From 1992 - David Klein and Jerry Rosen on fuzzy math and why we have it

The 1992 Mathematics Framework for California Public Schools governs, to a considerable extent, the mathematics curriculum in California's public schools. It is a model of mediocrity. The Framework recommends that calculators be issued to kindergartners and used in all K-12 grades; it strongly discourages placing students by ability or achievement; it advocates that teachers do more "facilitating" and less "teaching;" it discourages testing, and promotes portfolios, "authentic assessment," and "holistic scoring rubrics;" it de-emphasizes basic skills and promotes "cooperative work" over individual responsibility. In short, it is the bible of "fuzzy math."

[snip]

Why is this kind of mediocrity promoted by so many education professors and education experts? We suggest that it is simply good intentions gone awry, resulting in institutionalized "liberal racism." Liberal education experts fear that minority students can't learn real math because of "cultural differences." They recognize that it would be preposterous to lower standards only for those students while maintaining high standards for other groups. Thus, the education experts lower standards for everyone, with "authentic assessment" replacing hard-core, standardized tests, and so-called "higher order thinking" supplanting basic skills.

The clearest refutation of the racism disguised by the Framework comes from the work of Jaime Escalante, the teacher who was immortalized in the movie, "Stand and Deliver." Mr. Escalante proved beyond any doubt that minority students from poor neighborhoods can do as well in mathematics as any other group. His methods were traditional and "non fuzzy."

HOW EXPERTS DUMB DOWN MATH EDUCATION
Los Angeles Daily News
May 31, 1996
HOW EXPERTS DUMB DOWN MATH EDUCATION
by David Klein and Jerry Rosen

Ten years ago, I would have rejected this explanation out of hand.

But today, as a classroom instructor teaching "basic" composition, I wonder.

I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: college freshmen whose skills are far below where they need to be can be perfectly intelligent and 'smart' when you stick to spoken language.

They can be and they are.

In fact, it's not necessarily possible to tell which students have better skills and which poorer by listening to classroom discussion.

The Cambridge Pre-U courses are a case in point. I gather Cambridge Pre-U is being sold to districts (and to parents) as a rigorous replacement for AP courses that does not require grouping. All kids, at all levels of skill and ability, can take the same course and it's still advanced.

The reason that claim can be made is that the courses -- at least the one I witnessed -- primarily involve Googling (there is no assigned reading), creating group Powerpoints for presentation to the class, and class discussion. (The class I saw required one paper, written at the end of a year and a half of 'study.')

On the day I visited a Cambridge Pre-U class, one of the students strongly challenged a presentation four other students were giving. Every point the challenger made was dead-on.

Afterwards, the principal told us how wonderful the class is because you can't tell the AP kids apart from the non-AP kids.

Then he said proudly that the student who had done all the challenging was a kid who would never have been allowed to take a regular AP course in his school.

Naturally, that got my dander up. A talented student who hadn't been prepared by his school to take an AP course didn't seem like something a principal should be talking about with anything other than embarrassment and regret.

Today I feel a bit differently.

I certainly believe that the student I saw in action should have been prepared by his school to take one Advanced Placement course by graduation. He was headed for college, and that being the case, preparing him for AP was the school's job.

On the other hand, I now know that being smart and capable in speech does not mean being smart and capable in writing. Not even close.

I also know that writing really is thinking in any number of ways. Which means if you can't write....you're not the smartest person in the room.

So, back to Klein and Rosen. It now seems entirely plausible to me that, like me, a large contingent of education reformers has registered the fact that that underprivileged students fare better talking than writing (or doing math).

Education reformers don't have to have decided consciously to tackle the achievement gap by making math into a discussion subject in order to have done just that.

Walter Ong predicts Powerpoint in 1970

I've been thinking about talking versus writing, and about how thinking-in-writing is different from thinking-in-speech, and I'd forgotten that I'd pulled this article by Walter Ong a couple of years ago.

Ong's argument is that although thinking-in-speech is different from thinking-in-writing, the invention of the alphabet changes the nature of thinking. People develop new ways of thinking, which depend upon writing, and they transfer their new habits back to the medium of oral speech.

