Have I mentioned I don't like policy elites?

I opened up my NY Times app the other morning to discover this opinion from Richard V. Reeves, fellow in Economic Studies and policy director for the Center on Children and Families at Brookings:

"Let" affluent children fail is a thinkable public policy goal?

At Brookings?

The logic shoots off in all kinds of horrifying directions. E.g.: granting for the sake of argument that letting affluent children fail is a good thing, wouldn't giving them a little push off the cliff be even better?

(And how much should we pay suburban teachers for that service?)

Uggh.

I haven't been able to bring myself to read the column, especially after spotting this line:

"It is a stubborn mathematical fact that the top fifth of the income distribution can accommodate only 20 percent of the population."

Twenty percent is 20%, so the "bottom" 80%, a supermajority of the population, is forevermore locked into the bottom 80% unless we "let" affluent children "fail."

By that reasoning, whenever a child grows up in the top 20% and then, as an adult, descends to the top 21%, that child has "failed."

I skimmed long enough to spot the term "opportunity hoarding" and to discover that it originates with Charles Tilly, with whom I think Ed and I had dinner in Los Angeles years ago. I remember liking Professor Tilly immensely, assuming our dinner companion was in fact Charles Tilly; Ed doesn't remember. On the other hand, Ed did know Tilly, so I think it was Tilly.

Anyway, on the strength of one nonverifiable memory of a fabulous evening with Charles Tilly, I have decided that if I want to know more about opportunity hoarding, and I may want to know more about opportunity hoarding, I will go directly to the source and bypass Brookings.

In the meantime, I am now sufficiently well-versed in macroeconomics to know that the answer both to twenty percent being twenty percent and opportunity hoarding is a roaring economy and a weaker dollar.

Today's factoid: our strong-dollar policy apparently originated with Robert Rubin.

Another member of the policy elite.

Information isn't knowledge

re: Ignorance is Blitz: Mangled Moments of History From Actual College Students, Education World reports:

[Henriksson] hastens to add, however, that the book is not a criticism of teachers. Society's interest in what is current tends to eclipse attempts to focus on history. "We are bombarded with an array of material, and it is hard for kids to sort out what's important and what's not. We are losing our common body of knowledge. Teachers are battling uphill against an information revolution that devalues the past."

Still, Henriksson, who teaches a world history survey course taken mostly by college freshmen, points out that many students lack the most basic historical and geographical background. At the beginning of a recent term, he says, he distributed a series of basic history and geography questions to 80 of his students. The majority did not know that Dublin is in Ireland. "Either they never absorbed what they were taught, or they were never exposed to it," Henriksson said.

Some students confuse periods of history in their essays, Henriksson notes, citing the following example from the book: "Wars fought in the 1950s and after include the Crimean War, Vietnam, and the Six-Minute War. President Eisenhower resorted to the bully pool pit. John F. Kennedy worked closely with the Russians to solve the Canadian Missile Crisis."

Some students are simply confused, however, including the one who claimed, "Judyism had one big God, named 'Yahoo.'"

Based on his own experience, Henriksson says, the following general understandings represent the basic accurate historical knowledge one can assume of U.S. college students:

• At some point "in the distant past," the United States fought a war of independence against a major European or Asian power.
• George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and Richard Nixon were presidents of the United States. Washington was the first president and Lincoln was in office a long time ago.
• The United States still suffers from the legacy of slavery, whenever that occurred.
• The Civil War, which took place sometime between 1750 and 1930, had something to do with slavery.
• Adolf Hitler, "a foreigner of some kind," was a bad person.
• There was at least one world war but not more than three.

On the subject of common knowledge, I'm pretty sure I have only one student who knew what an adjective was when the semester began.

How to study

Look what I just found!

Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology by John Dunlosky1, Katherine A. Rawson1, Elizabeth J. Marsh2, Mitchell J. Nathan3, and Daniel T. Willingham4

Now I need to drop everything & spend the next two days a) reading "Improving Students' Learning" and b) employing "Effective Learning Techniques" so I can remember how to Improve Students' Learning....which is sounding a bit circular as I write.

I'll get to that as soon as I finish annotating Tony Wagner's 2008 "Rigor Redefined," which our new $400K superintendent distributed to the board of ed last week.

