New Rochelle Math Department Chairman Struggles with Basic Calculations

In a school that claims to have achieved massive improvements in math test scores over the past two years, what to make of a school board presentation where the head of the math department is unable to perform even the most basic mathematical calculations?

A few days ago, I had the misfortune to attend a local school board meeting held at the Isaac E. Young Middle School in New Rochelle, NY.  I was there to speak on an entirely different matter but found myself in utter shock as speaker after speaker presented charts and tables and graphs where the information in their presentations directly contradicted what they were telling school board members.  The board asked just one question over two hours.

The low point was a sorry presentation by the head of the math department who was supposedly comparing the percentage of students scoring at or above expectations on a state math exam between 2006 and 2008.  According to this math genius, the growth from 2006 to 2008 showed a three year growth rate.  Apparently, eight minus six equals three in New Rochelle.  Even more pathetic was his inability to calculate that growth rate.  For example, for black and African-American students, 46% scored "at or above" in 2006; in 2008 that figure was 71%.  In New Rochelle you apparently calculate growth rate by subtracting 46 from 71 to get 25% growth instead of the old-fashioned way where growth is calculated by measuring growth from a base amount  or (71-46)/46 = 54% growth.

Based on his calculation of 25% growth over three years or about 8% a year, he told the board that while the growth rate was not as high as he would have liked, the good news is that the data showed "steady and sustainable growth".  Except that the data actually showed an annualized growth rate three times higher, a rate that is, by definition, unsustainable.

There is a lot more to say about New Rochelle but first I would like to thank Catherine Johnson for the opportunity to post here about the many problems parents are facing in New Rochelle, NY.  We certainly have the deck stacked against us in our effort to foster greater transparency within our school district so every little bit helped.

How bad are the problems?

Last year a white supervisor at the same middle schools hung a stuffed animal - a monkey - on a noose in the building.  One of the janitors, who is black, removed it and complained.  The result?  The supervisor hung up TWO MORE nooses to retaliate for taking down the first noose.  The initial response of the District was to reprimand the supervisor.  When the NAACP got involved the supervisor was suspended for three weeks.  How many places in the United States do you know where a supervisor could hang a stuffed monkey from a noose and keep their job?  The NAACP is now suing the District.

As an experienced blogger, I have often been approached by people in New Rochelle to help them start a community blog to shine a light in a city of close to 100,000 people with no local newspaper and therefore almost zero accountability by the press for local government and the local school board.  Over the summer I finally broke down and helped them create New Rochelle's Talk of the Sound (the city is located on Long Island Sound).  I am now helping them file Freedom of Information Law requests, source tips from inside the school district and otherwise shine a bright light on the people who run the local school system.  The first time I went to follow up on a tip - again at this same middle school - the District responded by sending two police detectives to my house based on the false claim they did not know me.

Insider Tip on Illegal Cigar Lounge at Isaac Young Middle School Provokes Armed Response from School District

Sadly, many are being duped by the highly questionable data in New Rochelle.  The State has named the school "improving", MetLife gave them an award and now, based primarily on this sort of data BusinessWeek ranked New Rochelle one of the best places to raise kids in the United States.  Now, I live her, have four kids and my wife works for the District.  I really WANT this to be true.  It isn't.

21st century or the real world: pick one

The mean literacy scores of all jobs projected to exist in the year 2005 were only 2 to 3 points above those prevailing in 1992. Unless the demand for professional, managerial, and technical workers increases at a rate faster than that projected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, or unless literacy requirements for existing jobs are substantially upgraded, there does not appear to be any serious literacy mismatch between the projected occupational job structure and the available work force in the early years of the 21st century.

Literacy in the Labor Force
National Adult Literacy Survey
September 1999
p. 266

I say we forget the 21st century skills and teach the liberal arts disciplines.

Of course, I suppose these projections could have changed since 1999. If so, that's all the more reason to forget about 21st century skills and teach the liberal arts disciplines.

pop quiz, part 2

Literacy Quiz

I scored 4 out of 7.

I would have scored 5, but I misread one of the questions. (Yes, that's ironic.)

Off the top of your head, what would you say the answer to this one is:

Albert Shanker, President of the American Federation of Teachers, is quoted as saying that what percentage of "the kids who go to college in the United States would not be admitted to college anywhere else in the world."?

pop quiz

an acronym I can live with

DISEC

direct
intensive
systematic
early
comprehensive

National Right to Read Foundation

Designing a High School

A parent group at the charter school my children attend in Colorado is investigating adding 10-12th grades. I volunteered to work on the curriculum committee even though I doubt my middle school sons will attend. In order to be approved by the district to extend the charter, the school must provide an education not available at other local schools so they are looking at a math & science focus.

State and district standards in math and science are pretty basic, trig concepts, bio, chem and physics. The high school would be added to a k-8 school with a core knowledge curriculum that also teaches Singapore Math and Latin. An overwhelming majority of the students are in Algebra by 8th grade. My 7th grader is in Algebra and there is at least one 8th grader taking differential equations at the community college. (FYI- This school uses New Elementary Math as a pre-algebra course)

The committee is set on requiring math through Calculus and the basics in science. We're wondering about what to add as required: engineering courses, advanced biological science courses or physical science courses?

Suppose you were given the opportunity to devise a math & science high school. What type of coursework would you require?

While we're busy developing 21st century skills...

U.S. colleges scour China for top students

BEIJING, Nov. 9 (UPI) -- Harvard, Stanford and other top U.S. colleges say they're actively recruiting China's best high school students and offering them full scholarships.

Recruiting the best Chinese students will help elite U.S.colleges maintain international dominance, especially in math and science, said William Fitzsimmons, Harvard's admissions dean.

"There are no quotas, no limits on the number of Chinese students we might take," Fitzsimmons told more than 300 students during a recent visit to a high school in Beijing.

Somehow I doubt those Chinese students are busy putting together PowerPoint presentations or posters in anticipation of the 21st century. They're too busy working on math and science skills the world needs right now.

Source: United Press International

an era of secondary orality

In today's Wall Street Journal:

In 1937, twenty-nine per cent of American adults told the pollster George Gallup that they were reading a book. In 1955, only seventeen per cent said they were. Pollsters began asking the question with more latitude. In 1978, a survey found that fifty-five per cent of respondents had read a book in the previous six months. The question was even looser in 1998 and 2002, when the General Social Survey found that roughly seventy per cent of Americans had read a novel, a short story, a poem, or a play in the preceding twelve months. And, this August, seventy-three per cent of respondents to another poll said that they had read a book of some kind, not excluding those read for work or school, in the past year. If you didn’t read the fine print, you might think that reading was on the rise.

You wouldn’t think so, however, if you consulted the Census Bureau and the National Endowment for the Arts, who, since 1982, have asked thousands of Americans questions about reading that are not only detailed but consistent. The results, first reported by the N.E.A. in 2004, are dispiriting. In 1982, 56.9 per cent of Americans had read a work of creative literature in the previous twelve months. The proportion fell to fifty-four per cent in 1992, and to 46.7 per cent in 2002. Last month, the N.E.A. released a follow-up report, “To Read or Not to Read,” which showed correlations between the decline of reading and social phenomena as diverse as income disparity, exercise, and voting. In his introduction, the N.E.A. chairman, Dana Gioia, wrote, “Poor reading skills correlate heavily with lack of employment, lower wages, and fewer opportunities for advancement.”

