No WUG is too DAX to be ZONGED

Another fabulous grammar puzzle from Language Log:

No WUG is too DAX to be ZONGED.

Does this sentence say that a WUG should be ZONGED?

Or that a WUG should not be ZONGED?

And why haven't I been reading Language Log for lo these many years?

6 in 10 people get this one right.

Dedicated Teacher on differentiated instruction

Dedicated Teacher writes:

I agree that differentiated instruction^* presents a tremendous challenge to the classroom teacher. I currently teach at a school that has time built in for differentiation in reading, but I've been trying to devise a plan to implement the same practices in math, but I just don't have enough instructional time in the day. When I do try to work with a small group of students, I find that the others do not engage in anything meaningful or that I can't teach the small group because I'm having to constantly intervene with the other groups. I find that my differentiation comes when I'm sitting with a couple of children at recess reteaching a concept or by keeping students in during Music or P.E. This not only keeps them from their much needed recess, but I'm often giving up my much needed planning time. If you come up with a way to make differentiated instruction work....let us all know.

^* the arithmetic of differentiated instruction

writing = sentences

In her book The Writing Life (1989) Annie Dillard tells the story of a fellow writer who was asked by a student, "Do you think I could be a writer?" "'Well,' the writer said, 'do you like sentences?'" The student is surprised by the question, but Dillard knows exactly what was meant. He was being told, she explains, that "if he liked sentences, he could begin," and she remembers a similar conversation with a painter friend. "I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, 'I like the smell of paint.'" The point, made implicitly (Dillard does not belabor it) is that you don't begin with a grand conception, either of the great American novel or a masterpiece that will hang in the Louvre. You begin with a feel for the nitty-gritty material of the medium, paint in one case, sentences in the other.

But wouldn't the equivalent of paint be words, rather than sentences? Actually, no, because while you can brush or even drip paint on the canvas and make something interesting happen, just piling up words, one after the other, won't do much of anything until something else has been added. That something is named quite precisely by Anthony Burgess in this sentence from his novel Enderby Outside (1968):

And the words slide into slots ordained by syntax, and glitter as with atmospheric dust with those impurities which we call meaning.

Before the words slide into their slots, they are just discrete items, pointing everywhere and nowhere.


How to Write a Sentence: and How to Read One
Stanley Fish
page 1 - 2

Until this year, I did not know that the sentence is the basic unit in writing.

Not the word.

That's 'cause I was educated by wolves.

help desk - grammar

Inspired by an SAT question C. and I answered yesterday --

All of the editors at the magazine agreed.
All the editors at the magazine agreed.

What happens grammatically when you omit the preposition ('of')?

In the first sentence, 'all' is the subject.

Is 'all' the subject of the second sentence, too? Is the preposition ('of') implied?

Or does 'all' become an adjective modifying 'editors,' making 'editors' the subject of the sentence?

teach the sentence

Close on the heels of Katharine's post about reform writing and Debbie's on the lost art of sentence diagramming, I came across this study mentioned on Language Log:

Research into grammar by academics at Northumbria University suggests that a significant proportion of native English speakers are unable to understand some basic sentences.

[snip]

The project assumed that every adult native speaker of English would be able to understand the meaning of the sentence:

"The soldier was hit by the sailor."

Dr Dabrowska and research student James Street then tested a range of adults, some of whom were postgraduate students, and others who had left school at the age of 16. All participants were asked to identify the meaning of a number of simple active and passive sentences, as well as sentences which contained the universal qualifier "every."

As the test progressed, the two groups performed very differently. A high proportion of those who had left school at 16 began to make mistakes. Some speakers were not able to perform any better than chance, scoring no better than if they had been guessing.

Dr Dabrowska comments: "These findings are ground breaking, because for decades the theoretical and educational consensus has been solid. Regardless of educational attainment or dialect we are all supposed to be equally good at grammar, in the sense of being able to use grammatical cues to understand the meaning of sentences.

[snip]

The supposition that everyone in a linguistic community shares the same grammar is a central tenet of Noam Chomsky's theory of universal grammar. The theory assumes that all children learn language equally well and that there must therefore be an underlying common structure to all languages that is somehow "hard-wired" into the brain.

Dr Dabrowska has examined other explanations for her findings, such as limitations to working memory, and even so-called "test wiseness," but she concluded that these non-linguistic factors are irrelevant.

She also stressed that the findings have nothing to do with intelligence. Participants with low levels of educational attainment were given instruction following the tests, and they were able to learn the constructions very quickly. She speculates that this could be because their attention was not drawn to sentence construction by parents or teachers when they were children.

Many English Speakers Cannot Understand Basic Grammar
ScienceDaily (July 6, 2010)

Turns out grammar needs to be taught.

pop quiz, part 5

How many people do you think answer this question from the Wason test correctly:

[Four] cards are placed on a table to show 3, 8, red and brown....The rule is: “If a card shows an even number on one side, then it is red on the other.” Which cards do you need to turn over to tell if the rule has been broken?

And how many people would you expect to get the answer right on this one:

“If you borrow the car, then you have to fill the tank with petrol.” Once again, you are shown four cards, one side of which says who did or did not borrow the car and the other whether or not that person filled the tank:

Dave did not borrow the car
Helen borrowed the car
Brianne filled up the tank with petrol
Kirk did not fill up the tank with petrol

Does learning math make you more likely to know the answer?

Or, alternatively, does being able to answer these questions make it easier for you to learn math?

I'll put the percent-correct in the comments.

Here is Language Log on the Wason test. (Haven't read yet.)

Impostor Questions

Any thoughts as to whether or not it's helpful (or harmful) to use non-College Board material when studying for the SAT?

I'm suspicious, and they feel like impostors (though there are notable exceptions, including PWNtheSAT and UltimateSATVerbal), but I'm open to the possibility that these impostors make the knowledge more flexible.

Thoughts? Experiences?

(Cross-posted on Perfect Score Project)

Best Wishes in Your Search for Truth

Truth in American Education

Americans rightly have voiced these concerns that we address:

■Operating outside of the system of checks and balances that Americans rely on is dangerous to our freedoms. They are an affront to parents’ rights, the 10th Amendment and our tradition of local control over education.
■The mixing of public, corporate and foundation money without proper accountability is troublesome, as taxpayers contribute a significant portion of education funding.
■A one-size-fits-all set of national standards, curriculum and testing controlled by a few will affect us all.
■Impacts to public school, private school and home school education will be felt, as mandates increase and curriculum choices will diminish.
■Students are not widgets and require individualized learning. More top-down control is not in the best interests of educating individual students.

Truth in American Education provides information to parents, taxpayers, school board members, educators and legislators who are concerned about these issues. At the heart of it, the disposition of these issues will determine whether the federal government and elite, special interest groups have the right to form the hearts and minds of children and whether we will reject, or affirm, the concepts laid down by our founding principles.