The board is now deciding the future direction of the district, so naturally it's time to roll out a vintage piece of warmed-over, pre-crash Tony Wagner:

Daniel Pink, the author of A Whole New Mind, observes that with increasing abundance, people want unique products and services: “For businesses it's no longer enough to create a product that's reasonably priced and adequately functional. It must also be beautiful, unique, and meaningful.”1

Remember those days? The days when "increasing abundance" could simply be assumed?

That was then.

Have I mentioned lately that I am not a fan of credentialism? (and Word is not for writers)

Edel went to a college in Pennsylvania and Melinda to one in New York. Both have undergraduate degrees in elementary education, yet they both recalled how lost they felt when they first stood in front of a classroom. They hadn’t done nearly enough student teaching, they felt, and, in any case, the student teaching they had done hadn’t prepared them to deal with issues, as Edel put it, “like poverty, drugs, crime, and hunger” that she was seeing on a daily basis.

In desperation, Edel sent a note to one of her college professors asking for help. (He gave her a few pointers.) Melinda recalls thinking that even the most basic elements of her job — classroom management, organization, lesson planning — were things she had to figure out on her own, after she had begun teaching. When I asked them what they had learned in college, they shouted in unison: theory! (Denise went on to get a master’s degree in education, which she laughingly described as “not exactly hands-on.”)

Three Sisters (Not Chekhov's) by Joe Nocera | NY Times | Published: September 27, 2013

Speaking of classroom management, organization, and lesson planning, I am trying to figure out how to make my computer act like Google.

Katie Beals told me, a while back, that computers were not designed with writers in mind, and that is soooooo true. I have dozens of copies of exercises, lessons, class readings, handouts, fables, folktales, fairy tales, myths, etc. scattered all over my hard drive, and I can't tell which ones it's safe to throw out because I can't tell which copies really are identical copies and which are different.

Of late, I have taken to dating every single thing I write, create, or duplicate (making duplicates is the real problem)....but that doesn't work, either, because duplication produces multiple copies with the same date in the filename, which doesn't help.

Word does tell me, in the Finder window, which of several documents I opened most recently, BUT if I forget to read the date and open the document without thinking -- which I inevitably do--the history is gone.

I need my computer to do its own personal Google search.

I need it to go find every single copy of a document AND every single near-copy of a document (and I'd like it to find things it thinks may be related to the documents I'm looking for).

Then I need my computer (this part is nothing like Google) to tell me which copies are exactly the same, which ones are not the same, what exactly is different among the four or five copies of the same file, and when I last revised what.

I've tried to develop a habit of including a "Last Revised" notation inside every document I create, but I create hundreds and hundreds of tiny documents -- exercises and lessons and brief passages for my class -- and at any one time I'm juggling so many of them that I have not become a person who automatically and without having to think about it includes a "Last Revised" line in every document.

I will keep trying, but why should I have to become that person, anyway?

Word could easily enter a "Last Revised" line in every document I create, so why doesn't it?

As far as I can tell, Word was created for students, not teachers.

Students and student types.

Word was created for people who were going to write something ONCE, put it out there, then never look at it again.

Word was not created for people who write something once, then revise it after class, then re-revise it one year later, then re-re-revise it after that class, then re-re-re-revise it one year after that, etc.

It's a problem.

Skunk at the party

From Grammar Alive! A Guide for Teachers By Brock Haussamen with Amy Benjamin, Martha Kolln, Rebecca S. Wheeler, and members of NCTE's Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar:

A Broken Subject

At the start of this new millennium, throughout much of the K-12 English curriculum, grammar is a broken subject. If you find yourself just not knowing what to do about grammar-how to teach it, how to apply it, how to learn what you yourself were never taught-you are not alone. Grammar is often ignored, broken off altogether from the teaching of literature, rhetoric, drama, composition, and creative writing. Grammar is the skunk at the garden party of the language arts. Perhaps you've set aside time for labeling parts of speech, correcting errors, and modeling effective use of punctuation, but you may feel unmoored: you wonder whether the grammar you learned in school (what little there may have been) is sufficient or if the methods you learned by are up-to-date. And you certainly wouldn't be alone if you were embarrassed to reveal to your colleagues all that you don't know about grammar. Grammar feels like a frowning pedant reproaching you for not knowing enough about subject-verb agreement, for blithely ending sentences with prepositions, for splitting infinitives without even understanding what that means, for promiscuous use of commas and flagrant case violations. And, even if you speak and write with a confident tongue and well-schooled hand, you may tremble at the thought of trying to get your students to write complete sentences.

