High School Questions

My son will start high school next year and they will have an open house for 8th graders and their parents in a couple of weeks. Do you have any suggestions about what questions I should ask? One I already have is what the heck they do in "Advisory" for 20 minutes each day. They use a block schedule that alternates between day 1 and day 2. Is there anything I should look out for with this kind of scheduling? The first class of the day starts at 7:25.

Of course, we gave our son the pep talk about how all of his grades really matter now, even as a freshman. However, I don't want him (or us) to get weird about everything. I don't want him trying to fill in every last minute of his day. This led me to look at GPA and class rank. It dawned on me that taking more classes will not improve these numbers, but I don't know if they want to have kids fill up all slots with classes. By the way, what happens when you apply for college, do you give them the GPA/class rank at the end of the junior year? I know that colleges look at whether you slack off in your senior year, but does your final GPA/class rank really matter?

My goal is to have him focus on the core courses and not feel like there is always something more that he needs to do. I told him that if he does well on the SAT/ACT and has a good GPA, then he doesn't have to drive himself crazy with all of the intangibles.

New York loses Race to the Top Funds?

I haven't followed the ins and outs, so this is all I've got.

Hard work. Reverence. Discipline.

I loved this 60-Minutes story about Samoan football players and I couldn't help but draw parallels to education.

It's estimated that a boy born to Samoan parents is 56 times more likely to get into the NFL than any other kid in America.

Fifty-six times! And I don't believe it's just because these kids are bigger or that it's merely coincidental either. Sure, physical attributes come into play when we're talking athletic ability, however there are plenty of big boys in the U.S. that don't have what it takes to make it in the NFL.

[I]t's not just size that makes the Samoans such great football players. His people come from a farming culture that prizes hard work, reverence and discipline. And he thinks that's why scouts and coaches are pulling out their atlases.

Curiously, most Samoan players currently in the NFL didn't even start playing football until high school. They play on makeshift fields with equipment that wouldn't meet safety requirements here. Yet these kids are a testament to that elusive something more that makes all the difference. Except it's not all that elusive.

Hard work. Reverence. Discipline.

Not money. Not perfect fields. Not the best equipment.

Part II

Part III

Haiti

We've contributed to Partners in Health. Kausfiles put me onto that organization; here is the Pollster write-up.

micromanagement

I've been dipping into literature on management & I love the Corner Office series in the Times. Here is Cristóbal Conde on micromanagement:

Q. Besides the endless travel of that year [during which Conde ran his company as a top-down, command-and-control organization], was there something else that made you shift styles?

A. Yes, it was a huge disagreement with somebody who worked for me directly, and he ended up quitting shortly thereafter. And it wasn’t that the decision that we disagreed on was so big. It was more that, to him, it just wasn’t as much fun anymore. He felt he could do more, and I was in his way. I was chasing away somebody extremely valuable, and that is when I realized I never would have put up with that myself. If you start micromanaging people, then the very best ones leave.

If the very best people leave, then the people you’ve got left actually require more micromanagement. Eventually, they get chased away, and then you’ve got to invest in a whole apparatus of micromanagement. Pretty soon, you’re running a police state. So micromanagement doesn’t scale because it spirals down, and you end up with below-average employees in terms of motivation and ability.

Here he is on feedback:

Q. What is some of the best feedback you’ve received?

A. A boss once told me: “Cris, you’re a smart guy, but that doesn’t mean that people can absorb a list of 18 things to do. Focus on a handful of things.” Very constructive criticism, and the way I’ve translated that is, when I do reviews, everything is threes.

So, “Look, Charlie, these are the three things that are going well. These are the three things that are not going well.” Now, that’s very important because then people know that everybody’s going to get three positives and three things they should do differently. Then they don’t take it personally. I’ve found that to be an incredibly valuable tool.

Structure? The Flatter, the Better
Corner Office - New York Times
January 16, 2010

I love that.

One thing I've noticed, reading the columns: nearly all of the CEOs interviewed describe dramatically changing their approach to management at some point, often in response to criticism and/or setbacks. They talk about these moments frankly, without defensiveness.

I've come to prize the quality of not being defensive. At this point, I'd probably put it right up there with courage, generosity, clear thinking, and a good sense of humor.

"one strongly confirmed impact on math ability in a negative direction"

Cato@Liberty quotes from the new Head Start study:

Head Start improved children’s language and literacy development during the program year but not later and had only one strongly confirmed impact on math ability in a negative direction. (For the 3-year-old cohort, kindergarten teachers reported poorer math skills for children in the Head Start group than children in the control group.)

If they'd gone with Siegfried Engelmann in 1966, things would be different.

Anniversary Edition of Liping Ma's book out this month

You can now pre-order from Amazon, here's what the review says it includes:

The anniversary edition of this bestselling volume includes the original studies that compare U.S and Chinese elementary school teachers’ mathematical understanding and offers a powerful framework for grasping the mathematical content necessary to understand and develop the thinking of school children. Highlighting notable changes in the field and the author’s work, this new edition includes an updated preface, introduction, and key journal articles that frame and contextualize this seminal work.

It's a great book, a must have, I'm looking forward to getting my copy.

against strategies, part 2

from Dan Willingham:

I have written (on this on this blog and elsewhere) about the importance of background knowledge and about the limited value of instructing students in reading comprehension strategies.

To be clear, I don’t think that such instruction is worthless. It has a significant impact, but it seems to be a one-time effect and the strategies are quickly learned. More practice of these strategies pays little or no return. You can read more about that here.

Knowledge of the topic you’re reading about, in contrast, has an enormous impact and more important, there is no ceiling—the more knowledge you gain, the more your reading improves.

In a recent email conversation an experienced educator asked me why, if that’s true, there has been such emphasis on reading strategies and skills in teacher’s professional development.

There’s a temptation to say “Oh, Americans don’t value knowledge; they don’t think that people need to know stuff.” But I rarely run into a teacher or administrator who believes that, and I actually have (as yet unpublished) survey data to support that impression. So I don’t think that’s behind it.

Doubtless there is more than one reason, but as a researcher, I have a hypothesis: People think strategies are important because most of the reading research is on strategies. But that’s an accident of the way research is done.

Behavioral research (and educational research in particular) is a more conservative enterprise than you might think. When a researcher decides to conduct a study in classrooms, he or she typically commits at minimum two years of his or her life to the project. What if nothing much happens?

A researcher is therefore motivated not to conduct studies that break utterly new ground, but rather to conduct studies in which one is fairly confident that something will happen.

One takes an intervention that has worked in the past, and adds an interesting tweak.

[snip]

[T]o be competitive for funding the proposal has to be something for which there is already evidence that it will work.
Now consider what it takes to do research on strategy instruction versus knowledge instruction. Teaching children reading strategies is quick. A research project might call for 10 or 20 lessons in total, each lasting 30 minutes or less. One can imagine getting a school administrator’s permission to do such a study in his or her district.
But the hypothesis for knowledge instruction is that it takes years to make a broad impact on students’ knowledge.
Willingham: The Zeitgeist of Reading Instruction
The Answer Sheet

teaching content is teaching reading

IPA English vowel chart, oriented towards learners (not documentation)

So this is basically the IPA chart I used with Ali, just that it looks cleaner and there's less scribbling. (Click for larger version).


In my opinion (as in not backed by double blind clinical trials, rigourous empirical evidence or anything but simply my own intuition and experience with others), IPA charts are useful. They provide a "skeleton" in which to arrange the seemingly vast array of English vowel sounds.

I have not really been happy with the way the English vowel system is generally presented to learners, both native children and ESL learners. For one, the vowels are often presented in random lists, and learners aren't told how the vowels are related to each other. An IPA-based vowel chart is organised by two physical traits often used to classify vowels (among others): vowel height, and vowel backness.