$39,000 for tuition - $35,000 for tutors

Siddharth Iyer spent eight Mays cramming for finals, first at Stuyvesant High School and then at Columbia University.

Nine years later, it is still crunch time for Mr. Iyer, a top tutor at Ivy Consulting Group, as his clients face a deluge of end-of-year exams. “He’s been prepping my son all week,” said the mother of one, a senior at Riverdale Country School in the Bronx, speaking on the condition that she not be named because Riverdale discourages both tutoring and talking to reporters.

“Prepping” — in this case for an oral exam in Riverdale’s notorious Integrated Liberal Studies, an interdisciplinary class laden with primary sources instead of standard textbooks — did not start the week before the exams, the mother pointed out. She said she had paid Mr. Iyer’s company $750 to $1,500 each week this school year for 100-minute sessions on Liberal Studies, a total of about $35,000 — just shy of Riverdale’s $38,800 tuition.

Last year, she said, her tutoring bills hit six figures, including year-round SAT preparation from Advantage Testing at $425 per 50 minutes; Spanish and math help from current and former private school teachers at $150 an hour; and sessions with Mr. Iyer for Riverdale’s equally notorious interdisciplinary course Constructing America, at $375 per 50 minutes.

Push for A’s at Private Schools Is Keeping Costly Tutors Busy
By JENNY ANDERSON
Published: June 7, 2011

Elite New York schools like Riverdale and Dalton hire teachers with Ph.Ds -- not Ed.Ds^*-- in the fields they teach. Very likely, what has happened here is that these teachers have created advanced college-level courses high school students can't handle.

We need micro-schools.

^* When we looked at private schools 3 years ago, we found that the math teachers in nearly every private school had Masters degrees in education, not math.

diagramming the Preamble

redkudu left a link to this diagram of the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, and I had to post it:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The Lost Art of Sentence Diagramming

I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences. --Gertrude Stein

After reading this amusing article in the American Educator, I think sentence diagramming has a bad rap. It sounds like fun.

(Cross Posted at Perfect Score Project)

a bad economy depresses math scores

Given the magnitude of the recent recession, and the high-stakes testing the U.S. has implemented under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), it is important to understand the effects of large-scale job losses on student achievement. We examine the effects of state-level job losses on fourth- and eighth-grade test scores, using federal Mass Layoff Statistics and 1996-2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress data. Results indicate that job losses decrease scores. Effects are larger for eighth than fourth graders and for math than reading assessments, and are robust to specification checks. Job losses to 1% of a state’s working-age population lead to a .076 standard deviation decrease in the state’s eighth-grade math scores. This result is an order of magnitude larger than those found in previous studies that have compared students whose parents lose employment to otherwise similar students, suggesting that downturns affect all students, not just students who experience parental job loss. Our findings have important implications for accountability schemes: we calculate that a state experiencing one-year job losses to 2% of its workers (a magnitude observed in seven states) likely sees a 16% increase in the share of its schools failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress under NCLB.

Children Left Behind: The Effects of Statewide Job Loss on Student Achievement
Elizabeth Oltmans Ananat, Anna Gassman-Pines, Dania V. Francis, Christina M. Gibson-Davis
NBER Working Paper No. 17104
Issued in June 2011
NBER Program(s): CH

Here's the Curious Capitalist: Is the Economy Hurting Your Kid's Report Card?.

Perceptual Learning

There was a story in the New York Times yesterday about perceptual learning, and it brought up two things for me:

a) I was surprised (relieved?) to hear that I wasn't the only one who has trouble with fractions.

b) I had a breakthrough moment a few weeks ago when Catherine told me to break out the number line.

(Cross posted on Perfect Score Project)

Remind me not to travel in space

Lieberman’s joint research with medical school faculty, other colleagues, and Brown University graduate and undergraduate students have revealed a “syndrome” – a pattern of speech motor and cognitive deficits occurs [sic] that derive from impaired subcortical basal ganglia structures. Ongoing studies of Parkinson’s disease, childhood developmental verbal apraxia, Rolandic epilepsy, autism, hypoxic insult to the brain arising from exposure to extreme altitude as climbers ascend Mount Everest, and focal brain lesions provide an opportunity for both graduate and undergraduate students to participate in research. Other studies on speech production have synthesized the vowels that Neanderthals could have uttered. The findings of these studies have been applied to the diagnosis and treatment of these conditions as well as monitoring systems for exposure to high-intensity radiation in space travel, which produces damage to neural circuits involving the basal ganglia.

Philip Lieberman at Brown

I've spent the past year trying to figure out the basal ganglia. (pdf file)

In case you were wondering.

Bonus factoid: Here's what it sounds like when a Neanderthal tries to pronounce a long 'e.'

The Pleasure of Problem Solving

Willingham's article, Why Don't Students Like School, describes perfectly why I love working on SAT problems:

There is a sense of satisfaction, of fulfillment, in successful thinking......It's notable too that the pleasure is in the solving of the problem. Working on a problem with no sense that you are making progress is not pleasurable. In fact, it's frustrating. And there's not great pleasure in simply knowing the answer either.

And why I find them so challenging:

There's a final necessity for thinking: sufficient space in working memory. Thinking becomes increasingly difficult as memory gets crowded.

(Cross-posted on Perfect Score Project)

at Google

re: crowds vs herds, jtidwell writes:

I worked at Google. I was based in the Cambridge (Mass.) office, but its architecture is comparable to the NYC office. I spent my share of time working as a visitor in the NYC office, too, and also in Mountain View.

What they are doing at Google is TOTALLY different from guess-the-number problems. :-)

But, first, the architecture. There are large rooms with an open layout, but these aren't generally huge. Most that I visited only held about 20-30 people, and the people working in them were respectful about a quiet environment. There are countless meeting rooms, both large and tiny, that one can retreat to when necessary. And truth be told, I never spent much time at my desk! I was frequently working in one of these meeting rooms, either in F2F meetings, or on videoconferences, or some hybrid thereof, or by myself when I needed serious quiet.

Plus, everyone is issued laptops instead of (or in addition to) one's desktop computer. Googlers are encouraged to take their work anywhere they please, as long as it's secure. Working from home is fine, too.

The nature of the work there is quite collaborative, as all good software product teams are. But once decisions are made, or questions formulated, everyone scurries off and does individual work. Very intense individual work. (In my case, it was UX design, with occasional programming or online research to figure something out.) And let me tell you, if you weren't extremely competent at self-directed work and individual achievement, you didn't last long in that environment. :-)

Following the crowd's opinion, just because you don't have the nerve to state your own differing opinion, isn't looked well upon either.

