the 4 Cs at the Celebration

Judging by the program content at this year's Celebration of Teaching and Learning, "21st century skills" have won, and knowledge has lost. Although there was ceaseless talk of the "new Common Core," the Common Core standards were in all cases that I witnessed^* assumed to be a synonym for 21st century skills. So game over, at least as far as the two unions are concerned.

The only good news (I guess) is that "the Partnership"^** has finally decided what the 21st century skills actually are, just 10 years after making them up:

• Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
• Communication
• Collaboration
• Creativity

The four Cs.

There was universal agreement amongst the participants that the 4 Cs cannot be tested.

^* I'm guessing this workshop was different. I'll see if I can get my hands on the Powerpoint.
^**tech companies, the NEA, and the Department of Education

at the Celebration

The "Celebration of Teaching and Learning" was such a miserable experience that I refused to return for the second day. Instead, I'm spending my Saturday recovering my equilibrium & trying to find words to describe the scene.

"Aggrieved and angry" come to mind.

The teachers are aggrieved and angry; the union leadership is aggrieved and angry; the poo-bahs and the toadies are aggrieved and angry. The lady from Scholastic was downright offensive (see below) in a you-had-to-be-there kind of way. I will not be making purchases from Scholastic book fairs in the near future.

The worst of the lot was Gene Wilhoit, who is angry at all of America. "Americans don't value education," he said, his face hard. "Americans are complacent."

He went on at length, but iPad ate my notes, and I didn't think to get out my cell phone to film him. I hope someone did because the country needs to see what these people say (and how they say it) when they think parents are out of earshot. "Americans don't understand that education is important to the future," he said.

Yes, indeed. That's why we have 21-year olds graduating college with a lifetime of student loan payments to look forward to. Because we don't value education. (Speaking of college loans, the unions want taxpayers to fund college tuition for teachers and are clearly mobilizing opinion among the rank and file. So that's on the horizon.)

Wilhoit and the others had just come from a two-day meeting with leaders from countries that have good schools, and their experience at the International Summit on the Teaching Profession seemed to be the source of their anger. Each panelist offered up his take-away (e.g. free college for teachers), and all of them speechified about "systems" and "support for teachers" and "respect" and the like.^* None of it made much sense. They all agreed that although our schools are terrible, our teachers are great, or as great as they can be, considering.

It was Wilhoit who came closest to voicing the thought they were all managing to convey without speaking the words: We would have better schools if we had a better country.

Some celebration.

^*Obligingly, Arne Duncan's person told the gathering that the White House is launching a new initiative with the acronym RESPECT. She looked miserable, sitting there amongst the RttT haters.

awful

Celebration of Teaching and Learning

poster

lgm saw this poem on a poster in a library:

The more you read,
the more you know.
The more you know,
the smarter you grow.
The smarter you grow,
the stronger your voice,
when speaking your mind
or making your choice.

Selecting Colleges

Can I get advice on selecting/evaluating colleges to look at in more detail? I know that KTMers have recommended some web sites, but I didn't make a list. I'm still trying to figure out what criteria are important, including big school/small school, country/city, and whether the college is the town or whether the town has it's own life. I have a lot of preconceived ideas about different schools, so I was surprised when I started looking at the average SAT scores for different colleges, not that that is the main criterion one should use. Does anyone like some rankings better than others? How about the rankings of particular departments? How about intangibles such as opportunities that aren't necessarily related to the college? Are some colleges known for having their students go home on weekends? How did your views change as you got to know schools in more detail? How did your kids' views evolve? Were there conflicts between where your kids wanted to go and what might might be best for them academically? I suppose there is the pressure of picking the highest ranking school because that will sound best to others when they ask.

I thought it would be good to put together a list of tangible and intangible factors to go over with my son. When we go to a school to visit, I want him to have a lot of background knowledge first. I don't want him to accept or reject a school based only on what he sees while getting out of the car on the first visit. I went to the University of Michigan having never been to Ann Arbor before.

help desk

Do any of you have a rcommendation for a boarding school for students with psychiatric issues?

knowledge is good

I was swapping emails with SAT Verbal on the subject of Chappaqua's new TARP program this morning when it hit me: there's a reason why "Knowledge is power" is a saying, and "Thinking is power" is not.

SAT Verbal agreed and pointed out that "Discussion is power" isn't a saying, either.

True!

When you think about it, there are lots of things, in the edu-world, that have not become sayings and never will become sayings: things that are pretty much the exact opposite of a saying, as a matter of fact, if you take 'saying' to mean a brief and memorable observation that is actually true.

E.g.:

Accountable talk is power.
Lifelong learning is power.
Collaboration across networks and leading by influence is power.
Global awareness is power.
Promoting Powerful Professional Awareness to Support Student Success is power.

None of these things is a saying now, and none of them will become a saying in the future.

SATVerbalTutor on the SAT and phonics

One of the things I've begun to notice recently is that I can generally distinguish between kids who were taught to read using a whole language approach and those taught to read using phonics. Almost invariably, the kids who were taught using whole language have considerably more difficult breaking words apart and examining their component parts. I tend to see this much more prominently when I tutor French or Italian -- often a student will read the first couple of letters in a word and then simply guess what the rest of it says, which is an absolute disaster in French -- but I see it when I tutor the SAT as well, albeit in a more roundabout way.

For example, one Blue Book sentence completion contains the the answer choice "deferential," which is a word that most of my students are unfamiliar with. What's interesting, though, is how they react to it. Usually I ask them if they can relate it to a word they know, and typically they can't think of anything, but recently one of my students said that it looked like "different." That one threw me a little. On one hand, my student was absolutely right: "defer" and "differ" do sound similar. Unfortunately, they have nothing to do with one another. And that, in turn, made me wonder about the whole idea of asking students to relate unfamiliar words to words they already know. The underlying assumption of that strategy is that students already know what parts of words they should and should not focus on, that they can distinguish between "sounds similar" and "related in meaning." And that assumption, as I've discovered, is not necessarily a valid one.
The SAT and Phonics

how to write an English paper

Cruising Purdue University's OWL site for advice on how to write an English paper, I find the following "Timeline":

• Moral Criticism, Dramatic Construction (~360 BC-present)
• Formalism, New Criticism, Neo-Aristotelian Criticism (1930s-present)
• Psychoanalytic Criticism, Jungian Criticism(1930s-present)
• Marxist Criticism (1930s-present)
• Reader-Response Criticism (1960s-present)
• Structuralism/Semiotics (1920s-present)
• Post-Structuralism/Deconstruction (1966-present)
• New Historicism/Cultural Studies (1980s-present)
• Post-Colonial Criticism (1990s-present)
• Feminist Criticism (1960s-present)
• Gender/Queer Studies (1970s-present)

claptrap in Chappaqua

During these same years, elementary staff had been working with Columbia University Teachers College to implement reading and writing workshop, while middle school mathematics teachers were working with Lucy West, national mathematics consultant, on implementing accountable talk as they moved toward introducing students to rich, authentic problems along with their standard math curriculum.
Striving for Improvement Through a Strategic Question: Our Story

I think this is the most pretentious public school document I've seen to date.

[pause]

It gets better.

Our parent community began learning about our focus through presentations at Board meetings, including topics like action research presentations, and through parent workshops designed to keep parents informed about the new math program, Investigations, and our new elementary report card.

Chappaqua teachers, who currently earn an average of $110K (around $130K when you add pensions), are doing beaucoup action research in a new initiative they call "Teacher Action Research Program" or  TARP.

