tipping point, part 2

The Worthwhile Canadian Initiative post about a gender tipping point in occupations reminded me of this passage from a TIME story on college admissions:

Roughly 58% of undergraduates nationally are female, and the girl-boy ratio will probably tip past 60-40 in a few years. The divide is even worse for black males, who are outnumbered on campus by black females 2 to 1.

...[C]colleges are quietly stripping the pastels from brochures and launching Xbox tournaments to try to close the gap in the quality and quantity of boys applying. "It's a gross generalization that slacker boys get in over high-performing girls," says Jennifer Delahunty, dean of admissions at Kenyon College, "but developmentally, girls bring more to the table than boys, and the disparity has gotten greater in recent years."

Of course, admitting this is taboo, as Delahunty learned two years ago. She was in marathon committee meetings, stacking glorious girls on the waiting list while less accomplished boys wiggled through, when she got an e-mail informing her that her own daughter had been wait-listed. The experience inspired her to write a confessional Op-Ed, "To All the Girls I've Rejected," for the New York Times, responses to which lit up her inbox.

[snip]

But when it comes to private-college admissions, the law is murky, the process opaque, the needs of the institution primary. This includes ensuring that the freshman class is not 70-30 female, because that makes the school less attractive to male and female applicants alike. U.S. News & World Report found that the admissions rate of men at the College of William and Mary, for example, was an average of 12 percentage points higher than that of women--because, as the admissions director memorably told the magazine, "even women who enroll ... expect to see men on campus. It's not the College of Mary and Mary; it's the College of William and Mary."

If there is a gender tipping point phenomenon in occupations, should we expect to see the same (or similar) phenomenon in college applications and enrollment?

tipping point

One pervasive feature of economic life is that men and women do different jobs, and the jobs that women do are less well rewarded, whether it be an agricultural economy where men do the ploughing and women do the weeding or a modern post-industrial economy where women teach elementary school and men work in construction. ^*

But what is a male job and what is a female job varies in time and space. When I was teaching in Cuba once I casually remarked that, in Canada, most economics professors are male. My students were surprised because, in Cuba, most economics professors are female. A long discussion in Spanish followed, and after some time, the class reached a consensus. The reason for the difference? "In Canada, people listen to economics professors."

Worthwhile Canadian Initiative

Apparently, there is a gender tipping point in occupations:

Not infrequently, jobs "tip", or change from being male dominated to female dominated -- bank tellers, bakers, court reporters, teachers, secretaries. (Female to male shifts are less usual, but do happen, for example, the shift from midwives to obstetricians). In a fascinating paper, Jessica Pan estimates that, for US white collar jobs, the tipping point is somewhere between 30 and 60 percent female. Once that threshold is crossed, men stop entering the profession. At 34% female, the job of "university professor" is ripe for tipping.

Conventional wisdom has it that, when jobs become feminized, wages fall. Typically the reasons suggested for both feminization and falling wages are deskilling, loss of control over important working conditions by members of the occupation, and reduced advancement opportunities. (For a summary that critiques this conventional wisdom, see this Joyce Jacobsen article). (pdf file)

^* Not a good example in my neck of the woods, where total compensation for elementary school teachers averages $100K -- and this without taking into consideration the value of pensions and lifetime health care benefits.

Mark Twain on the almost-right word

My favorite saying about writing:

The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter--it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.
- Letter to George Bainton, 10/15/1888

Steve's SAT reading question - 2nd pass

(fyi: I deleted the first post I wrote on this subject)

I mentioned in the Comments thread that I reliably miss 0 to 1 items on SAT I reading and writing tests. I don't find the tests easy -- I find them taxing -- but I finish the sections five minutes early and never miss more than 1 item.

I don't know why that is, though.

So a couple of minutes ago I tried to analyze why I chose the correct answer to the question Steve posted:

The following line is from an SAT excerpt where the author really(!) dislikes the way science was being taught (in 1939).

(24) "As to the learning of scientific method, the whole thing is palpably a farce."

3. The word ‘palpably’ (line 24) most nearly means
A. empirically
B. obviously
C. tentatively
D. markedly
E. ridiculously

The answer is B.

1st step: I rapidly eliminate and cross out the three obviously wrong answers.

For me, answers a., c., and e. are obviously wrong:

a. empirically
c. tentatively
e. ridiculously

Why are these 3 answers obviously wrong?

a. Empirically is wrong because the author has said nothing explicit about running an experiment or observing actual students who were learning (or attempting to learn) the scientific method. Thus I conclude that the author is voicing an opinion, not describing an empirical observation or experimental result.

This is an example of former SAT tutor LexAequita's advice that to do well on the SAT you'd better start thinking like a 13-year old with Asperger syndrome.

Students should read SAT reading and writing questions the same way they're told to read SAT math diagrams: add nothing to the text that isn't explicitly stated. Easier said than done since reading is all about making inferences, but that's a conundrum for another day.

c. Tentatively is wrong because it's inconsistent with the tone of the passage, which is emphatic, not tentative. Tentative is the opposite of emphatic, so it's wrong.

e. Ridiculously is redundant. The writer says that "the learning of the scientific method is a farce," and farce means ridiculous. So you don't need to add the word ridiculously.

Second step: I choose the "more right" of the two answers that remain.

As far as I can tell, SAT reading and writing questions always come down to two arguably correct answers. Your job is to figure out which answer is more correct and choose that one.

In this case, the two arguably correct answers I'm left with are:

b. obviously
d. markedly

As I tried to reconstruct why the word obviously leapt out as me as the correct answer, it struck me that I may have been influenced by the conventions of idiomatic usage and good writing. If you substitute the word obviously for palpably, the sentence works; if you substitute the word markedly, the sentence doesn't work.

...the whole thing is obviously a farce

...the whole thing is markedly a farce

See?

Maybe markedly a farce sounded wrong to me because it's bad writing.

I'm going to start keeping an eye out for how often the right answer is also the better written answer.

graffiti

Visiting SUNY Stony Brook today, I found this scrawled inside a stall in the women's restroom:

Eff Twilight.

And eff romantic comedies.

Girls need to stop having such a bad reputation regarding taste in movies.

Harriet Ball: RIP

The EdWeek story quotes from her self-published "Fearless Math" manual. In it, she asserted that most students, particularly those at risk, "learn most naturally and best through play, songs, patterns, movement, imitation, imagination, and rhythm." Her method incorporated all those elements, the story explains. Ball insisted there's nothing wrong with drills—as long as they're presented in a fun and engaging manner. "Drill won't kill," she liked to say. "Boredom is the killer."

Teacher Who Inspired KIPP Schools Dies in Houston

SAT Reading Comprehension Questions

I thought I would start a new thread based on a comment by kcab in the School Boards thread about the SAT reading comprehension section. The question is how much general reading helps versus specific practice. Also, how much won't help at all. I have a lot of difficulty with some of these questions and I wouldn't know how to fix it. Here is an example:

The following line is from a SAT excerpt where the author really(!) dislikes the way science was being taught (in 1939).

(24) "As to the learning of scientific method, the whole thing is palpably a farce."


3. The word ‘palpably’ (line 24) most nearly means

A. empirically
B. obviously
C. tentatively
D. markedly
E. ridiculously


The answer is B.


How do you learn this by just reading? I've always seen papable used by authors to mean much more than "obvious". How would you learn this by studying definitions?


Palpable - Capable of being handled, touched, or felt; tangible

Obviously - unmistakably; clearly apparent

Markedly - in a clearly noticeable manner; conspicuously

In the answer section, they talk about substituting the different words in for palpably, but isn't that different than what they ask for? They wanted to know what it "most nearly means".