Red Horse Tutoring

Stacy Howe Lott has a website!

the arithematic of differentiated instruction

Concerned Teacher on differentiated instruction:

Differentiated instruction is a total scam. You MUST teach in order for students to learn, and you must offer practice time during which you are available to lend assistance. No superteacher can do both at multiple levels and through multiple modalities daily in the course of a single 55 minute period class, and do it well.

Teachers are not the folks who have perpetrated this myth. Teachers have had this myth forced upon them by administrators, and as far as I know, colleges have promoted this nonsense.

Concerned Teacher responding to Protecting Students from Learning

The arithmetic of differentiated instruction doesn't add up.

Put 20 kids at all levels of abilities and interests in the same classroom for 55 minutes.

Seat them in pods.

Have the teacher deliver a 10 minute mini lesson, after which she moves around the class working one-on-one with 20 different children.

While the teacher is making her way around the room, the other 24 children do whatever they've been told to do without being able to ask a question or get feedback. If they've been told to work together, then a lot of them are going to be copying whatever the quickest child in the pod is doing.

The total number of productive minutes an individual child can experience is 12 to 15 out of the 55, max, and that's assuming that the mini lesson was pitched to the child's level.

If the lesson was over a child's head, he or she has just two or three minutes of comprehensible direct instruction from the teacher.

If the lesson was below a child's level, he or she also has just two or three minutes of useful direct instruction from the teacher. If that.

Hunter Writing System

looks interesting:

Is this a whole-language approach to teaching grammar?

Yes and no. Yes, to the extent that whole-language instruction requires involvement of all the senses in learning. It is my recommendation that teachers have students say their rearranged sentences out loud (or, at least, subvocally) not only to test whether they are meeting the criteria for some grammatical element but also to hear what correctly spoken English sounds like. Of course, they do write and read the sentences as they carry out the exercise material.

No, because this system for immersing students in structure does not--and cannot--teach grammar through literature or through the students' own writing. Students must learn the structure of the sentence systematically, building from the known to the unknown in an experience-based and carefully sequenced way. This ownership of structure cannot be learned in random order nor without "interactive" types of exercises.

How does this way of teaching grammar relate to the process approach to teaching writing?

Nancie Atwell, a chief proponent of the process approach to teaching writing for middle school students, recommends occasional 10-minute mini-lessons in grammar primarily for the purpose of fixing some usage error. (Her reasoning is that the indispensable, if not sole, means to becoming a better writer is to do personally meaningful writing--as opposed to learning grammar as a means.)

Although my program would provide ideal subject matter for 10-minute mini-lessons, the primary instruction would have to be in the fundamentals of grammar (not in rules of usage); it would have to be virtually daily, not occasional, in occurrence; and it would have to be accompanied by extensive practice. It would have to include incrementally developed lessons on how sentences and their parts work and interact and would address usage errors only as sufficient background to understand and consistently apply them have been absorbed.

The philosophy of the proponents of the process approach to writing is that improvement in the mechanics of writing will take place with students' heightened desire to make sure that their message is read and acted upon and without formal instruction in grammar. (There remains the troubling question as to whether such experiences can lead to the remedying of most, let alone all or the most serious, mistakes. Then there is the question of permanency of the error-free writing.) Is it not reasonable to believe, too, that any lasting improvement in the mechanics of writing might occur just for the brightest of students or for those immersed in correct usage of English in their homes?

My philosophy regarding mastery of writing on the part of middle school students--in fact, all students--is entirely different. My philosophy is that immersion in grammar--that is, an experiencing of the roles of the key parts of the sentence by means of hands-on strategies, strategies that initially involve the rearrangement of sentence parts--is a prior and, for many (if not most) students, an indispensable means to self-confidence and competence in writing....

It is in light of this that I recommend that my grammar program--in accompaniment with on-going composition work--be the initial component of any foundational writing program (and, therefore, of any middle school program). My teaching suggestions in the next section offer some insights.

Competing Philosophies

help desk - absolute value

Problem 85 in Perfect 800: SAT Math:

In an amusement park, regulations require that a child be between 30" and 50" tall to ride a specific attraction. Which of the following inequalities can be used to determine whether or not a child's height h satisfies the regulation for this ride.

(A) | h -10 | < 50
(B) | h - 20 | < 40
(C) | h - 30 | < 20
(D) | h - 40 | < 10
(E) | h - 45 | < 5

update: The book's answer is C, which is wrong.

Should We Be Worried? (YES)

Core Standards Are Very Different
The new standards are supposed to be internationally benchmarked. Yet Common Core’s eighth-grade math standards don’t match Finland (0.21), Japan (0.17) or Singapore (0.13), primarily because these countries stress performing procedures. On language arts and reading, alignment ranges from 0.09 with Finland to 0.37 with New Zealand.

Should we be worried? Common Core Standards represent “a change for the better” when it comes to “higher order cognitive demand,” Porter concludes, but the “answer is less clear” when it comes to the topics that are covered.

Personally, I would say the "answer" is perfectly clear!

How Big a Change are the Common Core Standards?

SAT #4 Impressions

I just got back from taking the SAT for the 4th time in 2011.

Spent the month of May working with a tutor named Stacey Howe-Lott who taught me so much about math and grammar I hardly know where to begin; and she has excellent test taking advice (which may seem obvious to a lot of people, but it was new to me).

I'm hoping my score reflects the progress.

(Cross posted on Perfect Score Project)

Crowds vs. herds

In my book I draw a distinction between "cooperation" and "collaboration," defining the former as people working while interacting, and the latter as people working on joint projects, but not necessarily in one another's presence or with much productive interaction. In collaborations, after the work is divvied up, participants might spend the majority of their time working independently. 

I argue, furthermore, that this is what typifies most successful real-world collaborations. Except for those of us working on construction sites or film sets, we tend to get most of our work done at desks in private offices or cubicles; not at conference tables.

It turns out that there is a good reason for this. In an article in last weekend's Wall Street Journal, Jonah Lehrer reports that:

The good news is that the wisdom of crowds exists. When groups of people are asked a difficult question—say, to estimate the number of marbles in a jar, or the murder rate of New York City—their mistakes tend to cancel each other out. As a result, the average answer is often surprisingly accurate.

But here's the bad news: The wisdom of crowds turns out to be an incredibly fragile phenomenon. It doesn't take much for the smart group to become a dumb herd. Worse, a new study by Swiss scientists suggests that the interconnectedness of modern life might be making it even harder to benefit from our collective intelligence.

The experiment was straightforward. The researchers gathered 144 Swiss college students, sat them in isolated cubicles, and then asked them to answer various questions, such as the number of new immigrants living in Zurich. In many instances, the crowd proved correct. When asked about those immigrants, for instance, the median guess of the students was 10,000. The answer was 10,067.