Here, height and backness are relative. If you look up the IPA vowel chart on Wikipedia, you find distinctions like "mid-open", "mid-front", etc. but those are w/respect to "absolute" cardinal vowels defined by phoneticians -- and there is no single language that uses all of them. Most languages distinguish 2 or 3 heights, and distinguish 2 or 3 levels of backness. There are always exceptions -- but languages that distinguish 5 heights for example, may only have a handful of consonants, etc. It's a trend you find among the world's languages -- complexities in one area tend to be compensated by simplifications elsewhere.

The more "open" a vowel is, the higher its F1 formant frequency is (more close ==> lower F1 formant frequency). F2 formant frequencies are primarily influenced by vowel backness (more front ==> higher F2 formant frequency). Formant analysis in phonetics goes all the way to formants like F9 ... but their effects are more subtle. And of course formant frequencies have interfering effects on each other, but there are compensating functions to do that -- and I won't discuss any more phonetics because I really want to discuss literacy.

A brief vowel chart orientation (an initiation to IPA). In IPA, /j/ is used preferentially for the "yod" (as in yogurt), since /y/ is used for a vowel sound (that English doesn't use). English has (more or less) eight pure vowels:

æ -- "bad"
ɛ -- "bed"
ɪ -- "bid"
ʊ -- "good"
ɔ -- "law"; for people who make the cot-caught distinction. This pure vowel does not exist by itself in my dialect (New England rhotic)
ɑ -- "father"
ə -- "kernel"
ʌ -- "bud"

Now long vowels. Long vowels aren't actually pure vowels, though they used to be. They are actually diphthongs. A diphthong is a combination of vowel + semivowel (aka vowel-like consonant). Not all combinations of two vowel-like sounds are diphthongs. For example, if you pronounce "towel" with two syllables, there are three-vowel like sounds in there, but there is only one diphthong and there is no "triphthong". My rule of thumb:

1. A diphthong has to occupy the time length of one syllable. The semivowel component is generally shorter and more "clipped" than the vowel, thus the VV sequence is really behaving like VC. The preferred syllable structure in English (if not universally) is the structure CVC, which lasts for the length of one standard syllable. Deviations from this structure generally result in compensation.

For example: the word it. Kinda simple, but you never knew you implemented so many phonological corrections when you used this word! If you use it by itself (just say it to yourself), notice how, the /ɪ/ phoneme is stressed, and is slightly longer than say, the word in "sit". But put a consonant before it -- like in a sentence, and "it" will actually pull a consonant off your preceding syllable, and /ɪ/ will revert back to being an unstressed vowel of normal length. Thus, "make it so" can be analysed as: /mɛ^j.kɪt.sɔ ^w/; all three syllables have the structure CVC. This is part of what we usually regard as "fluency" -- our mind is so automatic and flexible, we unconsciously rearrange phonemes around based on sound laws we don't even think consciously about. These sound rules will also make consonants appear out of thin air:

by themselves: "you" "can" "see" "it" -- /jʊ^w/ | /kɛ~n/ | /sɪ^j/ | /ɪt/ [note stresses in bold]
in a sentence: "You can see it." /jʊ^w.kɛn.sɪ^j.jɪt/ (extra consonant suddenly duplicated from previous syllable: length compensation!) [stresses in bold, extra consonant italicised]

You can observe this as a rule in children. Young children and toddlers have incomplete length compensation -- the result is a sort of sing-song sentence structure we associate with two-year-olds. But analyse the sound structure of a six-year-old or an eight-year-old, and many elaborate sound rules suddenly appear.

Okay, that was a rather long aside. Second rule of thumb:

Diphthongs generally "obscure" their component sounds. Only by conscious analysis do you realise that the sound in "ay" (like stay) is made up of ɛ (like in bed) and the yod (the consonant of yogurt). Same goes for "how" (æ+w). I include rhotics in here too, because they have a tendency to change the vowel, but you can also make an argument for excluding them.

So here are the diphthongs of English:

æ^w -- "how"
æ^j -- "my"
ɛ^j -- "bake"
ɪ^j -- "bee"
ʊ^w -- "moose"
ɔ^w -- "bow"
ɔ^j -- "toy"
ɑ^w -- "sock"
ɑ^r -- "far"
ɑ^wr -- "war", "core" **
ə^r -- "wicker"
ʌ^r -- "kernel", "rehearse" **

** There's further discussion about these diphthongs but it would make this post too long.
There's also nasal vowels (like the vowel in sand) but I've decided to skip that for now.

IMO, this is better than the traditional short-long vowel system often presented, because that system really only allows for ten vowel phonemes and the rest of the vowels are randomly placed. Was always confused about the vowel system from day 1 when it was presented in first grade, until grade 10, which is when I learnt phonetics.

A pure vowel / diphthong contrast can be used to explain English spelling, whereas it's not apparent with a short-long system. So you have to explain why silent-e often generates diphthongs ("long vowels"). OK. Short answer: It's related to length compensation, like the syllable exercises we've been doing above. But why does double-o ("long o") not actually sound like a long "o" (like in stone)? Can you actually make sense of English spelling? Ah, that is for an upcoming post on the Great Vowel Shift.

cross-pressured individuals of the world, unite!

Beth wrote:

First of all, real progressives hate what's going on in the public schools as much as anyone. "Progressive" shouldn't mean "mushy."

True!

We've talked about this before; political opinion re: our public schools does not break along party lines. In fact, I have the impression that education politics are the single most bipartisan issue we have. (Is that true?)

The most useful explanation I've found of public school ideology is E.D. Hirsch on progressive education's roots in romanticism. Ultimately, though, Hirsch doesn't tell me why 'everyday liberals' and 'everyday conservatives' should see eye-to-eye on so many issues when it comes to K-12.

Then, a couple of days ago, I came across two studies of public opinion that struck me as relevant:

• The Nature of Political Ideology in the Contemporary Electorate by Shawn Treier and D. Sunshine Hillygus | Public Opinion Quarterly 2009 73(4):679-703
  

• Value Preferences and Ideological Structuring of Attitudes in American Public Opinion by Brendon Swedlow and Mikel L. Wyckoff | American Politics Research |Volume 37 Number 6 | November 2009 | 1048-1087
  

Both argue that political opinion is multidimensional. Thus the liberal-conservative dimension fails to capture a rather large percentage of the public. (62%?)

From Treier and Hillygus:

...Although political rhetoric today is clearly organized by a single ideological dimension, we find that the belief systems of the mass public remain multidimensional, with many in the electorate holding liberal preferences on one dimension and conservative preferences on another. These cross-pressured individuals tend to self-identify as moderate (or say "Don't Know") in response to the standard liberal-conservative scale, thereby jeopardizing the validity of this commonly used measure. Our analysis further shows that failing to account for the multidimensional nature of ideological preferences can produce inaccurate predictions about the voting behavior of the American public.

I can't pull a copy of their article just now, so I don't know the nature of the dimensions they see as characterizing American public opinion. I have been able to skim Swedlow and Wyckoff, who say that political opinion is organized along two dimensions:

• order vs equality/caring
  
• high freedom vs low freedom

From their article:

In this study, we investigate four attitudinal structures (including liberal, conservative, and libertarian configurations) associated with two ideological dimensions among American voters and demonstrate that these attitudinal structures are related in expected ways to differential preferences for the values of freedom, order, and equality/caring. Liberals are inclined to trade freedom for equality/caring but not for order, whereas conservatives are their opposites—willing to trade freedom for order but not for equality/caring. In contrast, libertarians are generally less willing than others to trade freedom for either order or equality/caring (although they probably prefer order to equality/caring). The fourth ideological type is more willing than the others to relinquish freedom, preferring both order and equality/caring. Depending on how our results are interpreted, this fourth type may be characterized as either communitarian or humanitarian. These findings help close the gap between unidimensional conceptions and multidimensional evidence of ideological organization in political attitudes by demonstrating that value structure and attitudinal structure are strongly related in two ideological dimensions.

