone that if heard aloud might be described as "mumbling lecturer." No wonder students lose interest.

Textbooks almost never use the present to illuminate the past. They might ask students to learn about gender roles in the present, to prompt thinking about what women did and did not achieve in the suffrage movement or the more recent women's movement. They might ask students to do family budgets for a janitor and a stock broker, to prompt thinking about labor unions and social class in the past or present. They might, but they don't. The present is not a source of information for them. No wonder students find history "irrelevant" to their present lives.

Conversely, textbooks make no real use of the past to illuminate the present. The present seems not to be problematic to them. They portray history as a simple-minded morality play. "Be a good citizen" is the message they extract from the past for the present. "You have a proud heritage. Be all that you can be. After all, look at what the United States has done." While there is nothing wrong with optimism, it does become something of a burden for students of color, children of working class parents, girls who notice an absence of women who made history, or any group that has not already been outstandingly successful. The optimistic textbook approach denies any understanding of failure other than blaming the victim. No wonder children of color are alienated. Even for male children of affluent white families, bland optimism gets pretty boring after eight hundred pages.

These textbooks in American history stand in sharp contrast to the rest of our schooling. Why are they so bad? Nationalism is one of the culprits. Their contents are muddled by the conflicting desires to promote inquiry and indoctrinate blind patriotism. "Take a look in your history book, and you'll see why we should be proud," goes an anthem often sung by high school glee clubs, but we need not even

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take a look inside. The difference begins with their titles: The Great Republic, The American Way, Land of Promise, Rise of the American Nation. Such titles differ from all other textbooks students read in high school or college. Chemistry books are called Chemistry or Principles of Chemistry, not Rise of the Molecule. Even literature collections are likely to be titled Readings in American Literature. Not most history books. And you can tell these books from their covers, graced with American flags, eagles, and the Statue of Liberty.

Inside their glossy covers, American history books are full of information - overly full. These books are huge. My collection of a dozen of the most popular averages four and a half pounds in weight and 888 pages in length. No publisher wants to be shut out from an adoption because their book left out a detail of concern to an area or a group. Authors seem compelled to include a paragraph about every president, even Chester A. Arthur and Millard Fillmore. Then there are the review pages at the end of each chapter. Land of Promise, to take one example, enumerates 444 "Main Ideas" at the ends of its chapters. In addition, it lists literally thousands of "Skill Activities," "Key Terms," "Matching" items, "Fill in the Blanks," "Thinking Critically" questions, and "Review Identifications" as well as still more "Main Ideas" at the ends of each section within its chapters. At year's end, no student can remember 444 main ideas, not to mention 624 key terms and countless other "factoids," so students and teachers fall back on one main idea: to memorize the terms for the test following each chapter, then forget them to clear the synapses for the next chapter. No wonder high school graduates are notorious for forgetting in which century the Civil War was fought!

None of the facts is memorable, because they are presented as one damn thing after another. While they include most of the trees and all too many twigs, authors forget to give readers even a glimpse of what they might find memorable: the forests. Textbooks stifle meaning as they suppress causation. Therefore students exit them without developing the ability to think coherently about social life.

Even though the books are fat with detail, even though the courses are so busy they rarely reach 1960, our teachers and our textbooks still leave out what we need to know about the American past. Often the factoids are flatly wrong or unknowable. In sum, startling errors of omission and distortion mar American histories. This book is about how we are mistaught.

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Errors in history textbooks do not often get corrected, partly because the history profession does not bother to review them. Occasionally outsiders do: Frances FitzGerald's 1979 study, America Revised, was a bestseller, but she made no impact on the industry. In a sarcastic passage her book pointed out how textbooks ignored or distorted the Spanish impact on Latin America and the colonial United States. "Text publishers may now be on the verge of rewriting history," she predicted, but she was wrong - the books have not changed.

History can be imagined as a pyramid. At its base are the millions of primary sources - the plantation records, city directories, speeches, songs, photographs, newspaper articles, diaries, and letters from the time. Based on these primary materials, historians write secondary works - books and articles on subjects ranging from deafness on Martha's Vineyard to Grant's tactics at Vicksburg. Historians produce hundreds of these works every year, many of them splendid. In theory, a few historians working individually or in teams then synthesize the secondary literature into tertiary works - textbooks covering all phases of United States history.

In practice, however, it doesn't work that way. Instead, history textbooks are clones of each other. The first thing editors do when recruiting new authors is to send them half a dozen examples of the competition. Often a textbook is not written by the authors whose names grace its cover, but by minions deep in the bowels of the publisher's offices. When historians do write them, they face snickers from their colleagues and deans - tinged with envy, but snickers nonetheless: "Why are you writing pedagogy instead of doing scholarship?"

