rightwingprof: "I Would Like an Answer Now"

Clay Bond posted this to rightwingprof on March 29, 2006. It's a keeper.

'Yes, I posted this some time ago. However, the questions are not rhetorical. I really would like an answer from my colleagues in the primary and secondary school system — particularly those in the education union establishment. And I’d like an answer because I really do want to know why I have to do your job as well as mine.

Thanks ahead of time for your response. Here it is:

I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea. I’ve had many extremely bright students. Many. Some had the necessary knowledge for the class, and some did not; of those who did not, most worked their butts off and did well. I also don’t want you to think smarts are what I care most about.

My favorite students are the ones who aren’t that bright, but work their tails off to do as well as they can. My least favorite students are the ones who are extremely sharp, but don’t work.

Sometimes, however, there’s too much missing knowledge, so much that the best thing the student can do is drop the class. It breaks my heart when I get a student like this.

I had a student some time back I’ll call Mark. Mark was bright, though his high school had cheated him, and he was lost almost from the first day. He worked hard, and came to my office hours. But … well, there was too much missing, as I discovered early in the semester when he was in my office.

I asked him what he wanted me to clarify, and he said he didn’t understand the 68-95-99 Rule. The conversation went something like this:

Me: “In a normal distribution, 68% of the data fall within one standard deviation in either direction of the mean. So here’s our distribution,” I drew a bell curve on the whiteboard, “And here’s our mean,” I drew a dashed line bisecting the curve. “Our mean is 50, and our standard deviation is 2, so 68% of the data fall between 50-2 and 50+2, 48 and 52.” I drew lines and arrows, and a 68% beneath.

Mark: “I don’t understand. Wouldn’t it be 75?”

Me: “Wouldn’t what be 75?”

Mark: “The mean.”

Me: “Why would it be 75?”

Mark: “That’s what you said in class.”

Ah. He was stuck on the example — and being a firm believer in introducing concepts in contexts familiar to students, I introduce basic descriptive stats in terms of grades, since what else are students more familiar with?

Me: “The mean could be 75, sure. In this particular distribution,” I pointed to the curve on the whiteboard, “the mean is 50.” I then erased the 50. “But let’s say the mean is 75,” and I wrote 75 after the x-bar, “then 68% of the data falls between 75-2 and 75+2, 73 and 77.”

Mark: “How do you know if the mean is 50 or 75?”

One of the difficult parts of teaching is diagnosing the problem. Students have questions, but the problem may actually be more fundamental than what they are asking about, as I was beginning to understand here.

Mark was having two basic problems: He didn’t understand what a mean was, and he was having trouble abstracting the idea out of the example. The former is easy to fix; the latter is not.

Me: “Can I erase this?” I pointed to the whiteboard, and he nodded. I erased the curve, and wrote a series of numbers on the board in a vertical column: 90, 85, 70, 65, and 50. “These are test scores,” I said, “How do you calcualate the mean, or average?”

Mark didn’t volunteer an answer.

Me: “Okay, let’s say the whole class takes an exam, and these are the scores. An average, or mean, tells me how well the class did overall. To calculate the average, I add all the scores, then divide by the number of scores. Here, you do it.” I have him the marker.

Mark added the numbers, then stopped.

Me: “How many scores are there?”

Mark: “Five.”

Me: “Okay, divide the total by five.”

Mark complied.

Me: “What’s the mean?”

Mark: “Seventy-two.” He looked at the numbers for a minute, then smiled. “I get it!” he said.

That’s when I realized what I’d suspected: Mark was a university freshman who had not, until just now, understood the concept of an average. I found that disturbing, but Mark was on a roll.

Mark: “So what’s a median?”

Me: “The middle score.” I pointed to the five numbers. “Half of the scores will fall above the median, and half will fall below the median. What’s the median of these scores?”

Mark: “Seventy.”

Mark was in my office three hours. No wonder he’d been lost. He didn’t understand an average. He didn’t understand sampling or distributions. We didn’t get to the 68-95-99 rule that day, because there was too much he didn’t understand.

