jobs

Interesting short video at the WSJ.

The video documents a massive loss of manufacturing jobs but doesn't discuss where those jobs went or why.

Ben Bernanke urges soldiers to combat high unemployment

Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke took his message about the U.S. economy to military servicemen, making a pre-Veteran’s Day visit to the Fort Bliss headquarters for the Army’s 1st Armored Division and urging soldiers to combat high unemployment by focusing on training and education.
Bernanke's Fed Takes Message to Texas
November 10, 2011

What next?

The chairman of the Federal Reserve advocating small class size and school uniforms?

from the FRBSF: Recent College Graduates and the Labor Market

Haven't read it yet, but here's the link.

I'm a big fan of the San Francisco Fed's Economics Letters.

Goldilocks and the money illusion

the money illusion:

The findings in this paper suggest that money illusion is real in the sense that the level of reward-related brain activity in the vmPFC [ventromedial prefrontal cortex] in response to monetary prizes increases with nominal changes that have no consequence for subjects' real purchasing power.
The medial prefrontal cortex exhibits money illusion Bernd Webera, Antonio Rangelb, Matthias Wibralc and Armin Falk - PNAS March 31, 2009 vol. 106 no. 13 5025–5028

In the car just now, Ed and I were talking about the money illusion. Ed pointed out that no one thinks when you've just been given a 3% raise in an environment of 4% inflation, your pay has actually been cut. (I know ktm people would have no problem figuring this out--! But ktm people are not the norm.)

I'm wondering whether good math education and/or the distribution of inflation calculators to one and all would affect the money illusion. I have no idea. Certain cognitive biases, loss aversion,^* for instance, are apparently built-in, but -- the money illusion? Is there something built-in about the money illusion per se?

No time to think it through just now; for the moment I'm going to guess that the money illusion is a specific manifestation of something more fundamental. Which probably means good education and universal inflation calculators would help.

That said, we are stuck with the money illusion, at least for now.

So what does this mean?

I think it means that we need a certain level of inflation for the economy to work. Deflation is bad --  everyone seems to understand that -- but zero inflation is also bad. Inflation is like the porridge in Goldilocks and The Three Bears; it can be too hot, it can be too cold, or it can be just right.

What is just right?

Having spent as much time as I have reading the market monetarists (pdf file), I assume that just right means 2% inflation along with 3% real growth.^*

But of course I don't know.

from the EurkAlert release:

"We had now confronted our test subjects with two different situations", Falk explains. "In the first, they could only earn a relatively small amount of money, but the items in the catalogue were also comparatively cheap. In the second scenario, the wage was 50 per cent higher, but now all the items were 50 per cent more expensive. Thus, in both scenarios the participants could afford exactly the same goods with the money they had earned – the true purchasing power had remained exactly the same." The test subjects were perfectly aware of this, too – not only did they know both catalogues, but they had been explicitly informed at the start that the true value of the money they earned would always remain the same.

Despite this, an astonishing manifestation emerged: "In the low-wage scenario there was one particular area of the brain which was always significantly less active than in the high-wage scenario", declares Bernd Weber, focusing on the main result. "In this case, it was the so-called ventro-medial prefrontal cortex - the area which produces the sense of quasi elation associated with pleasurable experiences". Hence, on the one hand, the study confirmed that this money illusion really exists, and on the other, it revealed the cerebro-physiological processes involved.

and more from the paper:

We used fMRI to investigate whether the brain's reward circuitry exhibits money illusion. Subjects received prizes in 2 different experimental conditions that were identical in real economic terms, but differed in nominal terms. Thus, in the absence of money illusion there should be no differences in activation in reward-related brain areas. In contrast, we found that areas of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), which have been previously associated with the processing of anticipatory and experienced rewards, and the valuation of goods, exhibited money illusion. We also found that the amount of money illusion exhibited by the vmPFC was correlated with the amount of money illusion exhibited in the evaluation of economic transactions.

