against strategies

A few years and -- oh -- maybe 3 or 4 Directors of Pupil Personnel ago,^* I noticed, while sitting in on another parent's CSE meeting, a liberal use of the word "strategies." As in: "We'll teach him some strategies for self-monitoring." Or: "We'll give him some strategies for managing his learning." It was strategies-this and strategies-that, all strategies all the time. Apparently our higher-functioning special needs students were being given strategies they could use to overcome their learning problems and work around their developmental disabilities. Check.

At the time, I took this as just another moderately annoying instance of edu-inanity.

But it's always worse than you think.

Reading Miss Brave, and I plan to read every last word Miss Brave has written and posted to her blog, I realize that "strategies" are yet another means of transferring responsibility from the school to the student, while also working your teachers into an early grave and providing employment for a cadre of Lucy-Calkins and/or Fountas-and-Pinnell-trained literacy specialists. Win-win.

Here is Miss Brave:

I've mentioned before that we're expected to make sure each of our students has three goals for each unit in reading, writing and math. While students are working independently after the mini lesson, we're supposed to meet with two small groups for strategy lessons to help them meet these goals.

And here she is again:

Each student is supposed to have three goals in every subject and be able to articulate those goals. That's five major subjects (reading, writing, math, science and social studies), which is fifteen goals for each student. To me, that sounds like a lot of goals. I mean, hello, I have students who don't even know their own last name, let alone the goal they're working towards in reading. I don't understand why we have to start with three goals. Can't we pilot it with one and see how it goes?

And again:

My reading goal is to read my books over to make sure I understand the story.
My reading goal is to stop and make a prediction about what will happen next and then read on to find out if I am right.
My reading goal is to listen to myself read the story to make sure all the words sound right.

My tentative plan is to print all these goals out on big labels that I can stick right on their book baggies. Of course, all the kids break their book baggies by swinging them around, so I was considering getting them all new, durable book baggies (and by "book baggie" I mean they cram all their books into a flimsy Ziploc bag, so I was going to buy durable Ziploc bags, and between those and the labels I am looking at spending a fortune of my own money, since the copier at school is still broken and I have been using my own paper and ink to print and make copies at home on my own time, thank you very much Department of Education).

Question: How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

Answer: The answer is not 'strategies.'

Students need distributed practice in order to learn and progress, and it is the school's job to give them that practice, not tell them to remember 15 goals and 30 strategies when they are age seven.

Even if a child does manage to hold 3 reading goals in working memory, he's not going to have room for anything else.


^* Recently I figured out that my district has had 5 assistant superintendents for curriculum, instruction, and technology in 6 years. That's a lot.

60 lessons a week

Have I mentioned lately that I am not a fan of differentiated instruction?

I've just this moment discovered Miss Brave, by the way. She's wonderful, but her school is a dystopian futureworld of guided reading, "strategies," goals, literacy coaches, and "APs." And paperwork. And more, more paperwork. Your tax dollars at work.

Lucy Calkins has a lot to answer for.

The good news: at least they're using phonics.

the mathematics in linguistics

In high school I was super-obsessed with linguistics. (I still am -- I just am less likely to burst out inappropriately into linguistic asides in casual conversation.)

In my childhood my father had always treated calculus like this esoteric and super-abstract thing that only erudites could know. It was a uselessly haughty attitude in retrospect; my father was kind of a weird character -- I remember at 7 or 8, I came home with the "we worked with fractions today!" excitement, and he gave me this dismissive, "Psh! With that excitement I thought you had learnt something truly enlightening, like calculus." My father piqued my interest in science, but he was also the type to leave the family when I was 10. My mother, who works in architectural drafting and currently designs ships for a defence contractor, has only the vaguest recollection of a derivative -- her knowledge of calculus is all procedural knowledge, like how to find shear stress or dead load, moment formulas for various geometric shapes, etc. AFAIK no one talks about the elegance of the Mean Value Theorem on the job.

So my father's leaving meant I became the mathy one in my family. Which was bad, cuz when I was 14, I basically failed my secondary two mathematics exam in Singapore with a score of 47%. (OK they also let me take a makeup exam and I passed, but it was none too glamourous.) I had lost most passion for mathematics, until I picked up this book called Fermat's Last Theorem. You mean .... there are active areas of research in mathematics? I was inspired to self-study ... in Singapore everyone has private tutors or something, even the lower middle class, but my single parent household was even below that. Now I can laugh at all those people who spent thousands of dollars a year on private tutoring ... when I spent an amazing amount of $0 using Google. This is why I don't really disagree with idea of an "Investigations" curriculum -- it's just implemented horribly, when there are so many more fascinating and intellectually-stimulating investigations one could use.

Like take linguistics.

It had come to pass that in high school I had become pretty fascinated with calculus and linear algebra. I was taking linear algebra via dual-enrollment, and was trying to wrap my head around things like vector spaces and determinants. "Yeah I get how to do this problem, and I get the fact that theorem X is proven, but I still don't get why it works." I made the mistake of treating it like a regular high school class, because apparently my constant question-asking had annoyed some of my classmates, and the Dean of Students came to me and was basically recommended a remedy of asking less questions.

This was around the same time I was really into historical linguistics and phonetics, and had discovered the real truth behind English "long" and "short" vowels, and suddenly English spelling made so much sense, especially since I was also working out sound changes between French, Latin and Spanish. I felt like a child again ...

But then came my beloved math teachers -- the last ones who I expected to ask, "Why are you studying all this math? You're going into linguistics, right?"

At that time I was totally caught off guard, and could only come up with replies like, "Well uh.... it's kinda interesting," or "It's good to know, if I ever switch fields..." or "There's so much physics in phonetics! Well, kinda...."

Well, I'm glad to report that the suspicions of my math teachers were wrong. Other than the fact that I suddenly became interested in materials science in college, there is so much abstract math in linguistics it's not even funny.




[the above is a CPG mutual-inhibition diagram for a nonlinguistic circuit, but I can't believe that some people -- math teachers of all people -- don't seem to get that in order to study acoustic signal processing, especially in the brain, you need to understand a) how to analyse a periodic function b) the general solution to the differential equation y'' = -ky]

are flyswatters better than the 3-cueing system?

dysteachia

Mary Damer posted a link to this video on the DI list, and it's well worth taking the time to watch -- especially the section starting at 3:42.

The lesson: reading is not naming.

Reading is unspelling.

Once Avid Mathblogger Re-emerges

Vlorbik On Math Ed is, in some sense, back.

a sentence is like a bicycle...

We're on clean-up duty this weekend: huge, ginormous stacks of dog-eared, dusty pdf-file print-outs are going away!

Buried deep in the bedroom pile^* I found my KISS grammar printout, which led me to the ATEG page (that was inevitable) and from thence to Tips for Teaching Grammar. At that point it was just a short hop to Pamela Dykstra on bicycles & appositives.

And then on to this, and best of all this.

Happy New Year!


^*shorter than the under-the-desk pile but taller than the family room coffee-table pile

The Book Knight on Liberal Arts Education