Birth tourism and base rates

South Orange County social media has been blowing up over a recent report of arrests of proprietors of “birth tourism” businesses, who accepted money from pregnant women, mostly Chinese, in exchange for airplane tickets, lodging, coaching on evading detection, and presumably lamaze classes, in an effort to have their babies become Americans via birthright citizenship. There are plenty of scandalous details in the indictments which seem designed to boil the blood of the still-common OC Republicans, but the rage-sieve that is social media has boiled the situation down to “I KNEW the Asian moms at the Spectrum were suspicious” and “China is playing us for chumps #MAGA”. I thought I would do a bit of simple math to see exactly how likely my neighbors are to be bigots.

My favorite book ever makes two points of relevance for this story: One, that memorable cases are likely to have their prevalences overestimated; and two, that base rates are often ignored when determining the degree of surprise in any given observation. In this case, the valences of the story (foreigners disregarding US immigration law, newcomers refusing to assimilate, Chinese economic exploitation) made it a particularly strong mindworm for OC conservatives, reactivated whenever an Asian woman blocks the aisle at Sprouts with a $2,000 stroller. The neglected base rates arise when every pregnant Asian woman becomes Exhibit A, despite the city having a large resident Asian population, many of whom are pregnant for non-criminal reasons.

Irvine is home to 277,453 people, and 41.2% are of Asian descent. That makes approximately 114,310 Asians. Assuming that the national average of 50.9% female holds true as well, that makes about 58,184 female Asian residents (pace non-binary Asian residents, I am rounding up). Assuming again (probably unreasonably this time) that the age composition of the female Asian population in Irvine is also the same as the US overall, 36.5%, or 21,237, are between the ages of 18 and 44. Using an Internet rando’s back-of-the-envelope calculation, and also assuming that the rates of pregnancy among Irvine residents are the same as the national average, 3.4%, or 722, are pregnant at any given time. Again, out of Irvine’s 277,453 residents, about 722 are pregnant Asian women between 18 and 44. I will guess, not unreasonably, that anti-immigrant conservatives will have some difficulty in distinguishing Chinese and Chinese-American residents from the other Asian ethnic groups that call Irvine home.

The news stories on the recent arrests do not make clear how many of the mothers resided in Irvine. The OC Register says the birth tourism companies has as clients “thousands” of women, and OC Weekly has one LA-based company accused of serving 8,000 over 20 years. An earlier article says the 2015 raid which yielded the evidence for the arrests was of “three dozen” homes, and one wonders what the maximum throughput of clients could have been for that space. For the purposes of this post I will assume 400 clients of these services per year reside in Irvine. This is almost certainly a high estimate, since it comes from dividing Star Baby Care’s 8,000 total clients evenly across the 20 years that they were in business and assuming that they all lived (and continue to live at the same rate even post-raid) in Irvine. Nonetheless, it yields a workable figure of 100 clients in Irvine at any given time after dividing a year by the 3 months that clients apparently stay/stayed before giving birth and returning to China.

So, assuming that 100 Chinese mothers-to-be in Irvine are here after misrepresenting their intentions to customs agents, and 722 Asian mothers-to-be are just minding their own business, you have 87.8% odds of getting it wrong when accusing random Asian women of being a part of this criminal conspiracy. As it turns out, in a city where almost half of the population is Asian, it shouldn’t necessarily arouse suspicion to see pregnant Asian women in public.

ESL Students’ Feared Selves

Part 3 of a 3-part series on possible selves (scroll down for parts 1 and 2).

If I’m being honest, these were the most fun to read, although as I stated before I can’t share any of them with you.

It’s not some kind of sadism that prompts me to say that: The descriptions in students’ responses to this final question were much more affective in content than the first two. Rather than lists of future colleges and jobs, here we had responses more along the lines of “I have no friends and I have a SAD SAD life”. Again, you can’t see them, but you can see what types of complaints were the most common, which should be just as fun. As in my last 2 posts, I combed over each entry looking for mentions of specific subjects. Because emotions were much more commonly mentioned for the feared self than for the other 2 selves, I tried sub-categorizing types of negative affect as well.

Below was the prompt, answered by my 2 multi-skill intermediate classes and 2 advanced academic writing classes over the past 2 semesters.

Imagine the worst version of you in 5 years (the opposite of the first). What happened to your English, and why didn’t you succeed? Give details. What is different in your life because you can’t use English?