[snip]

Intuitively, money illusion implies that an increase in income is valued positively, even when prices go up by the same amount, leaving real purchasing power unchanged (1). In this sense money illusion has been interpreted “as a bias in the assessment of the real value of economic transactions, induced by a nominal evaluation” (2). Economists have traditionally been skeptical about the notion of money illusion (3), but recent behavioral evidence has challenged this view (2, 4–6). For example, when asked to rate the happiness of 2 otherwise identical persons who received either a 2% wage increase without inflation or a 5% wage increase with 4% inflation, the majority of subjects attribute happiness on the basis of greater nominal raises, despite lower real raises (2).

[snip]

Our main hypothesis was that areas of the brain that are engaged in the experiencing of rewards (7–9), such as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), would exhibit money illusion in the sense of exhibiting a stronger BOLD response for incomes that were higher in nominal terms, but had an identical real value. Activity in these brain regions has been shown to be modulated by the receipt of both primary rewards such as food delivery (10) and more abstract forms of rewards like monetary incentives (9, 11, 12). Recent neuroimaging studies have also shown that the vmPFC is involved in the valuation of goods at the time of decision making (13–15).

[snip]

The importance of this finding derives from the fact that the answer to many classic economic problems depends on whether money illusion exists. For example, money illusion has been put forward as an explanation for the nonneutrality of money, which implies that central banks can affect production, investment, and consumption through changes in monetary policy that have an impact on the inflation rate. Likewise it offers an explanation for the important phenomenon that wages and prices are often downwardly rigid, a leading explanation for involuntary unemployment (17, 18). It is also a potential cause of bubbles in important markets, such as the housing market (19), and of deviations of stock prices from their fundamental values (20, 21). At the firm level, money illusion is important to determine optimal wage policies, which depend much on whether workers care about nominal or real wages (22). Finally, the existence of money illusion is important for the understanding of the relation between income, inflation, and subjective well-being (23). Importantly, even small amounts of money illusion can have substantial effects....

^* And even loss aversion has "boundaries". (pdf file)

^* Because I'm married to a historian, I also assume that "just right" for our time would be not right for another time quite possibly.

anonymous on lefties taking the SAT

Good advice:

Lefties should be particularly vigilant about the chairs/desks. I've heard stories about them having to take long tests on right-handed flip-up deskettes; a true nightmare. I know the registration forms for my grad comps asked lefties to identify themselves, because almost all of the seats in the auditorium had right-hand deskettes. They brought in as many extra lefty ones as they needed. Is there a similar question on SAT registrations?

I have got to find time to write a quick post on working memory.

I believe that the "transmission mechanism" from right-hand desks for left-hand test-takers to reduced performance is working memory blowout.

And see: death by calculator. Death by calculator is a case of working memory blowout.

(The real-world term for working memory blowout problems is cognitive load theory.)

off-topic (somewhat): Scott Sumner on targeting NGDP

Sumner: Nominal GDP Targeting Can Save the Recovery (video interview with Kelly Evans of the Wall Street Journal)

I can't remember when I first became convinced that the Federal Reserve should stop targeting the CPI PCE and start targeting NGDP (the sum of all current dollar spending in the US).

Maybe a year ago?

I bring it up today because the idea has abruptly broken through to the mainstream, and because the state of the economy will determine whether our kids have decent jobs after college (or any job at all), not to mention whether parents will have the money to pay for college in the first place. So now's the time.

I think about NGDP-targeting this way:

1.
The Federal Reserve has a dual mandate: price stability and full employment. It is required to pursue both.

Since the crash, we have had unusually low core inflation, lower than average inflation during the Great Moderation, which was 2%. Update 1/10/2012: PCE inflation has averaged 1.37% over the four years 2007-2012.

We have also had a catastrophic collapse in employment, which is not becoming any less catastrophic as the years go by:

This chart shows the percent of the civilian population that is employed. Before the crash more than 63% of the civilian population was employed; since the crash we have bounced between 58 and 59%.