Swedlow and Wyckoff duplicate Treier and Hillygus' finding re: self-identified "moderates":

When asked to identify their ideological orientation, nearly half (45% to 48% in both groups) of those with libertarian and communitarian political attitudes identified themselves as “moderates.” Similarly, when we recompute percentages by rows instead of columns, we find that just more than 60% of those identifying themselves as moderates on the self-identification scale are classified as libertarians or communitarians in our attitudinal typology. Those with libertarian and communitarian attitudes were also more likely not to respond to the self-identification question at all (4.6% and 8.6%, respectively). The bulk of libertarians and communitarians, to their credit, seem to know that they are not liberals and conservatives.^* Meanwhile, though less than perfect in their ability to match attitudes with ideological labels, those with liberal and conservative attitudes are by comparison noticeably less likely to select the “moderate” or “don’t know” categories, and when they pick one of the other two ideological labels, they are usually correct.

Swedlow & Wyckoff, p. 1056


Cross-pressured individuals who "don't know" their political orientation: that's a pretty fair description of my own plight when it comes to choosing between Door A and Door B.

The reason the grid strikes me as possibly relevant to public schools is that the "Communitarian" option -- low-low on freedom -- is one way to describe what it is that is not 'liberal' about public schools, whose employees are generally identified with the Democratic Party and with liberal politics. And I think you can use this grid to visualize why a real progressive like Mary Damer and a real conservative like Martin Kozloff can be so naturally allied. Neither is a communitarian.

By which I mean that individual freedom is a core value for liberals and conservatives alike, although in different realms, which is not the case for the people running our public schools. All too often, public school culture is distinctly illiberal.

They do what they do.


Michael Kinsley on Democrats, Republicans, libertarians and conservatives

And what is the opposite of libertarianism? Libertarians would say fascism. But in the American political context, it is something infinitely milder that calls itself communitarianism. The term is not as familiar, and communitarians are far less organized as a movement than libertarians, ironically enough. But in general communitarians emphasize society rather than the individual and believe that group responsibilities (to family, community, nation, the globe) should trump individual rights.

The relationship of these two ways of thinking to the two established parties is peculiar. Republicans are far more likely to identify themselves as libertarians and to vilify the government in the abstract. And yet Republicans have a clearer vision of what constitutes a good society and a well-run planet and are quicker to try to impose this vision on the rest of us. Now that the Republican Party is in trouble, critics are advising it to free itself of the religious right on issues like abortion and gay rights. That is, the party should become less communitarian and more libertarian. With Democrats, it's the other way around.

Very few Democrats self-identify as libertarians, but they are in fact much more likely to have a live-and-let-live attitude toward the lesbian couple next door or the Islamofascist dictator halfway around the world. And every time the Democrats lose an election, critics scold that they must put less emphasis on the sterile rights of individuals and more emphasis on responsibilities to society. That is, they should become less libertarian and more communitarian. Usually this boils down to advocating mandatory so-called voluntary national service by people younger than whoever is doing the advocating.

Libertarians and communitarians (to continue this unjustified generalizing) are different character types. Communitarians tend to be bossy, boring and self-important, if they're not being oversweetened and touchy-feely. Libertarians, by contrast, are not the selfish monsters you might expect. They are earnest and impractical--eager to corner you with their plan for using old refrigerators to reverse global warming or solving the traffic mess by privatizing stoplights. And if you disagree, they're fine with that. It's a free country.

Libertarians Rising
by Michael Kinsley
TIME Thursday October 18, 2007

^* I love it!

small-d democracy and its discontents

Middle School Mathematics Institute: msmi2010

The web site for the Middle School Mathematics Institute is up. You can see it at:

www.msmi2010.org

Comments welcome. Attendees welcome. Contact me for more information.

boondoggle

average cost of 1 DC voucher: $6,600
cost of sending 1 DC student to DC public schools: $28,170

DC Vouchers Solved?

strategies not content

The proposed English-Language Arts “college and career readiness” standards (which we are told are not high school graduation standards) are largely a list of content-free generic skills. Rather than focusing on what English teachers are trained to teach (quality literature), the drafters seem to expect English teachers to teach reading strategies presumed to help students to cope with biology or economics textbooks.

Alternative Needed to Common Core: An Additional Consortium for ‎Common Standards
Williamson M. Evers and Ze'ev Wurman

If you want a reading "strategy" that works, buy a copy of Eugene Schwartz's How to Double Your Child's Grades in School and/or read Carolyn Johnston's posts on Schwartz:

• A reading strategy that really works
• An approach to reading that really works, part 2
  

I like SQ3R, too.

other:
American Educator issue devoted to reading comprehension
Six-Way Paragraphs
SQ3R chart

Bill Evers has a blog

How did I not know this?

scripted

Guided reading is scripted.

Miss Brave:

Before I actually became a first-year teacher, I was all about the workshop model. I thought it would be helpful, as a new teacher, to have a script of sorts to follow. After all, every mini lesson sounds a little something like this, but with all the blanks filled in:

"Boys and girls, we have been working hard on _____. Today I want to teach you that ____. Let me show you what I mean. ________. Boys and girls, did you see the way I ______? Now let's try it together. Turn and talk to your partner about _______. Boys and girls, today and every day I want you to remember that _______. Now off you go!"

A month and a half into the school year, the workshop model is pretty much the bane of my existence. Remembering the script and keeping the mini lesson to a scant 10 minutes is not as easy as it sounds. Neither is trying to shoehorn all the aspects of my lesson into the workshop model framework. I'm used to teaching in a style where I ask lots of questions of my students and invite lots of discussion. During the workshop model mini lesson, there are no questions allowed from the students and no discussion (except during the active engagement); it's all the teacher, all the time. I see my students raise their hands with these hopeful looks on their faces because they have something they want to share or something they have a question about, and it breaks my heart to keep saying, "Hands down, it's my turn now."

I think the workshop model probably does work for the population of students in the school where I teach. After all, taking advantage of those "teachable moments" that lead the lesson astray can be really confusing for students whose native language is not English, like the students at my school. But at the same time, the workshop model feels really one-sided. I can tell that there are kids who are confused, who aren't getting it, and I'm supposed to pull those kids for a 2-minute "re-teach" at the rug instead of changing tack and trying a different method?

This weekend, I took two New York State teaching certification exams (because my teaching license is from another state, I have to pass New York's exams to get my New York license). Mostly they were a joke, but they included lots of samples of class discussions -- and I realized that's something I miss. In my workshop model lessons, there's no back and forth, no "What do you think?", no "Who else has an idea about this?" I don't get to invite my students' opinions, their knowledge, their ideas. All I get to do is tell them how to punctuate their sentences and then eavesdrop on them while they try it. And even though I allegedly have more freedom as a cluster teacher, I've still been told by the powers that be that every class I teach should start with a mini lesson. It's hard enough being a first-year teacher as it is, but trying to shoehorn every lesson into a framework I'm not all that comfortable with is overwhelming.

Apparently the workshop model is mandated for use in schools throughout New York City, so...I should use it or lose it, I guess? Or I should, as someone suggested, plan two lessons: one to be taught the way I want to teach, and one workshop model to pull out when I'm being observed.

I don't think I'm ready to be that much of a renegade just yet.

Can we conclude from this that 'it's scripted' isn't the real objection the education establishment has to Direct Instruction?

an Iraqi, English spelling, and a bit of English historical linguistics

I had an Iraqi roommate this summer. Let's call him Ali. His cultural story is interesting and comes with all sorts of other-than-linguistic things to muse about; he's very humble and is a sous-chef for one of the eateries on Grounds here. He was going to enter engineering school in Germany when the war broke out. He speaks broken German, more fluent Turkish and some Kurdish -- and very impressive English for two years of immersion.