Seriously. They created a taxpayer-funded boondoggle, and they named it TARP.

vision and vision therapy

Rickie by Frederic Flach

Seeing Through New Eyes: Changing the Lives of Children with Autism, Asperger Syndrome and other Developmental Disabilities through Vision Therapy by Melvin Kaplan

Dr. Kaplan was Rickie's vision therapist.

a difficult passage - & terrific advice

[Terri] LeClercq offers a very helpful technique to check for coherence in a multi-paragraph text: As you edit your rough draft, separate each topic sentence from your text and examine each one to make sure it is a strong introduction to the main idea of that paragraph. Then examine the coherence of the topic sentences as they relate to the overall thesis set-up by seeing whether the topic sentences form a coherent paragraph.
“Writing Good Paragraphs with Topic Sentences.” Legal Writing Tips 1.8 (2005). Print. Web. 14 March 2012.

My students had trouble with this passage today. They understood the first and second sentences (the 2 independent clauses linked by the colon), but they stumbled over the last one.

I'm not crazy about the last sentence myself: reading it, you have to keep too much information lit up in working memory until you finally get to the most important bit, which is at the very end. The end is where the most important bit usually should be, but still. There's an awful lot to hang on to until you get there.

I don't mean to sound harsh. That last sentence is perfectly serviceable, and impressive in its way. It's nicely linked to its partner sentence, the one that comes just before it, and it manages to pack a great deal of information into a small space, which is not easy. You'd have to be an experienced writer to write it.

Nevertheless, if it were my sentence, I would keep on writing it before I stopped. I would revise.

Teaching basic composition, I've come to realize how important it is for college students to be able to read prose I wouldn't advise any of them actually to write. A fair portion of academic and professional prose is not very good, and some of it is god-awful. But students have to read it.

Of course everyone knows this, but I hadn't thought about the implications until now. College students have to be able to read bad writing. Not just difficult writing, not just sophisticated writing, not just writing with a lot of big words. College students have to be able to read all those things, but they also have to be able to read difficult, sophisticated writing with a lot of big words that is bad.

So how do they acquire this skill?

Composition textbooks come stocked with dozens of heavily copy-edited essays written by journalists and originally published in popular books and magazines: these are works that have been professionally engineered to be maximally swift, cohesive, and clear. They make sense as models for writing, but they're useless for reading. They're so well written they practically read themselves.^*

Where are the composition texts featuring 100s of pages of dense and mystifying academic prose, I ask?

And how does one teach students to read badly-written prose?

Is it different from teaching students to read well-written prose?

I'm thinking it might be.

Last but not least, speaking of bad and good prose, I think LeClercq's advice is brilliant. It's an amazing fit for William Kerrigan's X-1-2-3s.

X-1-2-3

^* I don't remotely believe that well-written prose practically reads itself. Certain genres, however, are written to be effortlessly readable, and that's the writing that appears in college composition texts.

the distressed student and the helpful friend

I'm not a politically correct sort of person (I'm fairly antagonistic to political correctness, actually), but the casting for this USF video for the university's writing center struck me as being (unintentionally) hilarious and slightly mortifying all at once.

It's a cute film, but I was laughing and semi-cringing throughout: Oh, look! The distressed student has found another helpful white person!

I am reminded of the time I cruised every single textbook for every single education course at NYU one afternoon in the basement of the NYU bookstore. There were zillions of books about heroic white teachers bringing enlightenment to downtrodden black children.

As a general principle, I am against education as civilizing mission.

This is why I've never been a fan of character education for any child of any color.

Art of Problem Solving: Beast Academy

I've been waiting for this for some time, and am happy to report as of today or so, portions of Art of Problem Solving's new Elementary curriculum ("Beast Academy") are now available. I ordered it. It's shipping Media Mail, so it'll be awhile before it gets here but I'll report back after it arrives and we take it for a test drive.

So far, they've released 3A and 3B, obviously part of their third grade curriculum, though they're working on grades 2-5. We're currently nearing the end of Singapore 2A (and halfway through Math U See Beta), and though the 3B materials look a bit beyond my oldest yet, 3A is within close striking distance, based on the assessment test.

The samples look fun and my daughter was stoked when she perused the available pdf's.

advice for adults with reading problems

resources in the comments thread

And here are The Phonics Page and Don Potter.

gobsmacked

I'd read chemprof's and EM's descriptions of very bright students with serious reading problems, and I'd been appropriately horrified. But until this morning I'm not sure I really, truly grasped what they were talking about. Which is: very bright, very talented students who have major problems reading and who haven't been diagnosed with dyslexia.

This morning, one of the smartest students I've ever had reluctantly showed me the thesis statement he'd just written. He didn't want me to look at it because the spelling was bad, and I won't post it without permission. I'll just say that he had misspellings on the order of 'charitturs" for characters; "sirve" for serve; and "morle" for moral. Of 19 words, 9 are misspelled, and the words spelled correctly include only one noun.

His spelling is so bad, he said, that spellcheck doesn't work. At some point his laptop decided he might be writing in Spanish, so half the time spellcheck serves up a menu of Spanish options. When Microsoft Word does present him with a selection of words in English, my student often has no idea which one to pick.

I had him read out loud a difficult paragraph, written by Maria Tatar, on fairy tales. He could more or less do it (he's very sharp), but he kept missing the short words: prepositions and short verbs, too, I think. He kept missing the short words because he automatically filled in whatever word he thought would come next instead of reading the word that actually did come next. (I guess somebody taught him to 'make predictions.')

Here's an example of what I mean (I don't remember whether he misread this section):

Like many fairy tales, the Grimms’ narrative begins by framing a prohibition

He would likely trip over 'by,' reading it as 'with' instead (or whatever word seemed most likely to appear). Although he can spell all the prepositions -- prepositions are the main words he can spell -- he often misreads them.

Another problem: he doesn't read left-to-right. Instead, he jumps around in a sentence looking for words he can base his reading of the sentence in: he's looking for a kind of anchor word, I think. Once he's found an anchor word, he goes back to the beginning of the sentence and starts over. Then, if he has no luck on the second go-round, he'll jump forward again and look for a second anchor word that might help.

He couldn't read the word "prohibition" at all, but he demonstrated for me the method he would use to tackle it. He would start with the syllable "pro," which he could read; then he would hit "hibition," which he couldn't read at all. Then he would skip to "tion" at the end (which he saw as a separate syllable - that's good). Then he would try to guess "prohibition" on the basis of "pro" and "tion."

And he would fail, in spite of the fact that he does indeed know the word 'prohibition' and recognized it the moment I said it.

He's in his mid-20s, he's extremely intelligent, and he cannot read "prohibition" using phonics and syllables.

I know very little about dyslexia, so I don't know whether that's an issue. I do know a little about phonics, and it seems clear that he doesn't read phonetically. At least, not fluently. I'm sure he was taught to read using whole language or balanced literacy. As a child he memorized all the words he was taught and then, via high IQ, high energy, and a scrappy personality, figured out how to reverse-engineer paragraphs in order to wrest some meaning from them.

Interestingly, his problems have led him to a theory of paragraph development I've been mulling over myself: he believes paragraphs typically have a concluding sentence that sums everything up. He reads that sentence first, then goes back to the beginning of the paragraph to try and decipher the whole thing.

I've been wondering whether paragraphs have conclusions and have been operating under the theory that most of them do not. Now I wonder.

He can't really write at all (he says -- he's so verbal, I find that hard to believe). But he has somehow figured out how to think in whole paragraphs -- maybe even in whole 5-paragraph essays or perhaps beyond. Today he actually came up with a sophisticated thesis sentence AND three coherent supporting topic sentences almost entirely in his head. He says he got through high school on oral presentations, and by oral presentation he doesn't mean Powerpoint. He means thesis, topic sentence, elaboration, and specific support. He produces more content talking than I have the working memory to deal with: he's got to figure out how to write if only so other people will be able to follow what he's saying.