I worked with him twice every week, and he got a B in the class. He worked harder than nearly any other student I’ve had. But if he had not come to my office every chance he got, he would never have passed.

Mark had no sense of entitlement. He wanted to understand, and he wanted a good grade, and he worked for both. He was bright. The thing is, I pretty much ran him through a high school math program in the office during the course of the semester.

I’m a teacher, so I can ask the obvious question, and some other teacher can’t come back with any of the usual non-answers.

I did it. Why couldn’t you, when Mark was in high school? It’s not money. I got no extra pay for helping Mark. It’s not time. I spent many hours in the office working with him. It’s not his intelligence or ability to learn. He’s smart, and he learned quickly, once we got started.

So I’ll ask again: Why couldn’t you do your job? It wasn’t my job to teach Mark high school math, but I did. Why did I have to? How did Mark get through all the required high school math courses without understanding what an average is? How did Mark get through all the required math courses without ever having seen y=mx+b? How did Mark get through all the required math courses and not understand that each flip of the coin is independent of all others? Most of all, how did you, his teachers, let such a bright, hard-working, motivated student slip through the cracks?

What’s going on there?

speaking of rightwingprof

I've just seen this posted on the Clay Bond Memorial Facebook Page:

warning to Clay's Internet friends: Central Pennsylvania Orthodox will probably stay up for awhile because it runs on freeware. Right Wing Nation will vaporize at some point because there is a monthly charge for the blogspace. Cut and scrape things you want to keep, ok?

I'm going to save I Want an Answer now, but there must be a zillion other keepers on his site--does anyone have any ideas?

why can't U teach me to read?

Years ago, I asked a special needs attorney when it would be possible for parents of general education students to sue schools. He wasn't encouraging. (scroll down) In fact, he wasn't even interested.

I had thought such a case finally existed, but now that I've looked at Jennie's links (thank you, Jennie!) I see we're not there yet.

That's fine. I'm patient.





I miss rightwingprof.


Why can't U teach me 2 read?: Three Students and a Mayor Put Our Schools to the Test by Beth Fertig
due process for parents of general education students
diagnosis diagnosed
crack in the wall (educational malpractice)
status quo la-la-la

rightwingprof

in the hospital

Here we go again

Stuff like this really honks me off, and this is even worse (Darren, you owe me blood pressure medication).

Teachers at Soquel High School have agreed not to wear "Educators for Obama" buttons in the classroom after a parent complained that educators were attempting to politically influence his daughter and other students.

These teachers must not have much to do in the classroom, if they have all this time to waste on topics that have nothing to do with the curriculum. But I promised myself I wouldn't rant, so I won't. Instead, I'll offer an alternative for those who just can't keep from bringing the election into the classroom -- an alternative that does not push a candidate or a party, and actually has something to do with learning the class material -- and critical thinking, in the literal, and not the "think like a slobbering leftist" education school definition. Wow, how about that!

Student interest is a great motivator, particularly when you teach something many students find boring, or even intimidating, like I did. One thing we did that was very successful was build several applications with the tools we were going to cover that grabbed student interest when we said, "At the end of the semester, you'll be able to do this, too."

One of these was a simulation model that based on the scores for all of the games that season predicted the winner of the Superbowl (we had one for the NBA finals and another for the World Series, depending on which semester we were in).

So if you absolutely must address the election in class, here is one way you can do it where the students will actually learn something, and contains not a hint of advocacy or indoctrination.

Have students build an application that predicts the results of the election. Remind them that the more variables they incorporate, the more accurate it will likely be, and encourage them to make it as complex as they like.

You'd want to break them into teams to do this, and give them time to talk about what variables they would want to incorporate, and how. You should probably give them a list of sources for data, like realclearpolitics.com, gallup.com, and rasmussenreports.com. In fact, give them a whole class period to do nothing but plan their model, figure out where they'd get the data, and assign people in the team to do various tasks.