[snip]

Book sales, meanwhile, have stagnated. The Book Industry Study Group estimates that sales fell from 8.27 books per person in 2001 to 7.93 in 2006. According to the Department of Labor, American households spent an average of a hundred and sixty-three dollars on reading in 1995 and a hundred and twenty-six dollars in 2005. In “To Read or Not to Read,” the N.E.A. reports that American households’ spending on books, adjusted for inflation, is “near its twenty-year low,” even as the average price of a new book has increased.

More alarming are indications that Americans are losing not just the will to read but even the ability. According to the Department of Education, between 1992 and 2003 the average adult’s skill in reading prose slipped one point on a five-hundred-point scale, and the proportion who were proficient—capable of such tasks as “comparing viewpoints in two editorials”—declined from fifteen per cent to thirteen. The Department of Education found that reading skills have improved moderately among fourth and eighth graders in the past decade and a half, with the largest jump occurring just before the No Child Left Behind Act took effect, but twelfth graders seem to be taking after their elders. Their reading scores fell an average of six points between 1992 and 2005, and the share of proficient twelfth-grade readers dropped from forty per cent to thirty-five per cent. The steepest declines were in “reading for literary experience”—the kind that involves “exploring themes, events, characters, settings, and the language of literary works,” in the words of the department’s test-makers. In 1992, fifty-four per cent of twelfth graders told the Department of Education that they talked about their reading with friends at least once a week. By 2005, only thirty-seven per cent said they did.

[snip]

There’s no reason to think that reading and writing are about to become extinct, but some sociologists speculate that reading books for pleasure will one day be the province of a special “reading class,” much as it was before the arrival of mass literacy, in the second half of the nineteenth century. They warn that it probably won’t regain the prestige of exclusivity; it may just become “an increasingly arcane hobby.” [albeit a hobby associated with continually growing inequality]

[snip]

The scholar Walter J. Ong once speculated that television and similar media are taking us into an era of “secondary orality,” akin to the primary orality that existed before the emergence of text.

Twilight of the Books
by Caleb Crain

This thought has crossed my mind.

In the schools these days, "technology" is sexy and books are not. This phenomenon has now advanced to the point where the words "school library" mean what "computer lab" used to, and visual options are available in all courses at all levels. Honors English courses give students the option of making posters instead of writing papers, middle school students slap together PowerPoints instead of writing book reports, and lord only knows what's happening with the little ones these days.

Keyboarding, I guess.

Did it ever cross anyone's mind that we might one day look back on invented spelling as a Golden Era when reading and writing mattered?

21st century skills in action

In case anyone was wondering what 21st century skills look like.

Basically, the way this shakes out is:

21st century skills, yay or nay

Parents: nay

Unions, ed schools, edu-policy types, and advocacy organizations: yay

Which is pretty much all you need to know about where U.S. students are going to stack up internationally after unions, ed schools, edu-policy types, and advocacy organizations finish infusing 21st century skills into our public schools.

Sauve qui peut.<sup>*


*</sup> save yourself if you can

if Abe Lincoln had 21st century skills

from Laura:

the Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation

Why McGuinness is Mistaken: Some Reading Problems ARE Biologically Based

In the post called "Why English-Speaking Children Can't Read", CJ quotes Dianne McGuinness, who baldly asserts that there is no biological basis to reading difficulties--it's all bad teaching.

While I respect and admire Professor McGuinness's contribution to education and her approach to the teaching of reading, her assertion is not supported by findings from cognitive neuroscience, particularly findings from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies comparing cognitive patterns of good readers and poor readers.

Further, reading and writing are complex, subtle biological activities -- crudely put, the eye must see, the brain must make sense of the visual stimuli; the brain must order the hand to perform a precise series of actions. A sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the neurocognitive nature of the processes, when they perform well, will bring us to understand where the breakdowns occur and how to remediate them.

I believe that Professor McGuinness's assertion is made without a full understanding of what fMRI studies have revealed abou the structure of the reading brain.

The researcher who has done the most to make the cognitive neuroscience accessible to lay readers is Marianne Wolf. I will quote from several sources to illustrate her findings:

From a Tufts University interview with Wolf:

According to Wolf, the brain never evolved to read. Rather, reading reveals how the brain "rearranges older structures devoted to linguistic, perceptual and cognitive regions to make something new." Children with dyslexia have a range of difficulties that prevent this.

Children of the Code interview with Maryanne Wolf --

Dr. Maryanne Wolf: The history of reading disabilities, (I'll use the word dyslexia - some people use it, some people don't), is such a fascinating one because it's like a case study in science patterns, the desire for parsimony among scientists and the refusal of the human brain to be typed in one way. What you see in this history is one researcher after another seizing on what is in front of them and saying, "Ah, that's what dyslexia is. That's what causes it." And it's really the most over-worked and even platitudinous analogy in the world. But the blind men and the elephant describe the history of dyslexia research.

David Boulton: And the Sufi key Story.

Dr. Maryanne Wolf: Exactly. If you look and put together even only the names of dyslexia, you'll see one hypothesis is visual, one is memory, one is verbal, one is auditory. You just go down the list. Well, if you put them all together, or if, as I'm doing this in a book now [Proust and the Squid], I just put those names on the brain and you see a crude cartography of reading. In other words, if it can go wrong it does. And at one point in the history of dyslexia each has been called the major explanation for dyslexia. Now, the modern history has been punctuated by really different, very technologically sophisticated approaches including neurosciences and also including a lot of wonderful work done in an area called psycholinguistics.

In the 1970’s there was a great set of researchers at Haskins Lab at Yale and they were really beginning a whole new approach to understanding dyslexia by looking at the linguistic foundations of reading breakdown. That began one of the single best hypotheses we've ever had which is that the phonological system in language, that is, our ability to hear, to discriminate the smallest sounds called phonemes in words is a fundamental necessity in learning to read and a fundamental source of why some children can't learn to read. That began what is called the phonological deficit hypothesis, which has really been the most successful of explanations to date.

Rapid Naming, Phonemic Awareness and Speed of Processing:

Dr. Maryanne Wolf: My research began while that hypothesis was in its zenith. At the same time I was equally influenced by neurosciences, which was then called neurological or neuropsychological studies. We were beginning to see that there was this one very odd phenomenon that children who were going to become dyslexic were always exhibiting, whether they were five or six or seven, and that was a failure to be able to name, it’s so simple, to name things they saw at the same speed that other children could.

Well, naming seems very simple but it's actually a very difficult set of underlying processes. So, my mentor, Martha Denckla and her mentor, a neurologist, Norman Geschwind, were responsible for really getting the field to think differently, if you will. In the beginning, people said, "Well, naming speed is just another kind of phonology. You need to be able to retrieve a phonological label." And, for a while that satisfied me. Then, I began to see kids who had no phoneme issues in other areas and yet they had this....

David Boulton: You mean in terms of their ability to articulate themselves on the fly they would demonstrate that they had good phoneme processing but they couldn't name, which has an association component?

Dr. Maryanne Wolf: Well, that's really close. I'll just give you a slightly more technical explanation by saying that when we did all our tests we had explicit measures of these phoneme awareness skills that everybody says were the most important ones and we were seeing that some kids didn't have that but they had naming speed issues. Well, if they're both the same, they should have both. And they weren't exhibiting that and that began us thinking that there are so many issues beyond the phoneme, which includes the visual system and the retrieval system. It includes the speed with which the brain puts its systems together.

That was what we got fixated on. That's not the same as phoneme awareness. So, we then began to really get in-depth understandings of naming speed and the speed with which not only that you name but the speed with which you read and how that fluency in reading is really important not for speed as speed, but for the brain's ability to do those easy processes fast enough to allocate time to comprehension.