Then thinking changes again with the invention of print.

And again, with the invention of electronic communication.

(Ed told me something interesting re: the invention of print. There is a school of thought that nations don't come into being until the invention of print. Without print  -- print per se, not just writing -- you can't have countries.)

Ong's argument makes sense to me, but I'm wondering whether it can be true of students who've essentially never read serious expository prose.

What happens if all you do in 13 years of formal education is sort through packets and Google things?

I don't know the answer to that, and this passage from Ong doesn't address the question, but I'm posting it because I think it's cool.

The effects of [the invention of] print on narrative have never been worked out, but they were massive. Early narrative can be beautifully organized, but so far as I know, nowhere in the world before print was there any lengthy narrative with the tight sequential plotting (build-up, climax, denouement) which has matured everywhere since print, perhaps most typically in the detective story, although such tight plotting has been known outside narrative, in drama, for some two thousand years. There is no narration in drama, but actors. With print, but not without it, James Joyce could produce Finnegans Wake. It is humanly impossible to produce two handwritten copies of Finnegans Wake which are exactly the same. In this large book, as you know, thousands of words have their own idiosyncratic spellings. Every single letter has to be supervised individually. This means, of course, that the final composition of the work--as of most works in print today--is done in the printer's proofs. (Balzac used to strike out whole galleys and rewrite everything on the other side of the proof sheets--an extreme example which, in my friendship for publishers and printers, I do not recommend any of you follow.) But once you know the sort of things that can be put into print, the feeling for such things influences your writing, even such things as your personal. correspondence. You can tell that Alexander Pope's letters were written by a man who knew the printed book and that Cicero's were not. Cicero's sound far more oratorical, for one thing, and the audience is felt in a different way....

And so in the present and the future, when we live with the electronic media. These have not wiped out anything, but simply complicated everything endlessly. We still talk face-to-face and write and print. The electronic media have massively reinforced print.

[snip]

And so the future is already here. We have entered into a world of communication which we are only beginning to understand. Aristotle said that in his day the Greeks had no word for "literature." (If they had no word for it, don't ask me how he said that.) Today we have no word for this new thing. I would suggest that it might be called a "presentation."

The End of the Age of Literacy by Walter J Ong, S.J.
St. Louis University
Revision of April 10, 1972
Original draft completed November 1960 (taped for Opinion Institute, Omaha, Nebraska, developed out of article done for St. Louis Post-Dispatch and published April 4, 1959)

people talking

A sample stretch of talk

...speakers are sitting at the dinner table talking about a car accident that happened to the father of one of the speakers

< speaker 1 >  I’ll just take that off. Take that off.
< speaker 2 >  All looks great.
< speaker 3 >  [laughs]
< speaker 2 >  Mm.
< speaker 3 >  Mm.
< speaker 2 >  I think your dad was amazed wasn’t he at the damage.
< speaker 4 >  Mm.
< speaker 2 >  It’s not so much the parts. It’s the labour charges for
< speaker 4 >  Oh that. For a car.
< speaker 2 >  Have you got hold of it?
< speaker 1 >  Yeah.
< speaker 2 >  It was a bit erm.
< speaker 1 >  Mm.
< speaker 3 >  Mm.
< speaker 2 >  A bit.
< speaker 3 >  That’s right.
< speaker 2 >  I mean they said they’d have to take his car in for two days. And he says All it is is s straightening a panel. And they’re like, Oh no. It’s all new panel. You can’t do this.
< speaker 3 >  Any erm problem.
< speaker 2 >  As soon as they hear insurance claim. Oh. Let’s get it right.
< speaker 3 >  Yeah. Yeah. Anything to do with
< speaker 1 >  Wow.
< speaker 3 >  coach work is er
< speaker 1 >  Right.
< speaker 3 >  fatal isn’t it.
< speaker 1 >  Now.
Teaching about talk – what do pupils need to know about spoken language and the important ways in which talk differs from writing?
in: Spoken English and the question of grammar: the role of the functional model

I've been digging into some of the literature on talking vs writing.

re: the conversation above, I am struck by the fact that everyone knows what everyone else is talking about.