I used to teach a SSAT prep class and I would tell students that this sort of reading is unlike anything they've done before. I called it technical reading. Some people do well on these questions. Why?

Lifting the Lid on Essay Scoring in Standardized Tests

Our local free weekly rag, the City Pages recently published an "expose" on how the essay scoring sausage gets made on standardized tests. (A lot of the test scoring apparently happens in the Twin Cities.) It's about as you might expect.

I get a feeling I was supposed to come away with the idea that all standardized testing is bad, but I mostly went away with the feeling that standardized test essays were bad news and we should stick with computer scored #2 pencil bubble tests.

Barry's open letter to Deborah Ball

at Out in Left Field

school boards

With the contemporary focus on college and workforce readiness, many may be surprised that 14.1 percent of board members rank preparing students for college as sixth in importance out of six education goals, and 16.4 percent give the same ranking to preparing students for the workforce. When asked what they consider the most important objectives for schooling, the most popular board member responses are to “prepare students for a satisfying and productive life” and to “help students fulfill their potential.”

School Boards in the Age of Accountability
Frederick M. Hess
Olivia Meeks

Here in Irvington, a number of us have been asking the administration to hold itself accountable for student achievement. One parent has been pressing the case for well over a decade.

At this point, two of five board members are also asking the administration to measure the effectiveness of its programs and teaching philosophy.

At last week's board meeting, the interim director of curriculum put up a slide listing 20 "Indicators of Success," and said, "[This] is a new one for us. What indicators do we use to determine if we are being successful?"

Reform Writing

I'm a big fan of sentences. When I edit my work, I'm constantly combining and recombining them, altering the order of phrases, or their depth of embedding, to maximize clarity, flow, and efficiency. Following this, almost in lockstep, is clarifying my message. This works in both directions: the more I play around with sentence syntax, the clearer my thoughts become; when I know exactly what I want to say, the ideal sentence structure comes along for the ride.

None of my writing instructors ever focused on sentence-level syntax--except to tell us to "vary our sentence structures." But varying structure for the sake of variation alone does not enhance writing; when you structure each sentence for clarity, flow, and efficiency, you will, willy nilly, vary your sentence structures. My focus on syntax comes not from my English teachers, but from my own personal interest in sentence structure (one that ultimately culminated in a doctorate in linguistics). From a young age, I'd constantly scrutinize the variety of structures that undergird effective prose and try to internalize them so they'd become part of my own syntactic repertoire.

So when Catherine recently sent me an article by Robert J Connors on The Erasure of the Sentence, I was astounded to realize that explicit instruction in sentence syntax had been a staple of composition classes (dating back to classical antiquity) until just a few decades ago.

What happened? Here, in a nutshell, is Connors' thesis:

The usefulness of sentence-based rhetorics was never disproved, but a growing wave of anti-formalism, anti-behaviorism, and anti-empiricism within English-based composition studies after 1980 doomed them to a marginality under which they still exist today. The result of this erasure of sentence pedagogies is a culture of writing instruction that has very little to do with or say about the sentence outside of a purely grammatical discourse.

But first, what are these sentence-based rhetorics that have fallen out of favor?

Recent champions of sentence-based rhetorics include Francis Christensen, whose specialty was "sentence combining." In Connors' words, "Sentence-combining in its simplest form is the process of joining two or more short, simple sentences to make one longer sentence, using embedding, deletion, subordination, and coordination."

According to Christensen, you could be a good writer if you could learn to write a good sentence. His pedagogy consisted of short base-level sentences to which students were asked to attach increasingly sophisticated systems of initial and final modifying clauses and phrases-what he called "free modifiers." Effective use of free modifiers would result in effective "cumulative sentences," and Christensen's most famous observation about teaching the cumulative sentence was that he wanted to push his students "to level after level, not just two or there, but four, five, or six, even more, as far as the students' powers of observation will take them. I want them to become sentence acrobats, to dazzle by their syntactic dexterity."

Another "sentence-based rhetoric" was Edward Corbett's "imitation exercises," which involved the "the emulation of the syntax of good prose models." Students would begin by copying a model sentence word for word. Then came "pattern practice," in which students construct new sentences that parallel the grammatical type, number, and order of phrases and clauses of the model sentence, perhaps with the help of a syntactic description of the model sentence's structure. Students might also perform syntactic transformations (informed by Noam Chomsky's Universal Grammar) on the model sentence. In Corbett's words, the aim of such imitation exercises was to "achieve an awareness of the variety of sentence structure of which the English language is capable." Other advocates of imitation exercises noted that student writing "is often stylistically barren because of lack of familiarity with good models of prose style;" the remedy was explicit emulation of good models.

Both Corbett's and Christensen's methods were subject to empirical scrutiny, and studies showed that both methods not only increased the grammatical complexity of student writing, but also improved the overall writing quality (as compared with control groups and as rated by blind raters). In particular, internalizing syntactic structures, even by slavishly copying them, ultimately increased originality and creativity--presumably by giving students a wide repertoire of syntactic tools to choose from and handy ways to play around with them.

But as Connors notes, almost as soon as this sentence-syntax teaching methodology starting showing empirical success, it was shouted down into oblivion by critics who found it philosophically distasteful. After all, these methods involved:

1. textbooks

2. mere exercises, devoid of content and real-world application, with (worse yet!) correct and incorrect answers

3. rote imitation

4. an inorganic, narrow, analytical, reductionist approach that stifles creativity

5. a procedural focus at odds with the authentic writing process in which motivation and communicative intent and self-expression come first and everything else comes along for the ride (including, apparently, grammatically well-formed sentences).

The result of this backlash was that most writing instructors came to believe that "research has shown that sentence combining doesn't work."

Sound familiar?

If not, try substituting "sentence combining" with "traditional math," syntactic transformations with "mere calculation," "imitation exercises" with "drill and kill," and "communicative competence" with "conceptual understanding."

Woops! I thought that by writing about writing I'd be taking a break from math.

(Cross-posted, with a different title, at Out In Left Field)

summer school at Morningside Academy

I have the application sitting on my desk -- !

public sector unions & higher education in California

Daniel DiSalvo's The Trouble with Public Sector Unions describes a phenomenon we've seen here in Irvington, which is our unions (we have 3) pressing not just for higher pay and benefits but for a higher absolute number of employees as well -- and this as enrollment is declining.

Fewer students, higher pay, more employees. That is the formula. Per pupil spending currently stands at roughly $30K, and negotiations have been at impasse since last school year. So, under the Triborough Amendment, the district must continue to award raises that were negotiated during boom times.

Here's DiSalvo:

[A]s economist Richard Freeman has written, "public sector unions can be viewed as using their political power to raise demand for public services, as well as using their bargaining power to fight for higher wages."

[snip]

For a case study in how public-sector unions manipulate both supply and demand, consider the example of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association. Throughout the 1980s and '90s, the CCPOA lobbied the state government to increase California's prison facilities — since more prisons would obviously mean more jobs for corrections officers. And between 1980 and 2000, the Golden State constructed 22 new prisons for adults (before 1980, California had only 12 such facilities). The CCPOA also pushed for the 1994 "three strikes" sentencing law, which imposed stiff penalties on repeat offenders. The prison population exploded — and, as intended, the new prisoners required more guards. The CCPOA has been no less successful in increasing members' compensation: In 2006, the average union member made $70,000 a year, and more than $100,000 with overtime. Corrections officers can also retire with 90% of their salaries as early as age 50. Today, an amazing 11% of the state budget — more than what is spent on higher education — goes to the penal system.