This is a guy trading in complex ideas entirely inside the oral register. You can't do that! (Well, you can, but most of us can't 'hear' it ---- )

He told me a few weeks back that when he was a kid his school introduced a new reading program that was so terrible, and left him with such profound spelling deficits, that his parents had wanted to sue the school. No surprise there.

Of course, as we know, a parent can't sue a school for failing to teach their very bright child to spell. Educational malpractice doesn't exist.

Question. What is the way forward here? (If he wants a way forward, that is. He's not a kid, and he's figured out work-arounds that are serving him reasonably well.)

It strikes me that he needs to look into voice recognition software ---- although to use voice recognition software for writing anything more serious than a short email you have to be able to read what you've dictated. So I'm sure about that.....

He says he's often thought he needs to take ESL classes in English.

That doesn't strike me as a bad idea -- I've begun to rely upon lessons in English as a second language myself -- but I think what he really needs is phonics. Phonics and a lot of practice reading left-to-right. His jump-around habits are ingrained; he'd need to practice until he developed a new ingrained left-to-right habit.

Is there a phonics program anyone out there would recommend for this student?

Other thoughts or suggestions?

3 to 35

Three percent of New York property tax collections were used to pay pension costs in 2001; by 2015, pension costs are expected to eat up 35 percent of property tax collections.
Deficits Push N.Y. Cities and Counties to Desperation
By DANNY HAKIM
Published: March 10, 2012

I wonder if there are betting pools (yet) on how this is going to play out.

stuck (college tuition)

The lesson from "Bennett Hypothesis 2.0" (pdf file) is that there is an overwhelming danger, especially over time, that higher financial aid will lead to higher tuition, says Gillen. Barring an overhaul of the nature of competition in higher education, there are a few other ways to avoid this scenario, he says.

[snip]

[T]uition appears stuck in an upwards spiral.
Revisiting the Hypothesis That Tuition Rises With Student AidBy Caralee Adams on February 22, 2012 10:00 AM

Are we stuck in the same spiral with health care costs? I'm thinking we are -- or, at least, that we have been for a while now.

Ditto, I think, for public schools, at least in my town: the more we spend, the more we spend.

Stuck in a spiral.

Steve H on Irvington taxes

Steve sums it up:

So now we have towns like Irvington where you can buy a simple raised ranch on a half acre for $600K and pay $21,757 a year in taxes to pay for schools that use curricula like Everyday Math. [ed: Not even. We've got Trailblazers.] I had to double check that tax assessment. How about a split level on a quarter acre (on the market for $800K) with taxes of $27,150.

Our taxes doubled in 10 years' time with no measurable gains in student achievement. Curriculum quality significantly declined during that period (e.g.: Trailblazers, Fountas & Pinnell). Teacher quality may have declined, too (I don't know), given that the district stopped hiring teachers with experience because teachers with experience are too expensive. For over a decade, the district has hired only first-year teachers, nearly all of whom have been given tenure regardless of parent opinion.

The new union contract, signed this year, provides around 4% annual overall increase in compensation. Twice the rate of inflation.

Average teacher salary - base salary - is now $100K. Add in pensions, which taxpayers fund, and average salary is around $120K (if not more). Meanwhile, average household salary in Irvington -- household, not individual -- is $117K. 

We have two choices this year and every year going forward: layoffs or a 60% vote to override the cap.

The third possibility is to persuade the union to accept compensation increases indexed to inflation. As far as I know, I'm the only person in town who thinks that's an option. The only person at present, I should say.

I can't tell how things will play out.

At this week's BOE meeting, 100 parents and high school students lined up to protest cuts.

No one lined up to protest the contract that put us in the position of having to make these cuts. Union negotiations are conducted in secret, and when the new tax-cap busting contract was finally agreed to, after years of negotiations, it was hailed. In fact, the new contract is less rich than the old contract, so  that's what everyone focused on.

Cuomo's tax cap is an interesting law. First of all, you vote on taxes, NOT the school budget. I think that's an interesting shift psychologically. And you're not just voting on 'taxes,' you're voting on the rate of increase in your taxes. Do I want my taxes to increase by more than 3% this year, Yes or No? update: I remember reading this, but a friend says it's not true. Can't confirm either way at the moment, so I'm thinking I misread. (3% because of the tax certs, but that's another story. The 2% cap translates to roughly a 3% increase for most of us. A 4% increase would be a 5% increase.)

Second, the school board is taking a bit of a risk by putting forward a budget that breaks the tax cap. If the board does not get a 60% majority, it has one more chance to put forward a budget. If that budget also breaks the cap, and also fails to attract a 60% vote, the district then goes to zero: NO increase from the previous year's tax levy at all. Instead of 10 FTEs cut, suddenly you're looking at 20.

No one wants cuts, and no one wants to talk (out loud) about the union. (Everyone talks about the union sotto voce.) So what will happen?

We'll see.

uh oh

New AP Courses to Emphasize Critical Thinking and Research

The College Board is piloting two new Advanced Placement courses designed to focus on research skills that admissions counselors say are too often missing in high school graduates.

The new program for juniors and seniors, developed in collaboration with Cambridge International Examinations, will be tested over three years in 15 to 18 high schools starting this fall, the College Board announced today.

The AP/Cambridge Interdisciplinary Investigations and Critical Reasoning Seminar will be offered in 11th grade. Students will work in teams to research and write topics of global relevance. Each school can choose its own topic and pair different disciplines, such as history and English.

The AP/Cambridge Capstone Research Project taken in 12th grade involves writing a 4,500 to 5,000-word paper that will be evaluated on the students' ability to design, plan, and manage a research project, analyze information, and communicate their findings.

Trevor Packer, senior vice president of Advanced Placement and College Readiness for the College Board, says college admissions officers who sit on both organizations' advisory boards discussed the need for these types of courses. "They said U.S. students are not coming to college having developed research skills and the ability to integrate knowledge across a variety of academic disciplines," he says.
By Caralee Adams on March 5, 2012 5:47 PM

First of all, no college professor is complaining that students can't "integrate knowledge across a variety of academic disciplines." College professors are trained in the disciplines (in the disciplines, not across the disciplines); they research the disciplines; they teach the disciplines; and they'd like students to come to their classes prepared to do reasonably serious work within the discipline they research and teach, not across the discipline they teach and all the other disciplines they don't teach.

History professors aren't sitting around complaining their students don't know enough math, and math professors aren't sitting around complaining their students don't know enough history. No. History professors complain their students don't know history, math professors complain their students don't know math. (comma splice intentional)

Second, I tend to doubt college admissions officers came up with this idea on their own, though I wouldn't put it past them. More likely they're surfing the zeitgeist like everyone else, the zeitgeist being determined, for reasons unbeknownst to me, by Tony Wagner.

Third, I sat in on a Cambridge Pre-U global-shmobal course in a neighboring district, and it was wretched. Wretched! The course lasted a year and a half, replaced ELA, and involved no assigned reading whatsoever, and virtually no reading above the level of simple news stories and op-eds students found on Google. Students worked in groups -- group Googling, has anyone written a Prezi presentation on that? -- then gave group Powerpoints to the rest of the class during which they examined each item for possible bias: this was critical thinking.

One of the groups presenting that day had found a relevant article in Haaretz, so, seeing as how Haaretz is an Israeli newspaper, they reported to the class that the Haaretz article might be biased against Arabs. Apparently, when you are thinking critically, you take it as a given that anything written by anyone anywhere in Israel should be suspected of bias against Arabs; and that, furthermore, a suspected bias against Arabs should be first foremost on your mind. The fact that Haaretz is a liberal paper, and might thus be accused by some of 'bias' against, for instance, Israeli settlers, did not come up. (For the record, I have no idea what Haaretz is or is not, or might or might not be, biased for or against, or who thinks what about the paper and its writers. And I wouldn't presume to speculate.)