Ali, trying to go back to school and enter the American college system what with its SATs and all, entreated me for help on reading, writing and speaking. I do think his progress in two years is very laudable -- some other members of the refugee community have been here for a year or more, yet cannot speak more than a smattering of English.

"My biggest problem is reading," he once said, struggling to pronounce that "-ng" sound. "English is a hard language to learn, harder than Turkish, German or Arabic. In Arabic, you spell the words like they are pronounced. Like this..." He writes out an example for me, which I struggle to read.

"English is kinda written as it is pronounced," I try to reassure him, struggling to summarise the vast body of work linguists and philologists have done over the years. "It's just that the pronunciations have changed over the years, and many spellings have yet to be updated. You know Arabic dialects, right? Aren't they spoken much differently than Standard Arabic is? It's kinda like that." It's like speaking those dialects but writing them in the system of formal Standard Arabic.

But I already knew there were complications with this analogy. Often, the colloquial dialects -- if they are written at all -- are transcribed exactly the way the sound. This was the case with the Vulgar Latin's descendants -- the Romance dialects, that diverged into the Romance languages like (Old) French, Italian and Spanish. (Modern French writing is an interesting story and shares some parallels with English.) With the Chinese languages, many characters are in fact, composites of other characters, where some characters have been borrowed for sound rather than meaning. After that, the borrowed character and the word being represented diverge in sound in some dialects -- and incongruence develops à la English. Often some of the diverging dialects will simply adopt different characters -- but elsewhere other dialects will keep the original (but incongruent) analogy; and of course the most conservative dialects do not even see an incongruence at all.

An immediate concept that helped Ali, but wasn't taught very often in ESL classes, was the concept of stress. At first this didn't have anything to do with reading or writing -- simply the way he pronounced the words that made him hard to understand.

"Sometimes, you say the words correctly... correct vowel and everything, but you don't put the correct stress on the word, so it sounds as though the vowel isn't there. And sometimes you say the stress correctly, but you use the full vowel on unstressed syllables or the reduced vowel on stressed syllables."

This was new to him, because in the two years of ESL help he had received, "stress" was a concept that had appeared to escape ESL teachers' minds. A fundamental concept in English phonology, it's kind of hard to teach both fluency and reading/writing if you ignore it. Stress, you see, is a historical innovation in the history of the English language. Unlike many other languages, it's neither predictable (i.e. it's phonemic) but neither is it explicitly marked in writing (as is the case with Spanish).

But don't worry -- stress is something easy to memorise, because the stress of each word is usually memorable. Many grammatical function words like "the", "a", "of", or affixes "-ing", "-er" etc. have no stress at all. Ali, I discovered, had already internalised many stresses -- he just didn't know it was that important. If you randomly quizzed him on the stresses of "bigger", "party", "telephone", "ambulance" or "reduce," he would get it right, down to the primary and secondary stresses. This is because stress is something that is quite easy to memorise and he had already done it unconsciously, even as a non-native speaker.

There are complications of stress, like the fact that the relative strength of a word's stress compared to other word's stresses will change depending on where it is in a sentence (syntactical stress), but that was for a more advanced lesson. Some words' syllables can be stressed when emphasised, such that when you quiz them in isolation, they become stressed, e.g. the "re-" in "reduce" or "the" gets pronounced with an "-ee" (/i/) sound rather than a reduced vowel -- but are usually unstressed when you use them in a sentence. But I told Ali not to worry for now -- it's not a big error for a second language learner to sound extra emphatic.

Stress came in handy, I discovered, because Ali had a real trouble with the letter "e". It can be pronounced like the "e" in "me" (/i/), the "ei" (/e/) in "weigh", the "e" (/ɛ/) in "bed", the reduced vowels /ə/ and /ɪ/ (when unstressed, I treated them like the same phoneme for Ali's sake, but some English dialects -- including mine -- do not merge them). And oh yeah, if you want to be really finicky, there's the stressed rhotic /ɝ/ (like in "rehearse") as opposed to the unstressed rhotic /ər/, but I didn't go there.

And oh yeah. That silent-e issue, which Ali had learnt functionally but still had trouble with because his ESL teachers had taught him the rule imperfectly. But wait, stress can come to the rescue...

Long vowels, when pronounced long, are almost always pronounced stressed. That is, you rarely see unstressed long vowels. Plus, conjugations of verbs and their gerunds tend to preserve the stress of their parent verbs.

"Biking" preserves the stress of "bike" and is not pronounced "bick King"
"Corner" had the stress on the first syllable, so the e's in "cornered" cannot be stressed, and also cannot be pronounced "corneared".
"Cornea" in contrast has two stresses (primary and secondary). It's a good example of a word with syntax-dependent stress, because it is pronounced with three syllables when the second syllable is stressed (during emphasis, like if a med school lecturer distinguishing the cornea versus the sclera), but the secondary stress can be dropped to form a two-syllable word.

This got us into diphthongs and glides (when vowels get compounded together and one of the vowels get reduced). When not emphasised, the /i/ in "cornea" is reduced to a glide (/j/; it behaves like a consonant), and consonants cannot be stressed in English.

There are also "exceptions" that really aren't. For example, I gave this stress-based rule: Stressed terminal -y is pronounced like the vowel in "tie" -- e.g. fly, fry, why, rely, retie, deny
Unstressed terminal -y is pronounced like the vowel in "free" -- e.g. belly, patty, hearty

The reason why terminal -y is pronounced /i/ even in unstressed positions (like "party") has a historical reason behind it, because terminal -y doesn't come from historical "e" but historical "i", which historically split into /ɪ/ (bit) and /aɪ/ (bite) during the Great Vowel Shift.

For various reasons, historical "i" in this unstressed terminal position didn't become /ɪ/ and remained /i/, while stressed "i" followed the sound change to "/aɪ/". It sounds like a mouthful to explain, but makes intuitive sense to children who already have an implicit knowledge of English phonotactics. Some vowels (vowel sounds) are never found by themselves at the end of words, or heck, open syllables (syllables that do not end in a consonant). English simply forbids them to exist (or more accurately, the historical pressure for their existence never ... existed). This includes vowels like /ɪ/, /ɛ/, /æ/ and /ʌ/. Try it for yourselves: the vowels in "bit", "bed", "bad" and "but" never end words by themselves.

The reason even comes down to universal trends seen in all languages: if there is length distinction involved, long vowels prefer to be in open situations (syllables that end in vowel), and short vowels prefer to be in "closed" situations (syllables that in a consonant). It's sort of a length compensation. After the historical Great Reorganisation of the English sound system, consonant length is no longer as noticeable, but can be noticed in the following examples:

The /t/ in the word "fitting" is likely to be pronounced longer than the /t/ in "fighting"

i.e. a transcription making note of this might note "fitting" as "fɪt.tɪŋ" (CVC.CVC) but "fighting" as "faɪ.tɪŋ" (CVV.CVC).

The /f/ in "riffle" is likely to be pronounced longer than the /f/ in "rifle", hence
/rɪf.fl/ and /raɪ.fl/

This gives us a historical basis for why double consonants (in terms of consonants found in writing) tend to convert long vowels in verbs to their short counterparts, hence the distinction between "writing" and "written". If you say "rifle" like "rife-fel" as opposed to "rye-fel", you won't technically be wrong, but you will sound slightly strange. These subtle details can be confirmed by taking spectrograms of native speakers' utterances.

At some point -- to distinguish letters from sounds -- I had to introduce Ali to IPA and the linguists' English vowel chart, for both our sakes. I'm surprised that it isn't used in schools -- because there are some overarching rules that follow from it that was a big "OH! it makes so much sense now" moment for Ali.