In 2009, the New York Times reported on cuts to the UC system:

As the University of California struggles to absorb its sharpest drop in state financing since the Great Depression, every professor, administrator and clerical worker has been put on furlough amounting to an average pay cut of 8 percent.

[snip]

And on Thursday, to top it all off, the Board of Regents voted to increase undergraduate fees — the equivalent of tuition — by 32 percent next fall, to more than $10,000. The university will cost about three times as much as it did a decade ago, and what was once an educational bargain will be one of the nation’s higher-priced public universities.

A Crown Jewel of Education Struggles with Cuts
By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: November 19, 2009

Spittleless Politicians, Apathetic Constituents and Collective Bargaining

A new post on Throwing Curves.

There is plenty of blame to throw around, but Rosemary takes an unexpected approach in her latest blog post. Comments on the site are always welcome (and they so encourage us!).

have iPad apps solved the page riffling problem?

A friend bought me an iPad a couple of weeks ago, and it is amazing.

I've been skeptical of 'technology' in education, mostly because nothing I've tried (online learning, educational software, educational CDs & DVDs, educational audio CDs for the car, the Kindle) has worked well for me. ALEKS came closest, but I would only use ALEKS for review, and I probably wouldn't do that, either. I found the need to look back and forth from the computer screen to my paper-and-pencil notebook tedious.

The iPad is the first form of technology that I can imagine changing the way people read and study.

First off, the 'content' apps I've looked at so far (Wall Street Journal & The Economist) format articles so that video and interviews really are "integrated" in a way that CDs tucked unto the backs of textbooks can't be.

More importantly - and this is a fantastic innovation -- the graphic design of the content apps potentially gives readers a workable substitute for page riffling.

The inability to riffle pages is the huge drawback of reading on a Kindle; I would never buy a Kindle edition of a textbook or a cookbook for that reason. On Kindle, reading is a strictly linear affair.

The iPad apps potentially change that. The mobile versions of WSJ and The Economist places content inside two rectangles: a big rectangle containing the article you're reading, and a much smaller, scrollable rectangle containing all the article titles in that section of the paper or magazine.

This would be a terrific feature in a textbook, where you need to grasp the structure of the subject, not just the content on the page you're reading. Each chapter could (and should) have a scrollable list of all the chapter's subject headings flanking the page you're reading.

Having all of the subheads directly at hand would let you riffle. For example, I'm working my way through Greg Mankiw's economics textbook, and I need to constantly flip back to previous sections to remind myself, say, why the aggregate demand curve slopes downward. Doing that on the Kindle is next to impossible. Yes, you can use the search function to find content elsewhere in the text, but it takes forever, and gives you too many hits. If I could read the Mankiw text formatted like the WSJ app, I would be able to click on "The Downward Slope of the Aggregate-Demand Curve" and instantly be where I need to be.

Then, after re-reading the material on AG, I would be able to click on the subject heading of the section I had been working on before I returned to the AG section.

(It would also be incredibly helpful to be able to ask the book to give me the numbered explanations of the graphs illustrating long-term-vs-short-term effects in sequence instead of having all of the "Point As" and "Point Bs" and "Point Cs" visible at all times.)

I doubt any textbooks have adopted this structure as yet, but they should.

Ed is writing a textbook for Oxford, and I'm telling him they need to include author interviews -- interviews, not lectures -- in the electronic edition. I'm going to push the idea of a scrollable column of subsection heads, too.

new Regents diplomas - survey

from lgm:

If any NYers would like to give the Regents feedback on College & Career Readiness, their survey is here. 

Several questions ask about the various diplomas and there is plenty of room for comments.

geography

"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography."
- Ambrose Bierce

True of me, sad to say.

This morning, studying the Wall Street Journal's map of the Middle East, I noticed for the first time that Sudan is directly south of Egypt.

Also, Libya is next door.

Pathetic.

I remember everything

So now we have our public schools setting no-recall standards.

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, the rest of us are trying to remember where we put our car keys, one of the few remaining factoids you can't find on Google.^*

Which probably accounts for the appearance in the Sunday Magazine of a 6000-word book excerpt on the World Memory Championships.

[pause]

Oh, look!

The world memory champion is from China!

^* Speaking of where I put my car keys, the iPad has a finder! I need a finder-for-everything, and I'm often amazed that a finder-for-everything doesn't exist and can't be purchased on Amazon. The Sharper Image had a finder-for-everything gadget out a few years back (actually a finder-for-four-things-of-your-choosing), but the one I ordered didn't work.


I remember nothing

ms-teacher on history & science

re: I remember nothing

As a result of NCLB, many school districts have chosen to focus on reading & math, meaning that emphasis is placed on test skills that will ensure higher test scores.

This has meant that in school districts such as where I teach, elementary schools have virtually eliminated both history & science. When students enter middle school, those who continue to score below basic or far below basic usually have a semester of science & a semester of history, where they are expected to read from on grade level (or above) expository text.

It is no surprise to me that our students are not performing well in history. Until we start emphasizing the value of all subject matters, even when they are not tested, you can expect that schools will continue to deemphasize those subjects that they don't believe boost their test scores.

Teachers hate it & yet, our hands are tied.

I remember nothing

in The Economist:

History teaching is far from the biggest crisis in American education. But it is a problem nevertheless, and a neglected one. A broad effort to create voluntary national standards does not include history. No Child Left Behind, George Bush’s education law, tests pupils on maths, reading and science. On February 14th Barack Obama stressed the importance of teaching science, technology and 21st-century skills. Meanwhile America’s schoolchildren score even more poorly in history than in maths: 64% of high-school seniors scored “basic” on a national maths test in 2009, but only 47% reached that level on the most recent national history test.

One problem, a new report argues, is that states have pathetic standards for what history should be taught...A study from Fordham, published on February 16th, grades each state for the quality of its history standards. Twenty-eight states received a “D” or an “F”.

Many states emphasise abstract concepts rather than history itself. In Delaware, for example, pupils “will not be expected to recall any specific event or person in history”.

Don't know much about history
The dismal state of a vital subject
Teaching standards
Feb 17th 2011 | CHICAGO | from PRINT EDITION

 Will not recall any specific event or person in history ----

Is that a standard?

thank you Susan S -

Off-topic, but I have to write a public post about this.

Susan S, who has been part of kitchen table math from the very beginning (right?) babysat Andrew while Ed, Chris, Jimmy & I attended my mom's funeral.

She was shaking in her boots, having read the tales here for lo these many years, but she did it. I told her she was starting at the top.

That is one of the most generous things anyone has ever done for me.

Thank you, Susan.

I owe you.

Investigations Math in action: crashing and burning with large numbers

A third grade girl attempts, unsuccessfully, to add several large numbers using an Investigations Math strategy. She then adds them successfully using traditional "stacking" (disallowed at school) in a fraction of the time the Investigations method took her:




Filmed and edited by a fellow concerned parent who is a specialist in math remediation.

no stacking at school

via StopTerc Nevada

Pat and Bob

Robert H. Johnson
born: July 2,
died: October 29, 2010

Patricia Alice Johnson
born: August , 1929
died: January 25, 2010

We miss them.

Current events in the Internet Age

Last week when a eighth-grade English teacher at our local middle school asked his class if anyone knew what was going on in Egypt, only three students raised their hands.  This was reported to me by a student in the class.

This in the "Internet Age".  I'm unsure if I'm surprised or not.  Wait. . . . I'm not surprised.

Related:
"Who is this guy, Al Qaeda?"

ADDED:  US clueless about Egypt?

A senate hearing Wednesday revealed that top US intelligence agencies are largely ignorant about the current situation in Egypt and unfamiliar with the agenda of the country’s radical Islamists. 