I'd give them a week to turn in the models. After going through them, you can pull several up with different results and as a class, pick apart the applications and discuss why they got different results (this is what is known as a learning experience). You can then, again as a class, discuss which of the models is/are most likely to accurately predict the results, and why. You can even give bonus points to the team whose model most accurately predicts the election.

See? You addressed the election, and you didn't have them sing creepy Hitler Youth songs.

If you think about it, these models incorporate a lot of mathematical knowledge in many different areas, and all through the model. Take collecting the data, say, polls. How are they going to deal with the different levels of statistical error in different polls? How will they deal with different party weights in different polls? What, other than polls, will they use as input variables, and how will they incorporate them into the model? For example, if they're going to look at the number of voters who went for Hillary in the primaries and turn that into support for McCain, how, exactly, are they going to do it? What algorithm will they use, and what will they base it on? And would they also want to use another variable, say, Democrat respondents who only lean Democrat in the election, or are undecided to calculate their Hillary conversion variable?

And what about actual election day statistics, will they use those? If so, which variables? How will they incorporate them?

You can turn just about anything into a real, learning experience in the classroom if you just think about it. Unfortunately, "thinking" seems to be an alien concept to many teachers these days.

The learning isn't only in creating the models. The learning -- and critical thinking -- is also in analyzing the models and comparing them once they've been done. What makes a good model? What makes this model more accurate than that one? Would this be a more accurate model if we tweaked the algorithms, and if so, how would we tweak them? You get the idea.

When my students are working in teams, I usually migrate from team to team, playing devil's advocate, and gently nudging them when they're completely off track (I call this guided constructivism). With a project like this, I would probably limit my input to making sure they understood, and correcting fundamental errors, like only taking into consideration the popular vote. Oh. And I would only do something like this after the students had all of the necessary knowledge and skills to actually build a working application. Sorry, but if you think turning students loose on their own to do complex projects like this is a good way to introduce them to new skills, you have no business within a hundred miles of a classroom.

(We talked about doing this with one of the sports championships, don't remember which now, but decided against it because making the data usable would require complex Excel text functions we had not covered in class.)

Cross-posted at Right Wing Nation

Be afraid

I had lunch yesterday with an accountant who insisted on picking up the tab. When the waiter brought the check, the accountant pulled out his calculator.

To calculate the tip.

rightwinprof clears that one up

The first position in a sentence is topic position (this, by the way, is a pan-linguistic phenomenon), that is, the position of primary focus (focus is actually different from topic, but the distinction isn't relevant here). So "John went swimming" is about John, because John appears in topic position. We can, in English, shift something other than the subject to topic position when we want to make it, and not the subject, the topic of the sentence. This is called dislocation: "But as for Mary, John left her at the party." We also use cleft sentences to place something other than the subject in topic position, and make it the topic of the sentence. A cleft sentence looks like: "It was Mary John left at the party." Jefferson masterfully controls the topic throughout the document, and shifts it from section to section, beginning with the abstract, moving to King George III, and ending with the colonists. It's particularly effective in the long section of grievances, all of which begin with "He," meaning, of course, George III, even when the perpetrators of those wrongs were, in fact, other parties (ultimately, yes, Georgie was responsible).

Actually, to see what I was talking about wrt grammar and rhetoric, see Joseph Williams's Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace (am I imagining it, or didn't you say you had ordered it?) He has an excellent section on using topicalization to create coherence.

I do have Joseph Williams' book (haven't read much thus far) -- it is fantastic.

My neighbor thinks so, too. I got it for her for Christmas.

Fluff, fluff, and more fluff

I don't mean to piggyback on Karen's post, but this writing gig has brought me into contact with some writing folks here, and I lunched with a couple of them today. The conversation was . . . interesting.

Process writing is like constructivism, collaborative work, and a whole slew of other things: It is a powerful pedagogical tool when done in the right circumstances, and with the right amount of guidance. So it's quite possible for me to sit down with these people and have a conversation about teaching for, oh, about fifteen minutes before hitting a logjam -- like the one today.

