Puff The Magic Dragon

For the occasion of the Aqua Metropolis festival, in Osaka, Japan, the artist Yanobe Kenji turned a 50-foot cruise boat into, well, a cruise boat with a fire-breathing, animatronic dragon on top. Through mid-October, the vessel, christened Lucky Dragon, will be navigating Osaka’s Okawa River and Dotonbori canal; periodically, the operators raise the dragon-head to its full height of 23 feet and put on a fire-breathing show for spectators. (The head also sprays water.)

Conceptually, if not visually, the boat owes something to Godzilla: it is named after the Lucky Dragon No. 5, a Japanese fishing vessel that was exposed to fallout during a nuclear-weapons test conducted by the United States in 1954, in the South Pacific. So the dragon carries anti-war, as well as pro-tourism, messages.

The wisdom of janitors

A new documentary film probes the lives and world views of an often-overlooked group on college campuses: the janitors. “The Philosopher Kings,” reports Inside Higher Ed, focuses on service employees at the University of Florida, Cornish College of the Arts, Cal Tech, Duke, Princeton, and Berkeley. The original goal was to home in on Ivy League colleges, say the film’s producers, but several declined to make their employees available for interviews.

Those institutions may well have been wary of how the issue of class would be portrayed: images of janitors cleaning up after society’s sometimes-spoiled future leaders can make for unpleasant viewing. But while a socioeconomic chasm provides the backdrop to the movie - “Sometimes I’ll talk to people and they won’t even look at me,” says one worker - “The Philosopher Kings” doesn’t dwell on inequity.

Instead, the janitors, chosen in part for their articulateness, get to talk about their pasts (a harrowing tour in Vietnam, in one case), aspirations (a dream of financing clean water for a village in Haiti), and, yes, their philosophies. The film received several standing ovations when it was shown at Cornell a few weeks ago. It arrives on DVD October 2: National Custodial Workers Recognition Day.

The MCAS spirit hits campus

Is the standardized-test-driven, one-size-fits-all educational model making its way from K-12 into college? Yes, and with infuriating results, reports the pseudonymous blogger Clio Bluestocking. And professors, she suggests, aren’t putting up enough of a fight.

The problem, as Clio B. sees it, stems from a burgeoning movement in higher ed to measure “outcomes,” or what young people gain from their time in college. It sounds good in theory: an attempt to come up with a measuring stick for effectiveness that avoids the problems of selection bias and circularity (judging a college’s quality by the SAT scores of entering freshmen, for example).

In practice, however, the on-campus proponents of “outcomes assessment” act like Star Trek’s Borg, in Clio B.’s analogy. They tend to be administrators, not professors - “a group of True Believers who get paid a lot of money NOT to teach” - and they won’t relent until professors bend to their will.

It works like this, the blogger writes: The outcomes-assessment staffers come to the history department and say they want the department to produce an “instrument” to measure students’ mastery of, for example, American history. Much is made of the fact that the creation of the test will be up to the professors themselves (who happen to think they already measure outcomes through essays and exams). But as the negotiations continue, it is clear the Borg will not be satisfied until it sees a single test, given to all students, that will produce very specific, uniform answers. (“What caused the American Revolution?” “The Stamp Act.” Etc.)

“To keep up the lie that ‘we aren’t asking for a standardized or common exam’ they have to get us to decide that a standardized and common exam is the best option,” Clio B. writes.

“We rebel against that,” she says, “{hellip} We see that as not only an infringement on our freedom in the classroom but also the source of our students being untrained and even frightened to think on their own after 12 years of similar standardized testing.”

Alas, the “rebellion” mostly takes the form of grumbling and cynicism. (And kvetching on blogs.) To avoid trouble, professors mostly go along, producing a test they all think is a joke and which they will ignore. But it will keep the Borg happy, at least till next semester.