(Cross posted at Education Quick Takes)

Changing Gears

I've talked about how our high school's math expectations drove out CMP in 7th and 8th grades. There was a curriculum gap for those kids who wanted to move into geometry in high school. The problem was clear and parents complained. I suppose our school could have put the top kids onto a pre-algebra/algebra track and left the lower kids in CMP, but they decided to use the same books and go at different speeds. This was probably for practical purposes, since the school only has one math teacher for 7th and 8th grades.

However, that's where everything stops. K-6 is driven by Everyday Math and the state's low requirements. The school looks at the number of kids who get to algebra in 8th grade and thinks that is perfectly normal. It's probably about the same number who made the top track in high school math as in the old "traditional math" days. (Is there any data on this?) The lower schools only focus on improving the relative scores of the state math test. It doesn't help that the scores at all of the other schools in the state stink. They only see a relative problem, not an absolute one. Everyday Math spirals along and assumes that kids will develop the necessary skills at their own speed. When 6th grade comes along and it doesn't happen, it's too late, so I assume they just point to the kids who did well. Of course, they never ask the parents of the good students what happens at home.

Do lower schools ever try to track kids longitudinally to see if any one particular teacher is a problem? Do they ever check to see if kids really do achieve a balance of understanding and skills; that they really are developing up to their potential? You would think that if they studied these problems, they would use teachers who were certified in math starting in first grade. Does anyone know of schools that send K-6 kids to a separate room/teacher for math? What math curriculum do they use? Do they separate kids by ability?

It seems to me that many of the problems kids have in math are caused by gaps and gaps are caused by "trusting the spiral". These problems can happen for both understandings and skills. Schools don't want to take the responsibility for ensuring anything but some state minimum on a statistical basis.

AMC 10 Sample Question

Three children have a foot race in which the leader after 1 minute is declared the winner. Each child runs at a constant speed. At the end of the minute, Alicia has run 720 feet. Ben, who started 40 feet in front of Alicia, has run 600 feet from his starting point. Cheryl, who started 40 feet in front of Ben, has run 400 feet from her starting point. For how many seconds during the race was Ben in the lead?

A) 8
B) 10
C) 12
D) 15
E) 20


How would you tackle this using rote knowledge or memorization? What conceptual understanding is enough to solve this problem? Draw a picture? Work backwards? If you could solve this problem in the allocated 3 minutes rather than 20, what would that mean? What do you do to get to the point where you can solve virtually any D=RT problem quickly? Is that done with some sort of better conceptual understanding? Is speed meaningless? At what point, if ever, does it become meaningless? What happens when you practice? Is that just about speed? Is experience just about speed? When you see a new problem for the first time, will you be as slow as the first time you solved a DRT problem?

I think it would be hard to argue that experience and practice just mean speed; that they are not transferable to new problem types. We are told, however, that some sort of vague conceptual understanding is all that you need, even if it takes a long time to solve a problem. So what happens with practice and experience? What is that called? Drill and kill? Either practice matters or it doesn't.

A view from computer science college professors

I hear from a friend who teaches college computer science that many CS educators agree on the following:

1. There is too much emphasis on calculus, and more focus should be placed on discrete mathematics (graph theory, logic, automata theory, etc) and statistics.
2. K-12 education places too much emphasis on memorization at the expense of conceptual understanding.  This leaves college students ill-prepared for their computer science course work.

Interesting.

Cross posted at Education Quick Takes

"Silos"?

"Call for Papers
Integrated STEM Education Conference 2011 (ISEC 2011)
Best Practices in Integrated STEM Instruction
We are soliciting papers for the inaugural meeting of ISEC 2011, co-located with the
Trenton Computer Festival (TCF; www.tcf-nj.org) at the College of New Jersey (TCNJ),
on Saturday, April 2, 2011."

"Our goals for ISEC 2011 are to have thought-provoking discussions on how the “silos”
separating instruction in and, ultimately, comprehension among STEM fields can be
removed and, subsequently, on the various ways “integrated STEM methods” take shape
in K-16 classrooms. To this end, we invite you to submit original papers on best
practices in integrated STEM instruction that provide descriptions and assessment of
innovative integrated STEM instructional modules. Papers detailing initiatives that use computers to support programmatic initiatives are especially welcome."


I just got an email from IEEE with this call for papers. Can anyone translate the sentence that talks about goals? No wonder my dues are so high.

Graphic organizers "cheat sheet"

After my post on the middle school character cluster assignment, I thought I would follow up with an introduction to graphic organizers (aka concept maps).  This might be helpful to parents or others unfamiliar with these commonly used teaching tools.

Internet Savvy ? Not.

Kids Aren't As Internet Savvy As They Think

If you read it to the end -- I promise a website worth the click.

Students Talking About Student Life

Over at The Atlantic a guest blogger brought up for discussion a study showing students don't really learn anything their first two years at college, then he posted for further discussion some of the replies he received Student Life: Still More Views. All of it was interesting, but these two three comments really caught my attention.

There were many students that were thoughtful, interested, and hardworking. They did assigned readings, asked good questions in class, were ready to debate and argue, etc. THE MAJORITY WERE NOT. My friend and I would complain. We always thought that, yeah, you have to put up with people who aren't really interested in learning in high school, but then they get weeded out in college. Not the case, at least not at [my university]. My friend has since gone on to law school at a top 40 program. He thought that by graduate studies, those TRULY uninterested would have gone another way. Yet he still finds himself, at times, sitting next to students who have no intellectual curiosity or even a strong work ethic. I had one political science professor, who in a moment of candor during office hours, noted that when he taught at Princeton, he taught the same identical class (intro to political philosophy) and in the identical way. It was no harder at Princeton, and he was no different. The only difference he noted was the caliber of the students. Whereas at [the state university] there was a bell-curve distribution of a few As, some Bs, and lots of Cs and Ds, at Princeton, there were hardly any slacker students.

A different commenter said:

I went to a private, top 20 liberal arts school in New England for undergrad. I now attend a large state university as a grad student, and what I have to say about the quality of undergraduate education between the two institutions is this: state schools suck.

A professor's point of view:

As a tenured professor with a 22-year career teaching history at a "comprehensive public university," here are my reactions to Mr. Tierney's interesting musings on Contemporary Student Life....Most of the negative changes I have seen in college education began in the period when college aid, which tended to be dependent on performance in school, but which did not burden students with heavy debts upon graduation, was converted to loans, which are not usually as closely linked to getting good grades, but do burden students with debts. Result? Students want to get through school as quickly and efficiently as possible, to minimize their debt, and they are less concerned about grades. So they put more time into work, to try to work their way through, or overload their schedules, to get more units for each semester's loan money, and less time into study. (He/she also mentioned two other possible reasons)

Is this true?

Middle School Assignments and Kindergarten Ages

Two new posts at some favorite blogs:

Grace describes a middle school assignment that would have benefited from some proof-reading and attention to detail here: How to Confuse a Middle Schooler

And Connecticut considers whether to raise the age when Students can start kindergarten here:
Kindergarten Age Change Supported by Governor Malloy

Barry Garelick at Jay Greene

The Educationist View of Math Education

off-topic - wonderful blog

Hi everyone -

I'm back in IL, hanging out in the Highland Park Hospital ICU.

Since I'm not, at the moment, able to focus on the basal ganglia, I'm been scrounging the web, looking for things to read.

Struck gold an hour ago:

My Mother-in-Law is Still Sitting Between Us

The blog starts here, and I'm reading from the beginning.