As I recall, the group concluded that the Haaretz article was not biased, mostly because the writer's prose stye was flat and factual-sounding.

All the topics were global, and none of the topics would be addressed within the boundaries of a discipline. Or even across the boundaries of the disciplines, in the case of "Technology and Islamophobia in France."

Technology and Islamophobia in France seemed to be one of four topics students could choose from. (When I told Ed about the Technology-and-Islamophobia option, he said, "Did anyone think critically about the concept of 'Islamophobia'?) Not only is there no discipline that studies Technology-and-Islamophobia-in-France, but judging by what the kids had managed to come up with online even Google doesn't have much to say on the subject.

One of the articles the students reviewed was about surveillance cameras in French airports, as I recall. The presence of surveillance cameras in French airports had to do with Islamophobia in France because there are a lot of Muslims in France, and the French were having a debate about Muslim girls wearing headscarves in school. The headscarf controversy was the subject of another article the students reviewed, an op ed written in strong and emotional language, which led the students to conclude that the author of that piece was biased.

Here's an Eastchester version of the course. The Eastchester class has some assigned texts and consumes only a year, not a year and a half.

Steve H on compensation in the private sector

The IBM example of pay is typical for many companies. They put people into pay categories with fixed pay limits, review workers once or twice a year, and set enormously high stadards of expectation. Managers don't look good to their bosses if too many employees are at the highest performance level. Also, they don't want to deal with the potential complaints of putting bad workers into the lowest level. This means that people are thrilled to get a 2-3% raise, but this is unlikely as your pay gets higher. The company starts talking about the actual dollars you are getting. Also, if some are getting 3%, then that has to come out of someone else's pay. Then, if you get to the top of your pay category, they just set up more hoops for you to jump through to be promoted to the next level.

Ultimately, however, it's all driven by supply and demand for your job skills. Companies are taking advantage of what I call job inertia. People will put up with less money just because they don't want to move or prove themselves all over in a new job. At some point, however, you might realize (usually by seeing someone else leave the company) that you can make a lot more by going to another company. I'm sure that there is a pattern of job follow-the-leader to other companies. This keeps companies honest - a little bit.

Companies can pay you whatever they want. They make up the job categories and pay limits. They can give out over-inflation raises if they decide to. The company might be making profits that far exceed inflation.

In the first company I worked, where I used to go on their college recruiting trips, we thought we figured out the corporation's policy. We would go to good colleges (like RPI) and only interview students with 3.75 or higher grade point averages. They would be offered very competitive starting salaries, and since they were young, their salaries would increase by the highest percentages each year. After a few years, some might jump ship and leave, but many would get married and settle down in the area. Then, the company would start giving these people less and less for raises. They would claim that there were fixed dollars that were allocated for each department for raises. Some years, departments were told that 10% of the employees would get no raises. The department managers would know who to pick - the ones least likely to leave.

Ultimately, supply and demand keep companies honest, but in the public education world, it's all about having everything controlled by contract negotiation, even preventing parental influence and control via charter schools. They have lost the argument that people with comparable educational backgrounds and job risk make more money.

off-topic: a sex difference I had never heard of

Reading The role of the orbitofrontal cortex in normally developing compulsive-like behaviors and
obsessive–compulsive disorder by David W. Evans, Marc D. Lewis, and Emily Iobst, I came across mention of a sex difference so striking I had to post:

[H]man studies show gender differences in callosal axons projecting from the OFC -orbitofrontal cortex]: men attain maximal callosal size in this region at age 20, well ahead of women who do not attain it until 40-50 years (Cowell, Allen, Zalantino, & Denenberg, 1992).

We're talking about a 20-year gender gap in development?

Twenty or 30?

Really?

And how is it nobody's ever heard about it?

It's not like the orbitofrontal cortex is an insignificant part of the brain, or anything.

lgm on school boards and union contracts

lgm, reacting to no exit:

I wouldn't agree with a). [School boards] knew exactly what they were doing [when they negotiated contracts promising above-inflation increases in compensation forever.] Here it is illustrative to draw the family trees.. vendors that want b.o.e. business, union members' extended families - all have their interests represented on the b.o.e. Some of the comments we hear are that the income of the residents has been studied, and there is an assumption as to how much is wanted from the pockets. Those that cannot pony up need to move on.

For b) [voters signed off on these contracts], I dont' know about you, but in my district there is no line item vote by the people and there is no light on the union contracts either before or after the negotiations. People stood up at the budget meetings and objected to compensation well above private industry and against line item 10% salary raises for the ones that were spelled out rather than hidden up in the union contract. The answer every time was a smug smile and 'We have a contract', with some words to the effect that those employees not under a union agreement have had their wages frozen. Meanwhile, seethroughny.com has the facts. In retirement, my kids' teachers are in six figures between the base salary and the part-time work, not without including the other bennies. Nice work, if you can get it.

above-inflation spending

re: no exit

Budget season has heated up, and I'm finding that virtually no one thinks that annual above-inflation spending increases are unsustainable.

The union contract requires something in the neighborhood of a 4% increase in total compensation every year. (Employee salaries make up approximately 80% of the total budget.)

Meanwhile the tax cap requires us to hold spending increases to inflation, which is 2%.

The only way to stay within the cap is to cut jobs.

It's obvious to everyone that you can't cut jobs forever, but it's not obvious to everyone that you can't increase taxes above the rate of inflation forever.

Frankly, I'm confused myself.

There's no way out, right?

If you have permanent above-inflation spending increases while taxpayers aren't having concomitant above-inflation increases in their own incomes, eventually you run out of money, right?

Same for cutting jobs. Each year individual compensation goes up 4%, so you cut enough positions to average out at a 2% increase overall. (This year we need to cut 10 FTEs - "full-time equivalents" - to stay within the cap.) But you're not done. The next year individual compensation goes up by 4% again, so you have to cut more positions to average out at a 2% increase overall.

Am I figuring this wrong?

I know only two people who see things this way.

As far as I can tell, the only answer that makes mathematical sense is to persuade the union to agree to a contract that stays within inflation.

Or am I missing something?

The Syntactic Phenomena of English

Katharine told me about this book a year ago, and I need to read it NOW. Passing the title along...

The Syntactic Phenomenon of English by James McCawley

bean counters & others

My first public foray into anti-Triboroughism.

kids need spiraled practice, not spiraled instruction

Hainish left a link to a terrific post by a math teacher:

11th grade here = 9th grade here. In fact, Algebra 2 was such a rehash of the district's Algebra 1 course that some teachers called it "Algebra T-o-o." And really, the same point could be made about math curriculum as a whole in the U.S., since most content for any given year is a review of content from previous years. (The Common Core State Standards may help change this, but I'll believe it when I see it.)

This approach, where we touch on lots of topics each year--rather than go deep with fewer topics--and then revisit them in subsequent years is often called spiraling. But what it is for many students is stifling. And this is as true for kids who've yet to master a skill as it is for those who nailed it right away. I first noticed this when I taught 9th grade Algebra classes where every student was performing at least two years below grade level.

"Meet them where they are," fellow math teachers advised me. Makes sense, I thought, since I couldn't imagine teaching Algebra to kids who didn't know basic arithmetic. But what I soon learned is that perception matters more to students than performance. For many kids, having seen something is akin to having learned something. "Man, we already know this," students said, as I presented lesson after lesson on fractions, decimals, and percents.

