Steve H on choice

None of this would bother me if parents had the ability to go somewhere else. I don't care if a company has a union or how much Six Sigma training they have or if they are ISO 9000 certified. I can judge the product just fine, and I'll wager that most parents can do the same if schools weren't allowed to have such unknown products. Our school only publishes a very vague list of goals and topics for each grade, I don't know what goes on in classes, and everything gets hidden away in portfolios!

They want involved parents, but we don't get the tools to even help them do their job. We get questionnaires that ask us if we have enough information to help with our kids' math homework. It's an incredibly bad product for the price we pay. Clearly, parents will make better decisions when it comes to their kids' education, and it will be based on their individual needs, not the need to improve low cutoff test numbers.

I don't want to play their game and argue whether they should have coaches or not. Coaches could be a great asset if they were used to ensure consistency and mastery of basic math skills. Obviously, that doesn't happen, but arguing against coaches just means that I'm playing their game according to their rules.

The only thing that will really change schools is the ability of parents to walk away. No arguing. Just walk away.

Then, magically, the goal becomes a good education for your child and not fixing the schools, and schools will start paying attention to parents, not the other way around.

Steve's right about that: if parents could take their (tax) dollars and go, that would change things up considerably. Choice doesn't guarantee good schools. But it opens the door.


re: what is my school actually teaching & when?

Interesting moment at a school board meeting recently.

The Interim Curriculum Director was giving her report rejecting Singapore Math in favor of Math Trailblazers on grounds that "there us bi perfect curriculum." In practice, "there are no perfect curricula" means the district pays employees to "develop" the imperfect curricula we've bought. Citizens pay twice: once to buy the curriculum, then again to improve the curriculum. Because there is no perfect curriculum.

Virtually none of this activity is pegged to student achievement data.

Anyway, there was the Curriculum Director rejecting Singapore Math because there is no perfect curriculum.

At least two board members, of the four who were present, raised the question of international benchmarking and algebra in the 8th grade. At some point during the discussion, the new principal of the middle school said that we have 40% of our kids now taking algebra in the 8th grade. At an earlier meeting he had pegged that figure at 35% (which used to the case - he's right); but when he'd gone back and looked at this year's enrollment it was 40%.

Another board member said to the Interim Director: "Anecdotally, you hear that the accelerated course is less accelerated than it was. So we don't know what is happening. Are there more kids in accelerated math because accelerated math is less accelerated? What are your findings there?"

The Interim Director had no findings to share on that point.

Which begs the question. Why exactly do we need a central administrator to investigate whether the accelerated math track in the middle school is now less accelerated?

Why don't we have a published scope and sequence everyone can read and evaluate?

I fear I am going to have to pursue this issue.

Because I've got time on my hands.


what is "scope and sequence"?

Scope is the material or skills that is to be taught, and sequence is the order in which you teach the information.

WikiAnswers

inside the black box

from RedKudu:

Parents who don't know the right questions to ask, or even that there ARE questions to ask are at the mercy of what the schools tell them. Parents are spooked by direct instruction because of what they are told about it by teachers who don't know any better - it's rote repetition, it's drill 'n kill. No wonder, with those labels, it doesn't come across well.

I think I told these stories once before, but they're so recent they're worth retelling.

1. Our new math facilitator at the school divulged to me (reading and English teacher) that her 1st grader's teacher told her they "just don't teach phonics, because it's so wrong." Luckily, she's savvy enough to have been teaching her daughter phonics on the sly.

2. Another math teacher told me his two elementary aged sons, in the same grade with different teachers, are learning different things in reading. One is bringing home sight word lists every night, the other brings home nothing. I told him I disagreed with sight words before phonics because it taught kids to see words as images, rather than units of meaning. You should have seen how wide his eyes got - "I never thought of it that way." He gets it, because the same thing is happening with our high school math students.

This has got to stop.

Rich Getzel on teachers & constructivism

The fact is, it would be a lie to say that schools teach "reading, writing, and 'rithmetic" these days. Sounding out words, memorizing 6 x 4 - we're obviously going to lose these kids if we demand that they master these basic skills. This is the kind of thinking that pervades education, and as a new educator, I want to do terrible things to the snake oil salesmen who have peddled this ideology.

But don't lay the fault squarely on the teachers. Many publications often pit parents (who depise EM) against teachers (who unqualifiedly embrace it). But practically every teacher I know (that's a lot) depises the fuzzy math programs to which our schools have subscribed.

I am a new teacher, 23, but I learned mathematics from a traditionalist perspective. I came to my school, as a newly minted educator, and I was horrified by the Impact Math textbook that I was expected to use. It is worse than Everyday Mathematics. It is constructivism on steroids, and I wish more people would talk about this program, because it gets short shrift compared to Everyday Math.

