New winner in worst math program ever

I try not to post judgments that sound hyperbolic. It makes me sound less measured, less reasonable, less reliable. But in this case, I'm making an exception.

ST Math is a math software/curriculum company that has a demo showing their unique "spatial temporal" approach to teaching algebra readiness. It looks like it is trying to build off the old PLATO programs from the 60s and the 70s--a tool like LOGO to help students play games that teach them concepts, they say.

It is the worst program I have ever seen.



Their opening slideshow explains that they will

"introduce math concepts without the use of language, numbers or symbols"

Here's the demo. see for yourself.

http://www.mindresearch.net/cont/programs/demo/tours/SolvingLinearEquations/progTour.php

The examples are utterly counter intuitive and horribly ambiguous. They've failed to understand how their pictures could be interpreted in ways they did not foresee. Their examples teach students that algebra is a rigged game, where teachers tell you the right answers based on arbitrary hidden rules.

I only mention this because I already know a school that has adopted this program for next year.

still here

I have to stop doing school board elections.

Seriously.

Back tomorrow!

Teaching Geometry According to the Common Core Standards

Teaching Geometry According to the Common Core Standards,  by H. Wu.

from the preface:


This document is a collection of grade-by-grade mathematical commentaries on the teaching of the geometry standards in the CCSS (Common Core State Standards) from grade 4 to high school. The emphasis is on the progression of the mathematical ideas through the grades. It complements the usual writings and discussions on the CCSS which emphasize the latter's Practice Standards. It is hoped that this document will promote a better understanding of the Practice Standards by giving them mathematical substance rather than adding to the verbal descriptions of what mathematics is about. Seeing mathematics in action is a far better way of coming to grips with these Practice Standards but, unfortunately, in an era of Textbook School Mathematics, one does not get to see mathematics in action too often. Mathematicians should have done much more to reveal the true nature of mathematics, but they didn't, and school mathematics education is the worse for it. Let us hope that, with the advent of the CCSS, more of such e fforts will be forthcoming.
...

there is a seamless transition from the geometry of grade 8 to high school geometry in the CCSS. The concepts of rotation, reflection, translation, and dilation taught in grade 8--basically on an intuitive level--become the foundation for the mathematical development of the high school geometry course. In the process, students get to see, perhaps for the fi rst time, the mathematical signi ficance of rotation,
reflection, translation, and dilation as well as the precise meaning of congruence and similarity. Thus the latter are no longer seen to be some abstract and shadowy concepts but are, rather, concepts open to tactile investigations.

...

Because rotation, reflection, translation, and dilation are now used for a serious mathematical purpose, there is a perception that so-called "transformational geometry" (whatever that means) rules the CCSS geometry curriculum. Because "transformational geometry" is perceived to be something quaint and faddish--not to say incomprehensible to school students--many have expressed reservations about the CCSS geometry standards.

The truth is di fferent. For reasons outlined above, the school geometry curriculum has been dysfunctional for so long that it cries out for a reasonable restructuring. The new course charted by the CCSS will be seen to ful ll the minimal requirements of what a reasonable restructuring ought to be, namely, it is minimally intrusive in introducing only one new concept (that of a dilation ), and it helps students to
make more sense of school geometry by making the traditionally opaque concepts of congruence and similarity learnable. One cannot overstate the fact that the CCSS do not pursue "transformational geometry" per se. Transformations are merely a means to an end: they are used in a strictly utilitarian way to streamline the existing school geometry curriculum. One can see from the high school geometry
standards of the CCSS that, once reflections, rotations, reflections, and dilations have contributed to the proofs of the standard triangle congruence and similarity criteria (SAS, SSS, etc.), the development of plane geometry can proceed along traditional lines if one so desires.
...

Such knowledge about the role of reflections, rotations, etc., in plane geometry is fairly routine to working geometers, but is mostly unknown to teachers and mathematics educators alike because mathematicians have been negligent in sharing their knowledge. A successful implementation of the CCSS therefore requires a massive national e ffort to teach mathematics to inservice and preservice teachers. To the extent that such an eff ort does not seem to be forthcoming as of April 2012, I am posting this document on the web in order to make a reasonably detailed account of this knowledge freely available.