This is a remarkable passage.

It takes as a given the fact that English teachers know nothing about grammar. Worse, not only do English teachers know nothing about grammar consciously, they (apparently) know little about grammar unconsciously (procedurally), either. Their own writing is distinguished by "promiscuous" use of commas and "flagrant" case violations.

Why are these people paid to teach writing?

You are not alone. The obstacles to revitalizing the teaching of grammar are several. One is that our profession has lost sight of the connection between studying grammar and learning to read and write. As Robert J. Connors recounted in "The Erasure of the Sentence," our interest in analyzing sentences has faded since the 1970s. Today it is the process of writing, along with originality, authenticity, and personal writing, that we value. The change has left sentence-level work--even such proven approaches as sentence combining-in shadow. We're not comfortable encouraging students to be original and authentic one minute and then assigning them exercises in sentence structure the next. Many English departments, and highly respected English teachers, argue forcefully that sentence-level work is mechanical, behavioristic, antihumanistic, and, most scorn-worthy of all, boring.

I'm sorry.

An English teacher who has no interest in analyzing sentences is not an English teacher.

Writers write sentences. That's what writing is: it's writers writing sentences. The raw material of writing is the sentence, and a sentence is an essay in miniature.

The structure of every sentence is a lesson in logic.
John Stuart Mill (1773-1836)

The essential structure of the ordinary [English] sentence...is a noble thing.
Winston Churchill

Extracurricular hours per week

It's application time. Not only is there the Common App, but some colleges have their own app systems. My son also has a couple of other online apps (with essays) to fill out and we haven't even gotten to the scholarship season. The question for today is what to do about things like hours per week for activities. When you talk about a sport, people know that it's seasonal. Then again, some do three or four season soccer. My son does music year-round, and in the summer at camp, he could claim that it's 8 hours or more a day what with classes and practicing. If I convert this into a year-round weekly average, one might think that his hours are padded. This must also be an issue for sports kids and their summer camps. Do admissions people have red flag indicators on hours per week? Are their unwritten rules about how this number should be calculated? How about travel time to lessons or events?

Then there is the limited space for explaining extracurriculars and positions/awards. They want to make a holistic judgment about an applicant, but they give you extremely limited space to make your case. I know they don't want to see all sorts of fluff, but not only do they limit the number of activities you can enter, they give you almost no space to explain anything about the important ones.

Does anyone have any advice about this? Do you look for options to add in additional clarifying information? It seems that in their efforts to standardize format and to limit application thickness, they are missing critical information for their holistic decision. Essays are another whole topic. They were going over potential essay topics in my son's AP English class and one student talked about (the ideal place essay) how he wanted to talk about mowing the lawn. The teacher thought that was a good idea. Essays remind me of docudramas; heavy on the drama and light on the docu.

GPA and the Numbers Game

I went to a meeting at our school the other night where they said that they were changing from an unweighted GPA to a weighted GPA. Although our school calculates a class rank based on weighting courses, it's not in a typical GPA format. Actually, it's more accurate because it doesn't use buckets. However, many colleges look at whatever GPA is shown on the transcript and an unweighted GPA based on 4.0 rarely looks good against a weighted GPA based on a maximum of 5. An admissions person from our state university gave an example of how the head of admissions once said that he was "not comfortable" with someone's GPA even though he should have known it was unweighted. I was surprised to learn that many colleges value GPA, but don't bother (probably a money issue) to calculate their own even though they know there is no national standard even for weighting. It's also interesting that some people can make bad holistic decisions.

They said that across the nation, many colleges are ignoring class rank even if it is adjusted for class size. If the class rank is the only thing that reflects the difficulty of the courses taken, it will be ignored and the college may just look at the unweighted GPA. So much for holistic consideration. The admissions person said that one might get rejected in the first cut and never get to any sort of holistic evaluation. And even in the holistic process, your numbers can help or hurt. So the goal is to maximize your numbers to get into the highest holistic academic/EC bucket you can.

One formula is the Academic Index used by Ivy League colleges. Apparently, it dropped its rank portion (dependent on class size) and added in one based on GPA, although it requires recalculating the GPA into a standard form.