The scientists then gave their subjects access to the guesses of the other members of the group. As a result, they were able to adjust their subsequent estimates based on the feedback of the crowd. The results were depressing. All of a sudden, the range of guesses dramatically narrowed; people were mindlessly imitating each other. Instead of canceling out their errors, they ended up magnifying their biases, which is why each round led to worse guesses. Although these subjects were far more confident that they were right—it's reassuring to know what other people think—this confidence was misplaced.

The scientists refer to this as the "social influence effect." In their paper, they argue that the effect has grown more pervasive in recent years. We live, after all, in an age of opinion polls and Facebook, cable news and Twitter. We are constantly being confronted with the beliefs of others, as the crowd tells itself what to think.

...

This research reveals the downside of our hyperconnected lives. So many essential institutions depend on the ability of citizens to think for themselves, to resist the latest trend or bubble. That's why it is important, as the Founding Fathers realized, to cultivate a raucous free press, full of divergent viewpoints.

The ideal, then, isn't group think, but independent thinking followed by a compilation of people's thoughts. 

Jonah Lehrer, however, neglects to mention one reason why the social influence effect has grown in recent years:  all the time that today's students are forced to work in groups in K12 classrooms, and, increasingly, in college classrooms as well.  In this case it's not the hyperconnectedness of our wired and wireless lives that's responsible, but the group think of the education world, with its systematic confusion of "cooperation" with "collaboration."

(Cross-posted at Out In Left Field).

KIPP & special ed

Defending KIPP, again

Wonderlic test

5 minutes is not a very long time.

SAT Love

dangling modifiers at PWN

brand new!

Now I have to get Mr. PWN to write some SAT geometry questions.

Top 10 List of What I Learned in May

I spent the month of May doing SAT Test Prep with Stacey Howe-Lott. She's the person with the largest score improvement that I was able to find.

I *feel* like I learned a lot. Let's hope the feels are more reality based this time around.

Next SAT in 4 days.

Cross Posted on Perfect Score Project.

dangling modifiers at the Fed

Despite having cut interest rates by 100 basis points in January, layoffs were increasing, inventories were up, and consumer confidence had fallen to its lowest level in more than four years.

A Term at the Fed: An Insider's View
Laurence H. Meyer

lgm on back to the future

re: Diane Ravitch writing in today's Times--

If every child arrived in school well-nourished, healthy and ready to learn, from a family with a stable home and a steady income, many of our educational problems would be solved.

Waiting for a School Miracle
By DIANE RAVITCH
Published: May 31, 2011

lgm writes:

Our nation and NY have many students who can be described as ideal. They have been placed in fully included classrooms with students who have severe issues and [they have been] denied access to an appropriate education. Remove that barrier, place by instructional need with competent teachers, and we as a nation will see education succeed. Continue to mainstream, and pretend to teach at an instructional level several years below the grade level over the door if it all, and we'll continue headbanging.

Yesterday's home and careers assignment for my 8th grader was similar to his 1st grade assignments before full inclusion: Take the alphabet. Under each letter, list two careers that start with that letter.

The majority of this school meets Ravitch's definition of ready to learn. But the idealists won't let the majority of children learn at their instructional level.

back to the future with Diane Ravitch

Molly on back to the future

re: Diane Ravitch writing in today's Times--

If every child arrived in school well-nourished, healthy and ready to learn, from a family with a stable home and a steady income, many of our educational problems would be solved.

Waiting for a School Miracle
By DIANE RAVITCH
Published: May 31, 2011

Molly writes:

My children meet all those lovely criteria, but somehow our educational problems remain. My child's good health and nutrition didn't help her when her algebra class spent an entire week singing karaoke followed up by 12 minutes graphing the results. Her stable family with a steady income was of no use when her English class spent 4 weeks studying poetry but never read a single poem that wasn't written by one of her 8th grade classmates. My child's good fortune doesn't do a damn thing to protect her from a crappy curriculum indifferently taught.

back to the future with Diane Ravitch

back to the future with Diane Ravitch

Diane Ravitch writing in today's Times:

If every child arrived in school well-nourished, healthy and ready to learn, from a family with a stable home and a steady income, many of our educational problems would be solved.

Waiting for a School Miracle
By DIANE RAVITCH
Published: May 31, 2011

I can tell you definitively that a child arriving at school well-nourished, healthy and ready to learn from a family with a stable home and a steady income does not solve the educational problem of a high school junior needing to learn precalculus inside his actual school.

how much does a B on a precalculus final cost?

Approximately $500 for private tutoring at $100/hour.

Now we'll see how much it costs to pay said tutor to re-teach precalculus over the summer.

help desk - precalculus
lsquared on what you must know to take calculus
Crimson Wife's online tutoring recommendation

Agressive Distraction

I'm days away from starting an Online SAT course and am more than a bit nervous. Not sure if I have the self-control to push through "Compare the Two Passages" with the internet at my fingertips.

We shall see.

(Cross Posted on Perfect Score Project)

dangling modifiers on SAT writing

Say you're taking the SAT next Saturday, and you want to know the one thing you can do to improve your writing score.

For my money, the answer is: figure out dangling modifiers.

Dangling modifiers are ubiquitous on the test, and they are especially ubiquitous in the multiple choice selections. Not infrequently, you can identify the correct answer simply by identifying the only answer that is not a dangling modifier.

This is so often the case that I now routinely read through the multiple choice options and cross out all the dangling modifiers (and the comma splices) before I even bother thinking about what's wrong with the sentence. I don't know whether that's a good idea for everyone, but it's a shortcut for me.

My goal with C. is to get him to the point where dangling modifiers 'jump' off the page at him, which is what they do with me. 

Here's an example of what I mean (based on College Board materials, but clunkier):

One of the first women to serve in Congress, more than twenty significant laws were introduced by Jane Doe, making her a leader in her era.

(A) more than twenty significant laws were introduced by Jane Doe, making her

(B) Jane Doe's introduction of more than twenty significant laws made her

(C) introducing more than twenty significant laws made Jane Doe 

(D) her introduction of more than twenty significant laws led to Jane Doe being considered 

(E) Jane Doe introduced more than twenty significant laws, making her

Choices A, B, C, and D all contain dangling modifiers. You don't have to read the final sentence to make sure it's correct because a dangling modifier is always wrong. Choice E has to be right, and it is.

The problem with a dangling modifier is that it isn't close enough to the thing it modifies, which is presumably why it is said to be 'dangling.' A dangling modifier is not firmly attached to the thing it modifies.

(Modifies means adds information to.)

When I get further along with Martha Kolln, I'll come back to this, but for now I'll say that generally speaking a modifier needs to be directly 'next door' to the thing it is modifying.^*

Since the phrase "one of the first women" modifies (adds information to) Jane, Jane has to come next in the sentence -- and just Jane, not Jane-apostrophe-s. Jane-apostrophe-s isn't Jane-the-person; Jane-apostrophe-s is a modifier, too.