Qualfying for high school honors classes

Many Most* high schools establish criteria for admission to honors and/or AP classes.  Here's a window into how one school does it.


Qualifying for high school honors classes - Education Quick Takes


*  UPDATE:  I've corrected this because I don't have data to back up my statement that "most" schools have admission criteria, and gassstationwithoutpumps pointed out in the comments section that in his experience many do not.

Memory and Cognition Lab

The three articles in the Chronicle are especially good.

Sciences Po joins College Board

at the New York Times

I don't know what it means for a university to be a "member" of College Board, but there you have it.

Sciences Po is one of the two four elite universities in France.

onward and upward

11:35pm

ME: Hey! What did M. say about the SAT?

C: He said it wasn't that bad!

ME: Really?

C: Yeah!

ME: That's great! D. said it wasn't that bad, either!

C. Yeah, he said it wasn't too hard. He skipped the whole last section.

dumbest thing I ever said

Dumbest thing I ever said: "Is there a political movement against charter schools for suburban kids?

On the front page in today's New York Times: On Upper West Side, Hurdles for Charter School

Parents, Acorn and the unions organizing against a charter school.

The grounds?

A charter school would be bad for the public schools.

It's never about the kids.


at least I got this one right

On August 20:

I keep thinking the politics of choice will be affected by the economy. Charter schools (and vouchers) are cheaper than public schools, and parents are happier (or at least spend fewer years of their lives being unhappy - pdf file).

Same academic outcomes for less money, with less stress on the family: put it that way, some of us are going to take that deal.

Looks like Eva Moskowitz had the same idea:

The guests sipped wine and nibbled sushi, guacamole and Gruyère — lawyers, bankers, preschool teachers, managers and consultants of various kinds, bound by the anxious decision they must confront in the months ahead: where their 4-year-olds will go to school in the fall.

Downstairs, a flier by the doorman’s desk had greeted them with a provocative question: “Why should you have to spend college tuition on kindergarten?” Back upstairs, in the stylish apartment on West 99th Street, Eva S. Moskowitz, a former City Council member who runs a network of charter schools in Harlem and the Bronx, delivered a tantalizing sales talk.

“Middle-class families need options too,” she said.

sorry, Johnny

little sister

QUESTION: Your method may work with children with a native high IQ—but demanding that kind of excellence from less intelligent children seems unfair and a fool's errand. Demanding hard work and a great effort from children is the best middle ground we can reach philosophically, isn't it? Your thoughts?

Jokes about A+s and gold medals aside (much of my book is tongue-in-cheek, making fun of myself), I don't believe that grades or achievement is ultimately what Chinese parenting (at least as I practice it) is really about. I think it's about helping your children be the best they can be—which is usually better than they think! It's about believing in your child more than anyone else—even more than they believe in themselves. And this principle can be applied to any child, of any level of ability. My youngest sister, Cindy, has Down syndrome, and I remember my mother spending hours and hours with her, teaching her to tie her shoelaces on her own, drilling multiplication tables with Cindy, practicing piano every day with her. No one expected Cindy to get a Ph.D.! But my mom wanted her to be the best she could be, within her limits. Today, my sister works at Wal-Mart, has a boyfriend and still plays piano—one of her favorite things is performing for her friends. She and my mom have a wonderful relationship, and we all love her for who she is.

Tiger Mother Talks Back
January 15, 2011

the myth of regurgitation

Educators rely heavily on learning activities that encourage elaborative studying, while activities that require students to practice retrieving and reconstructing knowledge are used less frequently. Here, we show that practicing retrieval produces greater gains in meaningful learning than elaborative studying with concept mapping. The advantage of retrieval practice generalized across texts identical to those commonly found in science education. The advantage of retrieval practice was observed with test questions that assessed comprehension and required students to make inferences. The advantage of retrieval practice occurred even when the criterial test involved creating concept maps. Our findings support the theory that retrieval practice enhances learning by retrieval-specific mechanisms rather than by elaborative study processes. Retrieval practice is an effective tool to promote conceptual learning about science.

Most thought on human learning is guided by a few tacit assumptions. One assumption is that learning happens primarily when people encode knowledge and experiences. A
related assumption is that retrieval—the active, cue-driven process of reconstructing knowledge—only measures the products of a prior learning experience but does not itself produce learning. Just as we assume that the act of measuring a physical object would not change the size, shape, or weight of the object, so too people often assume that the act of measuring memory does not change memory (1, 2). Thus most educational research and practice has focused on enhancing the processing that occurs when students encode knowledge – that is, getting knowledge "in memory". Far less attention has been paid to the potential importance of retrieval to the process of learning. Indeed, recent National Research Council books about how students learn in educational settings (3–5) contain no mention of retrieval processes.

It is beyond question that activities that promote effective encoding, known as elaborative study tasks, are important for learning (6). However, research in cognitive science has challenged the assumption that retrieval is neutral and
uninfluential in the learning process (7–11). Not only does retrieval produce learning, but a retrieval event may actually represent a more powerful learning activity than an encoding event. This research suggests a conceptualization of mind and learning that is different from one in which encoding places knowledge in memory and retrieval simply accesses that stored knowledge. Because each act of retrieval changes memory, the act of reconstructing knowledge must be considered essential to the process of learning. Most prior research on retrieval practice has been conducted in the verbal learning tradition of memory research (12). The materials used have often not reflected the complex information students learn in actual educational settings (13).

Most prior research has not used assessments thought to measure meaningful learning, which refers to students' abilities to make inferences and exhibit deep understanding of concepts (14, 15).

[snip]

[B]oth elaborative concept mapping and retrieval practice are active learning tasks, and our results make it clear that whether a task is considered "active" is not diagnostic of how much learning the task will produce.

The Critical Importance of Retrieval for Learning
Jeffrey D. Karpicke* and Janell R. Blunt
Sciencexpress Report
www.sciencexpress.org / 20 January 2011 / Page 1 / 10.1126/science.1199327

Although I read the research that came out a couple of years ago on learning-via-testing, I hadn't absorbed the idea that testing is a form of studying.

Years ago, I learned the distinction between recall (remembering an actor's name, say) and recognition (recognizing an actor's name when you hear it). Recall is harder.

I thought the learning-testing effect was a simple matter of working on recall as opposed to recognition.

Looks like it's not. Remembering always means reconstructing.


news flash: There's no such thing as regurgitating facts.

daily quizzes beat concept maps

an oldie but goodie: the Gambill method

a concept map

Retrieval Practice Produces More Learning than Elaborative Studying with Concept Mapping

"Test-taking cements knowledge" at Education Quick Takes

daughter of Chinese mom

Dear Tiger Mom,

You’ve been criticized a lot since you published your memoir, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.” One problem is that some people don’t get your humor. They think you’re serious about all this, and they assume Lulu and I are oppressed by our evil mother. That is so not true. Every other Thursday, you take off our chains and let us play math games in the basement.

But for real, it’s not their fault. No outsider can know what our family is really like. They don’t hear us cracking up over each other’s jokes. They don’t see us eating our hamburgers with fried rice. They don’t know how much fun we have when the six of us — dogs included — squeeze into one bed and argue about what movies to download from Netflix.

I admit it: Having you as a mother was no tea party. There were some play dates I wish I’d gone to and some piano camps I wish I’d skipped. But now that I’m 18 and about to leave the tiger den, I’m glad you and Daddy raised me the way you did. Here’s why.