2.
The chart above is, literally, an image of a depression. In it we see employment drop off a cliff, hit bottom (let's hope), and stay there. The chart makes it impossible for me to call the situation we are in a "recovery," a "weak recovery," a "faltering recovery," an "anemic recovery," a "limping recovery," a "recovery experiencing strong headwinds," or any other formulation that includes the word recovery. This is not a recovery. In my book, this is a depression: a minor depression, but a depression nonetheless. It's not getting better, and I don't believe that more 20-year olds acquiring STEM degrees will fix things.

More STEM degrees may or may not be a good idea; better K-16 education (I've expanded my horizons) unquestionably is a good idea.

Neither one is going to fix the chart.

3.
Why is that?

Since I'm not an economist, I have to choose which expert(s) to believe. And, after spending probably a year of my life reading the various explanations of the crash, I'm persuaded by Scott Sumner and the market monetarists, (pdf file) which is not to say anyone else has to be persuaded, obviously. I'm writing an amateur economics post on an education blog just to let you know about market monetarism if you don't already.

I'm convinced the market monetarists are right, and I want our federal overlords policy elites to stop targeting inflation, and start targeting NGDP, as market monetarists recommend.

4.
Wages are sticky -- sticky meaning wages can go up, but not down. (Wages are sticky in one direction.)

I live in a state, New York, where public sector wages are beyond sticky; here in New York, public sector raises are sticky. I'm tuned in to public sector compensation because I've been dealing with my district's budget crisis for a few years now, but wages are sticky across the board in every sector, public and private.

Sticky wages kill jobs. Period. Sticky wages kill jobs because when profits decline, some employees have to be laid off so other employees can maintain their current salaries. In theory, when profits (or tax revenues) fall, wages could fall, too, and everyone would still have a job. Companies would bring in less money in sales, so they would pay less money in compensation, problem solved.

In reality, when profits (or tax revenues) decline, wages stay put. So people have to be laid off.

I have had a front-row seat watching this process unfold here in my town. Where sticky wages are concerned, I don't need experts to explain the world to me. Sticky wages are real, I've seen them, they take away jobs.

Update 1/10/2012: human employees replaced by wolves....

5.
Which brings me to the Fed.

The Bernanke Fed strongly opposes deflation and will do whatever it takes to prevent it.

The Bernanke Fed also strongly opposes inflation (the cure for deflation), and appears to think that if low inflation is good, lower inflation is better. It's fine to go to 1.5% "core" inflation (CPI minus food and energy). It's fine to go to 1%. Two percent is a ceiling, not a target. Update 1/102012: The new 'ceiling' appears to be 2.5%.

At some point (where?) inflation is bad because it might turn into deflation.

Also, if you go into recession for 18 months, and "lose" all the inflation you would have had during that period, the Bernanke Fed thinks that's fine.

There is no such thing as an inflation shortfall in the Bernanke Fed, it seems.

6.
Real estate.

Housing prices, overall, are at 1990 levels.

1990.

The Bernanke Fed is a deflation fighter, and yet the Bernanke Fed has presided over a 25% deflation in house prices in just 3 years time.

7.
Given what we've been through, I conclude that neither real estate nor jobs are coming back as long as the Fed continues to target inflation. If the Fed is targeting 2% (or 1%) inflation, and we need 33% inflation (roughly) just to get back to where we were, then we're looking at the new normal. Since I personally see no way jobs can be decoupled from prices, that means jobs don't come back, either. Not for years and years and years.

Update 1/10/2012: Hamilton Jobs Gap Calculator

So I'd like the Fed to stop targeting inflation and start targeting nominal GDP, which includes inflation but is not limited to inflation. The beauty of NGDP is that it combines inflation and employment in one number. Double mandate, single target.

I'll post links to the market monetarist blogs and the various endorsements and counter-endorsements later on. In the meantime, Scott Sumner began his blog, The Money Illusion, in 2009. Within the past month Goldman Sachs published a report endorsing the idea, and Cristina Romer wrote a column agreeing. Brad DeLong and and Paul Krugman have both endorsed; at National Review, Ramesh Ponnoru was an early adopter and advocate.