So:

Choice A is wrong because "One of the first women to serve in Congress" modifies "more than twenty significant laws," which amounts to saying that the laws were women.

Sometimes you can see this better when you cross out the 'extra' words:

(A) One of the first women to serve in Congress, more than twenty significant laws 

means:

the laws, not Jane, were the first women to serve in Congress

(B) One of the first women to serve in Congress, Jane Doe's introduction of more than twenty significant laws made her

means:

the introduction of laws was one of the first women

(C) One of the first women to serve in Congress, introducing more than twenty significant laws made Jane Doe a

means:

introducing [20 laws] was a woman

(D)  One of the first women to serve in Congress, her introduction of more than twenty significant laws allowed Jane Doe to be considered a

means:

the introduction was a woman

(E) One of the first womento serve in Congress, Jane Doe introduced more than twenty significant laws

means:

Jane Doe was [one of the first] women, which is correct.

I am positive that sentence diagramming would help with SAT writing.

Too bad no one knows how to do it.


update: Martha Kolln on dangling modifiers:

The participle can open the sentence only when its subject is also the subject of the sentence and is located in regular subject position. Otherwise, the participle dangles.



^* I'm sure there's more to it that that. 

Courtney James - math tutoring

Crimson Wife writes:

I have heard really high praise for Courtney James as an online math tutor. 

update: For some reason, the link works for me only when I cut and paste the address into my browser, so here it is: http://mathperfect.net/Tutoring.aspx

update update:

Andy writes:

The link is broken because there is a trailing non-breaking space in the link (it ends Tutoring.aspx%20 instead of .aspx)

Thanks!

slower math students in Singapore

from the Air report on math education in Singapore:

The topic structure in Singapore’s framework is efficient because topics are not taught and retaught as students move through the primary grades. Instead of repeating topics that students have already learned, teachers simply reintroduce them as a foundation on which to build new mathematical content. This practice, however, may not be suitable for students who have more difficulty with mathematics. The Singapore system recognizes that students who have trouble with mathematics may not attain mastery by following Singapore’s regular program of mathematics instruction and that these students may need special assistance to attain competence.

Beginning in grades 5 and 6, Singapore identifies its weaker students on the basis of a general examination of mathematics and language competency. These students receive special assistance and are taught according to a special fifth- and sixth-grade mathematics framework. This special framework mandates that students in the slower track

• receive approximately 30 percent more mathematics instruction than students in the regular track, and

• be exposed to the same mathematical content as students in the regular track, although at a slower pace.

The mathematics framework for students needing compensatory assistance adds review material to strengthen students’ understanding of previously taught content. For example, topics on numbers and geometry taught in grade 4 are repeated at a faster pace in grade 5. The introduction of some new concepts such as ratios, rates, and averages, which are normally introduced in grade 5, are delayed until grade 6 for the weaker students (Ministry of Education, 2001a). What is important, however, is that because slower students spend extra time studying mathematics, topics usually taught in grades 5 and 6 do not have to be completely sacrificed to make room for repetition.6

To support the framework for slower students, Singapore has developed a Learning Support Program to help educators identify these students and provide them with extra help (Ministry of Education 2003c). Mathematics Support Teachers (MST), who receive on-the-job supervision and specialized training to ensure that they are professionally competent, deliver compensatory assistance.

In the United States, we expect all students to meet the standards in state frameworks, but the standards do not help teachers address the needs of slower students. In fact, U.S. standards do not acknowledge that students learn at different rates. No Child Left Behind addresses the needs of failing schools, but it does not directly require that failing students receive help. Although some research evidence supports the belief that students benefit when the curriculum is adjusted to match their ability levels (Loveless, 1999), a distinct alternative curriculum would raise concerns in the United States about potential harm to students from ability grouping. Singapore’s approach differs from traditional ability grouping in that Singapore establishes a framework that requires students to master the same content as other students, not a watered-down curriculum as often happens in U.S. ability grouped classrooms. Singapore also provides extra assistance from an expert teacher.

What the United States Can Learn From Singapore’s World-Class Mathematics System: An Exploratory Study (and what Singapore can learn from the United States)

Apparently teachers in Singapore do not deliver 10-minute mini lessons followed by 40 minutes of one-on-one work with the students who are "struggling."

400 point gain on SATs

Ms. Xu, who was born and raised in China before emigrating to suburban California at age 9, had high hopes that she would be the first in her family to go to college. But poor results on a practice SAT and a dearth of extracurricular activities convinced Ms. Xu, 17, that she needed a scholastic makeover if she were to make it into a school her parents could brag about to relatives.

ThinkTank sent her to a public speaking camp, helped her improve her college essay and gave her the e-mail addresses of all the members of the Stanford University history department. At the company’s prompting, she found two internships with department professors. She also enrolled in ThinkTank’s college prep courses, which helped improve her SAT score 410 points to 2160 out of 2400. Next autumn, she will start at Harvard University.

Coaching and Much More for Chinese Students Looking to U.S.

By DAN LEVIN
Published: May 29, 2011
NY Times

39,947 Chinese undergraduates

With China sending more students to American colleges than any other country, the competition for spots at the top schools has soared. During the 2009-10 academic year, 39,947 Chinese undergraduates were studying in the United States, a 52 percent increase from the year before and about five times as many as five years earlier, according to the Institute of International Education, a U.S. organization.

Coaching and Much More for Chinese Students Looking to U.S.

By DAN LEVIN
Published: May 29, 2011
NY Times

The admissions people at SUNY Binghamton told us they have undergraduate students from over 100 countries.

the exact science of college admissions?

As a record number of students from outside the United States compete for a limited number of spots at the most selective American colleges, companies like ThinkTank are seeking to profit from their ambitions.

In the United States, students have long turned to independent college counselors, but in recent years, larger outfits have entered the market, offering full-service designer courses, extracurricular activities and focused application assistance. These services have spread to the fast-growing and lucrative market in China.

With China sending more students to American colleges than any other country, the competition for spots at the top schools has soared. During the 2009-10 academic year, 39,947 Chinese undergraduates were studying in the United States, a 52 percent increase from the year before and about five times as many as five years earlier, according to the Institute of International Education, a U.S. organization.

[snip]

Capitalizing on the increasingly globalized education system, ThinkTank Learning has tapped into the market in the United States and China.

The founder of the company is Steven Ma, 32, a former Wall Street analyst who started the company as a business for preparing students for college entrance tests in 2002 before expanding into application consulting in 2006, starting with seven students. In 2010, that number had risen to 300, including 75 from China. The company said it made about $7 million last year, with 50 percent from admission consulting.

