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There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.While the other translations are also confusing here and there, there are a number of things that make the KJB sentence especially so.
Genesis 6, Verse 4
There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.
Genesis 6, Verse 4
version:Sons of God and daughters of menThe Jerusalem Bible passage is just as mysterious as the King James, but I'm not straining to decipher the pronoun referents.
When men had begun to be plentiful on the earth, and daughters had been born to them, the sons of God, looking at the daughters of men, saw they were pleasing, so they married as many as they chose. Yahweh said, 'My spirit must not for ever be disgraced in man, for he is but flesh; his life shall last no more than a hundred and twenty years'. The Nephilim were on the earth at that time (and even afterwards) when the sons of God resorted to the daughters of man, and had children by them. These are the heroes of days gone by, the famous men.
Genesis 6: 1-4
The fundamental reason for my sending my kids to a private school is that I could see that they got more opportunities for high level academics, sports, music and a lot of other things as compared to their highly regarded high school. Now some kids were able to get those same goodies at their public schools, and that is a wonderful thing. I did not enjoy those years of paying that tuition and if our public school, or any public school in the area could have provided the benefits that the privates could, I would have jumped on it. But they did not. I had kids who could not get into AP programs at our county school districts, but got into them in the private schools and got all 4s and 5s on the tests.and:
Now in our case, we were taking chances since our kids were not the top grade academic kids in K-12 that are at these private schools and were in the bottom half and even quarter of their class in high school. They needed every bit of positive push we could give them....they would not have had those advantages and choices from our public school. They would not have gotten into the top classes there that are gate kept (I checked), they could not get the number of ECs in terms of performing arts, and they would not have gotten the athletic opportunities. Their peers would not have been the kids who were assuming they were going to go to college as our high school is very diverse in socio economic situations and since they would not be in the classes where college is the main goal.This is what Paul Attewell documented in his study of elite public high schools. Kids who are capable of earning 4s and 5s on Advanced Placement exams are tracked out of the most advanced courses.
One thing that I feel was so worth while at that private school where I sent my kids was the Composition course. Every Monday starting with freshman year until the end of first semester of senior year, they have to write an essay on what is usually an unannounced subject. THey have to handwrite the essay in those old blue books used for final exams at colleges. Those essays are scrutinized and corrected and graded. The student then has a chance to rewrite the essay--in class during the week to better the grade. So no out of school help is available for that part of the grade, and the kids really do learn to write. Sometimes a general topic is given and the kids have to research a subject and can bring a page of notes and cites to use for the essay, but still, the exact question is not known.
What makes this work are dedicated teachers who read and grade those essays. One thing I despised about our public school experience were teachers who did not follow up on corrected papers and tests. They would mark off the answers, sometimes not even reading the work carefully, and then just hand back the paper, If they bothered to look in their wastepaper basket, they would find those returned papers for the most part, thrown in there. The kids would learn nothing from the assignment. X School teachers read every single answer and would make the kids redo what they showed they did not know. But that is not always the case for even private schools. The top privates, the selective ones with the top reps tend to offer this as a matter of course.
I want to share with you the experience I had going to the last commencement for Rice, a Catholic all boys school in Harlem run by the Christian Brothers. The CB are a dying breed, their extinction accelerated by the priest scandals, and this school never did make any money. The school graduated a group of all African American young men from Harlem, none of them deemed smart enough to be accepted to any of the top magnet schools the NYC city offers to its brightest students. The graduation rate of this school is remarkable, given who goes there, and nearly every single one of those kids is going to college, even more remarkable when you look at the stats for inner city AA young men. Now this is not a school that most middle class folks would want for their kids, but when you look at the accomplishments for those young men, given what the alternatives are, the result are phenomonal. I do not support school vouchers, but this a case that really makes me pause, and would the type of exception that I would support.
I personally know a number of young men who graduated with my son. They did not do well in the NYC high school lottery, so their parents, came up with the money to send them to a Catholic high school. It was a difficult 4 years for these families, who even with discounts and transportation vouchers found it very difficult to go to this school that often required transportation transfers to attend. Some of the kids lived in far away boroughs. They were NOT the brightest or best by any public or private school standards. But every single one of them are going to college with enough merit/financial aid to make it work. I talked to the mom of one who told me that less than half her sons' peers who did not get into the great NYC magnet schools are going to college and if they are, are going to community colleges or at best the CUNYS maybe. What a difference in results.
was the one I could read.There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.I don't know what this passage means.