ESL Students’ Ought-to Selves

Part 2 of a 3-part series. In case you missed the last one:

As an end-of-semester assignment, I had my summer and fall classes (4 total; 2 intermediate multi-skill and 2 advanced academic writing) write about their ideal, ought-to, and feared selves. Besides being a recent buzzword in ELT, possible selves make an interesting writing assignment for both the teacher, who gets to find out his students’ motivations in a bit more detail, and the students, who get to describe their (hopeful) future lives. Now, in fairness to you, I should point out right at the start that I won’t be excerpting their writing here; I didn’t warn them that I’d be using this assignment for my blog and I am one of those teachers who doesn’t even share pictures with his students’ faces in them without asking each one of them individually. Instead of showing you what they actually wrote, I will be analyzing each of their answers for the prevalences of certain topics and concerns and then doing some basic statistics with these. As it turns out, this takes a lot longer.

My prompt for the ought-to selves section was:

“What can you, now, do every day to bring yourself closer to that future best version of you? What kind of things should you do? How should you ‘study’ or ‘practice’?”

Basically, I’m trying to get at how students think they should be behaving as ESL students – not what their goals are, but what the little ESL angel on their shoulder is telling them to do every day.

ESL Students’ Ideal Selves

Part 1 of a 3-part series. As an end-of-semester assignment, I had my summer and fall classes (4 total; 2 intermediate multi-skill and 2 advanced academic writing) write about their ideal, ought-to, and feared selves. Besides being a recent buzzword in ELT, possible selves make an interesting writing assignment for both the teacher, who gets to find out his students’ motivations in a bit more detail, and the students, who get to describe their (hopeful) future lives. Now, in fairness to you, I should point out right at the start that I won’t be excerpting their writing here; I didn’t warn them that I’d be using this assignment for my blog and I am one of those teachers who doesn’t even share pictures with his students’ faces in them without asking each one of them individually. Instead of showing you what they actually wrote, I will be analyzing each of their answers for the prevalences of certain topics and concerns and then doing some basic statistics with these. As it turns out, this takes a lot longer.

This post will only deal with ideal selves, with ought-to selves and feared selves to come later. First, here is the prompt and example that they saw.

“For this discussion, please answer these questions in different posts:

• Imagine it is 2023, and you have succeeded in English in the best way. What steps did you take to get here? How do you use English now (in 2023)?
• What can you, now, do every day to bring yourself closer to that future best version of you? What kind of things should you do? How should you “study” or “practice”?
• Imagine the worst version of you in 5 years (the opposite of the first). What happened to your English, and why didn’t you succeed? Give details. What is different in your life because you can’t use English?

Last, reply to a classmate in at least 3 sentences.

Example first post:

In 2023, I am a college graduate. I have transferred to UCI and graduated with a major in computer engineering. I used English in all of my classes to do homework, work on group projects, and give presentations. Computer engineering was still hard, but my English helped me a lot. It also helped me to make friends and find a job. Now, I work for Blizzard Software and I design graphics for upcoming games. I use English at work, of course, but I don’t think of it as ‘practice’ anymore. Now, it’s just life.”

I had a TESOL Certificate student

Here’s a short “before I forget”-type post.

An administrator of the TESOL Program from the nearby large, public university reached out to a bunch of the ESL faculty at my college and asked if we’d like to host a TESOL Certificate student for his/her practicum. I volunteered to host one in my intermediate multi-skill course.

(Practicum is not a word we used in my MA program, possibly because almost all of us were already working in ESL/EFL.)

I first met the student in question at a café in town in October, and as it turned out, he is already a professor in another subject and has been teaching for decades, and just wants the TESOL Certificate for something to do after retirement. This shifted my idea of what would happen next from “I beneficently guide an idealistic neophyte teacher” to “I am judged by my pedagogical and academic betters and found wanting”.

During his observations, I managed to forget I was being “observed” and ran my classes more or less normally, even ad-libbing at least a few tasks. I find that I default to gregariousness in the classroom, and just get more ostentatiously relaxed when I know I’m being watched. I heard from the TESOL student after every lesson and apparently he was surprised by some of the things that we did. I was pleased with those lessons as well – if only they were all like those!

After 3 observations, it was his turn to teach, and he prepared 3 of his own lessons on prepositions, conjunctions, and phrasal verbs at my direction. The content of his lessons would fit pretty exactly into the frame we call PPP (present, practice, produce), sometimes with the last P dropped in favor of everyone reviewing answers together from the second P. He gave PowerPoints full of abstract example sentences and demonstrated usage with a bit of “realia”, trinkets brought from home. He handed out worksheets with closed-ended grammar questions and had people work in pairs and then solicited answers.