We were having a perfectly nice lunch, when one popped up with (this is from memory), "Oh, I just read an article proposing that we teach grammar! Some people are so stupid!"

I planned to keep my mouth shut, and I would have, except that the other three, like a Greek chorus, chirped their agreement -- not with her point about teaching grammar, but that anybody who thought teaching grammar might be a good idea has to be a stupid dolt.

I have been in these conversations before, and I know how not to disagree in these contexts. So I said, "But how do you analyze texts and talk about how they were written and why without grammar as a common language?"

Like I said, I've had these discussions before, and usually, bringing up that point leads to further, productive, and often interesting, discussion. But not today. The three just looked at me for a minute, and then one said, "What do you mean?"

Given that we had just done the Declaration of Independence in class so it was quite fresh in my memory, I told them what we had done. "Jefferson uses topicalization, active/passive voice, and topicalized cleft sentences, etc., etc., etc., in addition to choosing when to use personal pronouns and not to, etc., etc., etc., to shift the focus from the abstract, to King George III, to the Colonists. If students don't know what topicalization, or voice, or cleft sentences, or pronouns ARE, how, exactly, do you talk about how the document was written? Indeed, how do you talk about how ANY text is written if you have no common concepts to which you can refer? Sorry, but I don't see how you can approach a text even superficially without some shared understanding of grammar."

These three had no idea what I meant -- and they're all English composition teachers. I'm pretty cynical, but I was floored. I have had many conversations with many English composition folks, and nearly all of them are flaky, but never have I encountered any who were such clueless nitwits as these three. They just looked at me with their mouths hanging open. They didn't have even a syllable in response, because they had no idea what I was talking about. None.

To try to gloss over the rather uncomfortable situation, I asked them, then, what they did in their classes. That did get us past their unease, but it made me squirm. "Oh, we talked about the article in Time Magazine," and "We talked about the essay we're going to write about abortion," and "We talked about plagiarism."

Not sure that they weren't just incapable of expressing themselves precisely, I pressed. Yes, they all talked. That's what they did in their English comp classes. They talked. So what, exactly did they talk about? What was the topic of the article in Time? Why is it misogynist to oppose abortion? What is plagiarism? That's what they did in class.

The English comp/ESL writing split used to be rhetoric (that is, writing, and textual analysis) v. grammar correction. Now, it seems that it's meaningless fluff v. rhetoric. But what I can't get out of my head is that these three didn't have a clue what I was talking about. I find that amazing -- and depressing.

My latest rant

Chi-square in high school?

Latest update on that writing class

This is a state-sponsored ed program in a frigging college town, and I'm somehow the only writing teacher they have. So they've decided I need to teach two two-hour classes (you recall that this is volunteer work, right?) which will begin next week.

The director reeks of bong water. She's also a moron. I had to explain to her, very patiently, why I might want information on students, like, oh, their English proficiency (TOEFL scores, anything), or why they were taking the class (going to college, naturalization, etc.) She just didn't get it.

She's the one who gets paid.

I did get the information, at least on the first of the two classes. They're all over the place. The only thing they have in common is that they're not native speakers. Some are on the naturalization track. Some are going to college. One is going to move to Australia to work as a nurse. About half of the students are Chinese, with a smattering of students from Japan, Korea, Argentina, Brazil, and Cameroon. I've ditched plans to come up with any kind of coherent curriculum, because it's a collection of disparate goals, proficiencies, and interests. I'll go in next week, get to know them, then have them write in detail about why they're there, what they hope to accomplish, and that sort of thing.

I'll take it from there.

We'll see

Math tutoring was, well, let's just say it was annoying and leave it at that. So starting in November, I'll be teaching writing classes for the state. We'll have to see how that works out. I already know I want to have as little contact with the other people there as I can get away with.

