Time flies

I'm finding it incredible that about five seconds ago I was writing posts about teaching math to C., and today C. is taking his NY state teaching exam.

Meanwhile, our house went on the market yesterday.

I hate math, postscript

Actual conversation on this Memorial Day:

C. (studying for teacher exam): I hate geometry.

Me: Then you should probably do some geometry. It's good for your brain.

C.: I hate geometry.

Me: I don't care if you hate geometry. You should do some more.

C.: I hate triangles.

Me: You know I don't care if you hate triangles. You remember I'm a person who doesn't care, right?

C.: I do.

This exchange was more fun than it sounds. Lots more fun, in fact.

C. is actually enjoying himself (though he's not enjoying geometry). He's told me, several times now, "I like algebra."

I'm sitting in the kitchen, C. in the dining room, and I'm hearing "I got it right!"

"I got it right!"

That's fun!

(News flash: he just got a tennis ball versus basketball volume problem right. Progress.)

I remember, pretty distinctly, back when I was reteaching the entire middle-school math curriculum to C., that anything to do with geometry -- especially any angle-array-type image -- was a challenge. I think that's because C. is so verbal. When I was writing one of the Temple books, I found research showing that the verbal "masks" the visual. (The technical term for this may be "verbal overshadowing," but I could be misremembering.)

Here's another funny thing.

C. asked me to help him with the triangle problems. I said I would.

Then I didn't. He helped himself.

Consciously, I intended to help, but .... I didn't get to it.

This is yet another case where I think parental instincts work well and ought to be respected.

Throughout C's middle school years I was a helicopter mom. A helicopter mom and a direct instructivist. I had the t-shirt. (I still do.)

Then, when C. went to high school, I bowed out. Of course, the reason I could bow out was that we had pulled him out of our public school district and sent him to a Jesuit high school. The one and only time we had a significant problem there, with one particular teacher, Ed handled it.

My mother was sick at the time, and I was flying back and forth across the country, so I don't know what I would have done if that hadn't been the case. Nevertheless, the point remains: I was a helicopter parent up through 8th grade, then I wasn't.

C. graduated from NYU last week and starts his NYC Teaching Fellows program mid-June. He takes the teacher test this Thursday.

Today, when he asked for help with triangle problems, my cognitive unconscious apparently decided he didn't need help. And he didn't. So now I'm a hands-off parent and a constructivist.

This is the correct trajectory!

The correct, time-honored trajectory, may I add.

Treat children like children, treat grown-ups like grown-ups. An 11-year old doesn't need to teach himself, and shouldn't. A 22-year old does need to teach himself and must. And the best way to become a self-teaching 22-year old is to have teachers and parents who directly teach you when you're 11. People have known this for hundreds of years--thousands of years--and yet our public schools have somehow forgotten.

Another thing: all the give-your-child-the-gift-of-failure advice bestowed upon parents of middle school children is wrong.

Failure isn't a gift.

Knowledge is a gift. Teaching your child reading, writing, arithmetic, history, science, literature: that's the gift.

While I'm on the subject, grit is wrong, too. Give your child the gift of failure, then he'll have grit --- no!

C. is now 22 and guess what? He has grit. At least, he has as much grit as any other 22 year old, which is as much as he needs at this point. Today C. is responsible, he's independent, he's a serious person, and he's launched. He's exactly where he should be at 22.

C's friends are all in good shape, too, and none of them was ever "given" the gift of failure. When they experienced failure, the "gift" came from bad curriculum and bad teaching, and the parents responded with private tutors and personal reteaching at home. All of the parents we know protected and taught their children, and today those children are brand-new adults in good standing.

This brings me back to my long-time view that schools and governments and ed reformers and all the rest of the merry band should spend more time listening to parents and less time listening to themselves. We parents may not always know what we're doing, but we're on the ground, and we're not crazy. And we care. We don't just want to get it right, we have to get it right. Our kids' lives are our lives.

