The best of weekends, the worst of weekends

Spring is making a comeback in Bloomington and Little 5 weekend is upon us, and yes, we know it is only Wednesday. But we have reliable sources informing us that the serious partying started days ago. So as we lucky people in Bloomington gird up for "The World's Greatest College Weekend," our hearts and thoughts go out to our friends at Virginia Tech. Arguably, this will be the world's worst college weekend for the school that suffered such terrible violence and loss this week. As we walked to our car this evening, we said a cheery "Hello" to the IUB Dean of Students, Dick McKaig, who happens to be one of our favorite people on campus. Dean McKaig is a true friend to Indiana University students; we were touched to see that he was wearing a memorial ribbon in the Virginia Tech colors, because in truth he is a friend to all students. The horror at Virginia Tech has brought us stories of heroism and extreme sacrifice from some unexpected quarters. We cannot read the biography of the professor who barricaded the door with his body so his students could escape without weeping at the senseless loss of such a good person.

April is the busiest month

We, Elvis and Elvira, are trying to make it through the final month of the IU academic calendar with our faculties (ha - get it?!) intact. National decision day for next year's class of incoming freshmen is May; this translates into April being National Decision-making Month, which translates into a LOT of work for Elvis and Elvira.

There has been an awful lot going on around here:

• Student political leaders have, with the blessing and support of the administration and the city, put in a bid for the campus to host a 2008 Presidential Debate.
• The faculty have been vocal in their opposition to a statewide proposal to establish a one-man-one-woman criterion for legally recognized unions
• Two students majoring in the College were chosen as Goldwater Scholars
• The KKK (or someone claiming to have organized a group under this offensive name) says it is going to hold a march in Bloomington.

And so forth. In short - a busy end to a busy year, and we are keeping our heads down until after commencement.

Bring it on

We admire IU's president-designate Michael McRobbie for a lot of reasons. This is one of them. You want a do-something president who is not afraid of having his work reviewed, publically, year in and year out? Go ahead - make his day. He seems to welcome the scrutiny and thrive on the challenge.

Here's our bet: President McRobbie's annual reviews will be stellar and other universities will begin to demand the same sort of clauses as they hire new presidents. Business as unusual, indeed.

Sad end to Wade Steffey search

As his body is discovered on the Purdue campus. Our sympathy to Wade's family and friends.

No daffodils yet

But spring is definitely heading our way. Bloomington is enjoying mild weather; yesterday we had tons of sun and temperatures above 60. It's spring break this week, so town really started quieting down on Thursday. We were going to post a picture of an empty Bloomington street, but while we were googling around for that, we came up with something much more interesting. See you in a week!

Indiana b-ball is back!

At least it seems so tonight. Indiana KILLED Penn State in the last home game of the season. Assembly Hall was packed to the rafters. The current and soon-to-be IU presidents were both there, sitting on either side of the mayor of Bloomington. Our resident rock star, John Mellencamp, and his wife, Elaine, a former supermodel, were there with their kids.

There was a minor flap in town recently, with people wondering why Coach Sampson always wears blue button-down shirts to the games (side note: has Coach Sampson lost 30 or so pounds since starting at IU?). The hottest fashion item these days is the t-shirt pictured to the right. You can wear it to show your support for the coach.

Hand it to the trustees

The word is out that the IU Board of Trustees has selected interim IUB Provost Michael McRobbie as the next president of IU. This is good news for all of us - Provost McRobbie knows the institution and is a strong leader - exactly what we need.

"A" for effort turns out to be a good idea

A friend sent us this the other day:

"This article has rocked my world because the findings it outlines -- for example, that while praising children is good, the key is to focus on praising EFFORT, not intelligence -- have hugely powerful implications for educating children and are completely contrary to conventional wisdom.

Teachers at the Life Sciences Secondary School in East Harlem, because have seen Dweck’s theories applied to their junior-high students. Last week, Dweck and her protégée, Lisa Blackwell, published a report in the academic journal Child Development about the effect of a semester-long intervention conducted to improve students’ math scores.