Here's a question

After doing those articles on stats for teachers, I've gotten email from several people who have told me they don't know enough about Excel to really use it. So I'm thinking about doing a series of Excel for teachers articles, starting maybe with how to set up and maintain an Excel gradebook. (I'm not really very excited about dealing with all the &^$@#^! screendump graphics, but that's another story.) Do you think this is a good idea, or would I be wasting my time?

Problem complexity and higher-order thinking

Burger King math (silly to post it on both blogs).

Moonbat Math!

Follow the link.

you people

You people clearly don't appreciate creativity.

--rightwingprof re: Why we hate it

An Extremely Bad Idea

Crossposted on my blog.

Science Goddess is discussing the idea of giving Incompletes in secondary school (thanks to Joanne Jacobs for pointing it out--I'm not sure how I missed it on my first read through the Carnival this week). In the comments, I said that I'd have to think about it, but that my first reaction was that this was a remarkably bad idea.

The more I thought about it, the worse it seemed. It would have been bad enough if it were assigning an Incomplete for the whole class, but it's even more disastrous because it's assigning Incompletes for assignments. So if little Jimmy doesn't do his homework, instead of getting a zero for it, he gets an Incomplete (and we'll ignore the fact that Jimmy has earned an F, or perhaps leave it for another day).

We university types know something about Incompletes. Students ask for Incompletes all the time, and nearly always, the answer is "No," and for very good reasons. I've had this conversation with so many faculty members and grad students that I know it's not just my, or even a minority opinion. Incompletes are bad all the way around, for lots of different reasons. And the best example that the university--not just me or a handful of us--knows that Incompletes are bad is your nearest university policy on giving Incompletes. The typical university states that they should be given only in extraordinary circumstances beyond the control of the student. As another example, many universities also have policies that convert Incompletes into Fs after a specified time limit, usually a year.

Certainly, there are a handful of faculty who hand Incompletes out like candy, but they are a very small minority (or newly-minted PhDs who have next to no teaching experience). Incompletes are trouble all the way around, for the faculty member, for the university administration, and most of all, for the student.

Several commented that giving Incompletes sends the message that deadlines aren't important, and that's a valid objection, though by no means the only one, or even the major one. More importantly, it sends the message that deadlines--and assignments--aren't to be taken seriously, that work isn't important, and that managing time isn't important. Worst of all, it is grossly unfair to those students responsible enough to have done their work and turned it in on time--unforgivably unfair. Any teacher who would have handed out Incompletes in any class where I was a student to others who couldn't be bothered to do their work would have earned my undying, intense, cold hatred, the type of hatred that makes fantasizing about that teacher's gruesome, painful, tortuous death and screams of pain an erotic experience. And if I had children in a class and found out that the teacher was giving lazy little Jimmy an Incomplete instead of an F, you had better believe I would be in that teacher's office raising hell until he changed the policy.

But all that aside, there are other excellent reasons not to give Incompletes under these circumstances. A student gets an Incomplete because he is behind. If you could wave a magic wand and stop the passage of time so Jimmy could get caught up, it wouldn't be a problem--but you can't. What invariably happens is that as the class moves on, Jimmy either forgets about the Incomplete and stays behind, or doesn't, and gets further behind the rest of the class.

Most of the time, Jimmy forgets about the Incomplete, and never finishes it. This is why universities have implemented time limits on Incompletes, turning them into Fs if they aren't completed within a specified time. Or if Jimmy doesn't forget the Incomplete, he invariably turns in the paper or report or project at the very end of the semester, when the instructor is snowed with many hours of grading, recording grades, and turning in grades.

Jimmy assumes that his Incomplete will be given highest priority, but reality is the opposite (for obvious reasons). His report is put on the bottom of the already huge stack, or in a drawer so it won't get lost, and all too often, the instructor is so snowed with grading and end of the semester duties that, well, Jimmy's report falls through the cracks and turns into an F.

