Not used to being at home and awake at this hour

[omorka]

Well, off to jury duty.

I'm dressing slightly more conservatively than I had planned; I couldn't put a truly hippie-dippy ensemble together that still fit my internalized Southern standards of what is decent to wear in a courtroom. (I want them to think I'm a flaming Socialist leftist weirdo, not a stoner chick who doesn't know how to dress!) But the octagram is prominently displayed, and I am wearing glitter.

Hopefully, I'll be back in the early afternoon, having been deemed unfit to pass judgment on my peers.

If "evaluation" really is at the top of Bloom's Taxonomy (I feel about Bloom the same way memeslayer feels about Gardner), and most of the people who are on juries haven't graduated from college, no wonder our legal system looks the way it does . . .

Comments

[memeslayer.livejournal.com]

This Bloom stuff looks mildly interesting. What's the problem with it?

[omorka.livejournal.com]

I think it makes the same error common in biology. A proper taxonomy is a tree structure, not a straight and unbranching line, and trying to make a hierarchy of a branching and subdividing thing invariably ends in either disastrous oversimplification or equally disastrous repression. Moreover, to build a proper taxonomy, one has to have a set of distinct objects. I know of no research supporting Bloom's rigid separation of cognitive tasks into six distinct bins, and professionally have seen different evangelists of Bloom's take the exact same question and sort it into at least three of those bins. That even those who have taken it upon themselves to convert us all to the method can't get straight whether a particular math problem is Application, Analysis, or Evaluation is not encouraging to me.

Even if one allows for the six categories, I find the idea that they are hierarchical to be . . . unintuitive at best and Considered Harmful at worst. If anything, I would describe Knowledge as the "root" of the tree structure, Comprehension to be its sturdy and indispensable trunk, and the other four "levels" of the strict hierarchy as co-equal branches of the tree. In particular, I am distressed at Synthesis being ranked above Analysis (a closer pair of sister-skills never there were), and at Evaluation - at worst, a mere exercise of prejudice, and at best something that I think actually (and properly) becomes more and more difficult the more educated and wiser one becomes - being placed at the top of the chart.

Past all my intellectual quarrels with the thing, on a practical level the disciples of the Taxonomy tend to use it to justify emphasizing English and social studies, which use the "higher" skills of Synthesis and Evaluation, over mathematics and science, which use the "lower" ones of Analysis and Application. Science gets it even worse than we math folk do, since nothing is ever fully and finally judged to be True in science, and the popularizers make that the sort of be-all, end-all of the highest and most glorious level of the Taxonomy. I might also point out that these evangelists tend to cringe as soon as I state what I teach, and fall all over themselves to point out that not every level of the Taxonomy is appropriate to every subject, which as a teacher of statistics, one of the few branches of mathematics that requires frequent judgment calls and which they should therefore love, I find just short of disgusting.

In short, I see it as a way of feeling better about oneself despite being bad at math. Who cares whether you can Analyze worth crap? You can still Evaluate with the best of them, passing moral judgment on everything in sight! (*Cue Omorka, carrying a halberd . . . *)

[memeslayer.livejournal.com]

I see what you mean. I was taken in by the Knowledge->Comprehension->Application idea, but I think your tree structure works better.