David Boulton: Right. So, those lower levels are operating efficiently and there's sufficient bandwidth to be reflective and comprehensive.

Dr. Maryanne Wolf: Perfect. That's what we were beginning to understand. So, this tiny little innocuous naming speed test opened up a world of understanding about how important all of these individual processes are that go beyond the phoneme and how important reading fluency is for comprehension. So, that puts you into, literally, a different ball park from the implication of the phonological deficit, which is that you work on words and phonemes and you get the kids to be able to recognize words and read, decode them and everything else is going to happen naturally. Well, it isn't that simple.

Double-Deficit Hypothesis and Interventions:

Dr. Maryanne Wolf: My colleague, Pat Bowers, and I, and others, (we weren't the only two), advanced our hypothesis in the early nineties. Back then we were kind of John the Baptist-types. It was a little hard going there for a while. Then people started thinking, we know they're right. We still believe it's phonology but there is no doubt that there are these kids. Here is where what we call the double-deficit hypothesis comes in: there are these kids who have single deficits in phoneme awareness, single deficits in naming speed without phoneme, and then double-deficit kids who have both. The kids who have both reading fluency and comprehension issues have different reasons for reading failure than the kids who have only phoneme awareness issues.

David Boulton: And therefore, need different interventions to differentiate their way through what’s obstructing their processing.

Do go read the rest of the interview.

More:
Excerpt from Proust and the Squid

Brain Science Podcast: Interview with Maryanne Wolf

California Literary Review: Proust and the Squid

Podcast: Moira Gunn Interviews Maryanne Wolf: Evolution of the Reading Brain

Guardian Review of Proust and the Squid

Link to description of the RAVE-O reading comprehension program and to description of one RAVE-O training program.

thank you, Jay Mathews

Have I mentioned the fact that my district has produced a 20-page Strategic Plan that does mention 21st century skills and does not mention college preparation?

Well, it has.

This is why we have Jay Mathews:

Why I Don't Like 21st-Century Reports

Another well-intentioned report on the future of American schools reached my cubicle recently: "21st Century Skills, Education and Competitiveness: A Resource and Policy Guide." ... It is full of facts and colorful illustrations, with foresight and relevance worthy of the fine organizations that funded it -- the National Education Association, the KnowledgeWorks Foundation, the Ford Motor Company Fund and the Tucson-based Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a leading education advocacy organization that also produced the report and sent it to me and many other people.

So why, after reading it, did I feel like tossing it into the waste basket?

I know the answer to that one.

Because it's horsepucky on stilts.

"Our ability to compete as a nation -- and for states, regions and communities to attract growth industries and create jobs -- demands a fresh approach to public education. We need to recognize that a 21st century education is the bedrock of competitiveness -- the engine, not simply an input, of the economy.

"And we need to act accordingly: Every aspect of our education system -- preK--12, postsecondary and adult education, after-school and youth development, workforce development and training, and teacher preparation programs -- must be aligned to prepare citizens with the 21st century skills they need to compete."

Okay. Sounds good. I kept reading. There was much detail, accompanied by pie charts and graphs and photos of smiling children, about the growth of information service jobs.... It listed the "21st century skills" that our children need for the rapidly evolving labor market. These included thinking critically and making judgments, solving complex, multidisciplinary, open-ended problems, developing creative and entrepreneurial thinking, communicating and collaborating, making innovative use of knowledge, information and opportunities and taking charge of financial, health and civic responsibilities.

Good stuff. I liked all of those suggestions. I had only one question: How in the name of every teacher who has ever contemplated suicide during the unit on fractions are we supposed to make those things happen?

I know the answer to that one, too.

In low-performing schools, instruction in fractions will be replaced by instruction in PowerPoint (communicating and collaborating), new assessments measuring 21st century skills will be implemented, and scores will go up.

In high-performing schools, instruction in fractions will also be replaced by instruction in PowerPoint, new assessments measuring 21st century skills will be implemented, and scores will go up.

There will be one difference.

In low-performing schools, students won't learn fractions.

In high-performing schools, (some) students will learn fractions because their parents will teach them.

Question: what do parents think of this?

Or teachers?

Answer: it doesn't matter. The establishment has reached a consensus, and we-the-people will have no say in the mass abandonment by our schools of the liberal arts disciplines in favor of 21st century skills:

I know a lot of people are tired of testing, and some are tired of hearing about 21st century skills. But both are here to stay and both matter tremendously for education reform. Improving assessment is the very first bullet in Obama’s list of how to reform NCLB, and he intends to do it by creating new models for assessment that measure “higher order skills, including students’ abilities to use technology, conduct research, engage in scientific investigation, solve problems, present and defend their ideas.”

Easier said than done? On Monday Education Sector is going to release a paper I wrote about measuring 21st century skills (yes, 2 for 1! testing plus 21st century skills). At the same time we’re opening up a week-long discussion on our website to delve further into this topic--what should we measure? what can we measure? We hope you’ll join in with some good comments and hard questions.

Testing in the 21st Century

Ed Sector has spoken, and it will be so.

educationally correct

"KPM" just left a comment, which I've followed to a terrific site I don't think I've come across before:

Educationally Correct

Powell on Education

I've been intrigued by the idea of Colin Powell as Secretary of Education. I like the idea that he isn't cut from the education establishment cloth and has no allegiances to the Teacher's Unions or Schools of Education. I like the idea of discipline and hard work that he represents.

Mostly, I was encouraged when I turned up this quote today:

"If we truly believe they are all our children, then all of us must be willing to spend more to repair our schools and spend more to pay our teachers better. But we must also be open to new ideas.

Let’s not be afraid of standardized testing for students. Let’s not be afraid of testing teachers’ qualifications. Let’s not be afraid of charter schools. Let’s not be afraid of using private scholarship money to give poor parents a choice that wealthy parents have. Let’s not be afraid of home schooling. Let’s experiment prudently with school voucher programs to see if they help. What are we afraid of? Let’s use innovation and competition, good old American innovation, good old American competition to help give our children the best education possible."

Colin Powell, Speech at the GOP Convention, 7-30-2000

Colin Powell on Education

Syllable Divided Books

These books have been helpful for my remedial students. I also tested words divided this way on my daughter, they were helpful for her as a beginning student as well (although I only had 1 book then, and it's an actual 1851 First Reader in good condition, so it did not get used with a Kindergarten student.)

They are based on the syllable division rules taught in Webster's Speller in the Syllabary. (Short version of rules: Open syllables--those ending in a vowel--are long. Closed syllables--those ending in a vowel--are short. Any unaccented syllable, but especially open unaccented syllables, can schwa.)

These books allow students to read above their current reading grade level while observing the pattern of syllable division in words. And, they are all informative reading instead of the mindless stories you're prone to get in common readers in use after 1900.

Syllable Divided Books

If these books help your student, I recommend Webster's Speller as a follow on.

"Why English-Speaking Children Can't Read"

Why English-Speaking Children Can’t Read

As the universal-education movement began gathering momentum, educators broke ranks with nineteenth-century traditions. Reading instruction got so far off track that the twentieth century will go down in history as the century of the demise of the English alphabet code. The final reckoning of an unceasing attempt on its life came in the 1990s. For the first time, properly conducted national testing, international reading surveys, cross-cultural studies, and classroom research pointed to the inescapable conclusion hat reading instruction in English-speaking countries is a disaster. The functional illiteracy rate for American 9-year-olds is 43 percent (Mullis, Campbell, and Farstrup 1993; Campbell et al. 1996).

