the reluctant Machiavellian teacher

http://www.disciplinehelp.com/teacher/

117 behaviours, plus some pretty interesting analyses (registration required to read all of them but is free), and how to remedy them, and it seems pretty useful for newly-recruited TFA teachers shoved into a classroom and the like but have to deal with a few problem students who ruin it for everyone else eager to learn. The site breaks down each behaviour by "causes" or "needs" and suggests effective ways of remedy, and mistakes to avoid. In short, it suggests ways for a teacher to quickly gain control of a problematic situation, but in a subtle manner, without being unprofessional.

Teachers (or new talented ones at least) didn't join to be a Machiavellian, but perhaps for new teachers in some low-income districts it would be a necessary evil in order to be able to do the sort of thing they joined the corps for, infusing their students with passion and all of that. And many of the tips are rather insightful -- there are apparently promising ways to even make any troublemaker a potentially really productive student.

(-- and of course, I'm still a hopeful undergrad TFA applicant)

wrong turn

from the Instructor's Notes to The Everyday Writer by Andrea Lunsford, Alyssa O'Brien, and Lisa Dresdner:

In his essay “Structure and Form in Non-Narrative Prose,” Richard Larson explains what he sees as the three categories of paragraph theory: paragraphs (1) as expanded sentences, governed by comparable syntactical forces; (2) as self-contained units of writing with their own unique principles; and (3) as parts of the overall discourse, informed by the strategies a writer chooses for the overall piece. 

Reading this passage, my reaction is: Interesting!

And: Help is on its way.

Any one of these theories of the paragraph sounds as if it might be very useful to me in teaching college freshmen how to write a 5-paragraph English paper.

Unfortunately, Larson is not findable on Google, and there's no more to be learned from Lunsford, who buries Larson and his ilk in her next paragraph:

Today, partially as a result of the poststructuralist and feminist critique, scholars are challenging conventional paragraph norms. In Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, V. N. Volosinov notes that “to say that a paragraph is supposed to consist of a complete thought amounts to absolutely nothing.” Beginning with this provocative insight, Kay Halasek’s book A Pedagogy of Possibility [the Amazon results, not the book] shows the ways in which composition textbooks have traditionally taught the paragraph in strictly traditional ways, as unified, coherent, and tightly linear. But Halasek works to redefine the paragraph as dialogic, as a negotiation among writer, audience, subject, and other textual elements that surround it. Most important, Halasek insists, is for instructors of writing to understand that the process of producing “unified,” “cohesive” paragraphs calls for ignoring, erasing, or otherwise smoothing out a diversity of discourses and voices. Thus teaching students to be aware of this process not only illuminates a great deal about how “good” paragraphs get constructed but also introduces them to a philosophy of language that is not based on current traditional positivism or objectivism.

Even if I agreed with the sentiments expressed in this paragraph, which I don't, the words "to say that a paragraph is supposed to consist of a complete thought amounts to absolutely nothing" tells me absolutely nothing about what to do in class next Tuesday.

Then there's this:

Today theorists are questioning the ideologies surrounding practices of quotation. An early critique of such practices appears in the work of Bakhtin and Volosinov, who question the ways in which quotation perpetuates a view of language as the property of a radically unique individual rather than as a set of socially constructed systems.

and this:

Volosinov, Valentin N. “Exposition of the Problem of Reported Speech.” Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1973. Here Volosinov mounts a powerful critique of quotation practices, revealing the ways they are inevitably embedded in ideology.

The Everyday Writer costs $57.99 on Amazon.

headlines you don't want to see

Bridge deemed safe despite low rating
Rivertowns Enterprise Volume 36, Number 32 October 28, 2011

Ed was contemplating this front-page headline over breakfast the other morning.

He says what is means is the bridge is not safe, but they're hoping it doesn't collapse during the daytime.

Glen on grammar teaching in the schools

Responding to the suggestion that native speakers should have no trouble with the grammar section on the SAT, Glen writes:

[T]here are native speakers and there are native speakers. My second grade son lost a point on an English assignment today for writing, "Anna gave my sister and me the book." The teacher crossed out "me" and replaced it with "I," explaining that the proper expression was, "my sister and I."

My son complained to me that, in his opinion, "gave me" was correct, not "gave I," so "gave my sister and me" should have been right. I congratulated him for his correct analysis, but told him not to mention it to his teacher, because nothing good would come of it.

She's a middle class, educated, native English speaker yet she, like most of us, could have benefited from some explicit grammar training. Her students would have benefited, too.

And, later, responding to the possibility that "prescriptivist" grammar instruction is responsible for sentences like the teacher's Anna sentence above:

Explicit, prescriptive grammar training doesn't cause bad grammar. Bad grammar by overcorrection is caused by untrained attempts to sound trained. While there may, of course, be limited examples of "a little learning is a dangerous thing" in grammar, the cure is mo' learnin', not no learnin'.