Common Core Standards

The process is moving right along. In my son's high school honors classes, the teachers are required to cite CCSS book, chapter and verse for everything. Some teachers are annoyed and are directly teaching the kids their opinions. Also, our local paper talked about how the lower schools are finishing their scope and sequence document for CCSS math with help from the Dana Center at the U. of Texas. The Executive Director is Uri Treisman, whose philosophy is summed up by: "To Treisman, high school algebra is the burial ground for the aspirations of many students in part because "almost no one uses the content of these courses in their subsequent university courses." So why are these gatekeeper courses determining who goes to college? Kids who drop out of these math classes are the same kids who drop out of school, says Treisman. At the other end of the spectrum, students who need more challenges aren't finding them in high school math." "almost no one uses the content of these courses in their subsequent university courses." I had to reread that a few times. The Dana Center is working with the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career (PARCC) on their CCSS test - which happens to be the test that our state will use. I've been trying to find some sample questions, but have only seen a few scanned examples that I could barely read. Everybody is waiting for test developers to quantify what CCSS means by "fluency", "understand", "reason abstractly", "solve", "represent", and a host of other vague terms. "Fluency" sounds pretty explicit (and it is specifically used sparingly in the standard), but we will have to wait for the sample tests. Then, we will have to wait to see how different states define the low cutoff levels. I find it instructive that some seem only worried about whether the standards will ensure that nobody has to take remedial courses in college. They are trying to find out whether colleges will buy into accepting their test results - and their cutoffs. There's the rub. I also found this commentary on fluency. "Although we do find that students who are fluent in facts have fewer obstacles when engaging in more complex problem-solving, we also find that many students who are fluent in facts still struggle with such problem-solving, and many who are not yet fluent are able to generate highly sophisticated solution strategies to different types of problems." Fluent students have fewer obstacles with more complex problem solving, but they still struggle with problem solving. And many who aren't fluent are able to "generate highly sophisticated solution strategies". Figure that out. They can't let go of their idea that understanding is somehow not connected with fluency. The haves will continue to get help at home and completely ignore CCSS. They will get on the AP calculus track to a STEM career and the rest get to look forward to college without remediation.

adverbials are your friends

Do I need a $165 book on adverbials?

I'm sure I need a second life so I can actually read a $165 book on adverbials.

thinner, part 2

In the wake of my discovery re: weight and cognition, I've decided to harp on my vegans-are-thinner experience. Re-harp, that is.

AND SEE: thinner
AND: the Ed diet

arithmetic and the brain

ABSTRACT

Recent studies in human neuroimaging, primate neurophysiology, and developmental neuropsychology indicate that the human ability for arithmetic has a tangible cerebral substrate. The human intraparietal sulcus is systematically activated in all number tasks and could host a central amodal representation of quantity. Areas of the precentral and inferior prefrontal cortex also activate when subjects engage in mental calculation. A monkey analogue of these parieto-frontal regions has recently been identified, and a neuronal population code for number has been characterized. Finally, pathologies of this system, leading to acalculia in adults or to developmental dyscalculia in children, are beginning to be understood, thus paving the way for brain-oriented intervention studies.

Arithmetic and the brain.
Dehaene S, Molko N, Cohen L, Wilson AJ.
Curr Opin Neurobiol. 2004 Apr;14(2):218-24.

help desk

2 seats open; 5 candidates running; maybe 1600 people will vote. Two candidates are running as a slate, with posters around town saying "Two seats, two votes."

There will be some bullet-voting. No idea how much.

What's the fewest votes a candidate would need to win if the race is close?

good news from the state tests for once

Robert Pondiscio on Pineapplegate 

The kids interviewed in the Times seem to know exactly what's wrong with the pineapple item.

most Berkeley students do not know

Brad De Long:

MOST BERKELEY STUDENTS DO NOT KNOW THAT 2^5=32 AND 2^10≈1000
How can they expect to survive in the modern world without knowing these things?
And why haven't they learned them?

To which I can only say: Brad DeLong has not been paying attention!

I've just started reading the comments. Calculators in grade school aren't faring well thus far.

From the first Comment:

The best students are great, but the quantitative reasoning skills of even the average student at a good university are worse than those of a typical waiter/waitress 40 years ago.
invhand

brain atrophy in teens with Type 2 diabetes

We also measured the brain, the hippocampus... What we found was that among the kids with Type 2  diabetes, their hippocampi are smaller in volume, very significantly. For those of you who work in Alzheimer's disease, the difference between the kids with Type 2 diabetes and the control kids [who were obese but did not have Type 2 diabetes] is about the same as that between a normal elderly and one with mild cognitive impairment. So the volume difference is around 12% So this is not a small, little thing. So what will happen to these children, whether we're actually seeing permanent damage or not, we don't know.