One of my favorite KTM lines, from Steve H, was (from memory): "Parents make mistakes, but it takes an ed school bureaucrat to really screw things up."

Anyway, I must get back to revisions and packing.

I just want to say, to all parents who find themselves at odds with the prevailing orthodoxy:

Ed and I did everything the authorities told us not to do, and our son is a terrific young man as a direct result. 

............................................

P.S. Just to be clear, I actually do care whether C. likes geometry. I would like him to like geometry. I don't care that he doesn't like studying geometry for a certification test. As a matter of fact, I'm glad he has to study geometry for a certification test, whether he likes it or not.

I felt the same way about the SAT.

P.P.S. Side issue: is it good to be 'rounded'? If you're a verbal person, not a visual person, is it good to do some geometry (or drawing)? If you're an academic type, is it good to play sports as well? I can't tell, and I've read research supporting building up your weak skills as well as research supporting focusing on your strengths and not building weak skills (because inside the brain, skills compete). Intuitively, I always feel that you don't want to be completely one thing and not another, but I have no idea whether that's right.

Maybe I'll develop a bona fide attachment to a baseball team one of these days, as opposed to the weak-kneed attachment I currently have to the Chicago Cubs. It's never too late.

Math in the real world

Excerpt from:
Multiple Numeric Competencies: When a Number Is Not Just a Number
by Ellen Peters & Par Bjalkebring
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
May 2015, Vol. 108, No. 5, 802–822

Jeff is a friend of one of the authors and a highly skilled carpenter who claims he is “no good at math.” He excels, however, at estimating the angles, lengths, and areas that are critical to his craft. Ruth, a smart and personable woman in her 70s, broke down crying while attempting to answer questions about numeric data in a Medicare insurance choice experiment. She explained through tears that she was “not a numbers person” and that her husband always did such tasks for them until his death 2 years prior. Numbers were fraught with emotion for her. Individuals like Jeff and Ruth are common. Although students often ask why they should learn math and whether it will ever be useful, Jeff and Ruth provide examples of the importance of everyday math, belief in one’s numeric ability, and (in Jeff’s case) how compensatory numeric skills might exist.

Making good choices in life often involves understanding and using numeric information (Hibbard, Peters, Slovic, Finucane, & Tusler, 2001; Thaler & Sunstein, 2003; Woloshin, Schwarz, & Welch, 2004). Choosing the best health insurance involves calculating likely annual costs from monthly premiums, deductibles, and office and pharmacy copayments. Making an informed decision about a medical treatment or screening option requires understanding risk and benefit information (including their probabilistic nature). Such numeric data are provided to facilitate informed choices, but numbers can be confusing and difficult for even the most motivated and skilled individuals, and these issues are exacerbated among the less numerate. In the present article, we explore the value of explicitly considering multiple measures of numeric competence—objective numeracy, subjective numeracy, and the mapping of symbolic numbers. We review their likely interrelations, test their possible dissociable roles in evaluations and decision processes, and consider future directions in personality and social-psychological processes.

I find the image of a woman in her 70s crying over math profoundly sad.

I guess that's what I was trying to say about my years reteaching math at home--about not getting what I wanted, but getting what I needed instead. (scroll down to end of post)

After all the crying shouting over math around here during the middle years, I'm pretty sure I managed to raise a child who does not, at this point, define himself as "no good at math."

It wasn't easy.

But it was definitely fun.

"accessible" math, grouping, & IQ

from a friend:

Education Next has made the Jacob Vigdor article (released online in October 2012) the lead story in the current Winter 2013 issue.

He argues that the achievement gap and generally dwindling math performance of US students has been addressed by making the math curriculum "more accessible" (i.e., it has been dumbed down). He then argues that it need not be dumbed down if the curriculum were differentiated between low and high performing students.