International reading surveys carried out by Statistics Canada brought dismal news (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 1995, 1997). In six English-speaking nations, the proportion of functionally illiterate/very poor readers among 16- to 65-year olds ranged from a low of 42 percent in Canada to a high of 52 percent in the United Kingdom. These figures were in stark contrast to those of many European nations. The comparable figure for Sweden was 28 percent. Sweden’s functional illiteracy rate for 16- to 25-year-olds (level 1 of 5 levels) is 3.8 percent. This rate is nearly three times higher in Canada (10.7 percent), and six times higher in the United States (23.5 percent).

In 1993, an astonishing report came in from Austria. Heinz Wimmer set out to study poor readers and initiated a citywide search. He asked 60 second-to fourth-grade teachers in Salzburg to refer their worst readers for special testing. They identified 120 children, about 7-8 percent of the school population. Imagine Wimmer’s surprise when the worst readers in the city scored close to 100 percent correct on a test of reading accuracy and did nearly as well in spelling. Clearly, none of these children had any difficulty with the German alphabet code. It turned out their problem was reading too slowly. But slow is a relative term. How slow is slow?

To find out, Wimmer collaborated with an English researcher (Wimmer and Goswami 1994) to compare normal 7- and 9-year olds from Salzburg and London. The results were startling. The Austrian 7-year olds read comparable material as rapidly and fluently as the English 9-year-olds, while making half as many errors. Yet the Austrian 7-year olds had had 1 year of reading instruction, while the English 9-year olds had been learning to read for 4 or 5 years. Equal speed and half the errors in one-quarter of the learning time is an eightfold increase in efficiency!

Wimmer and his colleagues (Lander, Wimmer, and Frith 1997) got the same extraordinary results when they compared their worst readers (incredibly slow) with English children identified as “dyslexic” (incredibly inaccurate). The children were asked to read text consisting of nonsense words. The so-called Austrian slow readers were no only more accurate than the English “dyslexics,” but they read twice as fast. The average Austrian “slow reader” would be able to read a 500-word passage in about 10 minutes, misreading only 7 percent of the words. The average English “dyslexic” would read only 260 words in this time, and misread 40 percent of the words. It seems the expression “worst reader” is relative as well.

An even more dramatic study was reported from Italyy. Cossu, Rossini, and Marshall (1993) tested Down’s syndrome children with IQs in the 40s (100 is average) on three difficult reading tests. They scored around 90 (100 is average) on three difficult reading tests. They scored around 90 percent correct, breezing through Italian words like shaliare and funebre. However, they could not comprehend what they read, and they failed miserably on tests of phoneme awareness, the skill that is supposed to be essential to decoding.

What is going on?

The answer is simple. European countries with high literacy rates have a twofold advantage. First, they have a transparent alphabet code, a nearly perfect one-to-one correspondence between each individual sound (phoneme) in the language and a visual symbol—a letter or letter pair (digraph). For languages with more sounds than letters in the alphabet (English has 40+ sounds), this problem was handled sensibly. When a letter or digraph is reused to represent more than one sound, it is marked by a special symbol (a diacritic) to signal a different pronunciation. In German, an umlaut distinguishes the vowel sound in Baume (boimeh). And while a sound can occasionally be spelled more than one way, there is never more than one way to read a letter or digraph. The English spelling system suffers from both afflictions: multiple spellings for the same phoneme, and multiple ways to decode letters and letter sequences. This is the definition of an “opaque” writing system.

Reading instruction is the second part of the equation. To a great extent, reading instruction is a function of the complexity of the spelling code. Teaching a transparent writing system is far easier than teaching an opaque one, because it is obvious (transparent) how it works. Teaching can be streamlined and proceeds at a rapid pace. In Austria, children are taught the sounds of the German language and which letter(s) represents each sound. Reading and spelling are integrated at every step, which reinforces the code nature of a writing system—that is, the fact that the operations are reversible, involving both encoding and decoding. No clutter or noise clogs the process, such as teaching letter names or lots of sight words. Because basic reading instruction is fast and pretty well guaranteed, it can begin late – at 6 in most countries (age 7 in Scandinavian countries) –and early (after 1 year or less) Parents sleep soundly in their beds, safe in the knowledge that their child will be reading and spelling by the of the first year of school. (This is not to say that inappropriate teaching methods cannot mollify the advantages of a transparent alphabet.)

The cross-cultural comparisons reveal that the source of English-speaking children’s difficulties in learning to read and spell is the English spelling system and the way it is taught. These comparisons provide irrefutable evidence that a biological theory of “dyslexia,” a deficit presumed to be a property of the child, is untenable, ruling out the popular “phonological-deficit theory” of dyslexia. For a biological theory to be accurate, dyslexia would have to occur at the same rate in all populations. Otherwise, some type of genetic abnormality would be specific to people who learn an English alphabet code and be absent in people who live in countries with a transparent alphabet, where poor readers are rare. A disorder entirely tied to a particular alphabetic writing system is patently absurd and has no scientific basis. English-speaking children have trouble learning to read and spell because of our complex spelling code and because of current teaching methods, not because of aberrant genes.

Early Reading Instruction: What Science Really Tells Us about How to Teach Reading
by Diane McGuinness, pages 1-3

It's always worse than you think.

(I've asked Liz Ditz to weigh in on the question of what biologically-based reading and/or learning disabilities are.)

Le scandale de l'illetrrisme (nouvel obs: the scandal of illiteracy)
dyslexie, vraiment? ) (nouvel obs: true dyslexia? - whole language in France)
Comment en est-on arrivé là? (nouvel obs: How did we get here?)
French spelling

Why English speaking children can't read

Lucy Calkins on teaching children to write
Becky C on starting at the top

instructional casualties in America
curriculum casualties: figures
forcing hearing children to learn as deaf children must
Rory: I frickin' hate whole language!

thank you, whole language

apocalypse now

“A tooty-ta, a tooty-ta, a tooty-ta-ta,” she sang while standing in a circle with 25 other kindergarten teachers echoing. “Thumbs up. Elbows back. Feet apart. Knees together. Bottoms up. Tongue out. Eyes shut. Turn around.”

Everyday Math teaches students about sequencing

My Four Year Old Has Discovered The Calculator

... and she thinks it's awesome. The pink magical computing machine is her new best friend.

My aunt bought one for her last year, I tossed it in the toybox and promptly forgot all about it. But A. found it a few days ago and figured it out. She said, "Give me some numbers!!" "Uh, 4 and 5" "Nine! Give me more!!" I eventually told her to go around the house looking for numbers on things, and that kept her busy for awhile.

We're back to using Singapore 1A these days, after a few months of refusing to do anything that looked like it could involve writing. (Singapore Earlybird is fairly writing-heavy, with a lot of focus on learning to write the numbers. We skipped all that for now and I transcribe for her.) She's also really into the Singapore "extras": Challenging Word problems, Intensive Practice, and Extra Practice, which they have even for these low levels.

So as we're working more and more with beginning addition, we use our fingers or draw dots on paper and on a particular set I said, "Oh, this one looks like we should use our linking blocks to figure it out." She jumped in, "Or our calculator!"

I'm trying to gently explain why we don't just grab the calculator and cruise through the book so much more quickly and easily. She doesn't understand why we would reject such obviously magical and fantastic technology, but she's going along with it anyway.

Combatting the Disbelief

One of the major problems I see whenever someone is trying to change the curriculum at their local school is that only a tiny percentage of parents really knows how bizarre the curriculum is, how far off the standard map it is from their own upbringing. And if, for example, I try to tell other parents, they simply do not believe it, and I lose all credibility.