Update 1/10/2012: Worthwhile Canadian Initiative has the easiest-to-understand explanation of why inflation targeting has failed -- and why "level" NGDP-targeting would succeed -- that I've seen so far.

^* I've just this moment Googled a line from Brad DeLong saying 1% is the new 2%.

“Fair Test” Procedures for SAT Da

After my terrible SAT experience last Saturday, I decided to look into whether or not any official rules had been broken.

Turns out there is an official SAT rule guide, The SAT Standard Testing Room Manual, which I think is worth reading before you take an SAT (especially Section A, which is only 11 pages long).

From the first paragraph:

"The SAT Program has established policies and procedures to ensure that all students can test under a uniform set of conditions .... All students are to be protected from disturbance. By strictly following our policies and procedures, you give students the best guarantee of fair testing."

At the time, I felt intimidated to say something to the proctor because I wasn't sure if official "rules" were broken, or whether they were "courtesies" he was forgoing.

And if I had trouble speaking up, I'd imagine it would be even more difficult for a teenager to do so -- especially if he or she isn't even sure about the official rules.

I did speak to the proctor at the first break and told him that lopping off five minutes of our time mid-way through a Reading Section really threw me -- and he responded by saying, "it was the lesser of two evils," which did not leave me inclined to speak up again, when the noise disturbances from other kids who had finished the test in the same gym became so loud that they echoed for our last 4 sections.

Turns out this proctor was wrong.  It was not "the lesser of two evils" to cut off five minutes of our time, mid-section.   In fact there there is an official rule in the manual for this exact situation: "Overtiming: Make no adjustment."

That was just the beginning of the broken rules last Saturday.....

1) The "Visible Clock" Rule:

I have experienced this "visible clock" issue a few times over the course of the 6 SATs I've taken this year (5 different locations). But, "lack of visibility" last Saturday was the least of my problems.

Start with the fact that the proctor inexplicably wrote the time down in the middle of the the Essay Section (after telling us before we started that he had no chalk to do so) -- but he didn't write it in our time zone time -- because, as he later explained to me when I asked, the (non-visible) clock turned out not to be in ourtime zone.

Fine, except that it confused me to see "a time" (but not our time) suddenly appear on the blackboard without explanation.

Also, there were no "regular" time warnings, as mentioned above in the manual -- I'd say they were more sporadic in nature (i.e. "2 minutes," or nothing at all....)

2) Desk Size (Avoid having a "deskette" experience):

To be fair, my deskette last Saturday probably did meet this "official standard" -- but honestly, as a test taker, that's too small for an optimal SAT experience.  12" by 15" holds ONE 8 x 11 test booklet  -- except that there are TWO booklets that need holding when you take the SAT (plus your calculator for math sections, and pencils).

Lack of proper desk space adds a juggle variable to the SAT experience that is distracting, time consuming, stressful, and noisy.  Try to find an SAT location with full desks.

3) Adult Test Takers:

I've experienced "assigned seating" once out of 6 SATs, and the fact of the matter is that I was assigned the front and center seat.  Not sure if that was a coincidence.

4) Timing and Breaks:

I believe this rule was carefully followed at every other SAT that I took this year, which is how I ended up lulled into complacency last Saturday.  I had grown toexpect this rule to be followed, and when it wasn't (starting in Section 3), I was thrown for such a loop I had trouble recovering.  Or maybe I was thrown off when the time mysteriously appeared on the board in a different time zone.  I don't know.  Either way, this "Timing Policy" wasn't followed and it affected me.

5) Reporting Irregularities:

I have no idea whether or not our proctor reported the "timing irregularities" that day.

6) Student Complaints: 

I'm not "a student," but I did have many of these same complaints.

I could continue on with these screen shots of broken rules from last weekend, but instead I'll reiterate that any SAT test taker should read pages 1-11 of  The SAT Standard Testing Room Manual before test day.

Cross Posted on Perfect Score Project

Does anyone want a STEM career anymore?