In fact, this is pretty much how it was in the 50's and 60's. Students did not need the 3 or 4 years of math in high school to get admitted into colleges. What he leaves out, however, is the quality of math education in the lower grades and how this has affected the number of students who might otherwise be high performing students.
...
There’s no disagreement that some kids are smarter than others. Most people know that you can’t just set a standard (like algebra in 8th grade) and do nothing else. But Vigdor overlooks overlooks that issue and then claims that the failed initiative defines some IQ/algebra correlation. There are many other variables to consider–which he doesn’t.

The “Math Wars” are about curriculum and teaching methods, but this article skips over that analysis. Most schools separate kids starting in 7th grade. In affluent areas, since “enough” students get onto the top math track in high school, (often due to tutors, learning centers, or help from parents), educators will not look for any fundamental issues in K-6. They only assume that it’s a relative problem.

Why not interview parents to see what is done (or not) at home and try to find out how the best students got there? There may see an IQ connection, but it’s not that simple. There are things one can do to separate the variables. But too many authors of the recent spate of articles about math, algebra and its need, either can’t or won’t.

In his report, he pooh poohs the idea of introducing Singapore Math into classrooms, citing the usual cultural differences argument which is specious. (Teachers in Singapore have better math background; students go to school all year round, so there’s no forgetting concepts during the summer; the culture promotes education and hard work, etc). He neglects the fact that Singapore’s texts present the material clearly and succinctly and that there have been successes in schools in the US that have used it.

I remember one day back in middle school, when C. had done well on one of his death-march-to-algebra math tests, we were taking a walk & discussing his triumph. At some point we got to talking about where he would now rank in Singapore terms. We figured probably on par with Singapore kids who have developmental disabilities.

I'm (half) serious.

Remember the Singapore Math pilot project in New Milford, Connecticut?

The SPED kids were ahead of the general ed kids.

parent-oriented colleges

C. tells me that at his friend's Jesuit college, the R.A. had the students all make Christmas cards for their parents.

That would NEVER happen at NYU.

NYU students don't have parents.

At least, that's the vibe you get attending 'Parents' Day, which didn't feel like a Parents Day at all. When the various speakers referred to our children, they used the term "your student."

"Your student" is the same formulation administrators here in my peer-oriented school district always used, even for kids as young as 10.

"Please share with your student."

"Please discuss with your student." (My personal favorite: the letter home asking us to discuss bomb threats with our student.)

I don't have a student, bub! (Well, actually I do.)

I have a child.

C. told me the Christmas card story and said, "I wish I'd gone to a Catholic college."

I wish he had, too.

update from the Comments:

I teach at a Catholic college, and my husband used to teach at one of the elite Jesuit colleges. Trust me, they aren't worth drooling over. The elite Jesuit college was pretty much like small elite liberal arts colleges of all stripes, except the student body was 95% Irish. My large Catholic university has all the woes of large private universities everywhere, and the Catholicism mainly shows up in the form of trying to force professors to tack service learning into every course. Your kid is better off at NYU.

C.'s friend is attending a Jesuit college, come to think of it. Not sure whether it's an elite Jesuit college. C. will know.

only children and peer orientation

re: Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté

C (freshman in college & home for Christmas) has been very interested in the Neufeld discussions Ed and I have been having.

The other night we were trying to figure out whether Neufeld would consider C's friends to be adult-oriented. We all thought he would. C is an adult-oriented teen and all of his friends are adult-oriented teens. One of C's friends is very adult-oriented, as a matter of fact, to the point that he specifically wants to chat with Ed and me when he and C. get together.

So then we were trying to figure out why some kids are adult-oriented when so many aren't. It's certainly not as if any of us set out to raise adult-oriented kids on purpose, or even knew there was an 'adult-oriented' option on the menu.

C. thought about it for a while, and then said that "only children" are more peer-oriented than children with brothers and sisters.

That was a shock. In my day, "only children" were presumed to be adult-oriented. Obviously we didn't have the term "adult-oriented," but we had the concept, at least where "only children" were concerned. Pace Neufeld, nobody thought the adult-orientation of "only children" was a good thing...