Needless to say, this was not a modern ELT lesson. It seemed remote, pre-packaged, of little clear relevance and definitely not “student-centered“, although it was delivered with a professional touch. But given everything I’ve said about “playing the teacher role” in the past, I should have been prepared for the students’ reaction: they really liked it. Or rather, the students who don’t generally like my TBLT- or Dogme-ish lessons, the ones I might in a darker moment call ritualists in the cult of failed methods, really liked it. Students who I would have put in the bottom 1/3 of my class responded the most positively. I didn’t hear much from the students I usually get a lot of participation from, but I did see people whose engagement in the class can be described as “tertiary” work quite hard to get their worksheets done and really demonstrate concern that their answers were correct.

I don’t want this to come off as “the TESOL student succeeded despite himself”. He is an experienced teacher who delivered a lesson that understandably didn’t conform to modern ELT expectations. He also improvised when he needed to and established good rapport with the students. The thing I’m reacting to here is just that a lesson that was so different from what I usually plan worked very well with a demographic that my lessons usually succeed less with.

There were other things I noticed about his lessons, most memorably that intentionally striking academic professorspeak like “it can be compared to”, “simultaneously”, or “as a generic term for” from one’s working vocabulary at the podium is a challenge – one that I remember facing at the beginning of my career back in Japan. But my main takeaway as a teacher is that this “playing the teacher role” is even more powerful than I thought. If we take a certain amount of educational ritualism (in the form of embrace of the abstract over the personal, the effete over the practical, the comprehensible over the true, etc.) for granted in certain numbers in each one of our ESL classes, it may really behoove us to spend at least some of every week pedantically explaining grammar at people, for affective reasons if nothing else.

2018 in music (a post for 3 or so people)

This turned out to be a big year for me discovering new music, some of which was actually new, and some of which I had just neglected to check out. I think I bought more albums this year than any year since 2004 or so, and thus for the first time in many years have reflections on music beyond “Yup, rEVOLVEr is still great”.

(First reflection: The Haunted has become a very standard-issue thrash/death band with the loss of Peter Dolving, and although Ola Englund is a fun YouTube presence and very good guitarist, he doesn’t add enough originality to the band to make up for it).

What follows is a list of albums of note that I listened to over the past year.

Guilty. Pleasure?

I like the first 3 Ghost albums. I love the first and third. Unfortunately, the fourth album Prequelle makes the previous albums retroactively worse by telling where the band was really heading with those uncannily hooky songs – a type of cheese that is self-aware in the same kitschy way as a sitcom reboot (rather than reflective on past metal but with the pretense of unironic dedication).

The single below is one of two songs on the album I don’t usually want to skip.

Oldie but goodie

I bought 2 albums (Miasma and Nocturnal) from these guys while I was still in Japan, not coincidentally while I was undergoing a bit of a renaissance in gaming (they sound and name their songs like they spent a lot of time playing Castlevania 3 as youngsters). They still present the auditory equivalent of being in a wind tunnel, and now have a creative, Marty Friedman-like shredder on lead guitar.

Sounds oldie, actually newie

I’m actually very happy that a band is making music like this in 2018. Yes, the singer sounds like Robert Plant reborn (from still being alive), but how is that a complaint?

Also, I am fully on board with the trend of bands trying to recreate the 70s (The Sword, Clutch, pioneers The Darkness), complete with SGs and Plexi amps.

Genre-bender

The song below is not even recognizable as metal until about 2:00, and not as any “extreme” metal until 6:00. It turns out that at 39, this is just the kind of music (loud, technical, well-paced, reminiscent of the 90s in guitar tone) that placates all of my identities. After I had listened to this album for a good 2 weeks straight, I went out* and bought the previous 2, and they are just as full of surprising moments. My new habit of leaving on Banger TV on YouTube while I grade homework paid off, as it was one of their reviews that led me to this band in the first place.

By the way, this is the 2nd album on this list to prominently feature saxophones. Enslaved does it with less winking tweeness than Ghost does, but I can’t hear sax in a metal song without thinking that the band is going out of their way to flash their Pink Floyd fan club membership cards.

*switched over to the iTunes app at a traffic light

Discovered too late

Well, I don’t know exactly what made me check out a band for the first time in 2018 that most metal fans put in the same class of relevance as Metallica, but I’m glad I did. The prog death genre as a whole is pretty new to me, but it’s refreshing to listening to something that I like while having absolutely no understanding of.

For example, none of the opening of the song below makes sense to me, and I’ve been trying to play it myself at least since summer. Why start with that drum solo, why end the first riff (E phrygian, which I understand fine) with C# minor, and why not take that catchy riff in A and build a whole song around it instead of quickly moving on (and why into such a wrist-achingly fast bit)? As I said, I enjoy all of this song, but I have little idea why any of it works.