Academic Index

There is also this, which gives a spreadsheet calculator.

AI Calculator

Although AI was developed for athletes, they calculate it for all students.

The first part is based on your SAT scores, the second part is based on your SAT II scores, and the third part is based on your GPA. The link above talks about a GPA table supplied to the eight universities, but it doesn't explain how the GPA is calculated. It appears to use a weighted scale where the top score is 4.3. I haven't found out how this number is calculated. The spreadsheet then proceeds to choose the higher score associated with each of the two GPA numbers. It's always struck me that the SAT scores make up two-thirds of this index. Colleges might include a fudge factor if they know something about a high school, but no option for that shows up in the example spreadsheet.

The problem with rank is that you can't correct for it based on whether it uses weighted or unweighted GPA. Recalculating the GPA is good because it isolates the variable of grades. Some colleges are calculating unweighted GPAs using just the core academic courses. Then they can provide a factor for how much you challenged yourself given what your high school has to offer. Then they can correct again if they know something about the difficulty of your high school. At our meeting, they repeated the nugget that "it's best to get A's in AP classes." My nuanced view is that it's best to have the highest unweighted GPA while still looking like you are challenging yourself. Colleges want 'A' students. It's better to have them think you could have challenged yourself more rather than to do so, but slip.

Why nobody knows how to teach writing

"How Student Writers Develop: Rhetoric, Psychoanalysis, Ethics, Erotics" by T.R. Johnson

What are the odds an article with this title will provide an adjunct teaching freshman composition  substantial help teaching students where to put periods and where to put commas?

I'm starting a prediction market.

Happy Anniversary

BEFORE:

The US economy in 2000 had really, really full employment — it was an era when labor was so scarce that McDonald’s was actively trying to recruit senior citizens, when the joke was that you could get a job as long as your breath would fog a mirror, that is, as long as you were actually alive.
Slackers at the Fed

5 YEARS AGO TODAY:

• 9/12/2008 Lehman and Its Staff Await Next Step
  
• 9/13/2008 Wall St. Goliath Teeters Amid Fear of Wider Crisis
• 9/14/2008 Leading Plan for Rescue Would Split Up Lehman
• 9/14/2008 Jittery Road Ahead
• 9/15/2008 Stunning Fall Stunning Fall for Main Street's Brokerage Firm
• 9/15/2008 Wall Street's Turmoil Sends Stocks Reeling

AFTER:

Like so many young Americans, Derek Wetherell is stuck.

At 23 years old, he has a job, but not a career, and little prospect for advancement. He has tens of thousands of dollars in student debt, but no college degree. He says he is more likely to move back in with his parents than to buy a home, and he doesn't know what he will do if his car—a 2001 Chrysler Sebring with well over 100,000 miles—breaks down.

"I'm kind of spinning my wheels," Mr. Wetherell says. "We can wishfully think that eventually it's going to get better, but we don't really know, and that doesn't really help us now."

Mr. Wetherell is a member of a lost generation, a group that is only now beginning to gain attention of many economists and employment experts. From Oakland to Orlando—and across the ocean in Birmingham and Barcelona—young people have come of age amid the most prolonged period of economic distress since the Great Depression.

Most, like Mr. Wetherell, have little memory of the financial crisis itself, which struck while they were still in high school. But they are all too familiar with its aftermath: the crippling recession, which made it all but impossible for many young people to get a first foothold in the job market, and the achingly slow recovery that has left the prosperity of their parents' generation out of reach—perhaps.

"This has been for quite a while now a hostile environment for young people," said Paul Taylor, executive vice president of the Pew Research Center, which has studied the impact of the recession on young people. "This is all they've really known."

The financial crisis that struck five years ago this month opened up a sinkhole in the U.S. economy that swallowed Americans of all ages and backgrounds. Retirees lost life savings. Families lost homes. Millions of Americans lost their jobs.

Wanted: Jobs for the New 'Lost' Generation By BEN CASSELMAN and MARCUS WALKER
Five years after the 2008 crisis, younger adults still struggle to find work | Updated September 14, 2013, 4:26 p.m. ET

Employment-Population Ratio Ages 25-54
Data extracted on: September 15, 2013 (5:46:00 PM)

Ed says he remembers McDonald's recruiting seniors and, come to think of it, I have a vague memory of McDonald's scrambling to find workers, too. I certainly recall jokes about elderly greeters at Walmart. In fact, I recall the elderly greeters themselves.