Assuming C. is right (I have no way of knowing), it strikes me that the explanation may be the changed culture children and teens (and adults) live in. Neufeld argues, and I agree, that our culture fosters peer orientation.

Although the cultural changes Neufeld describes were already happening when I was young, it's probably easier, today, for an 'only child' to become peer-oriented than it was when I was growing up. Parents don't have the same gravitational pull they used to, and even an 'only child' can escape their obit.

Children who have siblings are subject to the same peer pressures, but peer pressure does not eliminate sibling rivalry. Any child who has a brother or a sister must compete with that sibling for the parent's love, and the competition for the parent's love makes the parent more important.

Are siblings a protective factor in a peer-oriented youth culture?

I think it's possible.

summer re-boot

After declaring Summer over, I'm declaring it back on again. Chris is home for the weekend, and Ed has scored some reasonably-priced tickets to the Open final.

So summer's end happens Monday.

We're lolling on sofas in the family room, watching World's Worst Tenants.

Bliss!

get the MESAG, part 2

Back from the Open, so summer is officially over, as opposed to emotionally over, which it was the instant Chris set foot inside his dorm.

Hate the empty nest! hate! hate! hate!

Anyway, getting back to my interrupted post on precision teaching, when you learn something to fluency, you "get the MESAG":

Maintenance	"You never forget how to ride a bicycle." When you learn content or skills to fluency, you remember them.
Endurance	This one surprised me. Fluency in content and skills means you can perform the content or skill for as long as you need to perform them. You have stamina.
Stability	Another surprise, rife with implications for our ADHD epidemic. Fluent knowledge and skills  are impervious to distraction. A noisy classroom has no effect on skills a child knows so well he can do them in his sleep. If he can do long division in his sleep, he can do long division inside Penn Station.
Application	Transferring semi-old knowledge to new contexts is hard. My favorite story re: transfer of knowledge is the little autistic boy whose parents and teachers spent months painstakingly teaching him to butter his bread. Finally he learned! Everyone was happy until, a few weeks later, they discovered that the little boy had no idea how to spread peanut butter on bread. Spreading butter on bread and spreading peanut butter on bread were two different things, and they had to start all over again. Fluency allows you to apply your bread-buttering skills to peanut-buttering bread. Autistic children, by the way, are rarely taught anything to fluency. "Discrete trial" teaching puts a ceiling on the number of repetitions a child can do in a minute. 80% correct does not equal fluency.
Generativity	Fluent knowledge and skill "repertoires" readily recombine to produce new skills that don't have to be directly taught.

Is fluency the magic that makes inflexible knowledge flexible?

I read the news today

Just got back from taking Chris to college, boo hoo. Not a day I was looking forward to.

Now, sitting down at my computer, I find this headline: Father’s Age Is Linked to Risk of Autism and Schizophrenia.

And this, in the body:

The age of mothers had no bearing on the risk for these disorders, the study found.

I read the words aloud to Ed, who said, "We're a long ways away from refrigerator mothers."

oops

Sorry to be out of touch -- our Long Goodbye (Chris goes to college tomorrow) is taxing, and taxing is time-consuming.

Am checking in to leave this image from the new issue of Education Week. The legend says it was "adapted from Smarter Balanced Assessment Corporation."

Apparently something was lost in translation. (Page 5)

Like the meaning of two-fifths.



Consortia Provide Preview of Common Assessments
By Catherine Gewertz
Published in Print: August 22, 2012

Happy Birthday, Andrew & Chris ---

18 years old today.

I woke up in the middle of the night, thinking about their birthdays. I thought about kitchen table math, too.

This morning I told Chris that now he's 18 and going off to college, I'm not going to be his frontal lobes any more. Siri's going to have to handle that.

Siri was supposed to remind Chris to wash the car after work today. So we'll see.