The result is not happy for textbook scholarship. Many history textbooks do list up-to-the-minute secondary sources in bibliographies at the ends of chapters, but the contents of the chapters remain totally traditional - unaffected by the new research.

What would we think of a course in poetry in which students never read a poem? The editors' voice in literature textbooks may be no more interesting than in history, but at least that voice stills when the textbook presents original materials of literature. The universal processed voice of history textbook authors insulates students from the raw materials of history. Rarely do authors quote the speeches,

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songs, diaries, and letters that make the past come alive. Students do not need to be protected from this material. They can just as well read one paragraph from William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech as read two paragraphs about it, which is what American Adventures substitutes. No wonder students find the textbooks dull.

Textbooks also keep students in the dark about the nature of history. History is furious debate informed by evidence and reason, not just answers to be learned. Textbooks encourage students to believe that history is learning facts. "We have not avoided controversial issues" announces one set of textbook authors; "instead, we have tried to offer reasoned judgments" on them - thus removing the controversy! No wonder their text turns students off! Because textbooks employ this god-like voice, it never occurs to most students to question them. "In retrospect I ask myself, why didn't I think to ask for example who were the original inhabitants of the Americas, what was their life like, and how did it change when Columbus arrived," wrote a student of mine. "However, back then everything was presented as if it were the full picture," she continued, "so I never thought to doubt that it was." Tests supplied by the textbook publishers then tickle students' throats with multiple choice items to get them to regurgitate the factoids they "learned." No wonder students don't learn to think critically.

As a result of all this, high school graduates are hamstrung in their efforts to apply logic and information to controversial issues in our society. (I know because I encounter them the next year as college freshmen.) We've got to do better. Five sixths of all Americans never take a course in American history beyond high school. What our citizens "learn" there forms most of what they know of our past.

America's history merits remembering and understanding. This book includes ten chapters of amazing stories - some wonderful, some ghastly - in American history. Arranged in roughly chronological order, these chapters do not relate mere details but events and processes that had and have important consequences. Yet most textbooks leave out or distort them. I know because for several years I have been lugging around twelve textbooks, taking them seriously as works of history and ideology, studying what they say and don't say, and trying to figure out why. I chose the twelve to represent the range of books available for American history courses. Two, Discovering American History and The American Adventure, are

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"inquiry" textbooks, composed of maps, illustrations, and extracts from primary sources like diaries and laws, linked by narrative passages. These books are supposed to invite students to "do" history themselves. The American Way, Land of Promise, The United States -- A History of the Republic, American History, The American Tradition, are traditional high school narrative history textbooks. Three textbooks, American Adventures, Life and Liberty, and Challenge of Freedom, are intended for junior high students but are often used by "slow" senior high classes. Triumph of the American Nation and The American Pageant are also used on college campuses. These twelve have been my window into the world of what high school students carry home, read, memorize, and forget. In addition, I have spent many hours observing high school history classrooms in Mississippi, Vermont, and the Washington metropolitan area.

The eleventh chapter analyzes the process of textbook creation and adoption to explain what causes textbooks to be as bad as they are. I must confess an interest here: I once wrote a history textbook. Written with co-authors, Mississippi: Conflict and Change was the first revisionist state history textbook in America. Although Conflict and Change won the Lillian Smith Award for "best nonfiction about the South" in 1975, Mississippi rejected it for public school use, so the authors and three school systems sued the textbook board. In April, 1980, Loewen et al. v. Turnipseed et al. resulted in a sweeping victory based on the first and fourteenth amendments. The experience taught me first-hand more than most authors or publishers ever want to know about the textbook adoption process. I have also learned that not all the blame can be laid at the doorstep of the adoption agencies. Chapter twelve looks at the effects of using these textbooks. It shows that they actually make students stupid. An epilogue, "The Future Lies Ahead," suggests distortions and omissions that went undiscussed in earlier chapters and recommends ways that teachers can teach and students can learn American history more honestly - sort of an inoculation program against the next lies we are otherwise sure to encounter.

Study Question

Do you agree with the central argument of James W. Loewen’s introduction to Lies My Teacher Told Me? Support your assertion with an exceptional argument.

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How School Dress Codes Shame Girls and Perpetuate Rape CultureLaura Bates @EverydaySexism May 22, 2015

Laura Bates is the co-founder of The Everyday Sexism Project which collects stories of sexual harassment and gender discrimination from minor incidents to more severe situations.