A lot of people have accused you of producing robot kids who can’t think for themselves. Well, that’s funny, because I think those people are . . . oh well, it doesn’t matter. At any rate, I was thinking about this, and I came to the opposite conclusion: I think your strict parenting forced me to be more independent. Early on, I decided to be an easy child to raise. Maybe I got it from Daddy — he taught me not to care what people think and to make my own choices — but I also decided to be who I want to be. I didn’t rebel, but I didn’t suffer all the slings and arrows of a Tiger Mom, either. I pretty much do my own thing these days — like building greenhouses downtown, blasting Daft Punk in the car with Lulu and forcing my boyfriend to watch “Lord of the Rings” with me over and over — as long as I get my piano done first.

Everybody’s talking about the birthday cards we once made for you, which you rejected because they weren’t good enough. Funny how some people are convinced that Lulu and I are scarred for life. Maybe if I had poured my heart into it, I would have been upset. But let’s face it: The card was feeble, and I was busted. It took me 30 seconds; I didn’t even sharpen the pencil. That’s why, when you rejected it, I didn’t feel you were rejecting me. If I actually tried my best at something, you’d never throw it back in my face.

I remember walking on stage for a piano competition. I was so nervous, and you whispered, “Soso, you worked as hard as you could. It doesn’t matter how you do.”

[snip]

Another criticism I keep hearing is that you’re somehow promoting tunnel vision, but you and Daddy taught me to pursue knowledge for its own sake. In junior year, I signed myself up for a military-history elective (yes, you let me take lots of classes besides math and physics). One of our assignments was to interview someone who had experienced war. I knew I could get a good grade interviewing my grandparents, whose childhood stories about World War II I’d heard a thousand times. I mentioned it to you, and you said, “Sophia, this is an opportunity to learn something new. You’re taking the easy way out.” You were right, Tiger Mom. In the end, I interviewed a terrifying Israeli paratrooper whose story changed my outlook on life. I owe that experience to you.

There’s one more thing: I think the desire to live a meaningful life is universal. To some people, it’s working toward a goal. To others, it’s enjoying every minute of every day. So what does it really mean to live life to the fullest? Maybe striving to win a Nobel Prize and going skydiving are just two sides of the same coin. To me, it’s not about achievement or self-gratification. It’s about knowing that you’ve pushed yourself, body and mind, to the limits of your own potential. You feel it when you’re sprinting, and when the piano piece you’ve practiced for hours finally comes to life beneath your fingertips. You feel it when you encounter a life-changing idea, and when you do something on your own that you never thought you could. If I died tomorrow, I would die feeling I’ve lived my whole life at 110 percent.

And for that, Tiger Mom, thank you.

Why I Love My Strict Chinese Mom
By SOPHIA CHUA-RUBENFELD
New York Post

baby videos

Just came across this study - passing it along ---

Do Babies Learn From Baby Media?

NY salary grid

We were talking about "grid raises" in a comment thread. Here's an example of a teacher salary grid:  

source:
Taylor Made: The Cost and Consequences of New York's Public-Sector Labor Laws
by Terry O'Neil and E.J. McMahon 
scroll down for pdf file

from the report:

Teacher salary schedules in New York State typically include 20 to 30 annual pay “steps” on each of at least four “lanes”-- for teachers with bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees, master’s plus 30 credits of graduate credits, and a master’s plus 60 credits. The following is a simplified example; many districts actually have more steps and lanes than shown here.

Most teachers spend most of their careers moving up salary steps—and, occasionally, across salary lanes—even if their union contract has expired, because the Triborough Amendment guarantees these changes. As a result, a school district’s salary costs rise even when union negotiations have reached impasse and there is no new contract. For the same reason, contract settlements calling for seemingly modest, inflation-level increases in base salaries can be far more costly than they look. This is especially true in districts with predominantly younger teaching staffs.

Figure 8 illustrates the projected 10-year pay history of a newly hired teacher, fresh out of college, working in a district with a salary schedule matching the reported medians for all Suffolk County districts in 2006-07. Assuming the teacher earns a master’s degree within two years—a prerequisite for certification—and assuming all base salary steps also increase annually by 2.6 percent under the union contract, her salary by Step 6 will reach $68,753, a pay boost of 58 percent after five years. Even if the salary schedule is frozen at 2006-07 levels due to a contract impasse, the Triborough Law guarantees that the Step 6 salary for a certified teacher with the same level of experience will reach $60,472, an increase of 39 percent in five years.

Earning 30 more graduate or “in-service” credits by the end of her sixth year will move the teacher up yet another lane on the salary schedule. Assuming continued annual inflation-level increases in base steps, the salary for this teacher in the “Masters + 30” lane by Step 10 will reach $100,687—an increase of 132 percent after 10 years on the job. Even if the salary schedule remained frozen throughout the period, Triborough would guarantee that the teacher’s pay by Step 10 reached $77,893—an increase of 79 percent from Step 1. By tacking on another 30 graduate or in-service credits during this period, the teacher could move to the “Masters + 60” lane and climb the ladder even faster, reaching $122,000 in her 11th year assuming continued inflation-level increases in base salaries.

cyberspace jabberama

Just found this phrase - cyberspace jabberama - in a Boris Johnson column.

Love it!

I put it right up there with codswallop, a word I learned from a book on British slang that I bought last year. I recommend it:

billboard

Just heard from a friend who saw this billboard on the way in to the city:

NYC:  where people are openly gay and secretly Republican

Trench Warfare on the Board of Ed

Peter Meyer at Education Next:

I couldn’t believe it.

John, the new board of education president, had just proposed that we move “Old Business” to the beginning of our meetings.

I had spent roughly a year-and-a-half arguing that it made no sense to put Old Business at the end of each school board meeting, which usually arrived about 10pm, the third hour of these star chambers of modern public education. By then, most people, including the lone reporter, had gone home.  That, of course, was the point: Old Business was dirty laundry, things not done. Why flaunt it?

I had gotten nowhere with my arguments because my colleagues on the school board thought I was the devil.  I was the infamous “rogue” board member, the person that school board associations give seminars about. Not a team player. The local paper wrote an editorial about me that prompted a friend, after church, to remark, “I’ve seen kinder things said about murderers.”

[snip]

Needless to say, my new colleagues were not looking forward to the prospect of sharing executive sessions with me. And, after being sworn in, they went out of their way to keep me in the dark. If the superintendent recommended hiring a new teacher and I asked to see the candidate’s resume, a motion was quickly made that school board did not want to see said resume. It passed, 6 to 1. When a special board meeting was called to approve $25 million in construction contracts, I asked to see the contracts. “I make a motion that the board does not look at the contracts,” said one of my colleagues. “I second that, said another.” Another defeat, 6 to 1.

One of my favorites was Board Policy #2510. It was titled NEW BOARD MEMBER-ELECT ORIENTATION and it said, in part, that “Each Board member-elect shall, as soon as possible, … be given selected materials of the previous year covering the function of the Board and the school district, including (a) policy manual, (b) copies of key reports prepared during the previous year by school Board committees and/or the administration, (c) the School Law handbook prepared by the New York State School Boards Association, (d) access to minutes of Board meetings of the previous year, (e) latest financial report of the district, and (f) copies of pertinent materials developed by the New York State School Boards Association….”

My orientation consisted of the board president and superintendent sitting me down and saying, “You’re not getting anything.” And so it went.

I once read the board’s orientation policy, out loud, at a public meeting, to the regional superintendent, a lawyer. “Aren’t school boards supposed to follow their own policies?” I asked. “The board can do whatever it wants,” he said. I was shocked, because board policies are, in fact, laws and have to be followed–or changed.