Their frontal lobe regions are also affected, and they have more overall brain atrophy than the control group. And remember, the control group was an obese control group.

Impact of Obesity and Metabolic Disease on Brain Structure and Function 5/5/11
Antonio Convit, M.D.
NYU

I haven't watched the entire lecture, but I gather that the reason he tells us to remember that the control group is obese is that we can also expect to see brain changes in obese teens who have not developed Type 2 diabetes, which would mean that the brains of teenagers with Type 2 diabetes are even more different from the brains of normal-weight adolescents.^*

The lecture - the few minutes I've watched of it - is horrifying.

I had no idea.

^*update (4/5/2012)

Right. Obesity in and of itself, without Type 2 diabetes, is linked to brain atrophy. Sounds like overweight may be as well, at least in people over 70.

They found that obese individuals [over age 70] had, on average, 8 percent less brain tissue than people of normal weight, while overweight people had 4 percent less tissue. According to Thompson, who is also a member of UCLA's Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, this is the first time anyone has established a link between being overweight and having what he describes as "severe brain degeneration."

"That's a big loss of tissue, and it depletes your cognitive reserves, putting you at much greater risk of Alzheimer's and other diseases that attack the brain," he said. "But you can greatly reduce your risk for Alzheimer's if you can eat healthily and keep your weight under control."

btw, remember back when I was bugging everyone about vegan diets making you thin?

Well, they do. I adopted a vegan weight-loss diet in September 2009, lost 11 pounds, and have basically kept it off ever since -- without even being a vegan. I need to get back on track, but still: even part-time veganism makes you thinner than full-time non-veganism.

what's wrong with this picture?

Education Is the Key to a Healthy Economy By GEORGE P. SHULTZ AND ERIC A. HANUSHEK

not your father's bell curve

Sticky wages in 2011:

The tall bar in the middle represents workers who had a wage increase of $0
People to the right of the bar had pay raises
People to the left of the bar had pay cuts
Why Has Wage Growth Stayed Strong?
By Mary Daly, Bart Hobijn, and Brian Lucking

I've been meaning to post this for a while now.

I find this chart fascinating. I have never, not once in my entire lifetime, seen a curve that looked like this -- although they must be out there.

Here's the San Francisco Fed write-up:

Researchers generally point to asymmetries in the distribution of observed wage changes among individual workers as evidence of nominal wage rigidities. Figure 2 plots an example of this type of wage change distribution in 2011. The dashed black line shows a symmetric normal distribution. The blue bars plot the actual distribution of nominal wages.

The figure’s most striking feature is the blue bar that spikes at zero, indicating the large number of workers who report no change in wages over a year. This spike stands out in the distribution of actual wage changes, suggesting that, rather than cutting pay [in line with reduced earnings], employers simply kept wages fixed over the year. This is supported by the large gap to the left of zero between the actual distribution of wage changes and the dashed black line representing the normal distribution. This gap suggests that the spike at zero is made up mostly of workers whose wages otherwise would have been cut.

Once you start thinking about sticky wages, you see them everywhere.

For instance, Ed and I were watching an episode of Friday Night Lights a couple of weekends back, and the story line, which spanned multiple episodes, revolved around budget cuts to the schools. First the cuts were rumored, then the cuts were announced, and then there was rending of clothes and tearing of hair and parents mobbing board meetings to demand that cuts happen to other people's programs, not theirs. (And, yes, this sequence of events does sound familiar).

It was high drama.

Teachers would be FIRED!

Football teams would be MERGED!

Fire and flood, death and despair!

Two years ago, right up to the moment I found out about  downward nominal wage rigidities over the business cycle, ^* this story line would have made perfect sense to me. Like everyone else on the planet (including pick-up farm workers and their employers in India, apparently), I simply took it as a given that people can be cut but wages can't. In hard times, fear and loss (and television drama) follow directly from this belief.

But once you know about the money illusion, a school budget crisis loses most of its oomph as dramatic premise. Watching the pandemonium onscreen, I was unmoved. I kept thinking, "How about a wage freeze? How about a furlough? How about a wage cut?"

"How about everyone sit down and do some arithmetic and, while you're at it, figure out that it's not like the Dillon School District is a family where the sole breadwinner just lost their^** job. You've still got money coming in, you just don't have as much money coming in next year as you did this year. (Or, if Dillon is anything like Westchester County, you don't have as big an increase coming in next year as you did this year, but you've still got an increase.) So everyone's gonna have to make do with less, but nobody's gonna starve, not unless you insist on firing the young teachers so the old teachers don't have to take a cut."