When teachers punish girls for wearing clothes deemed 'too distracting' for boys to handle, it teaches a damaging lesson

Some of our most powerful and lasting ideas about the world around us are learned at school. Hard work pays off. Success comes from working together. Girls’ bodies are dangerous and harassment is inevitable.

This might sound inflammatory, but it is not an exaggeration. It is the overriding message being sent to thousands of students around the world by sexist school dress codes and the way in which they are enforced.

In the past month alone a Canadian teen says she was given detention for wearing a full length maxi dress because it violated her school dress code by showing her shoulders and back and a UK school announced plans to ban skirts altogether.

These are just the most recent cases in an ever-growing list that has seen shoulders and knees become a battleground, leggings and yoga pants banned and girls in some cases reportedly told to flap their arms up and down while their attire was

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inspected, or asked to leave their proms because chaperones considered their dresses too ‘sexual’ or ‘provocative’.

Many schools respond to criticism of dress codes by citing the importance of maintaining a ‘distraction free’ learning environment, or of teaching young people about the importance of dressing appropriately for different occasions.

But at the Everyday Sexism Project, where people from around the world share their experiences of gender inequality, we have received over a hundred testimonies from girls and young women who are affected by the dress codes and feel a strong sense of injustice.

One such project entry read:

“I got dress coded at my school for wearing shorts. After I left the principal’s office with a detention I walked past another student wearing a shirt depicting two stick figures: the male holding down the females head in his crotch and saying ‘good girls swallow’. Teachers walked right past him and didn’t say a thing.”

Girls are repeatedly told the reason they have to cover up to avoid ‘distracting’ their male peers, or making male teachers ‘uncomfortable’…

“At my school our dress code dictates everything about a girls outfit: knee length shorts or skirts only, no cleavage, no bra straps, no tank tops. We can’t even wear flip flops, and girls will be given detentions and sent home for breaking any one of these rules. There’s no dress code for men, and the reasoning? Girls can’t dress “provacatively” [sic] because it could distract and excite the boys.”

I can’t help feeling there is a powerful irony in accusing a girl of being ‘provocative’ – in projecting that societal assumption onto her adolescent body – before she is even old enough to have learned how to correctly spell the word.

One student says she was given three specific reasons for the school dress code:

“1) There are male teachers and male sixth formers [high school seniors]

2) Teachers feel uncomfortable around bras etc.

3) Don’t want the boys to target you or intimidate you”.

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This sends an incredibly powerful message. It teaches our children that girls’ bodies are dangerous, powerful and sexualised, and that boys are biologically programmed to objectify and harass them. It prepares them for college life, where as many as one in five women is sexually assaulted but society will blame and question and silence them, while perpetrators are rarely disciplined.

The problem is often compounded by a lack of any attempt to discipline boys for harassing behavior, which drives home the message that it is the victim’s responsibility to prevent. We have received thousands of testimonies from girls who have complained about being verbally harassed, touched, groped, chased, followed, licked, and assaulted at school, only to be told: “he just likes you”, or: “boys will be boys”. The hypocrisy is breath taking.

Meanwhile, the very act of teachers calling young girls out for their attire projects an adult sexual perception onto an outfit or body part that may not have been intended or perceived as such by the student herself. It can be disturbing and distressing for students to be perceived in this way and there is often a strong element of shame involved.

“I’ve been told by a teacher that the way I was wearing my socks made me look like a prostitute in my first year of school, making me 13, and I’ve been asked whether I’m ashamed of myself because I rolled my skirt up,” wrote one young woman.

The codes aren’t just problematic for sexist reasons. One project entry reads:

“At age 10 I was pulled out of my fifth grade class for a few minutes for a ‘special health lesson’. As an early bloomer, I already had obvious breasts and was the tallest in my class. I thought they were giving me a paper about reproductive health that’s normally given to the 12 year old girls. Instead I was told to cover my body more because I was different.”

Other incidents have also seen boys banned from school for having hair ‘too long’ or wearing traditionally ‘feminine’ fashion, from skinny jeans to skirts. A transgender student said he was threatened with having his photo barred from the school yearbook simply because he chose to wear a tuxedo to prom. Black girls are more likely to be targeted for ‘unacceptable’ hairstyles. The parents of a 12-year

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old African American student said she was threatened with expulsion for refusing to cut her naturally styled hair. Her mother was told she violated school dress codes for being “a distraction”.

At this point it starts to feel like such ‘codes’ are less about protecting children and more about protecting strict social norms and hierarchies that refuse to tolerate difference or diversity.

This is a critical moment. The school dress code debate will be dismissed by many for being minor or unimportant, but it is not.