Most of all, though, I remember reading scores of articles expressing panic over the coming mass retirement of baby boomers -- not because baby boomers would be so expensive to support but because who would replace them?

That was the horror story circa 2000.

Where will we find people to fill all the jobs?

Last spring Ed ran into an an Irvington parent who complained that the high school was still telling students SAT scores don't matter. She told Ed that when she graduated from college, with a B.A. in English, I believe, she got a good job on Wall Street "walking in off the street." No M.B.A., no training, no experience of any kind. She was alive, she was intelligent, she had a college degree, so--bam--she had a job. A good one.

That's the way things work in a thriving economy.

AND SEE:
How a Market Crisis Unfolded

Grammar MOOC starting Wednesday

Grammar bytes, aka Chomp Chomp, is one of my favorite grammar sites. The grammar explained is traditional, but the presentations and examples are clear and effective. Plus the site is friendly without being jaunty. I hate jaunty.

My only complaint about Grammar bytes is the loud, sudden, and delayed chomping sound that startles me out of my wits every time I hear it. Those of you with outsized startle responses, consider yourselves warned.

Robin Simmons, the creator of the site, is offering a MOOC starting Wednesday September 18.

I'm signing up.

just let me staple the vicar...

I am going to try to get back on track here any minute now....but, in the meantime, and via Language Log, here is Peter Kay.

Glossary of Computer and Internet Terms for Older Adults

I've just this moment stumbled across a Glossary of Computer and Internet Terms for Older Adults, and I'm chuckling.

Judging by the Computer and Internet Terms they don't know, Older Adults have got it made in the shade. They are the last non-plugged-in humans on the planet, or at least the Western hemisphere.

In the world of the Older Adult, there is no Computer and internet addiction.

No obsessive gaming.

No Internet Blocking Productivity Software.

No glimmer of the possibility that surfing the internet is actually addictive!

Nope.

For the Older Adult, "surf the internet" is merely a term that needs defining:

Surf the Net:
To explore various websites on the Internet.

[pause]

Reading right along....(which is what happens to Older Adults who don't need a Glossary to tell them what Surfing the net means), I find myself partial to the definition of "Clicking":

Clicking
Pressing and releasing a button on a mouse to select or activate the area on the screen where the cursor is pointing. Usually, you click on the left side of the mouse (called a left click). For more advanced functions, you click on the right side of the mouse (called a right click).

The secret

Premack gave a group of rats free access to drinking water and a running wheel (Premack, 1959). He recorded their behavior across several minutes. Initially (at baseline), each rat spent some time drinking and some time running, but on average rats spent more time running than drinking: about 250 seconds running and only about 50 seconds drinking. Then, Premack restricted the rats’ access to the wheel: they were allowed to run only after they had drunk a certain amount of water. The rats soon learned the contingency and started drinking water in order to gain access to the running wheel. Unsurprisingly, the total amount of running decreased, because the rats now had to work to obtain access to the wheel. But the total amount of drinking increased to more than 100 seconds, as the rats now performed this behavior more often in order to gain access to the wheel. In effect, the activity of running was acting as a reinforce, and it was increasing the probability of an otherwise infrequent behavior, drinking:

S (running restricted) → R (drinking) → C (access to wheel)

Premack went on to show a similar pattern in human children (Premack, 1959). He put the children in a room that contained a pinball machine and a bowl of candy, and he recorded how much time each child spent playing pinball and eating candy. Some of the children spent more time playing pinball. Premack then restricted access to the pinball machine, allowing these children to play only after they had eaten some candy. Candy eating increased, showing that access to the preferred activity (pinball) could reinforce the less-preferred activity (candy eating). Conversely, children who preferred eating candy in the first place could be trained to play more pinball, by making access to the candy contingent on playing pinball.