3-month addiction

Gojira’s last 4 albums (along with the first 3 Ghost albums) were almost all I listened to between January and April. A lot of their riffs are just strings of repetitive 8th notes (or sometimes 16ths or triplet 8ths) in unison on every instrument, but this being metal, that is not a mark against them. In fact, their rhythm playing is so in the pocket that it recalls Dave Mustaine’s playing, but instead of being the focus of the entire song, it sets the stage for what actually sound like songs rather than riffs strung together. You wouldn’t think this type of riffage would qualify as “easy to play, hard to play right” in the same way as most Pantera or Van Halen riffs, but just try looking up covers of Toxic Garbage Island and compare how they sound to Gojira, live or in the studio. Their performances show the difference between the kind of heaviness that weighs you down and the kind that sits around you like a thick wool blanket.

Construct validity vs. a tight ship

I have a fantasy where I’m one of those hardass disciplinarian teachers, the kind whose students march in synchronized rows to the auditorium where I’m given some kind of award that these kinds of teachers always seem to get. While I’m standing at the podium of my real-life classroom daydreaming like this, one of my students turns in a piece of paper with a coffee stain on it after walking into class 40 minutes late, and while imperfect, the assignment shows clear development in language control and engagement. Suddenly, my “runs a tight ship” fantasy collides with my inner applied linguist, which naturally wants to reward development, even as my inner disciplinarian threatens to complain about me to my inner department head.

Being a strict teacher sometimes works against the construct validity of  grades. That is, enforcing one’s lateness, makeup, and assignment format policies drags the crosshairs of one’s grades away from “English ability” (however one defines that) and toward “not annoying the teacher by making them put out small fires all semester” or more charitably “being a responsible person in general”.

This problem comes to vex me when I’m looking at a well-written paper turned in 30 minutes late without a cover sheet or a proper MLA header. Is the difference between A and C supposed to be the ability to follow abstract rules in principle? Where is that in the course outline, or to take a wider perspective, in any definition of linguistic competence?

I honestly can’t imagine a class where this (taking points away for non-language-related violations) doesn’t happen at all – and I can imagine my colleagues’ frowns of consternation that I would even consider loosening late work policies in favor of some persnickety notion of validity we all last heard about in our MA programs – but I’ve noticed a trend in my work recently of lots of points hinging on things like “finding parking before class” or “understanding the difference between submitting in Google Classroom and submitting on Canvas” which I don’t remember being a prominent part of any theory of SLA. After all, I do have more eggs in the basket of “effective pedagogue” than “well-oiled adjunct faculty cog”.

Below is a partial list of things that have been at times worth more points in my classes than any variety of English competence, hidden point-stealers from beyond the realm of language ability:

•  “Please read and follow the directions for this assignment” Actually, “being able to read an assignment” is clearly part of the competence that should be tested in an academic English class – but assignmentese tends to have its own idiom and in my view needs to be taught explicitly as its own topic. Ditto for lines like “work must be accomplished without external assistance beyond what is available to all students in the language lab” in the syllabus.
  
• “Please turn this assignment in on time” There is a clear relationship between accomplishing a specific language-related task within a time limit and linguistic competence. That said, I don’t think that extends to assignments that took all weekend and are being turned in 15 minutes late on Monday morning.
  
• “If you don’t understand the directions, email me instead of waiting for the due date to ask a question in person” There is an unhealthy tendency to run all competences in ESL through the bottleneck of writing on computers, but I don’t really see a way around this particular issue. After a sour experience with a student who abused the ability to contact me, I don’t give students any other ways to reach out.
  
• “Write your name” I do give points for people who forgot to write their names after I ask the class who this mysterious person named “Essay 2” is, but I definitely also give them a hard time about it. Some teachers don’t give points for work that is not gradable on time for any reason, and I certainly empathize. Not writing your name is essentially hijacking a few minutes of class time and precious mental resources of the teacher’s that could be going toward his seldom-read blog.
  
• “Have friends that you can ask for help for days that you were absent” Given that Canvas, while equally available to everyone and therefore “fair”, is nonetheless intimidating to the point of inaccessibility for some low-intermediate ESL students, a lot of assignments’ scores depend instead on having a friend who will collect homework sheets for you, explain them for you, and sometimes turn them in for you. If you don’t use Canvas and don’t have friends like this in class, your competence as reflected in grades will drop.

Parts of this list make me react the same way my colleagues probably would: “You can’t seriously be talking about accepting…” or “Well, SOME teachers may not want their students to be responsible, but in MY classes…” and I understand this. I just want to point out that being responsible isn’t one of the areas of linguistic competence we all learned in grad school.