When a girl is taken out of class on a hot day for wearing a strappy top, because she is ‘distracting’ her male classmates, his education is prioritized over hers. When a school takes the decision to police female students’ bodies while turning a blind eye to boys’ behavior, it sets up a lifelong assumption that sexual violence is inevitable and victims are partially responsible. Students are being groomed to perpetuate the rape culture narrative that sits at the very heart of our society’s sexual violence crisis. It matters very much indeed.

Study Question

Do you agree with the central argument of “How School Dress Codes Shame Girls and Perpetuate Rape Culture” by Laura Bates? Support your assertion with an exceptional argument.

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Flunking the testFailing schools pose a big challenge to President Enrique Peña Nieto’s vision for modernising Mexico

Mar 7th 2015 | OAXACA |

GOING into the offices of the National Co-ordinator of Education Workers (CNTE) in Oaxaca, a city 350km (220 miles) south-east of Mexico’s capital, is like entering a world of rebellious teenagers rather than teachers. Graffiti are scrawled on the walls and posters denounce “state terrorism”. The trade union’s radio station, Radio Plantón (Demonstration Radio), rails against President Enrique Peña Nieto’s education reforms, which it blames on the IMF and other capitalist bogeymen.

In the main square nearby, the CNTE’s Oaxaca chapter, known as Section 22, maintains a campsite occupied by teachers not a bit repentant about abandoning their classrooms for weeks on end. Drivers have adopted a pragmatic response to the teachers’ frequent road blocks: they use a GPS app called, appropriately, S-22 to avoid them. The state government is just as anxious to keep out of the way. It is wary of a repeat of a crisis in 2006, when a teachers’ strike turned into a violent rebellion that shut down parts of the city for months.

This is not a local affair, however. The CNTE, which is smaller but far more aggressive than Mexico’s main teachers’ union, the SNTE, holds sway over four of Mexico’s most unruly states, Oaxaca, Guerrero, Michoacán and Chiapas, which contain about 15% of the population. All have large concentrations of indigenous people. Using a mixture of intimidation and political skill, the union is trying to

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knock down one of the pillars of Mr. Peña’s government: a transformation of education that is central to a series of reforms aimed at making Mexico a more competitive economy.

Despite its crude methods, in part it is succeeding. “If they give in to these guys, they are giving in to counter-reform and corruption,” says Claudio X. González, president of Mexicanos Primero, a charity that champions education reform. Last month he sent a letter to the government accusing it of endangering reform—and the rule of law—by bowing to the demands of the CNTE. He says that blows to Mr. Peña’s credibility, such as the disappearance of 43 students in September and scandals over his family’s properties, have weakened his government’s resolve to confront the dissident teachers.

The reform of 2013 is aimed at boosting the quality of education in a country that Mexicanos Primero says gives children an average of 8.8 years of study, compared with 13.3 in the United States. As in much of Latin America, most schools are awful. Graduates of teacher-training colleges have been promised jobs for life, regardless of their performance. According to PISA, a global education study, less than a fifth of Mexican students performed adequately in maths in 2012, compared with more than three-quarters in South Korea. Private schools are little improvement on public ones; the poorest children in Canada do better than the richest in Mexico.

Mr. Peña is getting tough with teachers, who earn, with copious benefits, the equivalent of 513.6 days of salary for 200 days of school, according to Marco Antonio Fernández of the Monterrey Technological Institute’s School of Government. His reform exposes them for the first time to independent evaluation, both at entry level and further up the career ladder. Those who miss three consecutive days of school without good reason can be sacked.

The reform has also centralised payments of salaries at federal level, in an effort to end a ludicrous anomaly by which both central and state governments paid teachers, though neither knew how many there were. The reform is supposed to streamline spending, and use the savings to improve education. Largesse continues nonetheless, and unionised teachers still hold powerful positions in national and

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state education ministries and in Congress. This year’s federal budget increases spending on teachers’ pay by 6.7%

Imperfect as it may be, pollsters say the education reform is far more popular nationwide than others promoted by Mr. Peña, such as bringing competition into the monopolistic energy and telecoms businesses. That is particularly true in the industrialised states in central and northern Mexico, where PISA scores are already well above the national average (see map). They see better education as a way to attract more investment. The moderate SNTE largely supports the reforms, and is implementing them in most states.