As the self-described 99% show the country what a wasteland a liberal arts education is, the current administration says STEM careers will transform (or is it save) America. But there's been a number of articles in the last few days about why American students today aren't choosing STEM careers.
in today's WSJ, Generation Jobless: Students Pick Easier Majors Despite Less Pay, the article opens with this:

Biyan Zhou wanted to major in engineering. Her mother and her academic adviser also wanted her to major in it, given the apparent career opportunities for engineers in a tough job market. But during her sophomore year at Carnegie Mellon University, Ms. Zhou switched her major from electrical and computer engineering to a double major in psychology and policy management. Workers who majored in psychology have median earnings that are $38,000 below those of computer engineering majors, according to an analysis of U.S. Census data by Georgetown University.

"My ability level was just not there," says Ms. Zhou of her decision. She now plans to look for jobs in public relations or human resources.

The NYT had this article, "Why Science Majors Change Their Minds (It’s Just So Darn Hard)" (pointed out by Glen a few days ago.)
it states:

Studies have found that roughly 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree. That increases to as much as 60 percent when pre-medical students, who typically have the strongest SAT scores and high school science preparation, are included, according to new data from the University of California at Los Angeles. That is twice the combined attrition rate of all other majors.

Why the attrition? Some are the usual suspects: from the WSJ piece again:

For 22-year-old Ms. Zhou, from Miami, the last straw was a project for one of her second-year courses that kept her and her partner in the lab well past midnight for several days. Their task was to program a soda machine. Though she and her partner managed to make it dispense the right items, they couldn't get it to give the correct change.

Such unpreparedness in part explains this (from NYT piece): "Ben Ost, a doctoral student at Cornell, found in a similar study that STEM students are both “pulled away” by high grades in their courses in other fields and “pushed out” by lower grades in their majors." But so does the burnout factor from the death march through calculus, as illustrated by "MATTHEW MONIZ bailed out of engineering at Notre Dame in the fall of his sophomore year...He had scored an 800 in math on the SAT and in the 700s in both reading and writing. He also had taken Calculus BC and five other Advanced Placement courses at a prep school in Washington, D.C., and had long planned to major in engineering....But as Mr. Moniz sat in his mechanics class in 2009, he realized he had already had enough. “I was trying to memorize equations, and engineering’s all about the application, which they really didn’t teach too well,” he says. “It was just like, ‘Do these practice problems, then you’re on your own.’

They quote Mitchell J. Chang, an education professor at U.C.L.A. who says it isn't just weak K-12 prep that causes this washout.

"You’d like to think that since these institutions are getting the best students, the students who go there would have the best chances to succeed,” he says. “But if you take two students who have the same high school grade-point average and SAT scores, and you put one in a highly selective school like Berkeley and the other in a school with lower average scores like Cal State, that Berkeley student is at least 13 percent less likely than the one at Cal State to finish a STEM degree.”

His argument seems to be that the kids at Cal are better prepared than the kids at CSU, so more of them should succeed, if the issue was really k-12 prep. I don't think that gets to the heart of the prep matter though. The kids at Cal, Notre Dame and the like are Used to Succeeding, and they aren't succeeding. This is a huge blow to them, at the same time that the intro courses are often seen as the drudgework to get to the electives, a point made in the NYT article. It feels better to get As in psych than B-s in EE.

Continuing,

Some new students do not have a good feel for how deeply technical engineering is. Other bright students may have breezed through high school without developing disciplined habits. By contrast, students in China and India focus relentlessly on math and science from an early age.

“We’re in a worldwide competition, and we’ve got to retain as many of our students as we can,” Dean Kilpatrick says. “But we’re not doing kids a favor if we’re not teaching them good life and study skills.

So many fall off. And what about the ones who make it?

You work harder for lower grades than your peers, and the payoff is either a) a career path where your employer is constantly lobbying the govt to drive down your pay by increasing immigration, or b) a career path where you front load all of your risk onto a low probability lottery ticket to the world of academia just as the higher ed bubble is bursting.