** At this point I should also mention various important laws of logic in analysing sound systems. Like causality. Situation X may imply sound type A, e.g. there is a correlation, but that doesn't mean sound type A implies situation X. Similarly, sound type B may imply situation Y, but the causality may or may not be bidirectional.

more fun with balanced literacy

from Miss Brave:

On an unrelated note, I love field trip days, because they let me get to see the best of my class. (i.e., my students are surprisingly enjoyable when I am not forcing the workshop model down their throats!)

against initiatives, too

Speaking of schools teaching strategies instead of knowledge (alert E.D. Hirsch!), an approach that requires fantastic levels of goal-mongering and running-record-keeping, I also stand foursquare against the obsessive "rolling-out" of "initiatives."

Take my district. (Please.)

Last year, not long after the crash, the monthly Superintendent's Letter included the following observation:

Excitement abounds throughout the district over recent and upcoming initiatives.

Jobs were disappearing, housing values were cratering, but in the high-flying world of our schools superintendent excitement was abounding. Excitement over initiatives.

Come to find out, there is a name for districts like mine:

Too often, the measure of success in schools has been the number of activities and innovations going on. Bryk, Sebring, Kerbow, Rollow, and Easton (1998) call schools like these "Christmas tree schools," a phrase they coined to describe schools undergoing school improvement where activity per se had run amok: "There were many new programs--not just a few--and a great deal of activity and hoopla surrounded them. Some of these new initiatives may have some real strength and integrity. But because they do not cohere as a group and may even conflict, their impact is minimal at best, and potentially negative" .... In the absence of a single-minded academic focus, educators are easy targets for the "innovation du jour," seldom finishing anything they start. The dean of American basketball coaches, John Wooden (1997), gave his playeres this advice, which is admirably suited for educators in Christmas tree schools: "Do not mistake activity for achievement."

10 Traits of Highly Effective School: Raising the Achievement Bar for All Students, p. 53 by Elaine K. McEwan

Guided reading and the workshop model: activity mistaken for achievement.

against strategies

A few years and -- oh -- maybe 3 or 4 Directors of Pupil Personnel ago,^* I noticed, while sitting in on another parent's CSE meeting, a liberal use of the word "strategies." As in: "We'll teach him some strategies for self-monitoring." Or: "We'll give him some strategies for managing his learning." It was strategies-this and strategies-that, all strategies all the time. Apparently our higher-functioning special needs students were being given strategies they could use to overcome their learning problems and work around their developmental disabilities. Check.

At the time, I took this as just another moderately annoying instance of edu-inanity.

But it's always worse than you think.

Reading Miss Brave, and I plan to read every last word Miss Brave has written and posted to her blog, I realize that "strategies" are yet another means of transferring responsibility from the school to the student, while also working your teachers into an early grave and providing employment for a cadre of Lucy-Calkins and/or Fountas-and-Pinnell-trained literacy specialists. Win-win.

Here is Miss Brave:

I've mentioned before that we're expected to make sure each of our students has three goals for each unit in reading, writing and math. While students are working independently after the mini lesson, we're supposed to meet with two small groups for strategy lessons to help them meet these goals.

And here she is again:

Each student is supposed to have three goals in every subject and be able to articulate those goals. That's five major subjects (reading, writing, math, science and social studies), which is fifteen goals for each student. To me, that sounds like a lot of goals. I mean, hello, I have students who don't even know their own last name, let alone the goal they're working towards in reading. I don't understand why we have to start with three goals. Can't we pilot it with one and see how it goes?

And again:

My reading goal is to read my books over to make sure I understand the story.
My reading goal is to stop and make a prediction about what will happen next and then read on to find out if I am right.
My reading goal is to listen to myself read the story to make sure all the words sound right.

My tentative plan is to print all these goals out on big labels that I can stick right on their book baggies. Of course, all the kids break their book baggies by swinging them around, so I was considering getting them all new, durable book baggies (and by "book baggie" I mean they cram all their books into a flimsy Ziploc bag, so I was going to buy durable Ziploc bags, and between those and the labels I am looking at spending a fortune of my own money, since the copier at school is still broken and I have been using my own paper and ink to print and make copies at home on my own time, thank you very much Department of Education).

Question: How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

Answer: The answer is not 'strategies.'

Students need distributed practice in order to learn and progress, and it is the school's job to give them that practice, not tell them to remember 15 goals and 30 strategies when they are age seven.

Even if a child does manage to hold 3 reading goals in working memory, he's not going to have room for anything else.


^* Recently I figured out that my district has had 5 assistant superintendents for curriculum, instruction, and technology in 6 years. That's a lot.

60 lessons a week

Have I mentioned lately that I am not a fan of differentiated instruction?

I've just this moment discovered Miss Brave, by the way. She's wonderful, but her school is a dystopian futureworld of guided reading, "strategies," goals, literacy coaches, and "APs." And paperwork. And more, more paperwork. Your tax dollars at work.

Lucy Calkins has a lot to answer for.

The good news: at least they're using phonics.

the mathematics in linguistics

In high school I was super-obsessed with linguistics. (I still am -- I just am less likely to burst out inappropriately into linguistic asides in casual conversation.)

In my childhood my father had always treated calculus like this esoteric and super-abstract thing that only erudites could know. It was a uselessly haughty attitude in retrospect; my father was kind of a weird character -- I remember at 7 or 8, I came home with the "we worked with fractions today!" excitement, and he gave me this dismissive, "Psh! With that excitement I thought you had learnt something truly enlightening, like calculus." My father piqued my interest in science, but he was also the type to leave the family when I was 10. My mother, who works in architectural drafting and currently designs ships for a defence contractor, has only the vaguest recollection of a derivative -- her knowledge of calculus is all procedural knowledge, like how to find shear stress or dead load, moment formulas for various geometric shapes, etc. AFAIK no one talks about the elegance of the Mean Value Theorem on the job.

So my father's leaving meant I became the mathy one in my family. Which was bad, cuz when I was 14, I basically failed my secondary two mathematics exam in Singapore with a score of 47%. (OK they also let me take a makeup exam and I passed, but it was none too glamourous.) I had lost most passion for mathematics, until I picked up this book called Fermat's Last Theorem. You mean .... there are active areas of research in mathematics? I was inspired to self-study ... in Singapore everyone has private tutors or something, even the lower middle class, but my single parent household was even below that. Now I can laugh at all those people who spent thousands of dollars a year on private tutoring ... when I spent an amazing amount of $0 using Google. This is why I don't really disagree with idea of an "Investigations" curriculum -- it's just implemented horribly, when there are so many more fascinating and intellectually-stimulating investigations one could use.

Like take linguistics.

It had come to pass that in high school I had become pretty fascinated with calculus and linear algebra. I was taking linear algebra via dual-enrollment, and was trying to wrap my head around things like vector spaces and determinants. "Yeah I get how to do this problem, and I get the fact that theorem X is proven, but I still don't get why it works." I made the mistake of treating it like a regular high school class, because apparently my constant question-asking had annoyed some of my classmates, and the Dean of Students came to me and was basically recommended a remedy of asking less questions.

This was around the same time I was really into historical linguistics and phonetics, and had discovered the real truth behind English "long" and "short" vowels, and suddenly English spelling made so much sense, especially since I was also working out sound changes between French, Latin and Spanish. I felt like a child again ...

But then came my beloved math teachers -- the last ones who I expected to ask, "Why are you studying all this math? You're going into linguistics, right?"

At that time I was totally caught off guard, and could only come up with replies like, "Well uh.... it's kinda interesting," or "It's good to know, if I ever switch fields..." or "There's so much physics in phonetics! Well, kinda...."

Well, I'm glad to report that the suspicions of my math teachers were wrong. Other than the fact that I suddenly became interested in materials science in college, there is so much abstract math in linguistics it's not even funny.




[the above is a CPG mutual-inhibition diagram for a nonlinguistic circuit, but I can't believe that some people -- math teachers of all people -- don't seem to get that in order to study acoustic signal processing, especially in the brain, you need to understand a) how to analyse a periodic function b) the general solution to the differential equation y'' = -ky]

are flyswatters better than the 3-cueing system?

dysteachia

Mary Damer posted a link to this video on the DI list, and it's well worth taking the time to watch -- especially the section starting at 3:42.