In the south, where reform is needed most, resistance is strongest. Teachers there say what they need is electricity, running water and toilets, not evaluations. In Oaxaca and Michoacán, CNTE-affiliated teachers have forbidden inspectors, including those from PISA, to test pupils, let alone themselves. Mohamed Otaqui, the spokesman for Section 22, says the union has successfully blocked the Oaxaca state government from ratifying the constitutional changes. Instead, it wants to enact a local policy rooted in indigenous values, rather than in those of an industrial economy. These include better use of the land, and respect for traditions such as village fiestas.

Despite its extremism, the union has got its way by threatening ruinous blockades if its demands are not met. It has won open support from Oaxaca’s leftist state government. Moisés Robles Cruz, the state’s education secretary, challenges the assumption that Mexico’s industrial north and poorer south can be united under a common education policy. His area, he says, is too underdeveloped. Only partly in jest, he pulls out a one-peso banknote printed in Oaxaca a century ago, when the state was pressing for autonomy during the Mexican revolution. “I may not be in agreement with [the teachers’] methods, but [their] causes are totally legitimate,” he says.

Such statements ought to be a red rag to the federal government. The education minister, Emilio Chuayffet, declares that all children should have the same opportunities and that no state is above the law. But with mid-term elections approaching in June, the interior ministry is handling the crisis, implying that political dealmaking will win out over policy. Last month Oaxaca’s teachers

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occupied the main road in Mexico City to press their claims. Analysts say that they have shrewdly outmanoeuvred the government by forcing it to pay perhaps 5,000 extra school staff, probably including union officials who should not have been on the payroll.

If militant unions can so easily undermine reform by threatening havoc, so may moderate teachers, who still wield huge influence in the states. Vested interests threatened by Mr Peña’s other reforms will also be tempted to counter-attack. Sadly for Oaxaca’s children, that is probably the most important lesson the CNTE will teach this year, unless the government stands up for what it believes in.

Study Question

1. Summarize “Flunking the Test” from The Economist.

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Dissident Teachers in Mexico Strike Over Education OverhaulThe action leaves at least a million children without classes

By JUAN MONTES

June 1, 2015 9:16 p.m. ET

TLAPA, Mexico—Members of a dissident teachers’ group went on indefinite strike in Mexico, vandalizing government offices, torching electoral documents and leaving at least a million children without classes, in an effort to halt an education overhaul and disrupt coming federal midterm elections.

The action Monday by the National Coordinator of Educational Workers—a branch of the national teachers union that is strong in the country’s poorest states—and the possibility of further disruptions ahead of Sunday’s vote pose a growing challenge to the administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto.

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In 2013, the government passed an overhaul of Mexico’s troubled public school system that, among other things, calls for mandatory evaluations of the country’s teachers, due to begin later this year. In 2012 education tests drawn up by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Mexico got the lowest marks in math and reading among its 34 member countries.

On Friday, under pressure from the CNTE, as it is popularly known, Mexico´s government said it would suspend “until further notice” plans to carry out the evaluations. The delay was broadly seen as a humiliating setback for the president, who has tried to cast himself as a reformer trying to modernize Mexico’s economy.

“The suspension of teachers’ evaluation is the hardest blow the reformist credibility of President Peña Nieto has suffered so far,” Héctor Aguilar Camín, a prominent writer, said Monday in a column in the Milenio newspaper.

Mexico’s Interior Ministry didn’t reply to a request to comment.

Many observers suggested the government took the step to ensure a peaceful midterm vote, and would try to return to evaluations after the election. The group, a powerful wing of the country’s official teachers union, appeared to be taking no chances, saying it would press ahead with its demands that the entire overhaul be junked.

Though the CNTE called a nationwide strike, it wasn’t known how many participated in Monday’s actions. In Mexico City, thousands of teachers took to the streets, disrupting traffic and public transport. In Oaxaca state, teachers broke into electoral offices, destroying furniture and burning ballots, state officials said.

In coming days, teachers say they will hold more strikes and will block the Mexico City airport and highways across southern Mexico.

“What the federal government announced Friday is not enough. We want the definitive suspension of evaluations and the repeal of the education reform. And we won’t stop until we get these things,” said Ramos Reyes, the head of the dissident group in southern Guerrero state.

The CNTE, which claims 250,000 members but which independent estimates put at about 100,000, said the mobilizations form part of an effort to boycott Sunday´s

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elections in which Mexicans will renew the 500-member lower house of Congress and elect nine state governors, state-level legislators and almost 900 mayors.

Lorenzo Córdova, president of the National Electoral Institute, said it was too soon to say how extensive or disruptive the threatened boycott may be to the voting. So far, only 17 of the 148,920 polling stations are at risk of not being installed, he said.

The southern states of Guerrero, Oaxaca and Michoacán are the most at risk from the boycott, authorities say.