At no point does the textbook spell out any procedure necessary to solve a problem. It is riddled with convoluted "discovery" exercises that theoretically will help students induce the right answer, and the right way (or ways) to get there. There is a dearth of practice problems (i.e. the kind of problems that students will be expected to answer on a standardized test).

So how did I adjust? I simply never used the textbook. It could never work with CTT students who, across the board, were years behind in mathematics. I taught the way I was taught the material. It's a challenge because every night I have to hunt for activities and problems. But I do believe that the students have responded very well. It's a shame, because they don't have a standard reference (textbook) to help them do their homework at night, but even if we used the Impact Textbook, they would not have a reference.

Practically every teacher I know who has had the misfortune of inheriting Impact Mathematics does some variation of what I do. Even my principal is baffled by the textbook, but it was sold as the most widely used textbook out there. The higher-ups (chancellor and his ilk) are gung-ho about constructivist learning, and as a result, teachers, and sometimes even administrators, are slaves to a system they despise.

But hey, it's a change from the old way, and any change is good, right?

inside the black box

I asked the union lackey about ATRs [Absent Teacher Reserve]. He said, they just got a great deal from the DOE. Smart principals will hire them in a minute. I reminded him of the fact that principals do not like experienced teachers, that they don't like teachers that think and have minds of their owns. Years ago, principals hid vacancies whenever they could. No one wanted a veteran teacher who would not jump when told to. He said smart principals did not think like that. I said the smart ones were few and far between. He just kept talking about the one smart principal he used to work for.

Pissed off teacher

Speaking of inside the black box, When Galaxies Collide is back!

under the bus

from Paul:

My take on this is that kids come in normal distributions, i.e. they come to your classroom with a range of capabilities. In low SES districts the spread, the standard deviation, is quite large. I've had classrooms with kids ranging from 1 year above grade to 5 years below grade.

If you are in a failing district, like mine, you are blanketed with consultants, coaches (of which I am one), tight curriculum maps, walk throughs, and on and on. The sum total of this is that you're asking teachers to teach to a really narrow portion of a theoretical distribution while, at the same time, you are 'delivered' children with a 5-6 year span in abilities.

This means that if you follow the rules, and it's perilous not to, you are by definition throwing 80% of your class under the bus. Teachers adjust the curriculum to try to push as many of the distribution as possible through the eye of the needle. They teach to their median. So by definition 40% of your class is bored and 40% don't get it.

My district retention policy is "We don't have one!" Even if they had one there is no remediation program so the miniscule portion of students who are retained are put back into the very same classroom that failed them with the expectation that the second time through will be magic.

"Just stand right there in the middle of center field, Stan, and I'll hit you a few balls," says Ollie, as he proceeds to spray 60 balls at poor Stan; all at once and all over the outfield!

from the ice cream shop

more from Anonymous Engineer:

One year I had to sit through endless hours of meetings, analyzing test results (Massachusetts MCAS). The principal, VP, and 10 or so teachers would sit around a table and look for anomolous results (pretty easy to find) where our school really sucked vs. the state average.

Then we would basically be asked to guess what went wrong. We had hundreds of square feet of 'what went wrong' guesses posted all over the conference room. One particular question (with a horrible failure rate) has always stuck with me. It was something like "How many quarter pound hamburgers can you make from 3 pounds of hamburg?"

Our guess? Kids are having problems dividing whole numbers by fractions. I wasn't comfortable with the guess since it was my class that bombed this question and I was very confident that my kids knew how to do such a simple problem. As luck would have it, one of my really bright students was passing the room and I called her in to ask her about the question.

She floored us all. "You can't make hamburg from hamburg." Huh? It seems that in Puerto Rico (school is > 85% Hispanic population) the source material for hamburg is called ground meat. In our New England cacoon we make hamburger patties from hamburg. The real story is that kids were totally baffled by the seemingly bizarre question.

Please don't think I've told this little story to push on test bias. That could be a whole 'nother blog. No, I bring it up as an example of the futility of analyzing test results, especially when there's no kids in the room. You really have no idea what went wrong when kids bomb a question.

Regards from the ice cream shop.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting here thinking, "Hamburg"?

What is "hamburg"?

In the Midwest, we make hamburger out of hamburger. Somehow I managed to live in Massachusetts for 3 years of my life and never pick up on the fact that, apparently, folks in Massachusetts make hamburger out of hamburg.

From time to time I try to think exactly what kind of book could or should be spun off from Kitchen Table Math.

I'm pretty sure it's a book of stories from inside the black box.

Or the ice cream shop, as the case may be.