Other students, meanwhile, knew they didn't understand the material, but had given up hope of ever understanding it. The implication was therefore the same for all students: encore presentations on previous years' topics were pointless. And though I was able to engage a few students when I found new ways to present old topics, one group of students was always slighted: those who really did "already know this."

[snip]

The problem, of course, goes back to the disconnect between kids seeing something and actually learning--and retaining--it. But if it didn't sink in for them the first, second, or third time a teacher presented it, why should we present it again?

We shouldn't. At some point the focus needs to be on students practicing math rather than teachers presenting it.

[snip]

[W]e should provide students spiraled practice, not spiraled instruction. When I did this in 10th grade Geometry classes, students said they learned more Algebra than they had learned in their 9th grade Algebra course. And, as a result, they were ready for more advanced math--starting with Algebra T-w-o.
Spiraled Instruction, Stifled Learning
By David Ginsburg on March 5, 2012 8:35 PM

Wow!

College Costs and Aid

There was an interesting article this week in the San Jose Mercury News, comparing the real costs at public California universities to those at private schools. I thought it was interesting to see that the kinds of issues we've been talking about for a while are just starting to make it into the mainstream.

Particularly relevant:

"At UC, "we hear from students who say, 'I was accepted at Cal, but such-and-such private university offered this aid. Can Cal match that?' said Anne DeLuca, UC Berkeley's acting admissions director."

adjectives, adverbs, and "sentence modifiers"

Reading the thread about Groucho's elephant in my pajamas, I think I see what the problem is. I think FedUp may be talking about modifier clauses in general, while I am talking about adjective clauses in particular.

When I write, I follow different rules for two different kinds of modifiers: adjectives and "adjectivals" on the one hand; adverbs and "adverbials" on the other.

I'm certain I follow a (third?) set of rules for a third category -- sentence modifiers -- but I still don't consciously understand what sentence modifiers are, so I can't take that thought any further. (Katharine's explanation is at the end of this post.)

I'm going to steer clear of sentence modifiers for the time being.

Grammar books, including at least some linguistically-informed grammar books, tell us that adjectives  must be put next to the words they modify, but adverbs can go all over the place.

Hence:
The black cat is sitting on the roof.
not:
The cat is sitting black on the roof.
or:
The cat is sitting on the roof black.

Adverbs are different:
The black cat is sitting happily on the roof.
The black cat is happily sitting on the roof.
The black cat is sitting on the roof happily.
Happily, the black cat is sitting on the roof.

The same principle holds for adjective & adverb phrases & clauses:

The cat that is black is sitting on the roof. (adjective clause)
not:
The cat is sitting that is black on the roof.
or:
The cat is that is black sitting on the roof.
or:
The cat is sitting on the roof that is black.

Adverb clauses can move around:
The cat is sitting on the roof because she likes high places.
Because she likes high places, the cat is sitting on the roof.
The cat, because she likes high places, is sitting on the roof.
And even, in some cases:
The cat is, because she likes high places, sitting on the roof.
(I wouldn't write that sentence, but I'm pretty sure I've seen the occasional adverb clause dropped inside a 2-word verb.)

According to grammar books - at least according to the ones I'm reading - the words "because she likes high places" are an adverbial clause modifying the verb "is sitting."

I find that explanation confusing, but I don't find the rule confusing. I follow the rule automatically and unconsciously, and I always have. I also follow, automatically and unconsciously, the rule that says adjective clauses must go beside the nouns they modify (though dangling participles are something of a temptation, which I think is interesting.) Importantly, if we're talking about English teachers imposing artificial, made-up rules they learned in books upon captive students, I didn't learn either rule from a book.

I learned these rules from talking and reading. I'm not just a native speaker of English. I'm a native writer.


Katharine on sentence modifiers

I'm starting to think maybe the reason I find adverbials confusing is that the category grammar books call "adverbials" includes the category linguists call "sentence modifiers." I don't know.

In any event, here is Katharine on sentence modifiers and Groucho Marx, and this explanation does make perfect sense to me, which is a great relief!:

It's true that modifiers are generally placed next to the things they modify. But sometimes it's the entire sentence that is being modified, in which case the modifier can go at the beginning or at the end.

In the ordinary interpretation of "I shot an elephant in my pajamas" (before the "How he got there, I don't know" clarification), "In my pajamas" is a sentential modifier. That is, it most obviously characterizes the circumstances of the elephant shooting. In the bizarre interpretation (which becomes obvious only after the clarification), "in my pajamas" is a modifier of object noun "elephant." As such, it cannot be moved to the beginning of the sentence. Thus, "In my pajamas, I shot an elephant." is unambiguous.

The tradeoff is between stylistic concerns (e.g. FedupMom's) and concerns about clarity. Depending on the overall context, sentential modifiers placed at the ends of sentences can be misinterpreted as verb phrase or object noun modifiers, which both tend to go at the ends of verb phrases. Since the end of a verb phrase is often also the end of the main sentence, you often can't tell what an end-of-sentence modifier is modifying from word order alone.

Cf:
With Dick Cavett, I discussed sex. (unambiguous)
I discussed sex with Dick Cavett. (ambiguous; example from Steven Pinker).

"bad teacher" - bad parent?

I AM a special education teacher. My students have learning disabilities ranging from autism and attention-deficit disorder to cerebral palsy and emotional disturbances. I love these kids, but they can be a handful. Almost without exception, they struggle on standardized tests, frustrate their teachers and find it hard to connect with their peers. What’s more, these are high school students, so their disabilities are compounded by raging hormones and social pressure.

As you might imagine, my job can be extremely difficult. Beyond the challenges posed by my students, budget cuts and changes to special-education policy have increased my workload drastically even over just the past 18 months. While my class sizes have grown, support staff members have been laid off. Students with increasingly severe disabilities are being pushed into more mainstream classrooms like mine, where they receive less individual attention and struggle to adapt to a curriculum driven by state-designed high-stakes tests.

On top of all that, I’m a bad teacher. That’s not my opinion; it’s how I’m labeled by the city’s Education Department. Last June, my principal at the time rated my teaching “unsatisfactory,” checking off a few boxes on an evaluation sheet that placed my career in limbo. That same year, my school received an “A” rating. I was a bad teacher at a good school. It was pretty humiliating.

[snip]

When the assistant principal walked in, one of these students, a freshman girl classified with an emotional disturbance, began cursing. When the assistant principal ignored her, she started cursing at me. Then she began lobbing pencils across the room. Was this because I was a bad teacher? I don’t know.

I know that after she began throwing things, I sent her to the dean’s office. I know that a few days later, I received notice that my lesson had been rated unsatisfactory because, among other things, I had sent this student to the dean instead of following our school’s “guided discipline” procedure.

I was confused. Earlier last year, this same assistant principal observed me and instructed me to prioritize improving my “assertive voice” in the classroom. But about a month later, my principal observed me and told me to focus entirely on lesson planning, since she had no concerns about my classroom management. A few weeks earlier, she had written on my behalf for a citywide award for “classroom excellence.” Was I really a bad teacher?

In my three years with the city schools, I’ve seen a teacher with 10 years of experience become convinced, after just a few observations, that he was a terrible teacher. A few months later, he quit teaching altogether. I collaborated with another teacher who sought psychiatric care for insomnia after a particularly intense round of observations. I myself transferred to a new school after being rated “unsatisfactory.”

Behind all of this is the reality that teachers care a great deal about our work. At the school where I work today, my “bad” teaching has mostly been very successful. Even so, I leave work most days replaying lessons in my mind, wishing I’d done something differently. This isn’t because my lessons are bad, but because I want to get better at my job.