“Not all of Mexico is Guerrero, and not all of Guerrero is Tlapa or Chilpancingo,” he told reporters at a meeting Monday, referring to several towns where the teachers have threatened to scuttle the vote.

In Tlapa, a poor town high in the mountains of Guerrero and a CNTE stronghold, teacher Bonifacio Iturbide says his main task on Sunday will be to make sure elections aren’t held.

“We will do whatever it takes. We’ll seize the ballot boxes if necessary,” said the 37-year-old elementary school teacher.

The education overhaul creates mandatory teacher testing by an independent government agency. If teachers miss the exams or fail after a third try, they can be fired. It also banned common practices like inheriting a teaching position or buying and selling the posts.

Teachers say the education bill seeks to privatize education and violates their labor rights. “We are building a social movement to defeat Peña Nieto’s reforms. That’s our goal,” said Mr. Reyes, the head of the CNTE in Guerrero.

Many in Mexico worry the overhaul will never be a reality in the impoverished southern states where the CNTE is strongest.

“Mexico can’t afford to not implement the education reform in all of its territory if we want to be able to compete in a global economy,” said Claudio X. González, the head of education advocacy group Mexicanos Primero. “And unfortunately, the government is being weak.”

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In Tlapa, hundreds of CNTE teachers have gathered in recent days to discuss possible actions to boycott the elections on Sunday: shutting polling stations with padlocks early on Sunday, or seizing the trucks that will distribute ballots and electoral material.

Other activist groups are planning to join and demand a thorough investigation into the abduction and suspected killing of 43 college students near the Guerrero state capital of Iguala in September. The federal government believes the students were abducted by local police officers and killed by a local drug gang.

Tension has built up across Tlapa since April. Candidates and electoral officials say they have received anonymous threats. On a recent evening, several hooded men armed with sticks blocked a rally held by the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party.

Several weeks ago, two electoral officials were detained in Tlapa´s main square, according to CNTE members. One of the officials managed to escape, but the other one was jailed at a self-styled CNTE-created “court” for several hours and later freed.

“He had to be re-educated,” said Mr. Iturbide, the CNTE teacher.

—Anthony Harrup contributed to this article.

Study Question

2. Summarize “Dissident Teachers Strike Over Education Overhaul” from The Wall Street Journal.

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Study Question

3. Why don’t the protesters want reform? Are these valid reasons? How would you reform the Mexican education system? Respond with an exceptional argument.

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Teachers strike in France to protest school reformsFRÉDÉRIQUE PRIS, AFP

MAY 19, 2015, 12:47 PM

Paris (AFP) Teachers in France went on strike Tuesday to protest against a proposed reform of secondary education that has become a bitter battleground for one of the country's rising political stars.

Education Minister Najat VallaudBelkacem, 37, has come under fire for the disputed changes, which concern schools for children aged between 11 and 15.

Among the most disputed elements of the reforms is a proposal to reduce the teaching of Latin and Ancient Greek, replacing these languages with a general class on classical culture.

Teachers are also furious at plans to give schools more autonomy in a system that has previously sought to ensure that all children at high school level receive exactly the same education.

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Despite this attempt at egalitarianism, there are wide differences between schools in poorer areas and those in more prosperous parts of the country.

The high school dropout rate among children of manual labourers is 32 percent whereas only five percent of children from white collar families drop out of school prematurely.

And the French education system has slipped down the rankings drawn up by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which says it is one of the least egalitarian in the world.

The reforms aim to even up this balance but critics say it will result in a race to the bottom.

According to the SNES union that organised the industrial action, more than half of high school teachers were on strike whereas the ministry said only 27 percent had walked off the job.

"There is still time... to take up discussions again and to stop what looks like being a serious waste for young people, for our profession," said the SNES.

An 'essential' reform

Tuesday's strike called by unions opposed to the reforms is seen as a first major test for VallaudBelkacem, a rising star in the ruling Socialist party and a minister at only 37.

She has come under huge political pressure over the reforms, notably from opposition leader and former president Nicolas Sarkozy who said she was involved in a "fight to see who was most mediocre" with Justice Minister Christiane Taubira.

Sarkozy was accused in some quarters of xenophobia for attacking these two ministers VallaudBelkacem has Moroccan roots and Taubira is French Guianese.

However, she has received staunch support from President Francois Hollande and Prime Minister Manuel Valls who has vowed to back his close ally to the hilt.

"There are questions, they are legitimate. But there is a reform which must assure success for all... and excellence," Hollande said on a visit to Berlin.