Thus, in both rats and children, the opportunity to perform a highly frequent behavior can reinforce a less-frequent behavior. This idea came to be known as the Premack principle. Examples of the Premack principle abound in human life. For example, left to their own devices, most children will spend more time watching television than doing their homework. Thus, watching television is a preferred activity, and it can be used to reinforce the less-preferred activity of homework. The parent restricts television time, making it contingent on homework. As a consequence, the child spends more time doing homework than he would have done if television had not been restricted. A later extension of the Premack principle, the response deprivation hypothesis, suggests that the critical variable is not which response is normally more frequent but merely which response has been restricted: by restricting the ability to execute almost any response, you can make the opportunity to perform that response reinforcing (Allison, 1993; Timberlake & Allison, 1974). For example, perhaps you have a chore, like cleaning your room or doing laundry, that you normally detest. But if access to this activity is restricted, it can become reinforcing. If you have been studying for several hours straight, the idea of “taking a break” to clean your room or do the laundry could begin to look downright attractive. If so, you’ve experienced the Premack principle at work.

Learning and Memory: From Brain to Behavior New York: Worth Publishers, 2007
Mark Gluck
Eduardo Mercado
Catherine Myers
p316-317

Read the whole thing....

I am violating my brand-new All-Premack-all-the-time Principle to put up this post first thing in the morning instead of second thing:

One Classroom, Two Genders
By JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN

There are two surprises: one in the middle, one at the end.

The middle one was especially fun for me because I'd read the whole first column thinking, "Really?"

The twist in the middle explained my astonishment.

Read the whole thing because.....the last line is fabulous. Especially for readers of ktm, I think.

postscript: I remember writing lots of posts on the subject of "the girl show."

I wonder if any of you remember the time our middle school principal -- Chris was in the 6th grade -- told us: "Everyone knows boys do worse in middle school."

Direct quote.

Emotional Intelligence brings empathy!

This shocking discovery was worthy of a headline in last week's New Haven Register.

Within the article, one finds pronouncements that are similarly astounding:

Emotional intelligence plays a part in a variety of human interactions.

and:

“Emotions are fundamental to who we are as humans. If we don’t have emotions, we can’t do our work, we can’t make decisions, we can’t have relationships.”

The person quoted here is Susan Rivers, deputy director of the Center for Emotional Intelligence at Yale University. As the article's lede explains: "Emotional intelligence is in the ascendancy at Yale University."

Yale, the same Ivy League institution that designed a new test that measures creative and practical skills and proposed it as a placement for the SATs, has recently jumped on the decades-old emotional intelligence bandwagon. This fall, it will officially open its emotional intelligence center. As the article reports:

The center, already operational, recently held its biggest training session to date, with educators from more than 50 schools across the country. They join 75,000 school leaders from more than 500 schools worldwide who also have had the training.

What exactly does the training consist of? It's hard to tell. In the words of director Marc Brackett:

“It isn’t a kit you can buy. It’s an approach. We are teaching the teachers and the kids. Some people call these 21st-century skills."

As the Register explains:

The training is known specifically as the RULER approach. It stands for: recognizing emotions, understanding the causes and consequences of emotions, labeling the full range of feelings, expressing them appropriately and regulating them.

Despite the gigantic number of school leaders who have already "had the training," much of it has yet to be developed. Purportedly in the works are instructional videos, games, and online simulations that will, in the Register's words, "illustrate emotional intelligence."

First train people, then develop the training curriculum... what's the logical final step? Perhaps, after hundreds of thousands more people have been trained and hundreds more schools have signed on and millions of dollars have changed hands, the center will conduct an efficacy study.

The ultimate goal? In the words of director Marc Brackett: "making Connecticut an emotionally intelligent state — one district at a time." How could anyone argue with that?

As for Yale itself, presumably it will take the lead in making emotional intelligence the single most important criteria for college admissions. In fact, it's already moving in this direction--especially when it comes to homeschooled applicants. "Yale wants to make sure homeschooled kids are not socially awkward," Joanne Jacobs reports. She cites Yale's admissions website:

We look for evidence of social maturity from all our applicants and especially from home-schooled students. Your personal statement, interests and activities, and letters of recommendation should speak to your ability to integrate well with other students and tell us about your non-academic interests.

As a side note, when it comes to impositions on home schooled children, we find another Yale-connected educational power broker. This would be Yale alumnus David Coleman, former lead architect of the Common Core and current president of the College Board. Coleman has been working had to align the SATs with the Common Core--in ways that, as Paula Bolyard writes in a recent post on Pajamas Media, may pressure home schools to conform to what's going on everywhere else.

Now all we need is for the Common Core to broaden its standards enough to make emotional intelligence its Meta-Standard. After all, emotions are so fundamental to who we are that, if we don’t have them, we can’t make decisions and do our work. Let alone attain any of the Common Core Standards.