In fact, I don’t just want to get better; like most teachers I know, I’m a bit of a perfectionist. I have to be. Dozens and dozens of teenagers scrutinize my language, clothing and posture all day long, all week long. If I’m off my game, the students tell me. They comment on my taste in neckties, my facial hair, the quality of my lessons. All of us teachers are evaluated all day long, already. It’s one of the most exhausting aspects of our job.

Teaching was a high-pressure job long before No Child Left Behind and the current debates about teacher evaluation. These debates seem to rest on the assumption that, left to our own devices, we teachers would be happy to coast through the school year, let our skills atrophy and collect our pensions.

The truth is, teachers don’t need elected officials to motivate us. If our students are not learning, they let us know. They put their heads down or they pass notes. They raise their hands and ask for clarification. Sometimes, they just stare at us like zombies. Few things are more excruciating for a teacher than leading a class that’s not learning. Good administrators use the evaluation processes to support teachers and help them avoid those painful classroom moments — not to weed out the teachers who don’t produce good test scores or adhere to their pedagogical beliefs.

Worst of all, the more intense the pressure gets, the worse we teach. When I had administrators breathing down my neck, the students became a secondary concern. I simply did whatever my assistant principal asked me to do, even when I thought his ideas were crazy. In all honesty, my teaching probably became close to incoherent. One week, my assistant principal wanted me to focus on arranging the students’ desks to fit with class activities, so I moved the desks around every day, just to show that I was a good soldier. I was scared of losing my job, and my students suffered for it.
Confessions of a Bad Teacher
By WILLIAM JOHNSON
Published: March 3, 2012

As far as I can tell, there are two approaches to accountability: roughly, top-down and bottom-up.

Top down means state tests, substantially reduced teacher autonomy, and lots and lots of principal observations.

Bottom up means professional learning communities.

At least, that's the way it looks to me.

I gather from some of palisadesk's comments that top-down can work. At the same time, I've spent the past 6 years of my life trying to function as a parent inside a tiny district headed by a top-down superintendent, and those were six long years. I never want to hear the words "work up the chain of command" again ever. Or "Thank you for your ongoing cooperation and support." I don't like being thanked for my ongoing cooperation and support. I feel that if there must be ongoing cooperation and support, I would like to be the person receiving the said cooperation and support at least occasionally.

Anyway, blood over the dam, but my point is: I don't think top-down makes for happy teachers, and I know for a fact that top-down in my district produced a very large cohort of unhappy parents.

I'm reading that in Finland teachers function as professionals, and it looks like maybe that's going to happen in my district.

I vote for teachers as professionals.

And I vote for Richard DuFour's "professional learning communities" as the best way to get there.

my other blog

I have infused technology into my teaching!

Charter School Lotteries

An article in our state paper today talks about how the lottery for a charter school in a mostly Hispanic neighborhood has 1380 applicants for only 68 openings, many of which are reserved for the siblings of existing students. For the whole city, there are 6521 applications for only 679 openings in 15 charter schools. This is in a city where many educators fought tooth and nail against new Achievement First charter schools.

Parents are desperate to get the kids in.

"It's like hitting the lottery," she said. "If he gets in here, it determines his whole future, including where he goes to high school. I'm praying."

This has little to do with pedagogical ideas of critical thinking and discovery. Urban parents clearly see that. What do grand ideas of democracy and public education mean when those on the lowest level are desperate to get out?

Advice Needed for Summer Math Class

My son needs to take Calc Honors next year (sr year of high school).  He took Trig Log Calc Honors as a sophomore, but it was a waste of a year.  Catherine's son had same teacher -- so it was same problems, but then add to that that he was out sick with mono for 6 weeks.

He did not take Calc this year (i.e. Junior Year) because it would have been the same teacher, and we could not live through that again.  Plus, he didn't want to take that risk for  his junior year transcript.

Instead, he took AP Stat - which is fun for him, but not really a math class.

So, I need to get him ready this summer to take Calc in the Fall.  First, I'm not sure if he should take a pre-calc class -- or take a calc class and just audit it, my thought being that he'd  pre-learn the material before school starts.

So that's my first question: Calc class vs Pre-Calc. class

Here are the 3 options I was thinking about:

1) MIT Online math class.  I haven't looked into, but I understand they have High School courses.  He loves this idea.  I wonder whether an online course could work for him.

2) Local community college (Mercy).

3) Local Private school summer course (Horace Man was recommended).  IT needs to be some place he can get to via public transportation, as I can't drive to from every day.


The other thing to add is that he has a summer job lined up (90%) -- so the most time-efficient way for him to do that is a variable too.  i.e MIT sounds appealing because it's on his own schedule.  Horace Mann sounds good because it's only 6 weeks (I think).  I haven't checked into Mercy College schedule.

CollegeVisits

I would like some advice about college visits. Do colleges like or expect to see rising juniors? Do they offer informal versus formal visits? What should I expect (or not) from a college. I would like to get started early and not wait until the spring or summer of his junior year. I think it will also get him thinking more about how important his junior year is.

What did you do with your kids? What worked and what didn't? I know that some plan trips and go to different parts of the country. It seems that this is best done in the summer, but you don't get to see the college in action, so to speak. What did you like about the visits and what didn't you like?

We were going to go to a couple of colleges last summer (not an official visit), and I contacted two professors directly because my son was interested in their work and background. Unfortunately, nothing worked out. One professor never showed up for the meeting (!) and we couldn't get to the other college.

no exit

Unless I'm mistaken, and I don't think I am, my school district finds itself in the position of being contractually obligated to fund annual above-inflation salary increases forever.^*

And since raises are figured as a percentage of current salary (I think - must fact-check), the 'miracle of compounding' is in play as well.

What's strange about this state of affairs is that:

a) smart, capable people (past school boards) created this situation without understanding that they were creating it
b) smart, capable people (voters) supported the creation of this situation without understanding what was being created
c) virtually no one, today, understands what the situation actually is

I don't understand it well myself, and I know only one person who does. (That would be the person who explained it to me.)

I'm wondering whether there's research on people's ability to comprehend trend lines over the long term. I'm sure there is.

^* Well, forever assuming the Fed continues to target 2% inflation.

value-add

“I’m definitely a lot more attuned to making my plans,” said Morgan Shinlever, a physical education and health and wellness teacher at Bearden High.

Since Mr. Shinlever knows his fate now depends on math and reading scores, he is making his classes more academic. After watching the documentary “Food, Inc.” recently, his sophomores wrote essays. Similarly, in Chester County, a gym teacher recently spread playing cards around and had students run to find three that added to 14.
States Try to Fix Quirks in Teacher Evaluations By JENNY ANDERSON
Published: February 19, 2012

Stop the multiverse, I want to get off.

why are there so many of these things? (off-topic)

In The Daily today:

The latest mind-bending show to explore the question of how we know what's real, NBC's "Awake" tells the story of LAPD homicide detective Michael Brittan, a man who has no ability or desire to distinguish between his actual life and his extremely detailed dreams.
Dual-Reality TV by Noam S. Cohen The Daily | Wednesday February 29, 2012

Battlestar Galactica, Invasion, American Horror Story, The 4400, V, Source Code, Haven (right?) .... even the theme song to Friday Night Lights, for pete's sake.

There've been so many of these stories that new shows with the same premise aren't new any more but merely "the latest" variant. Characters who are dead and don't know it, or they're aliens and don't know it, or they're pregnant with aliens and don't know it, or they're asleep (or awake) and don't know it -- the possibilities are endless.

I date this meme to 9/11, but I don't know whether that's right.

B.F. Skinner and the magic writing room

habit, part 1

Shortly after writing habit, part 1, I realized I have no business writing posts about habit. I'm supposed to be writing something else about habit, not blog posts.