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A combative Valls said the reform was "essential", adding he wanted to pay "special tribute" to the teachers in France. "This reform is also for them, for their work," he stressed.

"I am confident. This reform will be put in place as it was originally drawn up and the legislation will be tabled as soon as possible," Valls added.

VallaudBelkacem herself said: "I want to say clearly to all those who went on strike and all those who did not... that I am listening to you and I am there to ease your concerns."

Nevertheless, in France as in many Western countries, education policy raises huge passions and the debate promises to continue to rage.

Proof that education is a potentially explosive issue in France is that two of the 10 biggest postwar strikes in the country have been over education, in 1984 and 1986.

Sarkozy's rightwing opposition UMP party has called for the reform to be scrapped entirely.

* Copyright © 2015 Business Insider Inc. All rights reserved.

Study Question

Read the article “Teachers strike in France to protest school reforms” from Business Insider. Do you agree with the suggested reforms? Support your assertion with an exceptional argument.

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5 Things You Need To Know About The Future Of MathBelieve it or not, math is changing. Or at least the way we use math in the context of our daily lives is changing. The way you learned math will not prepare your children with the mathematical skills they need in the 21st Century.

Don’t take my word for it. I am not a math professor. I almost failed out of calculus in high school. I do not claim to be an expert. I write about video games, psychology, education, and philosophy. I understand the importance of math, but it is not my area of expertise.

When I am writing about math education and I need a true expert opinion, I reach out to Keith Devlin. He is co-founder and Executive Director of Stanford University’s Human-Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute. He is also a learning game and app developer who founded a company calledBrainQuake (a part of the Co.lab/Zynga.org edtech accelerator). And, of course, he is well known as the “NPR Math Guy.”About a month ago, I interviewed Devlin for my MindShiftKQED series on game-based learning. The enlightening conversation changed the way I think about math education. Unfortunately, I only had space there to share some of that conversation. Here, I offer some of the other gems.

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Jordan Shapiro (left) & Keith Devlin

I have distilled Devlin’s thoughts down to five key points that I think everyone needs to know about the future of Mathematics.

1. Math education is stuck in the 19th CenturyJordan Shapiro: You wrote a book called Mathematics Education For A New Era: Video Games As A Medium For Learning. You and I have talked a lot about video games in the past, so I’ll let that rest for now. What is this “New Era” and why do we need a different kind of mathematics education?Keith Devlin: To most people, mathematics means applying standard techniques to solve well defined problems with unique right answers. They have good reason to think that. Until the end of the 19th Century, that’s exactly what it did mean! But with the rise of the modern science and technology era, the need for mathematics started to change. By and large, most people outside mathematics did not experience the change until the rapid growth of the digital age in the last twenty years. With cheap, ubiquitous computing devices that can do all of the procedural mathematics faster and more accurate than any human, no one who wants – or wants to keep – a good job can now ignore that shift from the old “application of known procedures” to new emphasis on creative problem solving.

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Jordan Shapiro: What does this mean for mathematics education?Keith Devlin: When today’s parents were going through the schools, the main focus in mathematics was on mastery of a collection of standard procedures for solving well-defined problems that have unique right answers. If you did well at that, you were pretty well guaranteed a good job. Learning mathematics had been that way for several thousand years. Math textbooks were essentially recipe books. Now all those math recipes have been coded into devices, some of which we carry round in our pockets. Suddenly, in a single generation, mastery of the procedural math skills that had ruled supreme for three thousand years has become largely irrelevant. Students don’t need to train themselves to do long computations, as was necessary when I was a child. No one calculates that way any more! What they (we) need in today’s world is a deeper understanding of how and why Hindu-Arabic arithmetic works.

2. Yesterday’s math class won’t prepare you for tomorrow’s jobs.Jordan: But we’ve all seen statistics that show STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) skills are in high demand. Certainly a math degree is still good for job placement?Keith: It’s still the case that math gets you jobs, but the skill that is in great demand today, and will continue to grow, is the ability to take a novel problem, possibly not well-defined, and likely not having a single “right” answer, and make progress on it, in some cases (but not all!) “solving” it (whatever that turns out to mean). The problems we need mathematics for today come in a messy, real-world context, and part of making progress is to figure out just what you need from that context.Jordan: Have you seen examples where people with the old skills are struggling in a new economy?Keith: In all four offerings of my mathematical thinking MOOC to date, I have had as students, engineers with years of experience who

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suddenly found themselves out of a job when their employers replaced them with software systems (or sometimes overseas outsource services). Those engineers are now having to retool to learn this other skill of creative problem solving – mathematical thinking.