(Cross-posted at Out in Left Field).

Hello! and how Math Trailblazers saved my district

UPDATE 10/26/2013: Wrong again. Here and here.

Hi everyone -

Sorry to be sooooo absent. I got stuck in the middle of a math post the other night, and then got swallowed up by the new semester.

Will get back to the chart ASAP, but in the meantime, sneak preview:

After introducing timed worksheets two years ago, my district has some of the best math scores in Westchester County, a development that required a mere 10 (or was it 12?) years of sustained local Math War, annual Parent Uprisings, the creation of Kitchen Table Math and the Irvington Parents Forum (followed by threat of legal action issued by the union), and the election of two anti-Trailblazers members (here, too) to the Board of Ed. (Three now, counting last spring's election.)

All this to get Mad Minutes.

Turns out Mad Minutes is enough to raise student achievement. Through the magic of synchronicity, I happened to be re-reading my 72 pages of notes from Morningside Academy's Summer School Institute 2012 (I gave a short talk on precision teaching at my college!), where I found this:

Chief Joseph [a school in Montana] - they had no aims, no celeration aims, no peer coaching...they just had the kids practice computation (& some other things) - last 30 minutes of the day (worst time to ask kids to do anything) - real simple - use daily chart - timer on, timer off - use practice sheets & chart - by June the kids at the Chief Joseph school were now scoring at the 80th percentile while district kids were in low 60s - ITBS Chief Joseph School (Precision Teaching) Great Falls, Montana school district (comparison) THAT IMPROVEMENT was just from drill and kill at end of day

In other words, doing nothing but introducing timed worksheets works. Achievement goes up.

I wonder if we are the only district in Westchester County with Mad Minutes?

We may be.

Meanwhile Dobbs Ferry, next door, which adopted Singapore Math a few years ago, has an 8th-grade pass rate half ours (30% in Dobbs; 61% in Irvington). From what I gather, Dobbs has always been devoted to progressive education, to a degree Irvington has never been (again, as far as I can tell). I'm sure that accounts for it.

Dobbs hired a math coach who gives interviews to the local paper saying Singapore Math "isn't about finding the right answer" and is about extensive use of hands-on manipulatives. I remember being so horrified by the first story on Dobbs' adoption of Singapore Math that I wrote a letter to the editor. (Wonder if I can find that now....)

We've still got Math Trailblazers and we're killing them.

We don't want Math Trailblazers; parents have been protesting Trailblazers for years. The result: the administration & board dug in their heels, and we are today the last man standing: the very last district in all of Westchester still using Trailblazers. (Though in theory Trailblazers has been 'hybridized' with Singapore Math.... "Hybridizing" Math Trailblazers with Singapore Math is the kind of desperate measure administrators have been driven to.)

Thinking it over, I have to believe that Trailblazers is a major reason for the fact that my district now uses timed worksheets.

Parents hated Trailblazers so much that they stormed the ramparts every year, year in and year out; the issue never went away.

Usually the dogs bark and the caravan moves on, but not in this case. The dogs kept barking; there was no escape. So every year there was a scramble to fix Trailblazers until finally a part-time interim curriculum director (who had previously worked in Chappaqua, the one district far ahead of us) started talking about "automaticity" and brought in timed worksheets.

I used to always say: if you want to have parent uprisings every year, adopt Math Trailblazers.

Now I'm thinking: if you want timed worksheets, adopt Math Trailblazers and suffer through 10 years of parent uprisings.

Will get my chart finished & posted soon, I hope. Lots more to tell on various fronts.

I am lobbying now for timed worksheets in grammar, reading, and writing.

UPDATE 10/25/2013: Wrong again.

"That said", "in your best light", and "seriously"

My son just got a mailing from MIT that said:

"You shouldn't stress out too much about your scores, because we admit people, not numbers. Seriously. That said, tests are important, and you should prepare for them as best you can. If you take the same test (SAT, ACT, or an SAT Subject Test) multiple times, we will consider the highest score achieved in each section."

"too much"

"Seriously."

Then they say this on their web site:

Score Choice

"If you take the same test (SAT, ACT, or an SAT Subject Test) multiple times, we will consider the highest score achieved in each section. We do this in order to consider all applicants in their best light."