No dice.

The story arc ends with teachers getting fired and football teams getting merged, and nobody says 'boo' about the possibility of 'shared sacrifice' and the like.

I realize that, in real life, employees do take freezes and furloughs to keep everyone on the job. But they don't do it often, as the chart reveals.

^* I have now consumed so much macroeconomics that I can read formulations like downward nominal wage rigidities over the business cycle almost as fast as I can read twinkle, twinkle, little star.
^**It pains me to write "the sole breadwinner just lost their job," as opposed to "the sole breadwinner just lost his job," but I think the time has come.

Direct Instruction in Grammar

From the study guide for the California Teachers of English Learners Teacher Certification Exam:

"Direct instruction in grammar and spelling has had disappointing effects on students' writing.  Teachers have not achieved much success with extensive error correction either.  The most successful teaching of language conventions has been the presentation of well-written materials.  A good reader becomes a good writer as the self editing process develops and good models are available.  A teacher is most likely to be successful if he/she keeps a variety of well-written and easily understood examples of both written and spoken English available to the students."

Study guide was prepared by XAMonline.com and has no affiliation with the California Teacher Credentialing Dept. nor the testing companies that California uses.  The above quoted passage doesn't seem that far out of line from what I've seen presented in ed school classes.

Susan S on Facebook

One problem I had was with my special ed son. He is very "young" even though he's grown. He mostly likes coupons and anime, and kid stuff, so I never worried about him and rarely checked.

Well, I noticed one day that he had a couple of men that he barely knew that were his new "friends". They were friends of friends of friends, or so the story goes. He really didn't know them. Well, they were engaging him (trying to set up a meet) that was disturbing to me. He was uncomfortable, too, so he did unfriend them and refused to answer. But I was surprised that he had allowed them in.

If a photo gets tagged, you can get it untagged, but if it has gone out to a bunch of people, I don't think you can get it back. So, someone can have a picture of you that you have no control over, and then tag it and send it to many.

Another time, and I think this was Yahoo and not FB, I was alerted that a friend of mine had commented at some blog. It even showed me her comment. I asked her if she knew about it and she said no. We both had to change our privacy settings (and the rest of our family's) to stop it. Again, I think that was Yahoo.

Someone out there probably knows more than me, but those were just a few of my experiences.

Facebook rules

Terri W:
Do not post or say anything on any network, email, chat, text, website, WHATEVER unless you are willing for the whole world to see it.

chemprof:
For Facebook, I'd actually use a slightly different rule (borrowed from a friend who was going through a lot and who loved posting on Facebook): "Only good goes on Facebook." When I see my students getting into trouble, that's the rule they break.

Does your student know 10/9 is a fraction?

American elementary and middle school mathematics programs are poor in myriad ways. They lack breadth and depth. They lack reasoning. They lack precision. An object lesson in all of the above is the common use of analogy to teach math, even in grades 5-8.

 Math by analogy is when teachers substitute ideas completely unrelated to math in order to make some concept "easier". Usually, this is because they themselves do not understand the meaning behind what they are teaching, so they cannot explain it accurately. Math by analogy substitutes presumed common context for reasoning. Yet most young students don't share enough common context to build the analogous connection anyway, even if they can abstract away from the literal -- something most children cannot do. And if you are are ELL, it is probably entirely worthless. Plus, the analogy is by definition imprecise, so its correctness will break down with even the slightest scrutiny.

 You see math by analogy in both big and little examples, from the use of it to "explain" greater than and less than to its use in teaching place value. The most common analogy I see used by teachers and their books is that "a fraction is part of a whole".This analogy has devastating results. I routinely (in 100% of classrooms not using Singapore math, in more than 50% of the students) hear:

•  1. "there's no such thing as ten ninths." that's the majority response in classroom after classroom. Why? Because a fraction is PART of a whole. How can a part of a whole be bigger than the whole? What's the whole then?  
• 1b. therefore, they believe no fraction can be bigger than 1.
• 2. "You can't divide 6 things among 7 people." 6 things isn't one whole. It's 6. 
• 3. "three thirds is A Whole." Not one. 
•  3b. Therefore, they don't know 3 divided by 3, written as a fraction, is 1. I often hear of students who ask "is this a division problem or a fraction problem?" 

 Additionally they don't know decimals are fractions. how could 1.2 be a fraction? Twelve tenths isn't a fraction, remember?