3. Numbers and variables are NOT the foundation of math.Jordan: Just one question about video games: You’ve said games are the best way to teach math. How does this tie in with “Mathematical thinking”?Keith: The traditional symbols of math were developed to do mathematics on a sheet of paper. Actually, they were originally developed to do it in the sand, on clay tablets, later on parchment, and then paper (and blackboards). But in all cases, it was a static representation of something fundamentally dynamic – namely a form of thinking! Tablet computers and video games provide interactive, dynamic representations, which means you can get closer to the thinking, and break through the Symbol Barrier.Jordan: So you’re not only saying that technology renders basic procedural mathematics skills obsolete, you’re also suggesting that it offers new forms of dynamic representation?Keith: Yes, and a more efficient representation can make a dramatic difference for students. Take a look at the example below from the iOS/Android App Wuzzit Trouble. These are two representations of the very same problem!

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What I and a small number of other math learning game developers are doing, but most are not, is viewing the game as a representation of mathematics that replaces the traditional symbols with one that takes advantages of the many different affordances that video game technology offers, particularly tablet screens.

4. We can cross the Symbol Barrier.Jordan: So, mathematical thinking is the abstract logic that underlies the procedures, right? Does this mean the symbols–numbers as we know them–could change? Keith: No one, least of all me, is saying we should abandon the traditional symbolic representation for mathematics. You need to master that language if you want to go on to a career in science or engineering, and many other careers as well. Most advanced mathematics is inherently symbolic, and I cannot see any current technology changing that. What I do say, based on a lot of hard evidence, is that, because of the Symbol Barrier, we should not make the symbolic representation the entry pathway into mathematics. It

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disenfranchises too many otherwise able people. What video game technologies can do is provide a User Interface to mathematics that much better suited to beginner-level learning. Today, study of the symbolic representation can be postponed until after the student has mastered the basic mathematical thinking in a more efficient way.Jordan: I’m having some trouble grasping what this means in practical terms. Can you give me a real world example? Keith: The same thing happened in computing. Starting with the Macintosh, then Windows, now (to some extent) tablet touch-interfaces, we have made computing accessible to everyone. That does not mean it is no longer useful to learn how to code. But in my day, the only way to use a computer was to begin by learning how to code. Today, you first learn how to use a computer, then you learn to code. That opens up computing (and coding) to far more people.

5. We need to know math’s limitations.Jordan: You once wrote a book called Goodbye Descartes: The End of Logic and the Search for a New Cosmology of the Mind. Of your work, it is certainly among my favorites. Can you briefly explain the argument you make in that book? Why would a mathematician make an argument for the end of logic? And what does Descartes have to do with this?Keith: In today’s world, where our Cartesian-based sciences and technologies play such a huge role in our lives and our societal structures, it is just as important to make people aware of the inherent limitations of mathematics as of its powers. Mathematics is like fire. We need its power to live. But it can also be unbelievably destructive, and must always be treated with immense respect.Just as we have made great progress in the natural sciences and engineering, so too other researchers have made great strides in the sciences of the mind and in the social, psychological, and learning sciences. (Those latter three are, by the way, the true “hard sciences”. Referring to them as “soft sciences” is misleading, unless you understand the word “soft” in the William Burroughs sense of “The Soft Machine”, i.e., us.).

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Jordan: It seems like you’re saying we need more interdisciplinary communication. I often write about how important it is to understand that there are many different kinds of truths, many different ways to make sense of our experience in the world.Keith: When I moved to Stanford in 1987, I did so thinking I would benefit from being in one of the world’s leading technology research centers. And I did. But what changed me far more, was coming up against the world class expertise in the human sciences that Stanford also has. It was after working with (actually, mostly listening to) leading human scientists, and philosophers who consider those issues, that I was forced to reassess the role that mathematics can play in the human sciences.Jordan: It is dangerous to believe that one particular way of seeing the universe can offer all the answers. Keith: In the natural sciences, mathematics is the absolute ruler. If you break the mathematical rules, you are no longer doing physics, or astronomy, or whatever. But in the human sciences, mathematics is just a tool. A useful one to be sure, and getting more useful all the time, but still and all, just a tool. My book Goodbye, Descartes was an attempt to articulate what I saw as the inherent limitations of the mathematical approach (the “Cartesian approach”) in the human sciences.Jordan Shapiro, PhD. is the author of FREEPLAY: A Video Game Guide To Maximum Euphoric Bliss and The Mindshift Guide To Digital Games and Learning.

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Study Questions

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2. What is your reaction to the article? Your response should be a minimum of 300 words in length.

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