I got 10/12. That put me in the 83rd percentile. But women as a whole were in the 39th percentile. 39!!! Men were 56. What the heck??

Winawer, you are right about being grounded on the issues being more necessary than name recall. Clay’s observation that being well-grounded leads to name recall is probably true for most, though certainly not all, people. I fear that most Americans who can’t do the name recognition part wouldn’t fare much better on an essay about the issues either. All Kinds of Minds has done some interesting work on specific word recognition and/or recall skills showing that they vary widely from individual to individual.

Clay, My ulterior motive for commenting though is to find out how the wiimote in Korean went. My one piece of advice is to get some heat-shrinkable insulation for your wires. I built a few for our school (in English!) and now I’m not sure what to do with them (which I wrote about on my blog, but I’m not trying to generate traffic). My classroom isn’t really all about me or anything I’m “doing” on the board, but the inexpensive nature of the wiimote made me think I needed to revisit my dismissal of interactive whiteboards. I’ll be interested in what you experience. Just building them was fun.
Sarah

Maybe McCain *does* know what he is saying. After all, there *is* a situation in Iran.

I did do surprisingly well (12/12, woot) considering I think the only regular news program I catch is the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. By the way Jon Stewart commented on his show about McCain’s geography gaffe, citing McCain as beating Obama to the punch at a gaffe during Obama’s trip to Iraq.

“McCain: It’s a very hard struggle, particularly given the situation on the Iraq-Pakistan border.

Stewart: The Iraq-Pakistan border, otherwise known as… IRAN.”

Good feedback, and I agree to the criticism of the quiz to a degree, but: since all the names mentioned in the quiz are current power-holders shaping policy on all the big issues, from Iraq to global warming to the economy, on a national level, I want to argue that familiarity with the national policies on most issues should breed familiarity with the policy-makers’ names. They’re embedded in the news about the policies themselves, and should arguably be incidental learning for anyone who stays informed (via the media) about current affairs.

So “memorizing” the names wouldn’t be necessary (I didn’t memorize them), since they’re part of the territory of staying informed of the issues. Know what I mean?

PS. I read your post about the MN professor and the communion wafer “crisis,” and could not believe my eyes. What a country.

Actually, the quiz reminds me of the post that you did the other day on history (which my wife and I had a great time reading - we took the quiz ourselves). Rephrasing the questions of the Pew quiz in light of that post: would you rather that people had a grasp of the flow of history and the historical issues that have shaped our world, or would you rather that they memorize the names of every Pope? (I know that I’m spinning a false dichotomy here, but I still think that if effort is going to be placed in one direction over the other, I would prefer that it go towards the type of understanding you championed in your previous post). Leave the memorization to the history majors, I say.
Winawers last blog post..Out to the boonies!

But what an ironic message: we want kids to be politically aware, but ultimately they “don’t count” (don’t even exist!) for a national survey? If we want youth engagement, maybe we need to ask how many other tacit messages like this are floating around… (OK– he got 11/12 as “fill in the blank” answers while chewing his Cheerios, without even being offered the multiple choice options. I was 11/12– different error– with the hints. Parent life– so proud, so humble ☺.)

I work hard not to discuss religion in my English classroom, but sometimes it comes up (like Jonathan Edwards’ sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” which I no longer teach). I use a powerpoint I borrowed from Dana Huff (at huffenglish.com) about Transcendentalism. She teaches in a Jewish school and omits a letter when writing G-d. My students notice it and can’t understand why people would do that. It’s a small world after all (a small Baptist world that is).

Thanks for at least putting it out there.

PaulV8s last blog post..iPhone Updates: Prologue and Mdot