ThinkTank said it was able to distill the college admissions process into an exact science, which Mr. Ma compared with genetic engineering. “We make unnatural stuff happen,” he said.

Students, whose parents often pay tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, are molded by ThinkTank into well-rounded, socially conscious overachievers through a regimen often beginning as early as the year before entering high school. The company designs extracurricular activities for the students; guides them in essay writing; tutors them for the SAT, the U.S. college admission exam; and helps them with meet-and-greet sessions with alumni.

“There’s a system built by colleges designed to pick out future stars and we are here to crack that system,” Mr. Ma said.


Coaching and Much More for Chinese Students Looking to U.S.

By DAN LEVIN
Published: May 29, 2011
NY Times

Dyscalculia vs Lack of Math Facts

The other day someone emailed me about a new word he'd learned:

Dyscalculia

(He clarified that he didn't think I had it, he just wanted me to know that it existed.)

I have been starting to wonder why it is so difficult for me to improve my math SAT score though.....

.....Which lead me to Daniel Willingham's article about whether or not it's true that some people are "bad at math." After reading it, I believe I fall squarely in the "lack of automaticity" category, rather than "dyscalculic."

Headed to Kumon this summer with my son to brush up on math facts so that I can free up some working memory for the fall SAT. Surprisingly (miraculously?), my son is psyched; daughter is another story.

(Cross Posted on Perfect Score Project.)

C's SAT writing section minority rule

A couple of weeks ago, C. told me that on the Identifying Sentence Errors portion of SAT writing, sentences pertaining to minorities are error free. The correct choice is always E.

Darned if I haven't seen the same thing ever since he pointed it out.

Then today C. missed an answer because the sentence was about minorities and had an error.

"I used my rule," he said, "and it was wrong."

Starting this week, I am going to re-direct his attention to dangling participles, subject-verb agreement, pronoun antecedent agreement, tense consistency, parallelism, and idiomatic usage, among other things.

If that's possible.

Barry Garelick on mini lessons and inequality

The history of tracking students in public education goes back to the early part of the 1900′s. By the 20′s and 30′s, curricula in high schools had evolved into four different types: college-preparatory, vocational (e.g., plumbing, metal work, electrical, auto), trade-oriented (e.g., accounting, secretarial), and general. Students were tracked into the various curricula based on IQ and other standardized test scores as well as other criteria. By the mid-60’s, Mirel (1993) documents that most of the predominantly black high schools in Detroit had become “general track” institutions that consisted of watered down curricula and “needs based” courses that catered to student interests and life relevance. Social promotion had become the norm within the general track, in which the philosophy was to demand as little as possible of the students.

[snip]

By the early 80’s, the “Back to Basics” movement formed to turn back the educational fads and extremes of the late 60’s and the 70’s and reinstitute traditional subjects and curricula. The underlying ideas of the progressives did not go away, however, and the watchword has continued to be equal education for all. While such a goal is laudable, the attempt to bring equity to education by eliminating tracking had the unintended consequence of replacing it with another form of inequity: the elimination of grouping of students according to ability. Thus, students who were poor at reading were placed in classes with students who were advanced readers; students who were not proficient in basic arithmetic were placed in algebra classes. Ability grouping was viewed as a vestige of tracking and many in the education establishment consider the two concepts to be synonymous.

The elimination of ability grouping occurs mostly in the lower grades but also extends to early courses in high school. The practice of such full inclusion is now so commonplace that theories have emerged to justify its practice and to address the problems it brings. “Learning styles” and “multiple intelligences” are now commonplace terms that are taught in schools of education, along with the technique known as “differentiated instruction” to address how to teach students with diverse backgrounds and ability in the subject matter. Teachers are expected to “differentiate instruction” to each student, and to keep whole-group instruction to a minimum. To do this, the teacher gives a “mini-lesson” that lasts 10 to 15 minutes; then students work in small groups and told to work together. The prevailing belief is that by forcing students to solve problems in groups, to rely on each other rather than the teacher, the techniques and concepts needed to solve the problem will emerge through discovery, and students will be forced to learn what is needed in a “just in time” basis. This amounts to giving students easy problems, but with hard and sometimes impossible approaches since they have been given little to no effective instruction to the mathematics that results in effective mathematics problem solvers.

[snip]

Brighter students are seated with students of lower ability in the belief that the brighter students will teach the slower ones what is needed. And frequently this occurs, though the fact that the brighter students are often obtaining their knowledge via parents, tutors or learning centers is an inconvenient truth that is rarely if ever acknowledged. The result is that brighter students are bored, and slower students are either lost, or seek explanations from those students in the know. Another inconvenient truth is that in lower income communities, there are unlikely to be students who have obtained their knowledge through outside sources; they are entirely dependent on their schools.

[snip]

Through the efforts and philosophies of otherwise well-meaning individuals, full inclusion and equality for all has served as a form of tracking.

Protecting Students from Learning: Raymond
by Barry Garelick

In my experience, when a school opts for "differentiated instruction," parents have no way to know whether their children are being taught the same curriculum as other children -- especially since differentiated instruction tends to go hand-in-hand with a reduction in quizzes and tests and the introduction of "standards-based" report cards parents don't know how to interpret.

A less-able child is treated equally in the sense of being placed in a classroom with more-able children.

But is the less-able child taught the same curriculum?

Is the less-able child given the same problems to do?

And, if he is given the same problems but can't do them, what then?

In Singapore, somewhere around 4th or 5th grade, less able children are given more time in the day to master the curriculum. Equality means that all children are taught the same curriculum.

the children of immigrants

One surprising characteristic unites the majority of America’s top high school science and math students – their parents are immigrants. While only 12 percent of the U.S. population is foreign-born, 70 percent of the finalists in the 2011 Intel Science Talent Search competition were the children of immigrants, according to a National Foundation for American Policy analysis. Just 12 of the 40 finalists at this year’s competition of the nation’s top high school science students had native-born parents. While former H-1B visa holders comprise less than 1 percent of the U.S. population, 60 percent of the finalists had parents who entered the U.S. on H-1B visas, which are generally the only practical way to hire skilled foreign nationals. Finalists’ parents sponsored through a family preference category represented 7.5 percent of the total, about four times higher than their proportion in the U.S.

THE IMPACT OF THE CHILDREN OF IMMIGRANTS ON SCIENTIFIC ACHIEVEMENT IN AMERICA (pdf file)
BY STUART ANDERSON

Today's Mantra: Learn to Mastery, Then Add 20% More Study Time

Willingham's advice has been incredibly useful as my son heads into finals this season.

Interestingly, my son seems as intrigued by the study advice as I am, and wants to read the articles and book for himself when school ends.