How?^*

Student writers have to achieve the same effect with readers they can't see, a tall order. Professional writers have to produce a steady stream of sensible-seeming thoughts and images inside the minds of readers they can't see, don't know, and will never meet.

How does that happen?

The answer is: via cohesion devices.

But how do cohesion devices work? Are the cohesion devices used in writing direct analogues to the cohesion devices used in speaking? (And what are the cohesion devices in speaking, anyway? I'm not sure, exactly.)

What are the best devices; when do you use which ones; and how do you teach them to students?

I'd like to know.

I'm reading Vande Kopple next. Then Halliday and Hasan, Kolln, and Dillon.

^* ESP?

talking isn't writing, part 3

The typical grammar of conversation is radically different from the typical grammar of informational writing.

Douglas Biber and Susan Conrad

Katharine on awkward student sentences

Here is Katharine on students using "it" as the subject of their sentences:

In terms of awkward sentences written by students, what I'm seeing is an avoidance of modified nouns as subjects. Instead, the would-be modified-noun subject is "factored out" of the sentence into a modifier, and then replaced by "it":

In Happe’s article it is said that this deficit is due to an autistic children’s inability to infer a communicator’s intentions.

[As opposed to Happe's article says that... Notice, btw, that the final noun phrase, the object of "due to", is heavily modified]

Or:

By discovering which parts of communication are more challenging to develop, it can help speech researchers discover where people with other language and communication challenges stumble as well.

[Instead of: Discovering which parts of communication are more challenging can help...]

Actually, only the first example ("Happe's article") is a modified noun; the second one is a sentential subject ("Discovering which parts of communication are more challenging"). So more precisely what I'm seeing is an avoidance of any syntactically complex element in subject position.

Perhaps this goes for speech as well?

in the predicate: an autistic children’s inability to infer a communicator’s intentions

in the subject: it

Interesting.

talking isn't writing, part 2

John McWhorter gives the timeline.

I think he may be wrong (or perhaps I mean misleading) about the simplicity of spoken English, however:

Thus spoken language is fundamental, while written language is an artifice. Not surprisingly, then, the earliest writing was based on the way people talk, and that meant short sentences with a direct logical throughline. Researchers have found that even educated people today speak in word packets of 7 to 10 words a pop.

Talking With Your Fingers

I'm not so sure about that "direct logic throughline" concept, I must say. As far as I can tell, the Longman Grammar corpus study found that conversational English is more grammatically complex than linguists have assumed, which may (or may not) mean that the logic of spoken English is less direct than the simple Subject-Verb-Object ordering we imagine is typical of speech. And it strikes me that transcripts of spoken English often show a certain meandering quality.

But I don't know.

[update 4/27/2012: As I think about it, I realize I have no idea whether transcripts do or do not show meandering...]

RELATED: The single most fascinating article I've read on the question of novice versus professional writing is Bill Robinson's Rhetorical and Grammatical Dependency in Adverb Clauses, which appeared in a 1995 edition Syntax in the Schools.

Robinson summarizes Kellogg Hunt's study comparing K-12 students to professional writers. Surprisingly, Hunt found that professional writers did not use more subordinate clauses than novice writers:

In short, the high school seniors were using coordination and subordination at almost the same rate as professional writers of superior ability.

The major difference between professionals and students was that professionals wrote much longer sentences, 40% longer to be exact. And what made the sentences of professionals longer wasn't the presence of more clauses per sentence, but the presence of longer clauses.

It seems that professionals do a great deal of "noun modification."

Which, upon reflection, I'm thinking is right. At the moment, if I had to say what I do that a student writer does not do, I would go with: noun modification and plenty of it!

EXCEPT: I'm not so sure that's true of blog writing.

How much noun modification is going on in this post, for instance?

Not too much. Assuming I know what noun modification actually is, of course, which I may not.

I probably need a 1200-page corpus study to nail this down.

update 4/27/2012: Actually, there's a lot of noun modification going on in a subject as long as this one: "The single most fascinating article I've read on the question of novice versus professional writing..."