So, for the time being, I'm going to re-recommend Piers Steel's The Procrastination Equation, which is revelatory, and post a passage I tracked down on the subject of B.F. Skinner's magic writing room:

Meanwhile I had set up a pigeon laboratory in which Charles Ferster and I worked very happily together for more than five years. It was the high point in my research history. Scarcely a week went by without some exciting discovery. Perhaps the behavior we dealt with most effectively was our own. Near the end of our collaboration we found ourselves with a vast quantity of unanalyzed and unpublished data, and we proceeded to design an environment in which we could scarcely help writing a book. In it we both worked as we had never worked before. In one spring term and one long hot summer we wrote a text and a glossary and prepared over a thousand figures, more than 900 of which were published.
B.F. Skinner: An Autobiography (in Festschrift)
p. 15

We worked slowly at first, but the need to finish before my scheduled departure in June 1955 led us to organize our environment and to develop several ways of self-management. All our work was done in a room dedicated to writing and not used at other times. Interruptions were the first problem, which we handled by a decision not to take phone calls. When visitors appeared at the door, we routinely stepped in the corridor to speak with them briefly. The frequency of interruptions became very low and the writing room came to control our behavior. Usually we began before nine and stopped by lunch time. There was frequently a temptation to continue in the afternoon when we were working especially well or when the data was especially interesting, but our recently acquired data on fixed-ratio performances convinced us to seek a work schedule that kept our performance at maximum frequency for the period we were actually writing. The procedure worked very well. There were no warm-up or inactive periods in the writing room. Naturally we did not write elsewhere nor did we converse about outside matters nor do anything but work on schedules of reinforcement so long as we were in the writing room. At times the pace of the writing was so intense, and rewarding, that we began to control our outside activities in the fear that they might compete with or decrease the frequency of writing and graph-making. Bridge, chess and late social evenings were out.
Festschrift for B.F. Skinner by P.B. Dews
p. 45
Ardent Media 1970
“Schedules of Reinforcement with Skinner” by C.B. Ferster American University

The way I heard this story, back in college, was different.

The way I heard it, Skinner was alone in his magic writing room, and he systematically left the room any time so much as a stray thought crossed his mind. Eventually, by dint of heroic self-discipline and his rigidly adhered to exit strategy, he worked his way up to -- and maxed out at -- 45 minutes of sustained concentration without extraneous thoughts.

Forty five minutes was the outer limit, we psych students were told, the pinnacle of human attentional capacity: 45 minutes was to concentration what 120 years was to lifespan.^* I have believed this to be true for my entire adult life.

Come to find out it wasn't 45 minutes, and making a magic writing room wasn't hard. It was 3 hours, or possibly 4, and when the 3 or 4 hours were up, Skinner and Ferster had to force themselves to stop.

So .... number one.... damn. Sure wish I'd gotten the straight story the first time around.

And, number two, I'm putting myself under stimulus control.

Actually, I think I already did.

more anon

^*Possible but not bloody likely. 

Question about teacher seniority

I was talking with a girl who is finishing up her education degree (music) and asking her whether she will have to look out-of-state for a job. She said yes, but she was not sure what school level she wanted. I asked her about trying to find the best location right away because I heard that seniority doesn't transfer between states. She said that seniority doesn't transfer between school districts! Is this true everywhere? I know that we lost a good math teacher because he didn't want to lose his seniority moving from one state to another. Why would unions agree to that? Is it because the contracts are by district? Is tenure transferred, but not seniority? What happens with pay? Isn't it tied to seniority, or is pay step separate from seniority?

In our lower schools, if there is a reduction in force, teachers with higher seniority who have lost their class can bump a teacher out of any other class if they have lower seniority. This isn't true for 7th and 8th grades where you have to be certified in the area you teach. This bumping has been a big problem for us. A reduction of one class can cause a chain reaction of bumping. The school has no say over whether they think the teacher would be appropriate for that grade. Parents are angry because of the wholesale change and how many kids will have a teacher just getting up to speed for that grade. I think we now have a back-room battle between the administration and the union over this one.

She also said that the biggest demand is for teachers who teach material that is tested. She was resigned to the fact that music is the first to be cut. We then talked about finding towns that have a history of support of music. However, that's probably not where the job openings are.

I'm confused

What Do the NAEP Tests Really Measure?by David Klein | January 2011

The answer is green, right?

Or is there some aspect of this item I don't understand?

Maybe there's a right triangle hiding in there somewhere. Speaking as a veteran of SAT prep.

can elite students do arithmetic?

Looks like the answer is no. (pdf file)

After a conversation with a "well respected mathematician who was heavily involved with K-12 mathematics education," W. Stephen Wilson re-analyzed the results of the arithmetic test he gave his Calculus III students at Johns Hopkins in 2007. The unnamed mathematician had told Wilson that fewer than 1% of college students would be unable to work a multiplication problem by hand, so Wilson took a look:

He was a little off on his estimate.

In the fall of 2007 I gave a 10 question arithmetic test to my 229 Calculus III (multi-variable calculus) students on the first day of class. Among other things, this means they already had credit for a full year of Calculus. The vast majority of these students were freshmen and ... and the average math SAT score was about 740.

[snip]

Seven of [the problems involving multiplication] were each missed by 8% or more of my students and 69 students, or 30%, missed more than 1 problem.

These are high achieving, highly motivated students (remember the 740 average SAT math score). These are disturbing numbers for them, but I suspect the numbers are much much worse among college freshmen with an average math SAT of 582, and, from Table 145 of Digest of Education Statistics 2009 we see that the average SAT score for the intended college major of engineering is 582 in 2008-2009.

Anyway, there is no real purpose to this paper except as a resource for me. It does suggest, very strongly, to me, that we have lost the pro-arithmetic war. This is a revelation to me and it calls into question what I will do next year with my big service course. I now feel compelled to assume that [my students] are chronically accident prone or they really are arithmetically handicapped. It isn’t clear that there is a difference. The question remains, how can I teach serious college level mathematics to students who are ill-prepared?

For passers-by, here's a quick run-down of Wilson's original observations:

As another experiment, Wilson gave a short test of basic math skills at the start of his Calculus III class in 2007. The results predicted how students later fared on the final exam. Those who could use pencil and paper to do basic multiplication and long division at the beginning of the semester scored better on the final Calc III material. His most startling finding was that 33 out of 236 advanced students didn’t even know how to begin a long division problem.
Back to Basics for the "Division Clueless"
DECEMBER 6, 2010 | BY LISA WATTS

Mooping the lady (& children with ADHD)

Two-year olds can tell the difference between "the lady mooped my brother" and "the lady and my brother mooped!" (pdf file)

I love that.

Meanwhile, people with Parkinson's can have trouble understanding sentences like:

"The king that is pulled by the cook is short." (pdf file)

The words "That is pulled by the cook" are a "center-embedded" relative clause.

I'm intrigued by the Parkinson's research because Parkinson's and ADHD both involve dopamine deficits and problems in "set-shifting"— and impaired set-shifting appears to be the stumbling block for Parkinson's patients reading about the king and the cook. All of a sudden, mid-sentence, they have to shift off their expectation that what they are reading is a standard Subject-Verb-Object affair. That's where they stumble.

Do kids with ADHD also have trouble reading such sentences?

I wonder.

I gave Arthur Whimbey's zoonoses test to my class two weeks ago. Around 40% of my students got the answer wrong, which is what I've seen in my other classes.

Assuming I'm reading (make that skimming) the Parkinson's article right, the answer for ADHD kids having trouble with center-embedded relative clauses would presumably be to give them lots of practice reading sentences with center-embedded relative clauses.