The lesson: reading is not naming.

Reading is unspelling.

Once Avid Mathblogger Re-emerges

Vlorbik On Math Ed is, in some sense, back.

a sentence is like a bicycle...

We're on clean-up duty this weekend: huge, ginormous stacks of dog-eared, dusty pdf-file print-outs are going away!

Buried deep in the bedroom pile^* I found my KISS grammar printout, which led me to the ATEG page (that was inevitable) and from thence to Tips for Teaching Grammar. At that point it was just a short hop to Pamela Dykstra on bicycles & appositives.

And then on to this, and best of all this.

Happy New Year!


^*shorter than the under-the-desk pile but taller than the family room coffee-table pile

The Book Knight on Liberal Arts Education

New Year

I've been mulling this year's resolutions. So far I'm thinking they may have to be mostly about 2 of the kids:

• daily PSAT prep for C. (which means daily math, mostly)

• daily GrammarTrainer for Andrew (we were going great guns until I fell off the wagon)
  

• teach Andrew to pedal a bike (so not looking forward to that one)
  

Still need a resolution for me. Possibly: make enough money to pay somebody else to do test prep. That would be good.

Actually, this is the one I'm gearing up for:

A year ago, the Lincoln, Neb., artist and writer was so disorganized that she spent much of her time looking for misplaced supplies in her office clutter. To find all the Web sites where she had posted her artwork, "I often had to Google my own name," she says. But she made a resolution last New Year's Day to get organized, and now, a year later, she is sticking to it. With the clutter gone and her deadlines and routines under control, she says, "my life is so much easier."

A Cheat Sheet for Making New Year's Resolutions
by Sue Shellenbarger

Speaking of office clutter, we bought Billy bookshelves at Ikea today. The corner combination. So, clearly, I need a resolution to go with.

And, speaking of resolve, I am now basically a strict vegetarian.^* Well, strict except for the Swedish meatballs. I've lost 7 pounds.

It took me three months to stop eating meat, chicken, fish, dairy, eggs, refined carbohydrates, salt, and olive oil,^** but after a quarter century of trying I still can't organize my office.

That is preposterous.


^* I refuse to use the word 'vegan' in public.
^** still eating some salt & vegetable oil

Darn Pesky Content and Skills

Yesterday, we had some relatives over for a late Christmas gathering. During the meal, my niece complained about how she didn't like having to memorize stuff in high school just to forget it all after the test. My nephew complained about having to memorize math formulas with no explanation. Their conclusion? Memorizing stuff is bad. I asked them whether remembering things is bad.

Since my son was in Kindergarten, teachers have been trying to convince me that remembering knowledge and mastery of skills are not that important. My niece and nephew see real problems, but come to the wrong conclusion. My nephew wants an explanation (and he many have gotten none), but assumes that the skills would all be easy if he first had understanding.

Then the topic switched to class participation. I was surprised to find that they were all for it. My niece, in particular, liked being able to discuss topics with others in the classroom. She said that she learned better that way. I asked about shy kids and the concensus was that this would be good for them too. Unfortunately, our conversation followed a common route - it went all over the place and was used mainly as a vehicle for expressing their own opinion. All teachers and no students. They had the confidence to express their views, but little to back it up.

It could be that many kids are not shy. They just don't want to waste their time. After a short time, I changed the subject.

Merry Christmas!

picture t/k

A bottom up approach

After spending years worrying about k-8 math education, and a couple years on this blog clarifying for myself what the problems were, and what solutions had already been tried and found wanting, I mostly wanted to start my own private school. But after more time and wisdom, I realized I didn't have the skill set I wanted to do that now, nor did I know the people I'd need to do it with.

So, what could I do RIGHT NOW, to help improve math ed here in St. Paul?

And then it occurred to me: well, I'm a big fan of Hung-Hsi Wu; I believe his work teaching teachers is about the only thing that could make a difference in a classroom or school; so I could promote Wu.

I emailed and asked Wu if he'd come out to St. Paul for a week long institute (as he calls them) to teach fractions to middle school math teachers; he said he would, but pointed out that in his usual institutes, he does 5 days of followup throughout the school year. I agreed that I would do those for this institute, using his materials.

Then I started pounding the pavement at some local parochial schools, pitching the idea that their teachers needed to learn some math, specifically on fractions, decimals, percentages, and that we could get Wu to come do it.

I made essentially cold calls, but I did so to schools that I thought would be interested, who would see this as an opportunity to improve on their already strong academics. In each case, I had reason to believe that their ideas about education were in line with KTM's, shall we say. One school is a Core Knowledge school; one has a classical curriculum model in place; one is moving in that direction and is making lots of changes. I was not disappointed; one of the schools immediately offered to host the event; another offered whatever financial help was necessary. Another looked forward to creating a consortium of teachers between these schools to keep moving their professional development in a good direction--and to work on their struggles with their current textbooks.

After getting a small contingent in place, we called up Wu and set a date. Voila! An institute is born!

So, we're on: June 14 - June 18, 2010, in St. Paul MN, a 5 day institute with invited speaker Hung-Hsi Wu for middle school math teachers on fractions, decimals, percentages.

I will pound the pavement some more in the new year, offering the institute to a few more schools. I am hoping to find other schools that are equally interested in doing something based on content. In the end, we'd like to have about 30 teachers attend, though with some attrition, we may have to start out a bit higher. If we don't get that high a number, it will still be worth it though; the already committed schools are thirsty for this.

I picked parochial schools for a couple reasons. First, I'm Catholic, and the state of Catholic ed here in the Twin Cities metro is just dreadful--it's almost exactly the same as what the public schools offer--and that's truly saddening to me. I want Catholic education to thrive. Next, Catholic schools are much less connected, as they lack a district (most dioceses don't act anything like public school districts) and much less likely to be able to avail themselves of professional development opportunities, both positive or negative; they are much less likely to have a math specialist on their staff, etc. So there was less likely to be competition with other kinds of PD already in place. And finally, I'm doing this for free as part of my charity. The schools I've picked couldn't afford this without my doing it for free. Other privates could afford to hire someone to do this (and maybe they do), but these schools wouldn't have that option.

I will post more when I've got a few more things formalized. We have to work out the registration costs and funding details; I need a web site that looks professional; we'll need some professional posters, etc.

If anyone here is interested in attending, please feel free to email me. (my blogger profile has my address.)

And perhaps we could use this as a starting point for a KTM in person get together?

truth in advertising

My copy of the district newsletter arrived the other day.

On the back:

SAT scores on the Rise
Over the last three years, our students' SAT scores have been rising in all categories.

Do you wonder what happens when you back that up from 3 years to 5?

(properly formatted version)

Steve H on speed, mastery, & understanding

I remember being very discouraged (in the old traditional math days, no less) trying to understand mixture problems because the book we used approached it using tables and grids. When the problem changed a little bit, I couldn't figure out which numbers went into what boxes. I finally learned to approach the problems using governing equations and defining variables.

That understanding didn't come from solving one or two problems. I had to work at it. There were so many times when I thought I understood what I was doing only to feel completely lost when I tackled the homework set. That's when the real lightbulb goes on. Look at any proper math text book and you will see homework sets that give you all sorts of problem variations of the material in the section.

I also want to make a case for speed in helping understanding too. As you move along to more complex math, you need this speed or else you will be completely bogged down. In high school, I got really good at "seeing" right triangles in word problems, even if the triangles weren't explicitly drawn. I was very fast at finding any side or angle given "enough" information. I could state that a length was something like d*cos(theta) just by looking at it. I didn't have to draw a picture and stew over which leg is for sine and which leg is for cosine.