Life Sciences is a health-science magnet school with high aspirations but 700 students whose main attributes are being predominantly minority and low achieving. Blackwell split her kids into two groups for an eight-session workshop. The control group was taught study skills, and the others got study skills and a special module on how intelligence is not innate. These students took turns reading aloud an essay on how the brain grows new neurons when challenged. They saw slides of the brain and acted out skits.

“Even as I was teaching these ideas,” Blackwell noted, “I would hear the students joking, calling one another ‘dummy’ or ‘stupid.’ ” After the module was concluded, Blackwell tracked her students’ grades to see if it had any effect.

It didn’t take long. The teachers—who hadn’t known which students had been assigned to which workshop—could pick out the students who had been taught that intelligence can be developed. They improved their study habits and grades. In a single semester, Blackwell reversed the students’ longtime trend of decreasing math grades.

The only difference between the control group and the test group were two lessons, a total of 50 minutes spent teaching not math but a single idea: that the brain is a muscle. Giving it a harder workout makes you smarter. That alone improved their math scores.

Also, be sure to read this part about the self-esteem craze. I've always thought that self-esteem should not be an INPUT, but rather an OUTPUT that comes from genuine achievement, so it's good to see the research backs this up:

Since the 1969 publication of The Psychology of Self-Esteem, in which Nathaniel Branden opined that self-esteem was the single most important facet of a person, the belief that one must do whatever he can to achieve positive self-esteem has become a movement with broad societal effects. Anything potentially damaging to kids’ self-esteem was axed. Competitions were frowned upon. Soccer coaches stopped counting goals and handed out trophies to everyone. Teachers threw out their red pencils. Criticism was replaced with ubiquitous, even undeserved, praise. Dweck and Blackwell’s work is part of a larger academic challenge to one of the self-esteem movement’s key tenets: that praise, self-esteem, and performance rise and fall together. From 1970 to 2000, there were over 15,000 scholarly articles written on self-esteem and its relationship to everything—from sex to career advancement. But results were often contradictory or inconclusive. So in 2003 the Association for Psychological Science asked Dr. Roy Baumeister, then a leading proponent of self-esteem, to review this literature. His team concluded that self-esteem was polluted with flawed science. Only 200 of those 15,000 studies met their rigorous standards.

After reviewing those 200 studies, Baumeister concluded that having high self-esteem didn’t improve grades or career achievement. It didn’t even reduce alcohol usage. And it especially did not lower violence of any sort. (Highly aggressive,
violent people happen to think very highly of themselves, debunking the theory that people are aggressive to make up for low self-esteem.) At the time, Baumeister was quoted as saying that his findings were “the biggest disappointment of my career.”

Now he’s on Dweck’s side of the argument, and his work is going in a similar direction: He will soon publish an article showing that for college students on the verge of failing in class, esteem-building praise causes their grades to sink further. Baumeister has come to believe the continued appeal of self-esteem is largely tied to parents’ pride in their children’s achievements: It’s so strong that “when they praise their kids, it’s not that far from praising themselves.”

By and large, the literature on praise shows that it can be effective—a positive, motivating force. In one study, University of Notre Dame researchers tested praise’s efficacy on a losing college hockey team. The experiment worked: The team got into the playoffs. But all praise is not equal—and, as Dweck demonstrated, the effects of praise can vary significantly depending on the praise given. To be effective, researchers have found, praise needs to be specific. (The hockey players were specifically complimented on the number of times they checked an opponent.)

Sincerity of praise is also crucial. Just as we can sniff out the true meaning of a backhanded compliment or a disingenuous apology, children, too, scrutinize praise for hidden agendas. Only young children—under the age of 7—take praise at face value: Older children are just as suspicious of it as adults.

Psychologist Wulf-Uwe Meyer, a pioneer in the field, conducted a series of studies where children watched other students receive praise. According to Meyer’s findings, by the age of 12, children believe that earning praise from a teacher is not a sign you did well—it’s actually a sign you lack ability and the teacher thinks you need extra encouragement. And teens, Meyer found, discounted praise to such an extent that they believed it’s a teacher’s criticism—not praise at all—that really conveys a positive belief in a student’s aptitude.