• annals of Andrew
• annals of Chris
• kitchen table math begins (the page is frozen - can't be edited - so I can't fix the broken links or replace the missing images)

and

• I like math

onward and upward

from Education Week:

For years, bands of educators have been trying to free history instruction from the mire of memorization and propel it instead with the kinds of inquiry that drive historians themselves. Now, the common-core standards may offer more impetus for districts and schools to adopt that brand of instruction.
Published Online: July 30, 2012
History Lessons Blend Content Knowledge, Literacy
By Catherine Gewertz

I bet Ed's going to be happy to hear that.

For the record, Ed is not keen on memorization in history classes, either, although his views on that score shifted steadily as Chris went through school. I remember Ed once telling a friend of ours, "I used to want schools to drop AP courses. Now I want Chris to take as many AP courses as he can possibly manage."

That was pretty funny.

Have I mentioned that Ed was one of the people who invented the DBQ? He doesn't like my saying that because he thinks it's entirely possible someone else invented the DBQ before his group did, but I don't think that matters. If Ed and his colleagues didn't invent the DBQ, they re-invented it, which is good enough as far as I'm concerned.

Good enough or bad enough. I remember back when Chris was coming home with one DBQ after another ... in 4th or 5th grade ... which was the first time I heard Ed had been involved in inventing the damn things. Thanks, hon!

Hoist by your husband's petard.

then and now

4/2006 -  the first day .... and Catherine's story (all pages are frozen; I can't edit them)

11/30/2006 - Christopher masters technology

12/23/2011 - thick envelope

thick envelope

Just in time for Christmas!

(It's from U Mass, which has put Chris in its Honors college and given him $10K in merit aid (unasked). Have I mentioned Scores are Gold lately?)

SAT story & apologies for the disappearing act

Wanted to say quickly that I've got at least 4 meaty emails waiting for me, which I'm not getting to because they're vying for attention with a stack of student papers and so far the student papers are winning.

Hoping to get to emails later today!

I shouldn't be writing posts, either, but I had to pass this along.

C. just came into the kitchen and told me this story.

One of the math kids in his class, a kid so good at math that the calculus teacher (this would be the calculus teacher whose class C. has dropped) told him he could "sleep through every class" and get an A, got a 650 on SAT math.

650.

I say that's a benchmark. A gifted math student who takes the SAT cold gets 650.

C. said, "He doesn't care about the SAT. He's going to X University no matter what."

His folks have free tuition at X U.

update: The last two lines above are ironic.

instapaper

A few years back, C. moved into my then-office to sleep because Andrew had gotten too noisy to share a bedroom with. Since I never managed to get my computer shut down by bedtime, Ed and C. eventually developed a guessing game re: how many windows Mom has open on her iMac. It was always many dozens. Many, many dozens.

I think my life is about to change.

Australian spelling test

Anonymous left a link to the Australian Spelling Test, which was normed across 10,000 children in Southern Australia in 2004. I've just given it to C., who turns 15 at the end of the summer:

70 words
59 correct

scoring:
53 correct: above 15.5 yrs

Yaaaaayyy!

Words missed:
familiar
permanent
sufficient
cemetery
definite
apparatus
subterranean
miscellaneous
guarantee
embarrassing
conscientious


more fun with Dick and Jane:

me: "Apparatus."

C.: "a - p - p - e - r - a - t - u - s"

me: "Wrong. It's a - p - p - a - r - a - t - u - s. With an e."

C.: So? It's a verb.


WTM on spelling programs
Schonell spelling test
Megawords posts

Schonell spelling test

In the wake of last night's comeuppance (scroll down to 3rd comment), I decided to give C. the 100-word Schonell spelling test (pdf file) today (here it is without directions - pdf file).^*

C. turns 15 at the end of the summer; his "spelling age" today is 13.5 13.8 years.^**

words missed:
yoke
cushion
familiar
permanent
sufficient
cemetery
subterranean
apparatus
portmanteau (almost got that one - !)
amateur
miscellaneous
committee

Since I have nothing to compare this to (how would most American 14 year-olds fare on this test?) I'm declaring this a 'perfectly acceptable' performance.

