I need to write something
OK, I am falling down on my resolution to post here every other week. Although I have been doing a lot of writing. Just for classes and grant applications. So I want to talk about another topic today that has nothing to do with track coaching. OK, it has little to do with track coaching. It will also be less tightly written and more rambling than I like.
Lately I have been running into so many instances of what I am choosing call "expert syndrome" in which people attack or put down someone or something in order to establish their bona fides as an expert at something. Upon reflection, I realized that this has bothered me for a long time in a couple of different arenas that intersect my professional life.
The first is in programming. I have a general rule that when someone says that a particular operating system or programming language "sucks" or "is terrible" I pretty much want to ignore them. It happens a lot with students. We are a Mac district and every year I have a few student who try to explain why OS X is a terrible operating system. I also have students who look down on anyone who doesn't know how to use Linux. (Or even look down on someone who doesn't know how to do one specific thing in Linux that the student in question does know how to do.) But it happens in the professional world. I have lost count of the number of programmers who have told me that Java is a terrible language for teaching students to be good programmers. Or just a terrible language. They will usually do on to cite features of Java that they don't like that are intentional, reasonable design choices. They very rarely have any insight on how students learn.
This syndrome also intersects my professional life when people talk about education. Because any discussion of any length on the state of education today comes around to fixing teaching. And so many people out there think that they know THE solution to every problem in education. Sometimes it is legislators who just genuinely don't understand how schools work or how students learn. Sometimes it is experts like Marzano who forget the research data doesn't always tell you the whole story, because most of the problems have too many interrelated variables to control for everything.
And let's be clear, I am all for learning a lot about things. I am pretty much addicted to doing that. As a result I have a reasonable understanding about a great many topics. But I try to respect the fact that there are going to be topics in which I am not an expert, and experts may know things I don't know. I also know that people with expertise often try to win arguments with people who have less expertise by simply playing the "I am an expert card" - which is a different facet of what I am talking about here. This happens to me a lot in discussions of economics. Economists often try to mathsplain their way out of arguments. This one really irritates me, because then I generally have to explain to them the consequences of their mathematical assumptions, and we still have same argument as before.
I am not really sure what to do about this, or if it is even really a problem. Because there are plenty of instances (like with my son getting into an online argument with a flat earth believer) in which calm reasoning and evidence is not going to work. In some of those, constructive expertism may well be the way to convince the witnesses to the argument that you have a better point than your opponents. But I guess I could frame this as an appeal to avoid asserting your expertise as a reason to mock or attack someone or something if the other side is arguing in good faith.
Lately I have been running into so many instances of what I am choosing call "expert syndrome" in which people attack or put down someone or something in order to establish their bona fides as an expert at something. Upon reflection, I realized that this has bothered me for a long time in a couple of different arenas that intersect my professional life.
The first is in programming. I have a general rule that when someone says that a particular operating system or programming language "sucks" or "is terrible" I pretty much want to ignore them. It happens a lot with students. We are a Mac district and every year I have a few student who try to explain why OS X is a terrible operating system. I also have students who look down on anyone who doesn't know how to use Linux. (Or even look down on someone who doesn't know how to do one specific thing in Linux that the student in question does know how to do.) But it happens in the professional world. I have lost count of the number of programmers who have told me that Java is a terrible language for teaching students to be good programmers. Or just a terrible language. They will usually do on to cite features of Java that they don't like that are intentional, reasonable design choices. They very rarely have any insight on how students learn.
This syndrome also intersects my professional life when people talk about education. Because any discussion of any length on the state of education today comes around to fixing teaching. And so many people out there think that they know THE solution to every problem in education. Sometimes it is legislators who just genuinely don't understand how schools work or how students learn. Sometimes it is experts like Marzano who forget the research data doesn't always tell you the whole story, because most of the problems have too many interrelated variables to control for everything.
And let's be clear, I am all for learning a lot about things. I am pretty much addicted to doing that. As a result I have a reasonable understanding about a great many topics. But I try to respect the fact that there are going to be topics in which I am not an expert, and experts may know things I don't know. I also know that people with expertise often try to win arguments with people who have less expertise by simply playing the "I am an expert card" - which is a different facet of what I am talking about here. This happens to me a lot in discussions of economics. Economists often try to mathsplain their way out of arguments. This one really irritates me, because then I generally have to explain to them the consequences of their mathematical assumptions, and we still have same argument as before.
I am not really sure what to do about this, or if it is even really a problem. Because there are plenty of instances (like with my son getting into an online argument with a flat earth believer) in which calm reasoning and evidence is not going to work. In some of those, constructive expertism may well be the way to convince the witnesses to the argument that you have a better point than your opponents. But I guess I could frame this as an appeal to avoid asserting your expertise as a reason to mock or attack someone or something if the other side is arguing in good faith.
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