He might have said, “whatever it can get away with.” But his comment reminded me of a fundamental truth about public school systems: the buck stops with the people.

administration spends $50K without board vote
"it's just about statistically impossible that a bid would come in at exactly $50K"
fields exchange at BOE meeting
school boards behaving badly
board member FOILs district docs
trench warfare on the board of ed

trench warfare on the board of ed

Peter Meyer:

Re: [irvingtonparentsforum] Re: Is the Board violating the law?

To answer the question as straightforwardly as possible, as I read "the law," no individual board member has a right to do much of anything, including look at documents. Thus, you have to force the issue at a board meeting by getting the board to request the documents or, as an individual, file a FOIL request. (I am not a lawyer, so this is my opinion based on years, on and off the board, of fighting these battles.)

There is something which says any board member can ask for and see personnel records if a good reason is given (I'm sorry I'm not at my desk and can't quote chapter and verse), but when I tried that (we had teachers up for tenure), they claimed my reason wasn't good enough! This is real trench warfare up here, where most board members are afraid of their own shadow and being "a rogue" or a boat-rocker is considered a danger to the school. Thus, on some issues I have to shoot each arrow in the quiver -- demand the board vote, FOIL, and a letter to the editor. It's time consuming, of course, but if you're consistent about it (and civil), you won't need so many arrows for the next battle/request.

Because "the law" is so strange and complicated -- and stacked in favor of the status quo and those "leaders" of the status quo -- this stuff gets to be very personal. So, it helps to smile a lot while fighting. (I now know why Senators call their enemies across the aisle, "My dear colleague" -- though I don't know why Boehner cries all the time.)

cheers,

--pm

administration spends $50K without board vote
"it's just about statistically impossible that a bid would come in at exactly $50K"
fields exchange at BOE meeting
school boards behaving badly
board member FOILs district docs
trench warfare on the board of ed

they do what they do

Peter Meyer at the Parents Forum:

I hate to be cynical about this, but my BOCES guy has it about right: "the law" says (by implication, obfuscation, and contradiction) that the board can do whatever it wants -- until the Commissioner (or surrogate) says that you can't -- and even that's disputable. So, in this situation, where a board member is denied information, you have 2 choices: the FOIL route or the public embarrassment route (you make a motion, at an official BOE meeting, that the Super give you copies of the docs).

Keep in mind too, that the lawyer's maxim applies: if you have the facts, argue the facts; if you have the law, argue the law.

cheers,

--pm

administration spends $50K without board vote
"it's just about statistically impossible that a bid would come in at exactly $50K"
fields exchange at BOE meeting
school boards behaving badly
board member FOILs district docs

board member Foils district docs

Jim,

I am formally requesting copies of all documents related to the Upper Dows Lane field including the original board approval and all associated documents, the bid documents, the documents pertaining the to recent $50,000 change order, and copies of the checks along with all the approvals to pay those checks including those from the claims auditor. Also, give me any documents related to putting this construction project to a vote by the community. If the decision was made that such a vote was unnecessary, give me the documents related to that decision.

Last night I learned for the first time that the change order was necessitated by a mistake made by the architect. Please include everything that documents that mistake along with the contract or letter of engagement made with the architect.

In an email dated Nov. 23, 2010, I wrote, “I want to see all of the documents leading up to this and a written analysis by you of where we went wrong. I don’t want to have to figure it out myself, which will only lead to a more time-consuming exercise. I will also want to see past board resolutions and the minutes anytime this was discussed in a board meeting.” I received no response. In an email sent yesterday, I asked Jim to “bring me a complete copy of all the documents associated with this project including the original board approvals. I would like it tonight at the board meeting.” Again, I received no response.

I am now formally requesting that information under a Freedom of Information Law request. (I did not put this in the subject line since the school’s email system seems to automatically send such requests to spam.) You might decide to provide the documentation to all board members free of charge. If, on the other hand, you decide to provide it to me only, please send it by pdf to minimize my out-of-pocket costs.

As I said last night, the administration’s failure to give me the documentation on this transaction has made it impossible for me to exercise my fiduciary duty, and that is unacceptable.

Robyne Camp
re: Is the board violating the law?

administration spends $50K without board vote
"it's just about statistically impossible that a bid would come in at exactly $50K"
fields exchange at BOE meeting
school boards behaving badly

news from nowhere, part 3

the fields exchange at last Tuesday night's board meeting

school boards behaving badly

Peter Meyer responding to David Kaplan.

And here is Ed.

Steve H on "extreme non-pushing"

I mentioned in a previous comment thread that permissive parenting, which is not as effective as authoritative parenting, means "letting children learn from their mistakes."

Here is Steve H's take on laissez faire parenting:

As our son gets older, he has to be the one to set the line for himself, but he is not ready yet to go into the deep end of the pool without us watching. We also have to show him where the line is. In music, he can't just listen to his friends and relatives. He has to know what the Sophia Chuas are playing in competitions at each age level. He has to be realistic about how he fits in the world. This can't be left to chance or his own ideas of excellence. We could let him learn from his mistakes, but some mistakes can't be fixed. My wife and I had another discussion about the risk of mistakes just the other day.

My parents had a completely hands-off approach to our education. Since we never got poor grades, they never did anything. My brother and I talked years ago about how we wished that they did a lot more. We felt very ignorant and naive when we got to college.

Our father taught about jet/rocket engines at Pratt & Whitney. He never told me a thing about it or what he was doing at Cape Canaveral in the 1960s. I didn't know a thing about engineering until I was a sophomore in college.

People get upset about the Amy Chuas, but you have to see how awful (and invisible) the other side of the issue is. If kids don't learn, then it must be their fault, or their parents, or their peers, or society. Extreme non-pushing is so much more of a problem because people have no feedback. They can't see the problem. They think it's a matter of engagement or self-motivation.

Constructivism is consistent with permissive parenting, at least in my district, where the h.s. principal says that students are "young adults" who must "learn from their mistakes."

The great charter schools, I believe, are consistent with authoritative parenting.

cat vs internet

at The Oatmeal

My niece sent me the link.

news from nowhere, part 2

a likely story

Math competition for grades 1 through 6

A friend is seeking information about math competitions for grades 1-6.  Does anyone have specific knowledge or experience with these?  Are some better known than others are?  Any advice on which one is the best?  Are there significant differences in the types of questions asked?

Here are some that appear to be popular:

• Continental Math League , grades 2-9
• Math League, grades 4-12
• Math Olympiads for Elementary & Middle Schools (MOEMS), grades 4-8

Some previous KTM math competition discussions:
http://kitchentablemath.blogspot.com/2009/10/math-competitions.html
http://kitchentablemath.blogspot.com/2008/10/mathcounts.html

Why we can't trust math professors...

At least on k12 math education...

(Cross-posted at Out In Left Field) 

Consider the following math professors: Keith Devlin (Stanford), who wants grade schools to de-emphasize calculation skills; Dennis DeTurck (Penn), who wants grades schools to stop teaching fractions; and Jordan Ellenberg (University of Wisconsin) and Andrew Hodges (Oxford), who criticize grade school math as overly rote and abstract. And consider all the math professors featured in these three recent Youtube videos (an extended infomercial for the so-called "Moore Method," yet another re-branding of guide-on-the-side teaching and student-centered discovery learning--thanks to Barry Garelick for pointing me to these!).

Every last one of these math professors sounds like yet another apologist for Constructivist Reform Math. Each one of them can be--and in some cases is--readily cited by Reform Math acolytes and by the Reform Math-crazed media as such. And, yet, had these professors actually been subjected to Reform Math when they were students, it's hard to imagine that any of them would have enjoyed the subject enough to pursue it beyond grade school.