Not depressing enough? Read Arnold Kling's "What If Middle-Class Jobs Disappear?" Kling suggests high unemployment now is structural, coming from a new phase of an economic transition away from plentiful high paying white collar jobs, just as prior restructuring moved away from plentiful high paying blue collar jobs.

Using the latest Census Bureau data, Matthew Slaughter found that from 2000 to 2010 the real earnings of college graduates (with no advanced degree) fell by more in percentage terms than the earnings of high school graduates. In fact, over this period the only education category to show an increase in earnings was those with advanced degrees.
The outlook for mid-skill jobs would not appear to be bright. Communication technology and computer intelligence continue to improve, putting more occupations at risk.

For example, many people earn a living as drivers, including trucks and taxicabs. However, the age of driver-less vehicles appears to be moving closer.

Another example is in the field of education. In the fall of 2011, an experiment with an online course in artificial intelligence conducted by two Stanford professors drew tens of thousands of registrants. This increases the student-teacher ratio by a factor of close to a thousand. Imagine the number of teaching jobs that might be eliminated if this could be done for calculus, economics, chemistry, and so on.

So much for that lottery ticket to academia...but what about the private sector? Kling says:

...the main work consists of destroying someone else's job. Garett Jones has pointed out that the typical worker today does not produce widgets but instead builds organizational capital. The problem is that building organizational capital in one company serves to depreciate the organizational capital somewhere else. Blockbuster video adversely affected the capital of movie theaters, Netflix adversely affected the capital of Blockbuster, and the combination of faster Internet speeds and tablet devices may depreciate the organizational capital of Netflix.

The second challenge is the nature of the emerging skills mismatch. People who are self-directed and cognitively capable can keep adding to their advantages. People who lack those traits cannot simply be exhorted into obtaining them. The new jobs that emerge may not produce a middle class. Instead, if the trend documented by Autor for the period 1999-2007 were to continue, most of the new jobs would be low-end service jobs, for which competition will tend to keep wages low.

He goes on to posit some possible futures. He's not optimistic.

update: Kling link fixed. Thanks, ChemProf!

the other Chinese student

http://www.chinahush.com/2011/10/25/i-fought-for-18-years-to-have-a-cup-of-coffee-with-you/ (translation)

Here’s a question I pose for my white collar friends [in Shanghai]: what if I never graduated from middle school, and had become a migrant worker? Would you sit down for a cup of coffee with me at Starbucks? The answer, unequivocally, is that you wouldn’t

.

As you might know, college students from China's big cities (Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Wuhan...) apply to American colleges in a flood of high scores and intimidating talent, even socially. Typically, the quintessential undergraduate Chinese student I might meet at the University of Virginia might say, play Chopin and Debussy, have read Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, eat twenty-dollar sushi dinners daily, and in general, spend money outrageously, yet he or she will be well-read on the the ancient revered Four Classics as well as Harry Potter.

There are those who dress fobbishly, but there are many who dress with both a kind-of-unique yet canned style borrowed from the latest trends in Shanghai or Tokyo or something. Personally, the kids from Wuhan come closest to my hipster sense of aesthetics, but the kids from Shanghai are far too materialistic, accentuate their class differences, and generally snub me. (And in my experience, Chinese parents from Shanghai are the prim-and-proper quantitative finance type who would only pursue an art for its social prestige and not for its own sake. But I am only stereotyping to represent the breadth and diversity of applicants.)

Yet despite all this progress, 900 million people in the rural provinces have been left in the dust. The opposite of affirmative action exists in China: not only are the rural primary and secondary schools of horrible quality, constantly understaffed and undersupplied, and rural students less likely to afford the piano lessons and the tutoring and art lessons that a kid in Shanghai might enjoy throughout his childhood -- when applying to college, a kid who somehow comes out on par with the those in the cities will still face discrimination on the sole fact that he comes from the provinces. Imagine that if China used the SAT, a promising kid from the provinces would need a score of 2250 to be placed over an average city resident with a score of 1850, despite the fact that the provinces' own averages are much lower.