(cross-posted on Perfect Score Project)

And speaking of books, I am currently obsessed with brain/how we learn books. In the past month I have read:

Moonwalking with Einstein (about memory -- but includes brain research)

What Can I do to Help my Child With Math When I don't Know Any Myself (GREAT study advice)

The Shallows (I'm about 3/4 done. Well worth the read. I'm identifying strongly.)

About to read:

Why Students Don't like School

Welcome to Your Brain

another Chinese mom

Caught this line in a Wall Street Journal review of The Woman Who Could Not Forget:

..."As my mother used to say to me, the success in one's life was dependent on 70% hard work and only 30% talent or genetic makeup."

Stigler and Stevenson found that "American children, teachers, and parents emphasize innate abilites as a component of success more strongly than their Japanese and Chinese counterparts do."

I'd be interested to know what percentages American parents would slot into Ying-Ying's statement on the subject of math and math learning.

I'd really be interested to know what percentages American math teachers would pick - !




The Woman Who Could Not Forget: Iris Chang Before and Beyond the Rape of Nanking- A Memoir



Learning Gap: Why Our Schools Are Failing and What We Can Learn from Japanese and Chinese Education

Engineering Professor: Out of 18 Ph.D's I advised, 16 were from China

Interesting comment from Engineering professor in post about Chinese students taking SATs:

As a professor in Engineering, I see that the Chinese students who study in the US are just incredible. Out of 18 Ph.D's I advised, 16 were from China and we don't get any Americans into the doctoral program with nearly their qualifications. When they go back home, they will just leap-frog the US within the next 10 years.

The Benign Cousin to Rote Knowledge

I'm savoring these Willingham articles. Just one more to go, then I will read his book.

It's not only helping me with my own learning process, but I feel armed to help my kids study with specifics about what works best.

(cross-posted on Perfect Score Project)

lsquared on what you must know to take calculus

(lsquared couldn't get this comment to post on Blogger):

Yes, you need to be very good at algebra. Think factoring, equation solving and complex fractions.

You also need to be quite good at trigonometry: knowing right triangle trigonometry is sufficient for almost everything except calculus--for calculus you need to know how to solve equations that have trig functions in them, and you need to know your trig formulas (the double angle formulas are particularly useful). You don't actually do any of the "verify this trig formula" stuff in calculus, but those "verify the trig formula" problems are very useful for teaching the algebraic trigonometry you use in calculus. Oh--and radians. I'm morally convinced that radians were invented to make trig functions work for calculus. Degrees are better for everything else, but in calculus, you have to have radians.

You also need to know logs: solving exponential equations with logs, solving log equations with exponents, and manipulating logarithms.

Back to rational functions. Be able to solve rational equations, simplify rational expressions that are not equations, and graph (by hand, not by calculator) rational functions (using properties of the rational function to graph, not by plotting points) (I may be unusually picky about this).

Sequences and series, including finding sums using the formulas for arithmetic and geometric sequences. Also the binomial theorem.

You don't need matrices, though you do need to be able to solve simultaneous linear equations. If there's a section in the pre-calc book on find partial fraction decompositions, that's directly a calc algorithm.

I think that might be everything you need for pre-calc.

This was an excellent exercise for me. I’m going to have to keep a copy of this to use when counseling students about whether they are ready for calculus or not. Indeed, the homeschooled kid next door wants to get into my calc class in the fall, and I shall be handing this to him I expect. Good luck finding a good class--I think the community college might be a good choice (assuming that they have a pre-calc course).

help desk - precalculus

This year's math course has been a disaster. Beyond disaster, actually. Where math is concerned, this year has been epically^* bad.

Some kind of emergency repair has to happen this summer - but what?

Any suggestions?

I could conceivably sign C. up for an algebra 2/precalculus course at the local community college - but are the teachers there going to be any better? At this point, we desperately need an actual math teacher: a person who can teach math to a student who doesn't teach math to himself.

We could do ALEKS, but ALEKS is super-slow and overwhelmingly procedural; the 1 1/2 courses I took on ALEKS taught me one disembodied procedure after another. At this point disembodied procedures might be better than nothing -- but then again to the extent C. learned anything this year he learned disembodied procedures.

I could insist that the two of us work through Foerster (I own the teacher's edition).

We could work our way through Saxon.

I could advertise for a math teacher or check out the various tutoring companies....

We also have to do serious SAT prep (though that's not going to be onerous & time-consuming).

I'm thinking this wasn't the summer to sign up for the precision teaching institute at Morningside.

^* My neighbor's son, who is a terrific writer, is constantly inventing words he says ought to exist, and having watched him do this a few times, I think he's right. Epic is an excellent word, and its non-existent cousin epically is the word I need today.

Over 20,000 Students Took SAT Prep in China Last Year

According to the dean of admissions for the University of Virginia, 1200 applicants from China scored an average of 783 in math.

Not bad ;)

(Cross-Posted at Perfect Score Project)

Edgemont High School

Jay Mathews' Newsweek Challenge Index is now at the Washington Post (very glad to see it survive Newsweek's sale), where it is now called The High School Challenge.

How schools are ranked:

The formula is simple: Divide the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or other college-level tests a school gave in 2010 by the number of graduating seniors.

Edgemont High School is ranked 197 in the country, which is not surprising given the high socioeconomic status of its students.

What is surprising - what is astonishing, really - is Edgemont's "Equity and Excellence" score, which gives the percent of graduating seniors who have scored a 3, 4, or 5 on at least one AP exam by graduation: 86.6% of Edgemont's graduating seniors passed at least one AP test.^*

Can that possibly be true?

I assume it can, given that Rye and Chappaqua have reported similar scores now or in the recent past. 

Their figures over the past several years are very high compared to the percent most schools - including most affluent suburban schools - post.

^*IB scores count, too, but I don't think Edgemont has IB courses.

Familiarity Fools the Mind

I *feel* like I'm getting better at SAT math.

Turns out that feelings aren't facts. Practice test scores not improving (yet), despite being able to solve formerly elusive slope and function problems.

I told my son this morning, Daniel Willingham says, when you think you know the material cold, study 20% more.

(cross-posted at Perfect Score Project)

Telling truth from fiction

One of these stories appeared as a front page, May 18th Philadelphia Inquirer article. The other one is made up. Which is which?

Story A:

Some teachers swear that the best way to establish their authority is to avoid smiling for the first two weeks of class.

David Hall takes a very different approach with his students at North Penn High School by cracking self-deprecating jokes and pretending to be the dude who thinks he is hip but so is not.

In the classroom, Hall brings social studies alive, bypassing textbooks in favor of original sources and creating his own lesson materials. Inside and outside the classroom, he spends time getting to know students, hoping to connect with them and inspire them.

Now in his 13th year of teaching, Hall, 37, recently received a "Teacher as Hero" award from the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia, the latest in a long string of teaching laurels. The Liberty Museum cited Hall's field trips to courtrooms and prisons in Philadelphia and his work as an adviser for the school Gay-Straight Alliance. During summer vacations, Hall does corporate training on workplace diversity issues.