Jimmy's Incomplete then becomes an administrative nightmare. Rarely is the problem going to be noticed by the instructor; after all, had the instructor remembered, he would have graded the report. No, Jimmy or his parents will discover the problem when the grades come, and then (pardon the French) seventeen different kinds of hell will explode. The administration will call the department chair onto the carpet, and the department chair will then chew out the instructor. The instructor will then have to find Jimmy's report (where did I put that?), grade it, calculate a final course grade, file a change of grade form, and then explain to Jimmy that it can take the university up to a year before the grade change will be reflected on his transcript (ain't bureaucracy wonderful?)

And those are university Incompletes, given as a course grade. The proposal under discussion is giving Incompletes as assignment grades. Say the teacher gives twenty assignments. Multiply the problems mentioned above by twenty.

The best thing I can say about this idea is that any teacher who implements it will drop it after he recovers from his nervous breakdown.

Bye-bye school board!

We had our primary yesterday, and there was an estimated 55.71% turnout in this county, probably because so many people were furious with the school board (over money, not curriculum). All of the incumbents were tossed out yesterday.

here we go again

I have no problem with discussion questions. Our students' projects culminate in a report and presentation, after they have downloaded around 15,000 rows of data, run 26 different analyses (which must be done in a specific order, since some analyses provide the input or variables for other analyses), and decided on recommendations based on those analyses. They must include a section in the report critiquing their analyses and discussing the strengths and weaknesses, which lets us see how well the UNDERSTAND what they are doing and WHY, and not just whether they can do it or not.

But discussion questions come in the whole quality spectrum, and some are just plain idiotic. Consider this one:

In a couple of paragraphs, explain how you would estimate the square root of 170.

The square root of 169 is 13, so the square root of 170 is slightly larger than 13. I guess. A couple of paragraphs? Of what? What is she looking for, and what is the purpose of this question?

This one is a little better, but not much:

The base of a right triangle is 3 meters long, and the height is 4 meters. In a couple of paragraphs, explain how you know the third side is 5 meters long.

At least with this one we know what she's after. But why give them the answer, and why use the classic 3-4-5? If she really wants to know if they understand how to apply the Pythagorean Theorem, why not just give them a triangle problem? What does this tell her about what they know the triangle problem wouldn't?

Is this woman just out of ed school, or what?

why we need statistics

from rightwingprof, one of the most succinct & clear statements I've seen:

Before I go on, let me quickly address why we must analyze the data statistically, and cannot just report means. If we gave the same kids the same proficiency exams on two different days, say only a week apart, their scores would be different. Anytime we see a difference between scores, without statistics, we do not know if those differences are due to random variation or not. We cannot without statistics point to two different scores or means and say, "See? The scores increased!"

Also, let me mention a few crucial points.

• The more data we have, the more reliable our statistical analysis will be (this will become an issue later on).
  

• Means (averages) alone do not give us a complete picture, particularly when they are means of aggregated data, as these are (this is why I look at other descriptive statistics).
  

• Statistics always deals with probability (uncertainty), and we calculate our statistics to a specific probability, 95% here (sometimes statistics are calculated to a 99% probability). This is the level of sensitivity (alpha), here, 0.05.
  

• We are assuming here either that the proficiency exam standards did not change between the two years or that the proficiency reports for the two years are comparable (if they are not, then Wisconsin cannot make any statement about their proficiency levels over time).

Argh!

Well that didn't work well. When I got Ken's email about the data, I was furiously working on a very large data set in SPSS with a deadline approaching quickly. So I downloaded the Wisconsin data, ran the stats and posted.

Oops. When I opened the data in Excel (with SPSS running in the background) I didn't see either the "number advanced" or "% advanced" columns because they ran off the right edge of my screen, and for some reason on this laptop, Excel and SPSS do not play nicely together with the video card. So if I want to scroll while running both, I have to do little tricks like minimize both, then bring up Excel.

Anyway, I corrected the error. Hurriedly. Because I'm dealing with a deadline.

If you want to run ANOVA (most stats tests) in Excel, it requires that the input data be in a contiguous block. So to run ANOVA, I had copied and pasted the data to another worksheet, and guess what? Some of it was the original % proficient data.

Anyway, it's fixed now, and I can go back to SPSS.