'Perfectly acceptable' meaning: I'm thinking by the time C. graduates high school he will easily have reached Spelling Age 15, which is 100% correct.

The good news: all of his misspellings were phonetically correct, if phonetically correct is the term I'm looking for, which I'm not sure it is. e.g.: He spelled "amateur" amature. That kind of thing.

He starts an intensive 3-year French sequence in the fall, so that should help.


Lousia Moats on the English writing system

In addition, the English writing system reveals the history of the English language. For example, ch pronounced as /ch/, as in chair or chief, appears in Anglo-Saxon or Old English words; the same letter combination ch pronounced as /sh/, as in chef and chauffeur, appears in French words of Latin origin; and ch pronounced as /k/, as in ache and orchid, appears in words borrowed from Greek. Approximately 20 percent to 25 percent of English words are of Anglo-Saxon origin and about 60 percent are of Latin origin (of which 50 percent are directly from Latin and another 10 percent are from Latin through French, as in chef and chauffeur). The
remaining 15 to 20 percent of English words are primarily of Greek origin.

How Words Cast Their Spell by Louisa Moats
American Educator - Winter 2008-2009, pp. 6-16 & 42-43

^* posted at the Reading Reform Foundation

^** simple arithmetic eludes me (thank you, Michael Weiss) - and, yes, the formula is weird - not sure quite what's to the right of the decimal point

WTM Forum on spelling programs

They like Megawords (Nick's Mama recommends!), Sequential Spelling,^* All About Spelling (Orton Gillingham approach) and Apples and Pears.


department of oldies but goodies (you may need to hit refresh a couple of times)

On being your child's frontal lobes 5-3-2005
Great Moments in World History 5.14.2005
How to Spell 6-14-2005
How to Spell, part 2: Spelling Inquiry 6-14-2005
Megawords saves a reader? 6-14-2005


Speaking of Megawords, C. is finishing Book 6 this summer.

When he started Book 1, C's spelling was psychotic. That was the word that used to pop into my head whenever I caught sight of his spelling: 'psychotic.'

Today he can spell.

He can also pronounce unfamiliar words phonetically. A couple of days ago a copy of the Barron's guide to colleges arrived, and C. started reading the Most Competitive list out loud. He was getting towards the end of the B's when he said, "bou - doin."

Bowdoin.

Pronouncing Bowdoin "bou-din" when you've never seen the word before probably doesn't sound like much, but the fact is: in 5th grade C. could not pronounce a two- or three-syllable nonsense word phonetically. A single-syllable nonsense word: yes. Two syllables: no.

He was two years above grade level in reading, and suddenly, at the beginning of 5th grade, he stopped reading. We didn't know why and neither did he. He just seemed to lose interest.

Not long after he started the Megawords program, he began reading again and hasn't stopped since. I have to think that wasn't a coincidence.


Phonics Page
Don Potter's Education Page


^* Ken's post on spelling, with comments about various programs including Sequential Spelling

group home, part 2

Jimmy is moving to a group home on Monday, and I am so sad.

Christian and C. keep saying, "It's like going to college."

Sort of, I say.

It's like going to college except he's 21 and it's a group home.

Not that shipping C. off to college is going to be any better. Last summer my brother's eldest was leaving for college and his parents were awfully stressed. They're both solid Midwestern types, so they weren't saying they were stressed; it was just there, hanging over us. I felt majorly stressed on their behalf, for pete's sake.

At one point I said to my brother, "Well, at least you have two more kids at home," and he said, "Oh, great. I can just keep going through wave after wave of this."

If you knew my brother, you'd understand just how horrifying an image that is: this big, solid, kind Midwestern guy -- a rock -- talking about waves upon waves.

Maybe I'll keep Andrew with me for all time.


group home