On the other hand, I can also imagine practice with center-embedded relative clauses making it more difficult for kids with ADHD to read any sentence....?

Is there research on this?

Lingua Links: What is a relative clause?

to do

So I was thinking of actually writing a post, or possibly reading a post (I'm behind)...when I decided I would check my course enrollment first, to see whether the two absent students are absent or no longer enrolled. The other students were bugging me about it on Wednesday, so I figured I'd get that taken care of.

But no. Turns out I can't check class enrollment because my user name and password no longer match. I don't know why.

I was semi-taking that news in stride (I say "semi" because last semester's brush with IT took two days to resolve) when I opened up my scanned copy of the sheaf of papers that came with my contract and discovered that - lo! - I have to re-take my college's online Sexual Harassment Training Unit and send a paper copy of the training certificate to Human Resources. Which I can't very well do if I can't log on, now, can I?

Moving right along....I see my college has undergone significant planning for responses to potential health or other emergencies to guarantee continuity of instruction, resulting in adoption of a new 16- or 17-step process for temporarily suspending a scheduled in-class meeting. Well, OK, the instructions don't actually say 16 or 17 steps; the instructions say 2 steps. We have a new 2-step process. But the 2 steps come with a whole lot of sub-steps, bullet points (2 kinds of bullet points: solid and hollow), add-ons, and admonitions, and the time it's going to take me to talk to the IT person, fail to fix my user name and password, talk to the IT person's supervisor plus take the Sexual Harassment Training Unit (at least an hour last year, as I recall), and master the intricacies of canceling class should the need arise is starting to make me feel a tad...pressed.

Back soon!

The achievement gap: how our schools are working hard to make it go away

If you're concerned about achievement gaps of the sort recently reported on by the Times, you could either (re)instate rigorous, structured, direct instruction in line with the latest findings in cognitive science research, teaching each child in his or her Zone of Proximal Development, i.e., at his or her instructional level, with proper scaffolding, and furnishing each classroom with teachers who've mastered both their content areas and these best practices. Or you could:


I. Eliminate the ability of academically advanced students to get ahead in the classroom by:

1. implementing low level, one-size-fits-all instruction (for which there's no better model than Investigations math)

2. eliminating grade acceleration and individualized instruction

3. eliminating gifted programming or making it about time-consuming projects that supplement existing assignments rather about academic challenges that replace these assignments.

II. Reduce the ability of students to get ahead on their own time by:

1. assigning tons of homework of the low-ratio-of-learning-to-effort variety 

2. including massive summer projects and one-size-fits all reading lists.

III. Reduce the ability of grades to reflect achievement differences via"grade compression" and inflexible "rubrics" that:

1. employ subjective grading standards (elevating "creativity" and "engagement" over correct answers, clarity, articulateness, and solid analysis) 

2. take points off for unexplained answers, however correct 

3. give partial credit for "explained" incorrect answers 

4. keep the purely academic demands/expectations of assessments and assignments as low as possible 

4. minimize the opportunity for students to demonstrate work that exceeds those demands/expectations 

5. even if students find a way to demonstrably exceed expectations or go above and beyond academically, don't give them any extra points for it 

6. deploy "wild card" variables that partially randomize who gets what grade (e.g., trick questions; unclear directions; trivial requirements like including today's date on the title page of your report or using the word "I" in your science project abstract; rather than collecting homework, leaving it up to the students to turn it in and giving out zeroes for things not turned in on time) 

7. assign heterogeneous-ability group projects and give everyone in the group the same grade

IV. Reduce the ability of NCLB tests to reflect achievement differences, via:

1. low academic ceilings 

2. partial credit for explained incorrect answers; points off for unexplained correct answers (as above) 

3. wild card variables (as above)

V. Lobby colleges to pay less attention to high-ceiling standardized tests like the SATs and the Achievement Tests, and more attention to grades and "leadership" activities.



But then the next question becomes how to eliminate the growing achievement gap between U.S. students and those from other developed countries.

(Cross-posted at Out In Left Field)

sometimes life surprises you

at the Parents Forum

This school board, my school board, has won my respect, my appreciation, and my affection forever.

All five members.

Father of Algebra assignment

From an Algebra 2 class.  Thumbs up? Thumbs down? Would you guess this comes from an IB classroom or a Classical School classroom?
Anything like this in college level math courses?

Help Desk: Forming and joining sentences

I was working with my 10 year old DS on an assignment the other day.  He wrote a sentence with the word "but" separating two independent clauses.   At first, it sounded "okay" (hard to tell sometimes because he's young and his wording is still awkward at times).  Upon further examination, I realized the second part of the statement didn't refer to the first part.  He was mimicking good sentence structure, but wasn't "connecting" the facts correctly.

So I'm wondering: Do any of you know a good curriculum we can use at home that will help him do either (or both) of these things:

1. Build solid sentences:  I would like to teach him how to take a simple sentence ("Jack ran") and "connect" elements to it to make interesting sentences that are logically correct ("Realizing the train was closer than he thought, Jack ran quickly to the end of the tunnel, diving into the bushes and avoiding certain death.").

2. Connect sentences into paragraphs that make sense and flow into the next paragraph

I'm looking for a nice, direct instruction-type approach.

Any ideas?

NYU!

Chris heard this afternoon.

He's in! College of Arts and Science.

Hard to process ----- but he's in & he's going - !

Starting over

Long-time readers & writers here at ktm know that for the past 6 years I've been politically involved in an effort to move my district off the classic high-SES suburban model: Teach, Test, and Hope for the Best Have the Parents Hire Tutors.

It hasn't been easy.

The single best observation anyone ever made about my district came from a woman who has put 4 children through the system: 

We're great because 10 kids do spectacular things by senior year. The other 150 will get by and there are no glaring inadequacies.

Today is a new beginning.

UPDATE 7/19/2013:

OK, it's not a new beginning.

NY Regents Exam: ELA edition

This year, for the first time, high schools students must score at least 65 on the English exam, as well as on four other state tests — math, science, global history and United States history — to earn a diploma.

The three-hour English test includes 25 multiple choice questions; one essay; and two short responses that are each supposed to be a paragraph long. A short response is scored 0 to 2 points. A student who gets 1’s on both responses has a pretty good shot at scoring 65 and passing the exam.

Here, from the state teachers’ scoring guide, is an excerpt from a short response written by an unnamed student. The guide says it deserves a score of 1:

These two Charater have very different mind Sets because they are creative in away that no one would imagen just put clay together and using leaves to create Art.

Theoretically, passing the English Regents would mean that a student could read and write.

Here is the topic sentence of another student’s short response that, according to the state guide, also deserves a 1:

In the poem, the poets use of language was very depth into it.

Despite Focus on Data, Standards for Diploma May Still Lack Rigor By MICHAEL WINERIP Published: February 5, 2012

There is no excuse for this. None.

Now that I'm teaching the most remedial college writing course at my local college, I see how quickly students can pick up grammatically correct and coherent writing, not to mention proper spelling, when you keep them on track and on task. Granted, it's not so easy keeping students on track and on task when you see them just twice a week for just 14 weeks, but NY public schools have these kids 40 weeks a year for 13 years.

A couple of months ago, Ed and I went to the funeral of our neighbor and close friend's father. He was a 6th grade teacher in the 1960s, I think it was, and after his death our friend's husband had discovered a box of short essays his father in law's students had written about their teacher. The children were supposed to write what they thought of his teaching.

Each of the papers was crystal clear, coherent, grammatically correct, and very dear. The children's prose was vivid and alive, and we saw our friend's father in their words. We remembered him.

In 6th grade, in the 1960s 1950s.