I'm with Glen. I don't see how we can blame prescriptive grammar classes for constructions like "President Obama and myself are concerned..." (which I'm pretty sure I saw Arne Duncan use in reference to public education). Public schools stopped teaching grammar "in isolation" decades ago, not too long after the 1963 Braddock report:

In view of the widespread agreement of research studies based upon many types of students and teachers, the conclusion can be stated in strong and unqualified terms: the teaching of formal grammar has a negligible or, because it usually displaces some instruction and practice in actual composition, even a harmful effect on the improvement of writing (p. 37).
Braddock, R., Lloyd-Jones, R., & Schoer, L. (1963). Research in written composition. Urbana, Il: National Council of Teachers of English.

The Braddock report was followed in 1986 by the Hillocks report:

None of the studies reviewed for the present report provides any support for teaching grammar as a means of improving composition skills. If schools insist upon teaching the identification of parts of speech, the parsing or diagraming of sentences, or other concepts of traditional grammar (as many still do), they cannot defend it as a means of improving the quality of writing" (Hillocks, 1986).

Although Hillocks and Smith claim that by as late as 1986 "many" schools were still teaching the parsing or diagraming of sentences, that is certainly not my experience, nor is it the experience of anyone else I know. Parts of speech, yes; parts of sentences, no. And as far as I'm concerned, the grammar of writing is the grammar of the sentence, full stop. If all you're teaching is noun, pronoun, adjective, and adverb, you're not teaching grammar, prescriptively or otherwise.

The Braddock and Hillocks passages are quoted liberally by education school professors and college composition instructors alike. There is a near-universal belief that teaching grammar "in isolation" is useless or bad or both, and today's K-12 teachers would have themselves been taught by teachers who held this view.

Related: The other night I asked a professor of English at one of the Ivies whether he knows grammar. I was curious.

He doesn't. He said that at some point -- the 1980s, possibly -- English departments had required graduate students to take courses in linguistics. Then that came to an end, and today English professors know literature but they don't know grammar or linguistics.

not dead yet: the case of whom

Ed, C., and I all three just got this question wrong:

Is Charles the student who / whom you know wants to go to the University of Chicago?

(Well, C. and I got it wrong. Ed is resisting the verdict.)

On the other hand, my friend Robyne, an attorney, got it right at once. (Got to, got to, got to take a legal writing course. pdf file)

Related: how to find the verb(s) in a sentence the way a linguist might find the verb(s) in a sentence:^*

1. Change the tense of the sentence from present to past, or from past to present.
2. The word or words that change form (spelling) are the verb or verbs.

Traditional grammar books call the verb-like critters that don't have to change form when you move from present to past or past to present verbals, not verbs.

PRESENT TENSE: Hiding in the bushes, the cat watches its prey.
PRESENT TENSE: Hidden in the bushes, the catch watches its prey.
PAST TENSE: Hiding in the bushes, the cat watched its prey.
PAST TENSE: Hidden in the bushes, the cat watched its prey.

Watch and watches are the verbs; hiding and hidden are the verbals.

fyi: Linguists don't seem to use the term verbals, but I don't know what term they do use, if any.

and see:

THE COMING DEATH OF WHOM: PHOTO EVIDENCE

Meanwhile Mark Liberman says whom has been dead for a century.

From which I conclude that the word dead means something different to a linguist than it does to me. To me, a dead word is a word like ..... thee. Or thou. Or canst! Ere, oft, 'tis -- now those are dead words.

But whom is still with us. It is neither alive nor well, but it is definitely still kicking. Whom is a word no one has a clue how to use; we're all just closing our eyes and taking a flying leap when we pick it out of the Great Word Cloud inside our heads. Maybe linguists need a special category for words people no longer know how to use but are still using anyway.

(Maybe linguists already have such a category? Maybe the term for such words is dead?)

How about zombie words?

If you tell me whom has been a zombie word for a century, that I believe.

^*I don't know how linguists find verbs in sentences. What I do know, what I have discovered over the past year, is that traditional grammar books are frequently wrong, or at least semi-wrong: traditional grammar books are wrong enough to be confusing and of little help when you're trying to tell an 18-year old how to find a verb in a sentence.

Andrew Gelman wants to know what to cut from h.s. math

Deadwood in the math curriculum

He doesn't seem to know about any of the changes to K-8 math in the past 20 years, and the blogger he quotes, Mark Palko, explicitly rejects the math wars as a "clever narrative" that does not explain high school math curricula.

It's tough fighting a math war nobody knows about.

In any event, some of you should probably weigh in on which topics to include in a sound high school math curriculum.

Heat, but no light?

Due to TABOR, our elections were held this past Tuesday, instead of next week. The three candidates I supported for the School Board Election went down. (BTW-each of the winners received a significant amount of their campaign contributions from teachers' unions!) Three weeks ago, my neighbor had a community forum with some of the candidates. A little wine, cheese, and school topics chat with the neighbors.