Lauren Ewaniuk, 28, who graduated from North Penn in 2001, called Hall her "all-time favorite teacher by far."

"The best thing about his class was we didn't use the textbook very often," said Ewaniuk, now a teacher in Cheltenham. "He taught us in different ways. The classroom was set up as a circle - it was all class discussion. We read court cases, we did interactive things, watched videos - it was very engaging."

Story B:

Some teachers swear that the best way to engage with students is to crack jokes and relate to them as peers.

David Hill takes a very different approach with his students at South Penn High School. He spends most of his time standing in front of the class and rarely goes off topic

Hill brings social studies alive by ensuring that students can make sense of it. His approach bucks what has become a common trend among award-winning teachers: creating lessons from scratch out of original source materials. Noting that students often find such materials confusing or overwhelming because they lack the necessary background knowledge, Hill makes teaching this knowledge his number one priority.

"My job is to get them ready for the kinds of serious, primary source research that occurs in college and graduate level courses," Hill explains.

Now in his 13th year of teaching, Hill, 37, recently received a "Teacher as Teacher" award from the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia, the latest in a long string of teaching laurels. The Liberty Museum cited the well-informed essays that Hill's students wrote about the history of prison reform in Philadelphia and Hill's own original research on Gay-Straight relations in Philadelphia high schools. During summer vacations, Hill seeks out the most informative, interesting history texts and conducts workshops for teachers in what he calls "Textbook Resuscitation."

Evelyn Lemaniuk, 28, who graduated from South Penn in 2001, called Hill her "all-time favorite teacher by far."

"The best thing about his class was how he renewed my interest in reading history," said Lemaniuk, now a teacher in Cheltenberg. "Most of the approved textbooks are incredibly low-level and boring, and so the better teachers tend not to use them. The problem is that, without a textbook, we're really at a loss when it comes to understanding primary source materials and how they fit into the bigger picture."

(Cross-posted at Out In Left Field)

Music While You Study?

My kids are always trying to convince me that they can study just as well while IMing and BBMing and video chatting and listening to music. In fact, they may have even said they study better while multitasking.

Turns out my gut was right.

They can't.

(Cross-posted at Perfect Score Project)

fuzzy charters

My email correspondent gave me permission to post this email response to "Building a Better Edsel":

This is an important issue, and I'm glad Pondiscio and Joanne Jacobs have put it out there. Many, even most, of the charter (and private) schools offer the same "all fuzzery, all the time" curricula and instruction as your neighbourhood Everyday Math Academy.  They can and do get better results (in some cases, but not in most) by creating an achievement-focused school climate, hiring young people with loads of energy (who rarely stay for long), having a certain selection bias -- not necessarily the accused "creaming" of high performers, but simply the ability to select students whose families support the "mission" of the school -- and the ability to remove students who are clearly dysfunctional or misplaced.

Nevertheless, schools like KIPP and HSA^* (who are firmly committed to fuzzery) could and should do much, much better and probably would do so with a better-constructed curriculum. They need to start out with an intensive compensatory model (DI or DI-like) that gradually morphs into more student-led investigative and project-based work. Morningside does this (Catherine, you may not see that so much at the summer session, because the summer school is not organized like the full-time school) with empirical evidence of success. The students need to develop the critical foundation skills early and fluently and then there can be more balance between teacher-directed instruction and student investigation (still pretty teacher-directed).

All the hoopla about teacher accountability, incentive schemes etc. is missing the mark.  It's like saying we're going to hire the top doctors and forbid them to use antibiotics, effective surgical techniques or diagnostics and simply command them to "heal the sick." 

Right.

What I see is few to NO "bad teachers" in the last 15 years -- the demands of the job are such that those who can't, quit or are pushed out. Not publicly "fired" but counseled out.  There are incredibly talented and hard-working (and smart and well-educated) people in the ranks now, but weak curricula and demands for "all fuzzery all the time" seriously handicap them -- and the students.

In a follow-up, my email correspondent suggested I point out that not all charter schools are fuzzy:

The Charter Day School has a significant precision teaching component.

The Arthur Academy has strong Direct Instruction and Core Knowledge elements.

^* Harlem Success Academy

Robert Pondiscio on building a better Edsel

Robert writes:

A fascinating email found its way into my inbox last week describing a visit to a high profile, “no excuses” charter school.  The email was written by someone who is solidly pro-reform and strongly pro-charter.   She spent the morning visiting Big Name Charter and pronounced herself aghast.  “The school is fantastically well run, and the kids are on task —- and it is all fuzzery all the time. The reading curriculum is Fountas and Pinnell; the math curriculum is so bad it has sparked parent uprisings across the country,” she writes.

I've had an email from a person involved in public education who says KIPP is firmly committed to constructivist curricula. I'll post if the person who wrote gives me permission.

For now, I'll share my correspondent's analogy: giving excellent teachers bad curricula and expecting them to perform miracles (which they do) is similar to depriving the best doctors of antibiotics, diagnostic tests, and effective surgical techniques and telling them to "heal the sick."

From my perspective as a parent who values a traditional liberal education taught via direct instruction and deliberate practice, I find myself asking once again: why is it parents in my group can't have what we want?

Why do we have to have what other people want?

And why do we have to pay for it?

Speaking of what other people want, our board of education election was held last Tuesday. The candidate we supported lost.

The candidate who won pledged to keep Math Trailblazers and said we would not be replacing Trailblazers with Singapore Math.

One of the candidates who won last year made the same promise.

Meanwhile we've got parents in town who are paying to have their children take private classes that use Primary Mathematics.

Are there any parents anywhere in the country paying out of pocket to provide their children private lessons in Math Trailblazers?

More and more, I'm thinking micro-schools could be an answer for parents like me.


update: my correspondent's email is up

Michael Goldstein on teacher choice

Vocational Education on Throwing Curves

Finland has done an amazing thing -- embraced vocational ed rather than treat it with disdain (as we do in the U.S.). A new post on Throwing Curves gives some reasons to rethink our national strategy of college for all when we know most won't finish with a degree.

Can't Believe It Took Me this Long to Discover Willingham

I've just discovered the work of Daniel Willingham and am finding it to be so relevant and helpful, not to mention seeing examples of "inflexible knowledge" everywhere I look.

Check out the comments in this post for real life examples of "inflexible knowledge" from an SAT tutor.

And Catherine's post about the woman who calls 911 because she can't figure out how to open her car door is worth reposting.

help desk - online tech

Does anyone know what technology they're using? I would love to be able to write out a problem and post.

The ShowMe SAT videos seem to be terrific, by the way. I've only looked at one or two, but they were very helpful.