In the opinion of cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham, a teacher who praises a child may be unwittingly sending the message that the student reached the limit of his innate ability, while a teacher who criticizes a pupil conveys the message that he can improve his performance even further.

Weather 1; IU 0

Wow. IU is closed for the morning. Over the past 36 hours we've had rain, then sleet, followed by ice and then snow. Good call to close campus!

Ice, ice, baby

It takes an awful lot to close down IU, and today's ice storm didn't quite do it. Local schools and so forth are closed, the roads are not so much roads as wide sheets of ice, and power lines around town are snapping (or are being brought down by falling tree limbs), so right now 6,000 people are without power.

Our friends to the north have it worse, however. West Lafayette is under a snow emergency, and Purdue actually shut down for 24 hours. The IU-Purdue game, set for tomorrow night, might be postponed.

Time to stay indoors, put your feet up, and have some hot soup!

Who are they gonna call?

The IU presidential search committee has done its work and has turned over its recommendations to the Trustees. We have our guesses as to who will make the short list... and we certainly hope to see at least one internal candidate on the list in particular. So here are our questions for you: How important is the IU president to the institution? To the students? To the state? To you?

Why we love IU students

They take their responsibility to serve society very seriously. And they keep in touch.

Wade Steffey is missing

Wade, 19, is a Purdue student and a native of Bloomington. He was last seen in West Lafayette on January 13. Please help spread the word!

Who's yer Hoosier?

Take a number and get in line. Applications to IU are wa-a-a-a-a-a-ay up this year.

New Year, new semester

Same old issues dogging the campus. The trustees are interviewing candidates to replace IU President Herbert. Sorority rush is over, and by the way we think sororities are a great influence on campus and a wonderful opportunity for young women. The warm weather that blew in with El Nino seems to be over and we in Bloomington are feeling Mother Nature's full wintry blast. But here's good news:
warm fuzzy boots have replaced flip flops as the fashion statement of choice this year, so students don't look like they are suffering nearly as much as in previous years.

Caveat borrower

We have three rules for our children, should they decide to take a year or two off from their studies:

1. Don't get arrested.
2. Don't procreate.
3. Don't get into debt.

I.E. don't let yourself go too far down a path from which there is no retreat, and for which you will be responsible for the rest of your lives.

All well and good, and the rules could just as well apply to students in college as well, we think. Which explains why we are not particularly happy about the news that the College Board is in the business of private loans for college students. Crippling debt is one of the most intractable problems that bedevils those of us who really care about students; private loans typically have higher interest rates and less forgiving payoff schedules than Federal loans. The College Board does not belong in this business.

It's one heckuva town

Bloomington, that is. And now we've got our own magazine to celebrate it.

Worth a gamble?

Props to Governor Daniels for trying to come up with ways to support higher education in the state of Indiana. However, we are reminded that our sister calls state lotteries "a tax on the stupid." Ironic then, we suppose, that the monies generated would be used to support the smart. What do you think? Has the governor gone too far with privatization? Wasn't the money supposed to go to education anyway? Shoudl the state be in the business of promoting a potentially devastating, addictive activity like gambling? If not, have you got a better idea for funding higher education?

Silent nights...

Shhhhh... it is finals week for IU students, and the place is really starting to quiet down. Traffic is thinning out, and it is easier to park downtown. Next week, the students will mostly be gone except those few who live too far from home to travel for the holidays, especially students from abroad who have enough trouble getting a visa to attend IU in the first place. We're going to feed some of them at least one holiday dinner; on Monday night at the Herman B Wells Library, we fed 1,200 of them a free and healthy snack, and wished them best of luck on their exams.

Blue, blue, their world is blue

Our kids call the winter solstice holiday "Christma-Hanu-Kwanzaa," declining to differentiate between the annual getting of the presents. But apparently lots of people - especially male people - can't see any difference either. Interesting!