starting at the top

I'm going to start logging the number of hours Ed spends teaching C. to write.

Christopher has now finished his 3-page paper for social studies.

Ed's time on task: 4 hours

I couldn't possibly count the hours I've put into teaching math; nor could I count the lost income to our household. Not that I'm a MULTIMILLIONAIRE NONFICTION WRITER, but still: at this point my income would be quite healthy if I weren't dividing my energies between my day job as an author and my sideline as a middle school math teacher.

Make that: my day job as an author, my sideline as a middle school math teacher, and my other sideline as a math student attempting to learn enough math fast enough to serve as a middle school math teacher.

So back to English language arts.

This is an interesting situation because C's ELA teacher is very good, as is his social studies teacher. For the first time we're seeing clearly the contribution of the school's curriculum and pedagogy to our woes.

Ed has now looked at the paper assignment closely and, as C's ELA teacher had promised, there is lots of "scaffolding." Explicit instructions, steps, checklists, etc.

The problem is that the school seems to have only a vague notion of where their students' skills were going into the assignment.

As I've mentioned, Christopher, as it turns out, cannot write a coherent paragraph summarizing a text.

Being able to write a coherent paragraph summarizing a text is a foundational skill; you have to have it in order to write a research paper.

So Ed had to teach him this skill (begin teaching him this skill) while overseeing C's efforts to write a 3-page research paper.

Hence: 4 hours time-on-task for Ed.

Rule number 1: first things first.



open-ended assignments

The other problem is that the kids choose their own topics.

Christopher, being a boy, chose the Gettysburg Battle. I say "being a boy" because boys like battles. (To anyone who is inclined to argue the point I will just take this opportunity to point out that Ed, who is a super-liberal, likes battles. I rest my case.)

I don't know what most of the girls chose to write about, but the two whose moms I know told me their daughters were writing about a Civil War era person.

So:

• writing about a battle
• writing about a person

Which one is harder?

Writing about a battle is harder. Much, much harder. There is simply no comparison.

When you write about a battle — not to mention a 3-day battle — you're juggling time, you're juggling military strategy, you're juggling historical context, and you're juggling more than one actor. The organizational demands are immense, and are far beyond the capacity of a 7th grader who hasn't had a great deal of direct, explicit instruction in how to integrate this much material. Not to mention a great deal of deliberate practice to boot.

Writing about a person can be complex, but it doesn't have to be. Ed (and other historians who've thought about it) has long said that the first history kids should read is biography; that's probably the first writing they should do, too. Most of us probably have a "biography template" floating around in our collective unconscious; a brainy 7th grader can probably access the template without a tremendous amount of explicit instruction.

Rule number 2: open-ended assignments are poor pedagogy.



wicked environments/virtuous environments

In his book Educating Intuition, Robin Hogarth argues that when it comes to intuition there are wicked environments & virtuous environments.

A wicked environment is one in which people don't get much feedback as to whether their predictions and decisions were right.

A virtuous environment is the opposite. Weather forecasters live in highly virtuous environments, because either it rains or it doesn't. It's reasonably hard to game the system, a la Philip Tetlock's foreign policy experts.

I think high-end school districts like Irvington are wicked environments. In these districts teachers simply don't get proper feedback on the results of their teaching.

Here's the way I think it works:

• skewed bell curve: the town is filled with self-selected, high-SES, highly educated parents who've done well in their fields. So: the kids all seem bright - and are bright.
  

• parents were good students themselves in their day; often enough they're quick studies who are capable of doing enormous amounts of preteaching and reteaching at home. Hence: "help with homework" has mushroomed into a shadow school the district refuses to acknowledge.
  

• parents have the resources to hire tutors at $80 - $100/hour. Irvington district teachers are first in line for the jobs; school makes the referrals. The administration tried a couple of years ago to end this practice, but failed. (Still don't know the back story; must find out.)
  

• triumph of the bell curve: although Irvington is a skewed poplution, we have a bell curve like everyone else. Hence: the winners in the system are either the kids with parents best able to "help with homework" and/or the "naturals," the kids who pick things up in one or two exposures. Everyone else looks less accomplished by comparison. So: Honors courses for the elite, the American track for everyone else.

This explains Christopher and "accelerated" math.

The accelerated math course is not hard. It's easy, or it should be. It's all procedural; two years into the sequence I can still count the number of word problems assigned on my fingers. (If you added in the number of word problems appearing for the first time ever on tests I might have to move to toes, but not necessarily.)

Christopher can easily manage this material.

And yet without me he would have been out of the course mid-year 6th grade. He would have been out of the course because a) he's not a natural and b) other kids have superb tutors and/or math teachers for parents.

By dint of major obsession and help from the ktm-1 & 2 writers, I managed to vault him into category b), so he stayed put.

in a nuthsell: The math department has created a simple course that is too difficult for all but the mathematically gifted to manage comfortably on their own.^*

The ELA situation is different. The ELA curriculum has its problems, most notably the fact that they assign novels far below the reading comprehension level of many of the kids.

However, the writing assignment the kids have just done is serious and demanding.

The problem is that the kids aren't ready for it.

And yet many of them show up in class having pulled it off.

Why is that?

The teachers don't know, and the administration doesn't want to know.



high school

Looking ahead to high school, I'm shaking in my boots.

Christopher will do well in the verbal subjects. Assuming it's possible to be a natural in reading and writing-based disciplines (I think giftedness in reading and writing is probably different from giftedness in math & science), he's a natural. And, of course, Ed and I have years of experience in writing, although neither of us knows the first thing about literary analysis, so that could be a problem.

(Have I mentioned I'm trying to get through How Does a Poem Mean? in my spare time?)

Problem is, I'm not going to be able to reteach chemistry and physics. At this point I couldn't reteach geometry or algebra 2, either, though I'm still hoping to get up to speed in those subjects.

As for calculus — what are the odds I'm going to learn calculus well enough to serve as Calculus Reteacher here at home come senior year?


So.... now we're hearing about tutors in the Honors courses at the high school.

If I thought we could just hire a tutor for chem and physics (and calculus) and all would be well, I'd relax.

OK, I wouldn't relax. Somebody once told me the great Djuna Barnes line, "You would be marvelous company slightly stunned," and iirc, that person was talking about me at the time.

So I wouldn't relax, but I would feel some confidence.

We've never actually hired a tutor, and I'm not going to be hiring Irvington teachers as tutors. If I find myself needing to hire an Irvington teacher as a tutor, the district is going to be paying the bill.

The fact is, I have no interest in hiring a tutor. Judging by my friends' experience, tutoring doesn't work particularly well.

Independent study works.

Not tutoring.


hmm....

I will mull.



hedgehogs and foxes
KTM guest shows how to do it

Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It by Philip E. Tetlock
(chapter one)


^{* I say "comfortably" because I've discovered two highly motivated girls who've managed to pull through with no help from parents or tutors. I imagine there are others. These kids sometimes spend hours on their homework. So far I haven't met a boy this age who will do the same thing, though some must exist. What I see in the boys, time and again, is that when the work is too much for them they shut down.}