 These problems are so severe because these students have teachers who manage not to notice these errors. No problems in their books, no lesson script in the teachers guides illuminates this to the teacher. They only see the most trivial of problems. 10/9 is beyond the pale.

 The correct explanation is that a fraction is a number. What number? A number defined on the number line as follows:

1/3 is the point on the number line when you break the unit length into 3 equal length parts, and take 1 part. the endpoint of that part is 1/3.

4/3 is the point on the number line when you break each unit length into 3 equal length parts, and take 4 parts. the endpoint of those parts is 4/3.

 Yes, teachers will need to build up to this. They should do so.

Terri W is of two minds

re: Fill-in-the-blank has a really bad idea

I'm of two minds whenever I hear of particularly dumb ideas being floated in the school systems.

On the one hand, I'm thinking, "Cool, this gives my kids a leg up over the competition."

Then on the other hand, I realize that the overwhelming vast majority of the next generation of citizens are being educated with these cockamamie ideas and I think: "We are so hosed."

I'm on both sides of that fence with just one (typical) kid!

C. is now an official Math Victim of U.S. schools (including his Catholic high school, sad to say). And, at the same time, he's way out in front in the verbal realm compared to most h.s. seniors in America (also thanks to his Catholic high school, as well as to family background).

Speaking of 'official,' C. has just now reached the point of maturity at which he realizes, without being told by his mother: Holy ****, I don't know any math. 

He has two weeks left in high school. He came home the other day, said he'd had a talk with his math teacher (statistics!), who had convinced him he needed to take math in college. So he was wanting to know whether NYU has remedial math courses.

K-12 kids don't know, while they're K-12 kids, that they're going to be sorry they didn't learn math or writing or science or whatever else they didn't learn. I remember Glen, I think it was, once saying that we have to advocate for our children's future selves: for the selves they're going to be, eventually.

That's exactly right.

The Daily has a really bad idea

I love The Daily. Love, love, love. Read it every day.

That said, today's issue has an op-ed on the high cost of college that proposes, as a solution:

"Why not reduce undergraduate education to three years, while tacking an extra year onto high school?"^*
Josh Barro

Good God Almighty, as my father would have said.

Five years of public high school?

FIVE YEARS of Hunger Games in English and Core-Plus in math?

And here I was thinking everyone should skip senior year and go re-take algebra and English at their local community college instead.

(Is high school cheaper than community college? High school teachers here earn a great deal more than instructors in community colleges, but I don't know whether that's the case elsewhere.)

and see:
the founder, chairman, and CEO of Netflix has a really bad idea
Larry Summers has a really bad idea
David Brooks has a really bad idea
David Brooks has a really bad idea, part 2
All is forgiven.

^* That's the pull. Full passage: Why not adopt the Quebec model and reduce undergraduate education to three years, while tacking an extra year onto high school? 

Core-Plus Students at Michigan State

In summary, our data show a clear decline in the level of Michigan State University mathematics courses taken by Core-Plus graduates. The existence of that decline is statistically significant at any reasonable level. The decline in course level is accompanied by a decline in average grades for all but the very top students, as well as a decline in the percentages of those who eventually passed a technical calculus course. These trends occur in data that include students from a variety of communities. The data from individual high schools show that the timing of these declines corresponds precisely to the implementation of the Core-Plus program.
A Study of Core-Plus Students Attending Michigan State UniversityRichard O. Hill and Thomas H. Parker Thomas Parker

a cohesive paragraph about cohesive paragraphs

I spend a lot of time thinking about cohesion in writing.

student work

pretty good!

stop the multiverse

"We provide classroom teachers with lessons that allow them to teach standards-based math using topics students care about...Instead of teaching fractions and percent, teachers get to teach "Is The Wheel of Fortune Rigged?"
Mathalicious

I left a comment at eduwonk.

and see: stop the multiverse, I want to get off

talking isn't writing, part 3

The typical grammar of conversation is radically different from the typical grammar of informational writing.

Douglas Biber and Susan Conrad

Katharine on awkward student sentences

Here is Katharine on students using "it" as the subject of their sentences:

In terms of awkward sentences written by students, what I'm seeing is an avoidance of modified nouns as subjects. Instead, the would-be modified-noun subject is "factored out" of the sentence into a modifier, and then replaced by "it":

In Happe’s article it is said that this deficit is due to an autistic children’s inability to infer a communicator’s intentions.