Even my own husband doesn't believe it-- "They don't teach stacking??? Come on! That's hogwash." The list of topics I claim not covered is so deep and so wide, I must be exaggerating.

Even when you're talking to parents whose kids are in the same classroom, they seldom believe it. Even when these parents are college educated in the sciences or engineering themselves, they don't seem to coherently examine the whole arc of a school year (or years) to notice what's missing. They seem to assume that things are fine--until middle school is reached, at the earliest.

So, how is this best combatted? Handing someone a textbook and saying "go ahead, try to find stacking" doesn't work, as most won't see that as proof of anything. There's no way to show the overall year in, year out deficiencies by looking at one text, either. So what can work? What can help other parents to see how far from their common expectation the current curriculum is, while still saving one's credibility?

An Education Obamanation

Indentured servitude by any other name for middle and high schoolers, and taxpayers covering a tax free $40 an hour wage to every single college student.



The Obama Administration will call on Americans to serve in order to meet the nation’s challenges. President-Elect Obama will expand national service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace Corps and will create a new Classroom Corps to help teachers in underserved schools, as well as a new Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, and Veterans Corps. Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by setting a goal that all middle school and high school students do 50 hours of community service a year and by developing a plan so that all college students who conduct 100 hours of community service receive a universal and fully refundable tax credit ensuring that the first $4,000 of their college education is completely free. Obama will encourage retiring Americans to serve by improving programs available for individuals over age 55, while at the same time promoting youth programs such as Youth Build and Head Start.

-------------
UPDATE: Gosh, this is a LOT better than the original!
The original is cached here:

http://74.125.45.104/search?q=cache:f_Q-RMW-DJoJ:www.change.gov/americaserves/+http://change.gov/americaserves/&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us

It said (emphasis mine):


Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year.

And it didn't even mention the $4000...

TIME on Secretary of Education

Thus far I've only skimmed the article far enough to find this:

LINDA DARLING-HAMMOND

Current position: Top Obama education adviser

Why she could be tapped: Her day job is professor of education at Stanford, but for the past year, she has been a key voice defining Obama's positions on issues such as school restructuring, teacher quality and educational equity.

Why the job will go to someone else: Darling-Hammond is not popular among education reformers, particularly those to the center-right. That's because her views on issues such as merit pay vs. teacher tenure are more conventional than even Obama's. So if the President-elect really wants to shake things up on the education front, Darling-Hammond won't likely be his choice.

Who Will Obama Pick as Secretary of Education?

Back when I've read the whole thing....

update:

Here's good news, assuming it's true:

Why the job will go to someone else: Hunt has not been especially outspoken on how to expand charter schools and other alternatives to traditional public schools, which appears to be a priority for the Obama team.

GRE scores in 28 fields of study

here

from Greg Mankiw's blog

What is "Public Administration," exactly?

Secretary of Education

Lots of fun stuff at Flypaper:

Reader Contest
Cheers and Frets

And, a Concerned Parent find at the Chronicle of Higher Education: Obama's Possible Candidates for Secretary of Education.

Colin Powell is on the list!

I'm pretty sure Colin Powell would be fine by me, assuming he didn't round up the usual suspects and hand "execution" of policy over to them.

I don't remember whether I've mentioned this, but on my second visit to Hogwarts, back in the spring, I realized that the place felt like a happy military school, or what I imagine a military school to be. I've never visited a military school & don't know anyone who's attended one. Nevertheless, I had a distinct sense of "military-ness": really, really fun military-ness.

Then this fall, when we attended the all-day Family Orientation, the principal told parents that the Jesuits in general and the school in particular have a military cast. I don't recall his exact words, but that was the jist. He told us about the life of Loyola, who was a soldier, and pointed out that the head of the Jesuit order is the "Father-General."

So: quasi-military schools for America's over character-edded boys!

And possibly for America's over character-edded girls. Why should boys have all the fun?


About Face! A Case for Quasi-Military Public Schools
Mayor Daley letter re: military academies

teach your babies to read

European languages are written in an alphabet, because they cannot be written any other way. This is a fact, and there is nothing we can do about it. The evidence reviewed in this book shows that when you follow the principles by which writing systems are constructed and teach the English writing system appropriately, 4-year-olds can easily learn to read in about 10 to 12 weeks. It makes no sense to continue teaching reading the way we do.

Early Reading Instruction: What Science Really Tells Us about How to Teach Reading
by Diane McGuinness
p. xv

Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons by Siegfried Engelmann
funnix
Headsprouts
Reading Instruction for Children Who Are At Risk or Have Disabilities by Mary Damer
The Phonics Page
Don Potter
I Speak of Dreams
National Right to Read Foundation
Children of the Code
Reid Lyon

Obama!

Wow!

First black president. Amazing.

Of course, I wouldn't have minded having the first woman in the White House, either. I say that as a person without a Party.

I wonder what this means in terms of the country's "identity?" I was asking Ed the other night whether other countries have to stop calling us "racist," and he said yes. (Really?)

I'm not crazy about the idea of "transformational" leaders, but will the fact of the country's having elected Obama affect how Americans see themselves?

And if so, will that be transformational?

I have no idea!

This is amazing -----


update 11:55 am

change

kitchen table math, election edition

Economist Edward Glaeser on the campaign I wish we'd had:

[I]n this hopeful season of presidential change, even economists need to be for something. Some of my colleagues labor to improve healthcare; others fight for tax reform. My dream is that one, or both, candidates will make human capital the centerpiece of their campaign.

More than 70 percent of Americans routinely tell pollsters that the country is headed in the wrong direction. America will not change course just by electing a new president, no matter how much charisma or character that leader might have. America's future will instead depend on the skills of its citizens. In a remarkable new book, my colleagues Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz make a compelling case that America's 20th-century achievements owed much to our nation's once-robust investment in education, and that since the 1970s the growth in that investment has slowed dramatically.

[snip]

Education increases the ability to deal with innovation, so that investing in skills today will make Americans better able to weather the storms of future technological changes.

[snip]

The case for governmental investment in education reflects the fact all of us become more productive when our neighbors know more. The success of cities like Boston reflects the magic that occurs when knowledgeable people work and live around each other. As the share of adults in a metropolitan area with college degrees increases by 10 percent, the wages of a worker with a fixed education level increases by 8 percent. Area level education also seems to increase the production of innovations and speed economic growth.

American education is not just another arrow in a quiver of policy proposals, but it is the primary weapon, the great claymore, to fight a host of public ills. One can make a plausible case that improving American education would do as much to improve health outcomes as either candidate's health plans. People with more years of schooling are less obese, smoke less, and live longer. Better-educated people are also more likely to vote and to build social capital by investing in civic organizations.

Alas, a presidential campaign in which human capital figured prominently was not to be.

Meanwhile, here is Gene Expression discovering that more people should be attending college, not fewer:

The first observation here is that educational degrees, whether they confer skills or credentials, are more important to income than IQ when minimum thresholds are met.....Higher IQ generates the biggest pay-off differences between those with advanced degrees, which is consistent with IQ increasing in importance as jobs become more complex. Third, merely earning a Bachelor's degree is a golden ticket. People with average and below average IQs are getting just as much of a financial return out of their 4-year degree as those above the 85th percentile. This suggests many more people of marginal ability should be seeking a Bachelor's degree, not less. Fourth, the two lines for junior college and trade occupations overlap substantially, as we would expect if most people in trade occupations went to trade school. Fifth, and most directly related to Murray's argument, people with 4-year degrees earn much more than people with 2-year degrees and trade jobs at every level of IQ. Average IQ people will get a much, much larger monetary reward from completing a 4 year school than a 2 year school. So the BA is far from being a "meaningless credential" when it comes to "chances of making a good living".