Genesis 6, Verse 4
.)...when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown...They refers to the daughters of men; them refers to the sons of God; the same refers to the children; and which also refers to the children. I think. If this passage appeared on the SAT, it would be wrong on grounds that the pronoun antecedents are unclear.
Even though the Singapore method has won acclaim from researchers, no large urban or suburban school system in the United States has fully embraced it.That is the problem.
D.C.’s Bruce-Monroe school faces challenges as it tries Singapore math method
By Bill Turque, Published: June 6
Washington Post
Most of our verbs -- all except 150 or so -- are regular, as are all the new verbs that we acquire. For example, here are two recent acquaisitions:I guess people can stop worrying about the weird new words being created by texting teenagers.
I faxed a letter to you yesrerday.
I have e-mailed the invitation to our reunion.
Understanding English Grammar 8th edition
Martha Kolln and Robert Funk
p. 68
Abstract: The largest consistent sex difference in human cognition is found on mental rotation tests, which require participants to compare pictures of three-dimensional objects and decide whether they depict the same object or different objects. Across cultures, males score up to one standard deviation higher than females. We administered two standard rotation tests to 123 participants and found that these higher scores likely do not reflect superiority in the process of mental rotation per se, but rather in other aspects of task performance. Our results show that males decide more accurately when two objects are different, a situation in which women are more likely to claim incorrectly that they are the same, and that individual differences in confidence are responsible for part of the male advantage found on this test, whereas differences in spatial encoding ability are not. These results have implications for evolutionary theories of sex differences in spatial cognition.Years ago, I read an article that said Mozart had written 72 drafts of one composition.*
Christopher F. Chabris: Selected Publications
Hooven, C.K., Chabris, C.F., Ellison, P.T., Kievit, R.A., & Kosslyn, S.M. (2008). The sex difference on mental rotation tests is not necessarily a difference in mental rotation ability. Submitted for publication. PDF file of manuscript
No WUG is too DAX to be ZONGED.Does this sentence say that a WUG should be ZONGED?
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
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.Until this year, I did not know that the sentence is the basic unit in writing.
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
All of the editors at the magazine agreed.What happens grammatically when you omit the preposition ('of')?
All the editors at the magazine agreed.
Research into grammar by academics at Northumbria University suggests that a significant proportion of native English speakers are unable to understand some basic sentences.Turns out grammar needs to be taught.
[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)
[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
Siddharth Iyer spent eight Mays cramming for finals, first at Stuyvesant High School and then at Columbia University.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.
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
I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences. --Gertrude Stein
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.Here's the Curious Capitalist: Is the Economy Hurting Your Kid's Report Card?.
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
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 BrownI've spent the past year trying to figure out the basal ganglia. (pdf file)
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.
There's a final necessity for thinking: sufficient space in working memory. Thinking becomes increasingly difficult as memory gets crowded.
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.
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.The arithmetic of differentiated instruction doesn't add up.
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
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
: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
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.
...The ideal, then, isn't group think, but independent thinking followed by a compilation of people's thoughts.
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.
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
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.lgm writes:
Waiting for a School Miracle
By DIANE RAVITCH
Published: May 31, 2011
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.back to the future with Diane Ravitch
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.
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.Molly writes:
Waiting for a School Miracle
By DIANE RAVITCH
Published: May 31, 2011
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
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.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.
Waiting for a School Miracle
By DIANE RAVITCH
Published: May 31, 2011
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.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.
(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
, 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.* on dangling modifiers: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
The link is broken because there is a trailing non-breaking space in the link (it ends Tutoring.aspx%20 instead of .aspx)Thanks!
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.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."
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)
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
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.The admissions people at SUNY Binghamton told us they have undergraduate students from over 100 countries.
Coaching and Much More for Chinese Students Looking to U.S.
By DAN LEVIN
Published: May 29, 2011
NY Times
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.
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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