I asked the candidates questions about the Common Core, school funding, and Educator Effectiveness plans in Colorado. I was a minority. Nobody seems to know what goes on in a school, these days. The main question many wanted answered had to do with the district start date. Not all schools in my district are air-conditioned and the kids get really hot in August. Really hot. Boy those little sweetpeas get hot. For about two weeks, it can be over 80 degrees in some classrooms. So yeah, their kids come home sweaty.

Of course start dates are driven by many things, one of which would be the mandated test dates in March and April. What school district chooses to start after Labor Day when the rest of the state starts mid August? Another start date driver is the desire to end first semester before the Christmas break. Which allows us to get out of school by Memorial Day, which allows high school students the ability to get summer jobs, take community college course over the summer, etc.

Back the the whine and cheese forum...
Since it's hot, the classrooms run fans. The fans make noise and it's hard to hear the teacher, so one candidate discussed having seen a teacher using a microphone (you know, like Brittney Spears) and the classroom had speakers in the ceiling. A school I've worked at in the past used such a system to accommodate hearing impaired students.  "Oooh", the parent who complained about the noisy fans said, "I don't want to take away from money that might be spent on technology and smartboards in the classroom for that"

So I guess, to many parents' minds, a smartboard trumps the ability to hear a teacher.

When I start to worry about education, I am grateful for our charter school. It's not perfect and we do get complaints, but none of them are about the heat.

math professor's experience coaching the SAT

The Effectiveness of SAT Coaching on Math SAT Scores
(pdf file) by Jack Kaplan
Chance Magazine | Volume 18, Number 2, 2005

Comment: Jack Kaplan's "A New Study of SAT Coaching"" (pdf file)
By Derek C. Briggs

Here's the Fairtest write-up of Kaplan's coaching results:

Kaplan's course includes 20 hours of classroom instruction and seven to 12 hours of individual tutoring. Of the 34 previously uncoached students he worked with over six summers, 21 increased their Math scores by more than 80 points from a baseline SAT administration with 11 going up by 100 points or more. Average score increases were higher for students with lower initial scores. In a control group Kaplan studied, average scores increased by only 15 points during the same period. Thus, he concludes that "the estimated coaching effect was 63 points" on the Math component of the SAT.

Kaplan was coaching the SAT math test being given prior to the 2006 changes.

the writing test and the math test

Chemprof (and others, I'm sure) pointed out in Comments that math/science professors value the SAT math test for the same reason I value the SAT writing test: both exams test standard mistakes that college students make.

Btw -- this is something I haven't gotten around to putting inside a post -- when I mention "the main errors student writers make," I'm referring to the Connor and Lunsford list of errors compiled in 1988, which is pretty close to the SAT list.

The Connor-Lunsford list is close to the SAT list except for the fact that Connor and Lunsford did not see ginormous numbers of parallel structure problems in the student papers they read, apparently. I find that hard to fathom. I personally do see ginormous numbers of non-parallel structures in the student writing that comes my way.

Faulty comparison, tested on the SAT, does not make the Connor-Lunsford list, either. (I'm not surprised by that.)

In any event, while musing about chemprof's observation (which I agree with, btw), an essential difference between the two tests, one that I hadn't focused on, suddenly leapt out at me: where SAT Math tests content and procedures students have been seeing in school for years,^* SAT Writing tests content students have never seen or even heard tell of unless their Spanish teacher happened to explain what a gerund is in Spanish class.

(I use that example because I asked C. this week whether he knew what a gerund was, and he said he did because he'd learned it in Spanish. I myself had no idea what a gerund was until this semester. Public schools don't teach formal grammar today and haven't taught formal grammar in decades.)

So....when you think about it....isn't the Writing Test a bit of an odd concept?

Students have never been taught grammar, and now they're being tested on grammar?

And why would I be in favor of testing students on content the schools don't teach?

Now I'm thinking: well, maybe I'm not!

Mulling over chemprof's comment, I realize that what I value about the writing test is almost exclusively the test prep kids do for the writing test. The fact of the writing test, the fact that that the writing test exists and students have to take it, gives parents an excuse to insist their kids learn some formal grammar before they graduate high school.

And that's pretty much it; that's what I value about the test.

So, since high scores on writing come entirely from test prep (at least in my experience), what does a high score on the writing test actually mean? Does a high score on the writing section tell us anything about the student's writing?

I don't know the answer to that, and I don't have a good guess.

Basically, I think it's a good thing for a student to recognize a comma splice in an SAT sentence regardless of whether he recognizes a comma splice in his own writing, and effective SAT prep can make that happen. This is a statement of value: I value knowledge of comma splices, and I want my kid to possess it.

^* Most of the content anyway. That's a subject for another post: these days the SAT now features counting problems, and students taking traditional algebra classes don't seem to have counting "units" in their courses (although chapters on counting  units are included in traditional texts). Ditto for the algebra 2 material on the SAT if a student has not taken algebra 2.