It's possible people with average IQs who complete college are exceptional in other ways. But there is no other empirical evidence that vocational school is better at generating income for those <85th>Again we find that IQ shows no relationship to income for those with a BA, and, in fact, those with lower IQs might profit the most.

the future

Since I'm amongst those who think it's going to get worse before it gets better, it strikes me that it may be possible to make some predictions.

I believe education -- especially a liberal education -- makes you "smarter." Ed has always said that an education in the liberal arts disciplines teaches you how to think, so I'm going to go with that as a working hypothesis as to what it is a liberal education does for a person, regardless of IQ.

U.S. public schools in my neck of the woods are doing everything in their power to abandon the liberal arts in favor of the 21st century skills. I assume our national "progress" in this direction will accelerate under the next president regardless of which candidate wins office.

What does that mean in terms of real children and what becomes of them?

I think the answer can be found in the population of children being pulled out of the public schools for homeschooling or for enrollment in private, parochial, or charter schools.

For instance, Ed and I were trying to figure out, the other day, whether future presidents will be more likely to have attended private schools, as Obama and McCain both did, than they were in the recent past.

Another possibility: Ed suspects there may be, now, an increase in the percentage of private school students being accepted by highly selective colleges as compared to twenty years ago.

Or take Catholics and evangelical Christians, groups with fairly large numbers of children attending parochial schools or being homeschooled, comparatively speaking. Will we see these children moving ahead of their public school peers in terms of educational attainment and income? (Do we see it now?)

Another group: professors' kids. Professors are one unhappy group where public schools are concerned. Thinking back, we've known very few professors who've sent their kids to public school. We were the last holdouts in our circle, and now we're gone, too.

Last but not least: glancing through a couple of parents' lists, it struck me that political conservatives may be leaving the public schools in larger numbers than centrists or liberals. It's just an impression, but it would make sense. Centrists and liberals can put up with a certain amount of global awareness and environmental stewardship in lieu of college preparation on the district Strategic Plan.^* But political conservatives, it seems to me, are going to get their fill of this stuff sooner rather than later.

Many -- perhaps most -- students being pulled out of 21st century public schools for private, parochial, charter, or home schools are going to be better prepared for college, which means they'll be accepted by more competitive colleges, which means they'll be in line for acceptance by more competitive graduate programs. And that's where the action is. ^**

Point is: it's a safe bet within-group inequality will continue to rise. The question is: who's in the groups within the groups?

Which students will leave the public schools in the coming years, and which will stay?


^* Tomorrow, Election Day, my school board will vote to adopt a 20-page Strategic Plan that sets goals for environmental stewardship, global awareness, media literacy, 21st century skills, and wellness, but does not mention college preparation.

^** "Demand for those who graduated from more selective institutions as well as those with post-B.A. degrees is still soaring and they are doing spectacularly well." p. 302 The Race Between Technology and Education

Steve Levitt summarizes The Race in 2 sentences
Jimmy graduates

The anemic response of skill investment to skill premium growth
The declining American high school graduation rate: Evidence, sources, and consequences
Pushy parents raise more successful kids

The Race Between Education and Technology book review
The Race Between Ed & Tech: excerpt & TOC & SAT scores & public loss of confidence in the schools
The Race Between Ed & Tech: the Great Compression
the Great Compression, part 2
ED in '08: America's schools
comments on Knowledge Schools
the future
the stick kids from mud island
educated workers and technology diffusion
declining value of college degree
Goldin, Katz and fans
best article thus far: Chronicle of Higher Education on The Race
Tyler Cowan on The Race (NY Times)
happiness inequality down...
an example of lagging technology diffusion in the U.S.
the Times reviews The Race, finally
IQ, college, and 2008 election
Bloomington High School & "path dependency"
the election debate that should have been

Internet Required for Homework?

There's an organization in Readington, NJ called ReadingtonParents.org, (here's the page on constructivist math -- sound familiar?).

Anyway, one of the parents involved, John Painter has a blog associated with the organization, Readingtonparents.org Editor's Blog. He recently posted an essay on the various pitfalls of assigning homework that requires the internet. Here's the opening paragraph:

One recent survey of K-12 teachers indicated that 77% of them assign homework which requires the internet. My experience with my own kids certainly backs that up. Unfortunately, these assignments not only require an internet connection, but also direct parental supervision. Most (if not all) of these assignments are based on a simplistic or erroneous understanding of internet technology, or they put an undue burden on parents to provide expensive infrastructure and safety monitoring.

Since I'm not involved with the daily homework grind anymore (except for myself) I found his comments eye-opening.

What Goes into A Thrilling Performance: Dalton Sherman, Age 10, Motivational Speaker

At 10, Dalton Sherman is a speech-making pro. Since winning a big oratory competition in Dallas last January, he’s performed at numerous churches and events all over Dallas. He even opened an event for famed poet Maya Angelou.

Here's a kid who has found his passion: public speaking. A video of the presentation Sherman made to 17,000 teachers of the Dallas Unified School district is making the rounds.

Take note of what Sherman did to prepare:

• His school (Charles Rice Learning Center) has an oratory program, in which Sherman participated
• Dallas has an oratory competition that Sherman won earlier in the year.
• After Sherman won the Gardere MLK competition, Dallas Independent School District contacted the Sherman family to ask if Sherman would address the teachers
• His presentation was written by the district
• His mother and his oratory coach worked with him all summer to prepare for the convocation speech in August.
• Sherman gave the whole speech to live audiences throughout the summer.

In short: preparation, drill, more preparation, and more drill.

Think about that, constructivists.

Halloween at Hogwarts

C., home from the train station, reports that the school has been in an uproar, due to today being “Initiation into the Bloods Day” or some such.

Initiation into the Bloods, C. tells me, requires candidates for gang membership to run up to perfect strangers on the street and slice open their faces with a knife, starting just below the ear lobe and carving down to the corner of the mouth.

Plus which, “Nine women were raped in Queens!”

“9 women were raped in Queens?” I said.

“Yeah, or Brooklyn.”

Everyone was scared, C. reported, and the boys had all planned to run to the train station after school instead of walking as they normally do. In the event, however, C. and his friend chose to walk, mostly because C’s other friend, an Irish boy from a semi-rough neck of the woods, told him the Bloods business was all a bunch of cr**. On the strength of that opinion, C. opted to walk, and lived to tell the tale. Good news!

Still and all, C., as soon as he got home, was off to consult Christian (hometown: Yonkers) on the matter of Bloods initiation rites and the 9 women raped in Brooklyn or Queens. Unfortunately, Christian is out with M., trying to take Jimmy to his program, and they’re stranded in Greenburgh because nobody’s there. Ed is dealing with that.

So we all await word on the Bloods and the fate of Jimmy’s program.

On the train home, C. sat across from 3 Irvington moms who were chatting about their kids’ YouTube videos and also about Village plans for the police to scare everyone straight. On Halloween, Irvington kids on Main Street get rowdy with shaving cream, and Irvington police always have the situation well in hand. That's what makes it exciting, really: knowing the kids and the police will both be there, along with the moms and dads escorting their smaller children to people's houses, knowing that the older kids will get rowdy and the police will prevail.

I know this because I spend every Halloween night in downtown Irvington with my friend P. Last year’s excitement was the news that J. had been picked up by the police and taken home in the back seat of the police car. A likely tale, I thought, but since half the kids in town claimed actually to have seen J. riding in the back seat of the police car, who was I to argue?

