"vacation" over

Ed spent 2 hours helping with homework last night.

Easter Sunday. Two hours.

He had to spend two hours helping with homework because once again C's ELA assignment was over his head.

He was to do a "quote analysis," but he doesn't have the necessary skills to do a quote analysis on his own.

For one thing, he has no idea how to select an appropriate quotation to analyze. This is a highly sophisticated skill [see below].

Nor does he understand what his reader does and does not know; he doesn't know what he should explain and what he can assume. He doesn't know that he should be thinking about these things, either.

He simply has no idea how to write expository prose -- and, of course, he's spent practically no time reading expository prose. He spent 5 years in K-5 writing personal narratives (an approach to writing instruction that now appears to be installed as permanent practice K-5 here in Irvingtonland). And that's about it.

So his idea of analyzing a quotation from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime was to inform the reader that the boy in the story reminds him of Andrew.

Then, after that, he wanted to talk about the (autistic) character's feelings.

Of course, that will probably turn out to be what he was supposed to do, and Ed will have racked up another B- in middle school. He's probably got it coming. Christopher opened his analysis with a sentence that went something like, "The quotation tells about the character," and Ed made him get rid of it. C protested, saying he's supposed to start his paragraph with an introductory sentence; Ed said C.'s introductory sentence wasn't a very good introductory sentence.

I can see where that's headed.

Ed is sooooo annoyed.

This is a person who has spent his entire career teaching and refining his teaching. In particular he has spent years of his life figuring out what a good assignment is and is not.

A good assignment, according to Ed, is first and foremost an assignment a student can actually do.

Of course, you don't have to be a college professor to figure that one out.

A good assignment, he says -- and you do need to be on top of your game to figure this one out -- does not simply send a student off into the night to "write a paper." Or, in C's case, to perform a "quote analysis."

Undergraduate students, even very bright, accomplished students, aren't academically ready to choose their own topics; nor are they adept at shaping a topic once they've chosen it.

Just to put in my own two cents: finding and shaping a book topic is HELL. I've been a professional writer for years, and it still takes me months to home in on a topic. Finding and shaping a topic is never going to be easy for me.

So why would you send 12 year olds off to find their own quotes to analyze?

Ed says the teacher needs to have all the kids read the same book -- or choose one from a small selection of books. Then she needs to select the quotes herself. Here, too, she could offer choice; she could choose a handful of telling lines from the handful of novels she's provided. If the object is to give kids choice so as to allow them to activate prior knowledge and whatnot, she can do this by providing limited choice.

Ed always gives his students suggested topics. He is a professor European history at NYU; his students are smart and reasonably-to-very-well prepared to do college work. Also, none of them is 12.

Nevertheless, Ed does not expect them to choose their own topics.

Last year, after listening to me talking about formative assessment, he decided to give his students explicit instruction in writing history papers.

He told his students how long their papers should be and how many subtopics would be too many. He wrote model introductory paragraphs; he looked over the students' introductory paragraphs if they wanted him to and told them how to revise.

In one semester his students went from grades of C and B- to grades of B+ to A.

None of this professional expertise is of the slightest interest to our district. Ed is a parent, and the views of parents are foolish, old-fashioned, and plain wrong by definition. I believe I mentioned that one of our administrators recently said to him, after Ed pointed out that he had been a "disciplinary specialist" for 25 years, "Did you ever think that might be your problem?"

logic alert: Well, suppose that is his problem. So what? Everyone else around here has the same problem. Everyone wants his kids to go to college; Ed is a college professor. What Ed has to say about what college professors are looking for in a college paper ought to, at a minimum, arouse some curiosity.

You'd think.


Twiki fiasco

Some of you probably remember that I wrote up a detailed post about all this last year; then Twiki lost it. So I'm going to interview Ed soon and rewrite it.

I have to get to this, because it's obvious the middle school is fixing to implement a writing workshop model next year. I'm going to campaign for a "prep school model" or maybe a "writing in the disciplines" model, in lieu of or in addition to the writing workshop model so dear to our administrators' hearts.

(Naturally we'll be expected to cough up more money to fund the model; there's a second teaching-learning facilitator on the budget. We hired our first last year; the super said an evaluation would be performed of the first one, but that seems not to have happened. Instead we are receiving glowing backpack letters about our fourth and fifth-graders workshopping their writing under the watchful eye of teaching-learning facilitator number one.)

Memoirs, ahoy!