In such a case, I wouldn't mind if our financial aid system granted some of these exceptional rural students a chance to enter the University, perhaps replacing just a handful (out of dozens) of the somewhat-conceited Shanghai students that the University might admit each year (yes just for Shanghai only, out of the thousands of students from China that apply to our school). Students from Shanghai, if rejected from our University, can go to some other college to make their future; the bright rural students that can't get admitted into college in their own country are stuck with nowhere else to go. Such a move would be Jeffersonian, after all.

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.

SAT math is tricky at all score levels

re: the a in f(x) = a - x² (question below), which appears in the College Board's Online SAT Test 5 and is designated "medium difficulty"

I should have made clear in the post I wrote about the post Debbie wrote^* that this question is not "tricky" for me. This question is easy for me, and the fact that this question is easy for me tells you nothing about whether I have mastery of quadratic equations and their graphical representations. At this point, I do not.

This question is easy for me because I have some basic understanding of shifts, because I have memorized the rules about shifts listed in all of the SAT test prep books (and most notably in Phillip Keller's book), and because I see the intended trick of the question the minute I look at it.

The fact that this question is easy for me probably does tell you I am pushing 700 on SAT math, which I am. I scored 680 on the real test, putting me at the 90th percentile for all test-takers; on sample sections my range is well into the 700s. I don't know the exact percentage of test-takers in the 90th percentile who get this question right and find it easy, but it's going to be very high. The top 10% of test takers is the group for whom this question is not tricky.

This question is tricky for test-takers scoring in the 500s, and the College Board knows it. They tell us they know it; they're not keeping it a secret. When the College Board assigns a "Medium" level of difficulty to an item, they are telling us that x number of kids scoring in the 500s will reliably get the question wrong, and x number of kids scoring in the 500s will reliably get the question right. That is the meaning of the words "medium level difficulty."

Kids scoring in the 500s are the ones you can depend upon to see a in f(x) = a - x² and think, in a certain percentage of cases, a-the-coefficient-of-x^2-in-ax²+bx+c=0. Those are the kids getting tripped up by this question.

Test-takers scoring in the mid-500s do not have mastery of quadratic equations and their graphical representations, and neither they nor anyone else is claiming they do. So when a designated percentage of kids scoring in the 500s get this question wrong, we learn nothing about them we did not already know. By the same token, when a designated percentage of kids scoring in the 500s get this question right, we also learn nothing about them. As a general rule, 500-scoring kids do not have mastery of quadratic equations and their graphical representations. I think that is a safe assumption to make.

Ditto for me. When I easily get this question right -- and, again, I stress the word easily -- no one knows anything about my level of mastery of quadratic equations and their graphical representations. I do not have mastery at present, yet for me this question is so easy it's a gimme. In Steve H's words,  I have (near)-mastery of the test, not the math.

So why is this question -- or, rather, questions just like it^**-- on the test?

Questions like this are on the test because they have appeared in the experimental sections of previously-administered SAT tests and have been found to reliably produce a certain level of error. The College Board needs test items that produce reliable levels of test-taker error in order to keep raw scores stable from test to test. They can't have everyone getting all the questions right; they can't have everyone getting all the questions wrong; and, in the big, mooshy middle, they need items that reliably produce a certain percentage of right and wrong answers.

Hence the a-question.

^* this is the mouse that lived in the house...
^** I don't know whether items in Online Course have been tested in Experimental sections. As I understand it, all items in the tests actually administered to real test-takers have indeed been tested in experimental sections taken by other test-takers.

the essay

C. was talking to his friend J. about their writing scores on the SAT.

After he hung up, he said, "I can't believe J. wrote the stupidest essay I've ever heard of and got a 9."

J.'s essay was about his family having to steal food in order to eat. Never happened.

"How come he wrote that?" I said.

"He spent too much time on the introduction and couldn't think of anything else to say."

Last year my neighbor's son got an 8 on an essay about why the essay question was stupid.