We found out the next day that J.’s parents hadn't let him go out for Halloween, so I was right after all.


update

M. and Christian are back sans Jimmy, so the program must be happening.

re: the Bloods, Christian had this to say: "Oh, you heard about that? They said the same thing at my job, too. Supposedly the Bloods are going to be slashing 38 people tonight for initiation. 'Cause New York gangs suck."

On that note, Happy Halloween!

Latin vs Spanish

Please tell Juan to recycle the plastic.

or

The centurion bravely slaughtered the barbarian.

choose one

Well....we may laugh (ha ha!) but, judging by events unfolding here in my own leafy suburb, twenty-five years from now we'll look back fondly on the days of Please tell Juan to recycle.

Twenty-five years from now schools will be teaching the critical languages and nothing but.

phinally!

Have I mentioned Ed's a Phillies fan?

woo hoo!

Frederick Education Reform - for your school board, paper, & PTSA

I think the PowerPoint presentations at Frederick Education Reform are probably the single most important and most potentially effective grass-roots reform documents I've ever come across. These parents have managed to pull the whole thing together: not just the math wars but the reading wars and the education wars, too.

I'm going to forward several to my school board, the PTSA, and the local newspapers.

Seven Styles of Learning

I can't believe it.

My son came home today and told me that his (seventh grade) science teacher talked to them about seven styles of learning. I guess this was to justify having them draw pictures of science definitions. My son already has about 100 3 X 5 index cards with pictures from sixth grade science. I suppose I should be happy that they expect them to learn definitions, and that the seventh grade science teacher will not grade the artwork, but this adds to the book dust cover he has to draw for language arts and the diorama he has to do for social studies. Only in math does he have regular homework. All of the other classes have projects. (He has math with me, but that's another story.)

Linguistic learner
Logical/mathematical learner
Spatial learner
Musical learner
Bodily/Kinesthetic learner
Interpersonal learner
Intrapersonal learner

"Everybody has a preferred learning style. Knowing and understanding our learning style helps us to learn more effectively. Through identifying your learning style, you will be able to capitalize on your strengths and improve your self-advocacy skills."


Did you ever notice that they don't let kids decide on and use whichever style works best for them. Everyone has to do the artwork. Everybody has to work in groups. What about the poor intrapersonal learner who is no good in art and likes to work by himself? Tough s***. What about my son, who is extremely good in music. What the heck does that mean?

The school hands out questionnaires about this each year and I just throw them away. I try to ignore it, but this learning style formality is really getting annoying! Parents can't say anything about it because that would be questioning their competence.

Of course, drawing a picture for a definition should help one with memorization, but one can always trade speed for understanding. It's not as if they are covering more material using these techniques. They are slowing down. It took my son a lot more time to draw the science pictures last year (20+ minutes each) than it took him to memorize the definition.

Even if you believe that each child has a preferred learning style, schools really don't care. Everyone does art and works in groups.

How does it all stack up?

A parent and I recently started up a Continental Math League team at our school, which uses Investigations math.

The response?  Enthusiasm from students and parents; skepticism from teachers.

Specifically, about "stacking." (Today's word for how we used to add, subtract, and multiply numbers by placing one number on top of the other.)

Kids love it. And not just the ones on our team. As as friend writes:

When I showed one of my sons how I had learned addition, i.e. the "stacking" method, he was very impressed. "Wow, that's so cool! That works great! I wonder if my math teacher knows about this?" was his innocent comment.

Yes, she does, and she doesn't like it. At least if she resembles the teacher who approached me after math practice yesterday and recounted the dismay she felt when she caught one of her students stacking numbers, thus abandoning the more "meaningful" and "faster" way he used to solve problems.

My co-coach and I tried to explain that the Continental Math League numbers are big enough, and random enough, that Reform Math's methods aren't faster and more meaningful, but inefficient and confusing. It's one thing to add 48 and 39 by reasoning that:

48 is 2 less than 50, and 39 is 1 less than 40, so add 40 and 50 and get 90 and then count backwards by 3 and get 87."

But take one of the problems we did at Continental Math League practice yesterday: 825 - 267. Restricting myself to the kinds of calculation that these second and third graders are able/expected to do in their heads, here's the most efficient non-stacking method I can come up with:

The closest friendly number to 825 is 800, and the closest friendly number to 267 is 250. 825 is 25 more than 800. 250 is 10 more than 260, and another 7 gets you 267. 10 plus 7 is 17. So 267 is 17 more than 250. So subtract 250 from 800. Well, 800 minus 200 is 600, minus 50 more is 550. Then subtract 17 from 25 by counting up from 17. Seventeen plus 3 more is 20 plus 5 more is 25. 3 plus 5 equals 8. Add 8 to 550* to get 558."

*By this point in the problem, how many people remember what they should be doing with this 8?

Anyone with a more efficient non-stacking method for subtracting 267 from 825 (no calculators allowed!) is invited to share it here.

(Cross posted at Out in Left Field).

Sum Swamp--fun adding and subtracting

We recently ordered "Sum Swamp," an addition and subtraction game, from Amazon. It is helping with basic math facts, and also covers odd and even. It's a fun game, and very cute. It only has two 6-sided dice, however. I'm planning on buying two 10-sided dice to make it cover all the basic addition and subtraction facts.

There is an "endless loop" where you have to land on the exit to get out. For a shorter game, we don't make the endless loop endless. You could play with multiplication as well, and then either add the digits or for any answers 10 or over, divide by 10 and round to the nearest number.

We lost a bit of math knowledge this summer, this game will be a fun way to keep up basic math facts during holidays.

Now, if I could only find a fun DVD! Something along the lines of Leapfrog's "Talking Letter Factory" for letter names and sounds would be great. Unfortunately, leapfrog's math circus doesn't teach much, although it is cute.

21st century skills

from Susan S



That's what I call a race between education and technology.

One small answer to the engineering gap?

Johnny Chung Lee made the NYT today .
My favorite part of the article, on building an interactive whiteboard with a wii remote:

An after-school Lego robotics club for fifth graders at Clara Byrd Baker Elementary School in Williamsburg, Va., built a Wiimote whiteboard in four one-hour sessions. “Once it was done, the kids were so excited,” recalls Kofi Merritt, then the school’s computer resource specialist, who suggested and advised the project. “They recognized themselves as innovators and demonstrated the whiteboard in classroom after classroom.”

Lee provides specs and instructions for all his inventions free online. What a great way to introduce students to engineering as the U.S. engineer gap is growing.

According to Sheila Riley of the EE Times:

The population of experienced engineers is aging, he (Albert Helfrick, chair of electrical and systems engineering at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University said. "There's a serious problem in our country with people like me: gray-haired people who could retire tomorrow," he said. If large numbers do retire, the U.S. faces a severe engineering shortfall.

Joe Sciabica, executive director of the Air Force Research Laboratory, agrees:

"We are facing a crisis in this nation," Mr. Sciabica said, referring to a loss of technical talent and experience as an aging workforce of scientists, engineers and mathematicians prepares for retirement.

"What alarms me more is that the professors to teach the next generation are also retiring," he added.

Looks like loss of quality teaching isn't just an ed school issue.

I'll take a piece of that action

…it is possible for students to construct for themselves the mathematical practices that, historically, took several thousand years to evolve…

source: A Constructivist Alternative to the Representational View of Mind in Mathematics Education Author(s): Paul Cobb, Erna Yackel, Terry Wood Source: Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Jan., 1992), pp. 2-33; p. 28.

I've posted this line before, but had always drawn it from secondary sources. So I had wondered whether perhaps the authors had been misquoted.

Nope.