"For example, if you take the SAT Reasoning Test in 11th grade and score 750 math, 700 critical reading and 650 writing, and then take the SAT again in 12th grade and score 700 math, 650 critical reading and 700 writing, only your best scores from each sitting (i.e. 750 math, 700 critical reading and 700 writing) are used in our admissions calculations."

"Students are free to use the College Board's Score Choice option and the ACT's option to submit the scores of your choice."

Score Choice only allows one to send in the best scores from one sitting, but it sounds like MIT will supersize individual test scores. Also, the new Common App does not allow you to select Score Choice only for some schools, and many schools want to see all of your numbers. That's moot for MIT because they don't use the Common App.

In any case, I'm getting a mixed signal. My son did very well on his first and only SAT test. He should not bother to take the test again. "Seriously." Will he get kudos for that or should he take it again? He could get 60-90 more points (especially if the scores are supersized) and that would show him in his "best light" when all others are taking the test multiple times.

When admissions officers sit around talking about applications and holistic ideas come out of their mouths, are SAT scores floating around in their heads?

Letter from a friend

I love this letter from Debbie Stier to a friend of hers whose daughter has "started the SAT gauntlet." (Debbie never thinks of SAT prep as a "gauntlet," by the way. Not a gauntlet: that is a first principle of doing SAT prep with your child.)

My favorite part:

Vocabulary is the biggest part of the Critical Reading. The entire reading section (passages included) is a vocabulary based reasoning test; vocab is MORE than just those fill in those blank questions. The more vocab she knows (as in the "I can use it in a sentence and define it for you and tell you the 2nd and third def's" sort of way), the better.

The New York Times is a GREAT way to learn vocab IN CONTEXT. I've been reading the newspaper every morning with Daisy and we get at least 10 words per day that she can't define. We started with a half hour every morning and her mission was to find ONE article that she wanted to read in it's entirety and tell me about it and pick out a few vocab words.

She is now up to an hour and often reads 3-4 full articles and LOVES it.

She asks me vocabulary as we go along and I define the words and she writes them down with a little memory jogger. And as I read the paper next to her and I find words, I ask her the def's and she adds them to her list if she doesn't know them.

I'd say she's up to about 100 words now just from the NY times for the last 5 months.

Then, whenever doing anything (e.g. cleaning the kitchen, driving, etc.), I have her break out "the list" (it's handwritten plus on our phones), and she uses them in sentences and I tweak them for her.

This exercise will help with the speed of the reading passages too. A large part of the challenge in that section is the sophisticated vocabulary. They are college level reading passages (i.e. not what high schoolers are used to reading).

That's why the "as long as they read it doesn't matter WHAT they read" line of thought doesn't stand up in this context.

My other favorite part, from the P.S.:

3) Don't ask her, "Are there any words you don't know?" because she will say "No. I know them all." They all do. After she tells you the 1-2 words she thinks doesn't know, look through the article yourself and ask her words. You'll add another 3-4.

People don't know what they don't know -- especially teenagers.

4) If she rejects this whole idea at fist, ignore. They ALL say they don't want to do "SAT Work" -- especially with a parent. That will change very very quickly.

Beautiful!

These are great, too:

• Letter From a Friend
• The Curb Appeal of a Testing Location
• The One Thing You Should Know

Book is out in February!

35 lbs

Chris has lost 35 lbs.

35 lbs! Since June 6. Today is August 21, so that's 11 weeks.

I've lost weight, too, though I can't report how much since I haven't been weighing myself. At least 5 lbs, maybe more. Shorts that were too tight to wear at in June are loose now.

AND: I think I finally understand the Premack principle, which I'm certain is the basis of the VB6 diet we've both been following. VB6 is the first diet I've encountered that uses eating to reinforce not eating^* -- and it works, just as the principle predicts. I would never have guessed, even though I've been reading about the Premack principle for years. I wouldn't have guessed because until now I haven't understood the principle.

I am now thinking PP is the secret to life. (Unless response deprivation is the secret to life. Clearly I need a MOOC on radical behaviorism.)

I'll try to find time to explain tomorrow.


^* Or, more accurately, eating stuff you do like to reinforce eating stuff you don't like

Good News for Math Beasts

Good news to report! The Art of Problem Solving has released book 4A from its Beast Academy series and is hard at work at the rest of grade 4 and all of grade 5.