Indeed, unless the mathematician in question has actually sat down and looked at the Reform Math curricula in detail, and imagined him or herself subjected to it, year after year, in all its slow-moving, mixed-ability-groupwork, explain-your-answer-to-easy problems glory, we should not trust what he or she has to say about it. Indeed mathematicians in general, unless (like Howe and Klein and Ma and Milgram and Wu) they take the time to examine what's going on with actual k12 math students in actual k12 classrooms, are especially unreliable judges of current trends in k12 math. Here's why:

1. Grownup mathematicians remember arithmetic as boring and excessively rote, and tend therefore to downplay the importance of arithmetic in general, and arithmetic calculations in particular, in most students' mathematical development.

2. Unable to put themselves in the shoes of those students to whom math doesn't come as naturally as it does to them, they tend also to downplay the importance of explicit teaching and rote practice. Some mathematicians take this a step further, imagining that if one simply gave grade schoolers more time to "play around" with numbers, they'd make great mathematical leaps on their own.

3. As more and more college students show worsening conceptual skills in math, mathematicians tend to fault k12 schools for failing to teach concepts and "higher-level thinking," not for failing to teach the more basic skills that underpin these things.

4. In upper-level college and graduate math classes, attended disproportionately by those who are approaching expert-level math skills, student-centered learning is much more effective than it is in grade school classrooms, where students are mathematical novices. Not enough mathematicians read Dan Willingham and appreciate the different needs of novices and experts.

Now there are two specific ways in which mathematicians can provide valuable insights for k12 math instruction:

1. They are perhaps the best source on what students need to know in order to handle freshman math classes.

2. To the extent that they remember what it was like to be a math buff in grade school, and to the extent that they take a detailed look at what's going on right now in k12 math classrooms, they can offer insights into how well suited today's curricula and today's classrooms are to the needs and interests of today's budding mathematicians.

But the fact that mathematicians are really, really good at math does not, in itself, make them reliable sources on what works in k12 math classes. Quite the contrary.

Amy Chua in the NY Times

In interviews, she comes off as unresolved. “I think I pulled back at the right time,” she said. “I do not think there was anything abusive in my house.” Yet, she added, “I stand by a lot of my critiques of Western parenting. I think there’s a lot of questions about how you instill true self-esteem.”

Her real crime, she said, may have been telling the truth. “I sort of feel like people are not that honest about their own parenting,” she said. “Take any teenage household, tell me there is not yelling and conflict.”

Yelling and conflict in the teenage household.

Check.

Initially, Ms. Chua said, she wrote large chunks about her husband and their conflicts overchild rearing. But she gave him approval on every page, and when he kept insisting she was putting words in his mouth, it became easier to leave him out.

“It’s more my story,” she said. “I was the one that in a very overconfident immigrant way thought I knew exactly how to raise my kids. My husband was much more typical. He had a lot of anxiety, he didn’t think he knew all the right choices.” And, she said, “I was the one willing to put in the hours.”

In my family, I've had the over-the-top Amy-Chua role.

I had it with Jimmy, and I had it with C. (Not with Andrew.)

At one point, the entire household - Ed, M. (nanny), Christian (aide for Jimmy & Andrew & unofficial son) - were lined up in opposition to my four-year quest to teach C. math.

Today everyone's glad I did what I did.

Ms. Chua wrote most of the book in eight weeks, yet struggled with the end, she said, reflecting the East-West tug on her parenting. “It’s a work in progress,” she said. “On bad days I would say this method is terrible. I just need to give them freedom and choice. On good days, when Lulu would say: ‘I’m so glad you made me write that second draft of my essay. My teacher read it out loud,’ I think, I’ve got to stick to my guns.”

Retreat of the ‘Tiger Mother’
By KATE ZERNIKE
Published: January 14, 2011

That's where Amy Chua and I are different.

I am torn over not doing enough.

Not doing enough with C., and certainly not enough with Andrew.

And, heck, while I'm at it -- Jimmy could have used a couple more efforts to teach him to read, too!

extreme parenting

The New York Times has a group of responses to Amy Chua's "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior."

I thought two were interesting:

The Power of Conviction

Defining Success for Myself

Amazingly, no one has thought to ask Laurence Steinberg what he thinks. At this point, we have 50 years of research into what type of parenting produces great kids, but no one mentions it over at the Times.

multiple choice:

a) authoritarian
b) permissive
c) authoritative
d) disengaged

The answer is C.

linguistic authority and mental illness

As Mr. Loughner has tried to explain it in Web postings, English grammar is not merely usage that enjoys common acceptance. Rather, it is nothing less than a government conspiracy to control people’s minds. Perhaps more bizarre, even potentially troubling, is that he is not the only one out there clinging to this belief. Some grammarians say they hear it more often than you may think.

“It is completely off the wall,” said Patricia T. O’Conner, the author of several books on grammar, including “Woe Is I.”

“But I’m not actually that surprised,” said Ms. O’Conner, who also writes a blog, grammarphobia.com, with her husband, Stewart Kellerman. “I get mail once in a while from people who believe that it’s wrong to try to reinforce good English because it’s some kind of mind-control plot, and English teachers are at the bottom of this. For anyone to say that subject and verb should agree, for example, is an infringement of your freedoms, and you have a God-given right to speak and use whichever words you want, which of course you do.

“But they see it as some sort of plot to standardize people’s minds and make everyone robotically the same.”

[snip]

Ben Zimmer, the “On Language” columnist for The New York Times Magazine, said he, too, had received letters talking of a “grand conspiracy.” He got them, in particular, when he was editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press.

“When people are confronted with linguistic authority of various kinds, whether it’s dictionaries or grammar books, the more conspiratorially minded may use that as evidence of some grand scheme, or something where people are pulling the strings behind the scenes and using language to do that,” Mr. Zimmer said.

Subjects and Verbs as Evil Plot
By CLYDE HABERMAN
Published: January 13, 2011

court-ordered mental health evaluations in Arizona

In Arizona, people can be sent involuntarily for a mental health exam after any concerned party applies for a court-ordered evaluation, which can lead to mandated treatment.

Stella Bay, the police chief for Pima, said the college could initiate an involuntary evaluation only if a student posed “an imminent danger.”

But that assertion seemed to reflect a misunderstanding of the state’s laws regarding involuntary evaluations. Dr. Waterman, of the Southern Arizona Mental Health Corporation, said a mandated evaluation required only some evidence of danger. “It’s a broader standard,” she said. “And it costs nothing to make a phone call and talk about it and consult with a professional.”

Since the weekend shootings, the number of petitions for mandated exams at Dr. Waterman’s clinic has increased, she said, presumably because of wide awareness of the issue now. In fact, Ms. Bay called in a case on Monday about a Pima student, Dr. Waterman said. The police brought the student right to a hospital to be evaluated.


College’s Policy on Troubled Students Raises Questions
By A. G. SULZBERGER and TRIP GABRIEL
Published: January 13, 2011

and see: A Predictable Tragedy in Arizona by E. Fuller Torrey

Science Teachers Should Know The Content They Teach

The National Council on Teacher Quality finds the level of science content knowledge demonstrated by teachers in many states to be unacceptably low. Connecticut received the lowest score possible: a red light. You can read more at my blog post here:

Connecticut's High School Science Teacher Certification Found Wanting

Chinese moms, part 5

Today I finally got through the basal ganglia article I was trying to read.

Then realized the reason I'm so captivated by Chinese moms is that I desperately need one myself.

Speaking of desperation, Piers Steel's book is out!




and see... structured procrastination

Chinese moms, part 4

C. and I saw this a while back & he's been quoting it to me ever since.

I'm printing out a copy of the Chinese mom story for him to read now ---