This is the precise claim Cobb, Yackel, and Wood are making. In these exact words.

pick one

Lynn G and I watched the debate between Lisa Graham Keegan & Linda Darling-Hammond two nights ago, and now you can, too. The last 6 minutes are worth the time.

The debate was terrific, I thought, though the fact that curriculum and pedagogy, the twin issues that have driven my own family from the public schools, were barely mentioned goes quite a ways towards explaining to me why I've become an "Independent." I put "Independent" in quotation marks because I wasn't planning to become an Independent and don't consider it a badge of honor to be one. I am a believer in two-party politics, as a matter of fact; I just don't happen to have a party to believe in.

Of course, having become a person without a party and a parent without a public school, I'm thinking maybe now's the time to morph from small-l libertarianism to the real thing.

But I think I'll hold off on that. I can't be a libertarian; I have to carry on supporting NCLB if only to be the one parent in all of leafy suburbia who does.^* It's my job.

Speaking of leafy suburbia, on the video you'll hear Linda Darling-Hammond giving a shout-out to Scarsdale superintendent Mike McGill and his strategic use of resources or some such. That is horsepucky. The secret to Scarsdale Mike McGill's success is tutors. Lots and lots and lots of tutors.

And don't you forget it.



^* Me, and the hardy band of commenters and readers around these parts.

dumb question

Does anyone know, offhand, how I post my contact info where it's easy to find?

If not, I will have to RTFM.

portfolio assessment and grade deflation

I've left a comment at Flypaper re: portfolio assessments used to deflate high achievers' grades.

Grade deflation is a topic near and dear to my heart.

questions for Lisa Graham Keegan and Linda Darling-Hammond

• Do you believe that knowledge of the liberal arts disciplines is a form of intellectual capital?

• What is your opinion of the banking theory of schooling?

• Can children whose parents are committed to providing them direct instruction in the liberal arts disciplines be served by public schools? Or must these parents resort to homeschooling or enrollment in private and parochial schools?
  

• Can you name the 7 liberal arts?

I'm emailing my questions to Susan Fuhrman at: SusanF@tc.columbia.edu

children don't like group learning

a comment left by Jane re: how did you get 3?---

I think I now understand why the first words out of my seven year old after school yesterday were "Mom, I don't want to be in any group in my class."

She is a second grader in a class with a range of skills from preK to 3rd grade. She has the 3rd grade skill.

It got worse last night when my fifth grader commented about wonderful it was that she wasn't in a group.

Where exactly was the fifth grade level math in the video?

As I understand it, teachers in the 4-5 school here are now required to teach children in groups. It's against the rule to seat the children in rows.

education debate tonight

Lynn G filled me in:

Education and the Next President

I can't for the life of me figure out why Barack Obama appears to be sticking with Linda Darling-Hammond, assuming that's what is happening. Flypaper has predicted she'll be gone, and I've been assuming the Flypaper people know what they're talking about in these matters. But perhaps not.

Here is Darling-Hammond twinkling her way through eight and a half minutes of blather re: [S]ocial and emotional learning is a crucial part of teaching the whole child. Darling-Hammond and her legions of colleagues, students, and disciples in the business world are the reason why parents like me who want a classical education in the liberal arts disciplines for their children are having to pay the Jesuits to provide one.


The word "parents" does not cross Ms. Darling-Hammond's lips.


snippets:

When you think about how you want to educate the whole child, it’s critical to be sure that you’re helping kids be able to engage with one another, understand themselves and how they think, be able to handle the stresses and challenges in their lives which are increasing all the time.

We are still struggling to get past the factory model school that we inherited in the early 1900s, which adopted age-grading so that students go to different teachers every year. ... [M]uch of the environment, particularly in big, urban factory model schools is punitive and coercive because it’s about control of large numbers of people being asked to do things that are not natural.

Interesting, that.

Punitive and coercive are precisely the words I would choose to describe public schools in which children are forcibly enrolled in emotionally invasive project-based, experiential learning activities and graded on the outcome.

[snip]

If you think about the ways we have to be functioning adults, it’s in context where we have to work in groups on hard problems that need creative solutions, that require problem solving, and it’s getting to do that work well that is really part of the major goal of education in the 21st century. So when you think about project-based learning, learning that results in demonstrations of performance, exhibitions of what kids can do in real tasks that have brought these kind of novel challenges to them to solve, you can see that when an individual student or a group of students come together to solve a hard problem to figure out how to do research how to do inquiry, how to investigate, how to put their ideas together, how to figure out which ideas have the most grounding, how to present what they’ve done, they have to do a lot of social, personally intelligent work. They have to be able to figure out how to relate to one another, how to divide tasks, how to solve problems, how to probably run into dead ends, pick up the pieces, reorient, and go in a different direction — all of that develops children’s abilities to be socially capable, emotionally capable and grounded, and, in the long run, also intellectually capable. And those pieces all come together when you’re working on project-based, experiential learning activities.

All your children are belong to us.

A constructivist approach to ratios and proportion

This is a video that purports to show how questioning can be used in teaching. In it, a teacher has a series of one-on-one conversations with a boy who is working on a math problem. I recognized the problem as coming from Connected Math. There are four recipes for an orange drink, with various ratios of orange concentrate to water. The problem is to find out, for each of the four recipes, how many cups of orange concentrate and water are required to make enough drink for 240 campers. Each camper is to have 1/2 cup.

Typical of CMP, the student in the video has received minimal instruction on ratios and proportions. What's more, the problem is a multi-step one, that requires one to figure out the total amount of cups needed of orange drink, given that of 240 campers, each receives 1/2 a cup. This is not in itself hard, but given that he has minimal instruction, it is all one big jumbled mess of a problem in his mind. He has four such recipes and therefore four problems to do, but as is evident from the first dialogue, he has mushed all four recipes into one.





This problem is not difficult to teach with a systematic direct approach. Singapore Math approaches it using bar s. As an example, if the recipe is 2 parts orange concentrate to 3 parts water, the 2:3 ratio is illustrated as follows:

[ ][ ] Orange drink
[ ][ ][ ] Water

There are a total of five parts that make up the orange drink. If there are 120 cups needed (1/2 cup for 240 campers = 1/2 x 240, which Singapore Math students have learned how to do in 4th grade), then each part is 120/5 = 24 cups, and then it is easy to see that the amount of orange drink is two parts, or 2 x 24 = 48 cups, and water = 3 x 24 = 72 cups.

It doesn't take a long time to teach this, and based on my experience with my daughter, the Singapore approach is quite effective and leads to extensions of the concept whereby students can set up ratos between amount of orange concentrate and total amount of orange drink.

When you view the video it is apparent that it is taking this boy quite a while, through quite a few one-on-one dialogues with the teacher. Personally, I don't know of many classrooms where a teacher is going to have that kind of time to have a one-on-one like that.

technology I'm willing to pay for

laptop smackdown

synchronicity alert: I just bought a new Neo for Andrew a month ago. I liked it so much I kept it for myself & gave him my old AlphaSmart. Now he has two & his teacher can keep one at school, thus eliminating the daily scramble to locate the thing & put it in his backpack before his bus arrives at 7:12.

Be sure to click on the photos of kids at the bottom of the screen.

re: photos of kids at the bottom of the screen ---- I am constantly amazed that school districts apparently want students to spend more time on the internet than they already are. Of course, when you're being heavily lobbied by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, then I suppose it's inevitable you're going to be buying 4000-dollar SMARTBoards & 1000-dollar laptops instead of 219-dollar Neos.

After all, when the business community, education leaders, and policymakers want you to do something, you better do it.