The mechanical monkey paradigm leads to all sorts of wrong conclusions. It also conveniently fits in with their predisposition to equate mastery with rote learning and drill and kill. When they talk of balance, they really don't mean it. They still think it's just for convenience rather than understanding.

This position might seem reasonable when it comes to the basic algorithms of arithmetic, but it falls completely apart as you head into algebra.

Reading this post makes me want to go do, right this minute, two things that cannot be done at the same time:

• fire up ALEKS and finish the geometry course I was taking before my mom fell last summer
• finally write my post on just exactly how much money Response to Intervention (pdf file) is going to cost us once RTI gets going in public schools with a) lousy curricula and b) no focus whatsoever on deliberate practice (pdf file) & mastery
  

Maybe I should spent 10 minutes de-cluttering my desk before I do either of those.

shoot me

highest ever

(current per pupil spending: $28,291)

learned disability

from the Comments thread on Paul's post, Creating Learning Disabilities,

Exo wrote:

I think you are right, Paul. Learned disability - and it's almost impossible to correct in later years.

I see the same in my HS science classes. Elementary computations, numbers make them look like the deer in headlight...They ARE afraid. The ones that are not are either my ESL students who recently moved to the US or "math kids." And please, we don't do anything higher than what in Soviet schools would count as 6th grade... Maybe even 5th.

It's just that immediate "I don't get it" as soon as the numbers are involved.

I think the psych term for this phenomenon is learned helplessness.

According to this woman, it takes about 5 minutes to induce learned helplessness in a 20-year old.



Unfortunately, the teacher ends up saying girls are specific victims of learned helplessness.

I'm pretty sure the person operating the camera doesn't agree.

Alternative to Common Core

What are your thoughts on this post from Jay P. Greene's blog?

links for Barry's Education Next articles

The links to Barry's Education Next articles have gone missing on Google, so here they are (I'll get them linked on the sidebar, too):

An A-maze-ing Approach to Math (2005 and now a classic--)

Miracle Math (about Singapore Math)

I'm giving both articles to folks here.

Beyond Singapore's Mathematics Textbooks

Hello,

The winter issue of American Educator will be available online (I believe) on 18 December. In the meantime, I have received several boxes, as this issue contains an article I co-authored, Beyond Singapore's Mathematics Textbooks: Focused and flexible supports for teaching and learning.

If you are not a member of American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and would like to receive a hard copy, please email me privately (pwangiverson@gmail.com) with your mailing address.

Happy holidays to all!

Thanks!

Patsy

Creating Learning Disabilities???

This quarter our school established three cohorts in the 7th grade and three in the eighth that are based (primarily) upon academics. We also split our math blocks in half with one half dedicated to our grade level curricula and the other half dedicated to remediation of core number sense skills. The core skill blocks are further homogenized such that there are six distinct groupings that are independent of grade level. If you are in the seventh or eighth grade you are in one of three groups attending normal curricula for your grade and in one of six groups attending remediation, independent of your grade. These splits are the best we could do based upon scheduling, teacher, and room considerations. Our goal was to create the most homogeneous groupings possible.

After about five weeks with this schedule I've come to the conclusion that there are two kinds of learning disabilities. There are those that are inherent to the child and there are those that we have created. Each of my grade 7 cohorts are about a third of the class, with the highest being no more than one year below grade level, the middle group being 2 or 3 years below grade level, and the lowest group being more than 3 years below grade level. The really interesting feature of this schedule is that I see most of my kids in two entirely different academic settings.

One setting, the grade level curriculum, is fairly conceptual so you get to see kids working with new concepts and from that you can assess their prowess with connecting the dots in their zone. The other setting, core skills, is not big concepts or word problems. It is simply raw calculation of rational numbers in all their various forms. This skills component lets you see more of what they bring to the table from lower grades.

Here's the nut… My highest group is making progress in both grade level curriculum and their core skills training. My middle group is making progress in their grade level curriculum (subject to the limitations inherent with their lack of core skills) and little to no progress in the core skills block. My lowest group isn't making progress in either curriculum or core skills.

My observational shock is not so much with the lowest group as they have clearly identified, documented learning disabilities. The highest group is making progress across the board so they're not a big concern either. The real conundrum is the middle group. In their grade level curriculum they appear to have no problem attacking new material (as long as the computation is simple) but their core skills are every bit as resistant to improvement as those in the lowest group. For these kids in the middle, it's like they have two personalities, one of which has a learning disability.

One more relevant point of reference is that this middle group has a normal amount of enthusiasm and energy level in the grade level work but in the core work they have all the inherent joy of a glazed doughnut. They sit in the core class with obvious boredom and do not apply themselves at all. In this class you could easily mistake them for the kids in the lowest cohort.

I would argue (perhaps foolishly) that this middle group is capable, based on my assessment of their grade level work, but disabled when it comes to computation. I would further submit that this seeming disability is induced by their prior failure, i.e. we created it. Could it be that after enough exposure to 'failure' in a particular domain, kids simply give up on it, concluding that it is a skill that is beyond them? Remember that this skills stuff is what they've been getting for the six preceding years.

My anecdotal evidence is telling me that these kids have an externally induced learning disability. It's induced by too much early indulgence towards their early lack of mastery and the school's failure to address it before it has damaged them. As a result they level out at a place that is far below their full potential. Is it possible that at some point, the failure to master becomes a built in disability that impedes further progress? Is there a threshold, beyond which a lack of progress becomes viral, thereby blocking future attempts to improve?

Has anyone experienced this?

Am I drinking too much coffee?

6th (actually 7th) grade holiday math project: Just Because I Care About You

A Just - Because - I - Care - About - You MATH PROJECT!

You have been given $2,000 to buy gifts for ten different people in your life. You must decide who you want to give a gift to, what you want to buy them, and why you want to buy them this particular item. You must find a picture of this item with the price. Every item you select has a discount. You must find the discount for each item, calculate how much you will save, and how much the item will finally cost you.

Each student must complete a booklet consisting of 13 pages
Page one is your title page. This must include your name, and title of this project.

Pages 2 - 11 will display:
* A picture of a gift
* The original price
* The discount
* The final price with calculated sales tax ***
* Your math work
* Who the gift is for and why you chose this item for this person

Page 12 will show the price you spent for each item, how much money you spent all together, and how much you have left.
On page 13 you will donate the remaining money to a charity of your choice and explain why you chose this charity.

DISCOUNTS
20% off all major appliances (refrigerator, washer)
...
50% off all jewelry and clothing

***Please remember, there is a 8% sales tax on everything but clothing.

...Your project will be judged on creativity, accuracy, and neatness.

Sample

[Picture of Lamp]

A lamp for my friend Nancy.
My close friend, Nancy, just got married. At the Craft Show last month, she admired a lamp which bears a resemblance to this one. She said it was the perfect lamp for her foyer. I could not pass it up.

[Various calculations]

[Final price]

Barbara Oakley at ktm-1

Here she is!

ideologically-motivated intellectual gatekeepers

small-d democracy and its discontents

communicating with the public

or not:

11/24/09 Board of Education Meeting Agenda 8E:
Protocol for Information Requests by Board Members

Recommended Motion: “RESOLVED, that the Board of Education of the Irvington School District, approve the protocol for Board functioning that all information requests made by Board members of any District employee must be made to the Board President. If he/she so deems the request might require a significant expenditure of time, the Board as a whole will vote as to whether the request will be approved or not.”


11/24/09 Board of Education Meeting Agenda 8F
Protocol for Request of Information (FOIL)

Recommended Motion: “RESOLVED, that the Board of Education of the Irvington School District approve the protocol for Board functioning, that it is the intention of the District to manage the effective use of District staff time. Thus, it is the intention of the Board of Education that any request from the community for information that requires collection of data, pulling a report, copying, or any work and time commitment should be requested through the FOIL process. To that end, it is the intention of the Board that no individual Board member should directly ignore this protocol by circumventing the FOIL request – by providing information to which a Board member has access directly to a community member without the requested FOIL request.”

On the agenda for December 22 vote.

COOG weighs in.

if you live in New York:
Committee on Open Government

meanwhile, in Britain

State schools admit they do not push gifted pupils because they don't want to promote 'elitism'


As many as three-quarters of state schools are failing to push their brightest pupils because teachers are reluctant to promote 'elitism', an Ofsted study says today. Many teachers are not convinced of the importance of providing more challenging tasks for their gifted and talented pupils. Bright youngsters told inspectors they were forced to ask for harder work. Others were resentful at being dragooned into 'mentoring' weaker pupils.

In nearly three-quarters of 26 schools studied, pupils designated as being academically gifted or talented in sport or the arts were 'not a priority', Ofsted found.Teachers feared that a focus on the brightest pupils would 'undermine the school's efforts to improve the attainment and progress of all other groups of pupils'.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1234906/State-schools-admit-push-gifted-pupils-dont-want-promote-elitism.html#ixzz0ZWqSe4TI

Everyone has won. All must have prizes. (fixed.)

From Russia with love: real wor[l]d problems

A friend of mine discovered this paper, Word Problems in Russia and America, by Andrei Toom. Quite a find. A long read, but worth it if you need any moral support in your personal fight against fuzzy math. Here is an excerpt:

The high-school part of [ed. American NCTM 1989, I think is being referred to]“standards” contains a list of topics to increase attention, where the first place is given to “the use of real-world problems to motivate and apply theory” (p. 126). What is a “real-world problem”?

Browsing through “standards”, I found quite a few statements about these mysterious critters. On p. 76 (middle-school part) it is said:

“The nonroutine problem situations envisioned in these standards are much broader in scope and substance than isolated puzzle problems. They are also very different from traditional word problems, which provide contexts for using particular formulas or algorithms but do not offer opportunities for true problem solving.”

What? What did they say about traditional word problems? What a nonsence! With their narrow experience the authors pretend to set standards! Are they aware of the rich resourses of excellent traditional word problems around the world? Let us read further:

“Real-world problems are not ready-made exercises with easily processed procedures and numbers. Situations that allow students to experience problems with “messy” numbers or too much or not enough informations or that have multiple solutions, each with different consequences, will better prepare them to solve problems they are likely to encounter in their daily lives”.

Pay attention that the author uses future tense. This means that he or she has never actually used such problems in teaching and never observed influence of this usage on his or her students’ daily lives. He or she has not even invented such problems because he or she does not present any of them. Nevertheless, he or she is quite sure that these hypothetized problems will benefit students. What a self-assurance!

After such a pompous promise it would be very appropriate to give several examples of these magic problems. Indeed, we find a problem on the same page, just below the quoted statement. Here it is:

Problem 48: Maria used her calculator to explore this problem: Select five digits to form a two-digit and a three-digit number so that their product is the largest possible. Then find the arrangement that gives the smallest product.

This is a good problem, although rather difficult for regular school because having guessed the answer, Maria needs to prove it. But the author never mentions the necessity of proof. What does the author expect of calculator’s usage here? It can help to do the multiplications, but it cannot help to prove. It seems that the author expects Maria to try several cases, to choose that one which provides the greatest product and to declare that it is the answer. But what if the right choice never happened to come to her mind? This is very bad pedagogics. Also let us notice that Maria is expected only to “explore” this problem rather than to solve it. According to my vision, exploration is the first stage towards a complete solution. Do the authors expect Maria ever to attain a complete solution? Do they want children to solve problems or just to tamper for a while?

But let us return to our main concern: so-called “real-world problems”. Notice that this problem has none of the qualities attributed to these mysterious critters on the same page: there is neither too much nor not enough information and there are no multiple solutions, each with different consequences.

One colleague noticed that the book still contains some problems described on page 76. Indeed, there are, but in another document. Here is one of them:

Problem 49: You have 10 items to purchase at a grocery store. Six people are waiting in the express lane (10 items or fewer). Lane 1 has one person waiting, and lane 3 has two people waiting. The other lanes are closed. What check-out line should you join?

I have never read any report about usage of this problem. Also I have never read any solution of this problem. Irresponsibility again!

What about problems with too much or not enough informations, they attract much attention in Europe lately, but European scolars want children to treat them critically and in many cases to refuse to solve them! Take for example that famous problem, after which Stella Baruk named her book [Baruk]. In the late seventies, the following problem was given to 97 second and third graders of primary school in France:

Problem 50: There are 26 sheep and 10 goats on a ship. How old is the captain? [Baruk], p. 25

76 children (out of 97) presented a numerical answer obtained by tampering with the given numbers. For instance, they might add the numbers and declare that the captain was 36 years old. Educators of several European countries (France, Germany, Switzerland, Poland) are very preoccupied by the fact that children “solve” unsolvable problems. The European educators would be very pleased if children refused to solve such problems with a comment like “It cannot be solved”. The European educators are quite right. But the same is true of what the “Standards” call “real-world problems”.

The most sound reaction to the problem 49 is “I don’t know”. But what a grade will an American student get after that?

TIMSS Advanced 2008 International Release

Hi,

The data were released yesterday in Norway: http://timss.bc.edu/timss_advanced/ir-release.html

Too bad the U.S. didn't participate.

Patsy

Ideologically-motivated intellectual gatekeepers

What Climategate and Discovery/Constructivist math have in common.

Narrow intellectual gatekeeping is omnipresent in academia. Want to know why the government wastes hundreds of millions of dollars on math and science programs that never seem to improve the test scores of American students?[3] Part of the reason for this is that today’s K-12 educators—unlike educators in other high-scoring countries of the world—refuse to acknowledge evidence that memorization plays an important role in mastering mathematics. Any proposed program that supports memorization is deemed to be against “creativity” by today’s intellectual gatekeepers in K-12 education, including those behind the Math and Science Partnerships. As one NSF program director told me: “We hear about success stories with practice and repetition-based programs like Kumon Mathematics. But I’ll be frank with you—you’ll never get anything like that funded. We don’t believe in it.” Instead the intellectual leadership in education encourages enormously expensive pimping programs that put America even further behind the international learning curve.

I like it. This will be widely distributed to our local educators.

Perhaps I should picket like this Climategate picketer (I have no idea who he is) at the entrance to NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research) in Boulder.

Imagine, that could be me!
Change title to "Discovery Math Protest Longmont, Colorado Day 1

Testing Shows Improvement in Shoe Tying

Recent testing has shown improvement in shoe tying by fourth and eighth graders over the past two years, although the growth has been stagnant in some districts. Urban school activists, however, can be encouraged by the statistical improvement in areas with populations of 250,000 or more. This continues an upward trend that started 6 years ago when this testing began.

Urban districts still face enormous issues of poverty and large numbers of English language learners. Forty-eight percent of 4th graders tested nationwide were eligible for free or reduced-price lunches. In spite of the improvements, many still point to the problem of the large shoe tying gap and the lack of properly trained teachers in urban areas.

Still others claim that they are testing the wrong things. "Kids don't want to tie their shoes", said Sarah Sandala. "The other kids would make fun of them if they did." She said she knows that the skill is important to get ahead in the world, but many kids might just decide to wear loafers. However, those in charge of the testing emphasized that some districts are willing to be held to high standards. "I think we are now safely walking on the right path.", said Dan Foote, chairman of the testing board.

Late, but unique opportunity

Hello,

I apologize for sending this message at such a late date. It is directed toward those flexible individuals in the DC area. ;->

There will be a workshop on fractions presented in DC by one of only two mathematics master teachers in Singapore on Friday, 11 December from 1 - 4:30pm. There are a few spaces available. If you are interested and able to participate, please email me: pwangiverson@gmail.com

Again, my apologies for the late notification.

Patsy