[As opposed to Happe's article says that... Notice, btw, that the final noun phrase, the object of "due to", is heavily modified]

Or:

By discovering which parts of communication are more challenging to develop, it can help speech researchers discover where people with other language and communication challenges stumble as well.

[Instead of: Discovering which parts of communication are more challenging can help...]

Actually, only the first example ("Happe's article") is a modified noun; the second one is a sentential subject ("Discovering which parts of communication are more challenging"). So more precisely what I'm seeing is an avoidance of any syntactically complex element in subject position.

Perhaps this goes for speech as well?

in the predicate: an autistic children’s inability to infer a communicator’s intentions

in the subject: it

Interesting.

Happy Passive Voice Day!

at Shaun's Blog

Geoff Nunberg on Our Friend the Passive Voice

Facebook Issues

Do any colleges ask for full Facebook access from applicants? I've heard this is starting to happen at some job interviews. In general, I would like feedback about how people set up accounts with their kids and what kinds of limitations are imposed. I find Facebook somewhat creepy in how I'm sent potential friends of friends as if everyone needs to know everything about everyone. I really don't want friend requests being sent to my sister's complete mailing list. I also suppose it's a good idea to set up an account using a new or separate email - one that isn't called "partyguy6972". I know that one can control access to information, but is there a model that seems to work? I assume that you can group information and you can group friends. Ideally, you would would want each piece of information in a separate group, and you would want each friend to have access to only specific groups. Unfortunately, you would have to tediously set this up for each new friend. Even if you have larger groups of information, you might not want Aunt Sarah to see everything that's in the "relatives" group. I've generally ignored Facebook, but now I would like some real world feedback - not so much the extreme stalker/bully sorts of examples, but the more subtle issues of privacy and access. My son's account might be proper, but his friends' accounts might not.

talking isn't writing, part 2

John McWhorter gives the timeline.

I think he may be wrong (or perhaps I mean misleading) about the simplicity of spoken English, however:

Thus spoken language is fundamental, while written language is an artifice. Not surprisingly, then, the earliest writing was based on the way people talk, and that meant short sentences with a direct logical throughline. Researchers have found that even educated people today speak in word packets of 7 to 10 words a pop.

Talking With Your Fingers

I'm not so sure about that "direct logic throughline" concept, I must say. As far as I can tell, the Longman Grammar corpus study found that conversational English is more grammatically complex than linguists have assumed, which may (or may not) mean that the logic of spoken English is less direct than the simple Subject-Verb-Object ordering we imagine is typical of speech. And it strikes me that transcripts of spoken English often show a certain meandering quality.

But I don't know.

[update 4/27/2012: As I think about it, I realize I have no idea whether transcripts do or do not show meandering...]

RELATED: The single most fascinating article I've read on the question of novice versus professional writing is Bill Robinson's Rhetorical and Grammatical Dependency in Adverb Clauses, which appeared in a 1995 edition Syntax in the Schools.

Robinson summarizes Kellogg Hunt's study comparing K-12 students to professional writers. Surprisingly, Hunt found that professional writers did not use more subordinate clauses than novice writers:

In short, the high school seniors were using coordination and subordination at almost the same rate as professional writers of superior ability.

The major difference between professionals and students was that professionals wrote much longer sentences, 40% longer to be exact. And what made the sentences of professionals longer wasn't the presence of more clauses per sentence, but the presence of longer clauses.

It seems that professionals do a great deal of "noun modification."

Which, upon reflection, I'm thinking is right. At the moment, if I had to say what I do that a student writer does not do, I would go with: noun modification and plenty of it!

EXCEPT: I'm not so sure that's true of blog writing.

How much noun modification is going on in this post, for instance?

Not too much. Assuming I know what noun modification actually is, of course, which I may not.

I probably need a 1200-page corpus study to nail this down.

update 4/27/2012: Actually, there's a lot of noun modification going on in a subject as long as this one: "The single most fascinating article I've read on the question of novice versus professional writing..."

palisadesk on full inclusion and funding

re: Do general ed parents really want 'relief' from special education mandates?

palisadesk writes:

When they went for a full inclusion policy here, the senior bureaucrats were quite frank (at least in-house) that it was for financial reasons. While providing appropriate support to kids with exceptionalities in general ed classrooms is in fact very costly, providing pseudo-support and platitudes is relatively cheap.

The move from the top was, perhaps synchronistically, aligned with a lot of pressure from parents and groups representing children with disabilities for full inclusion. I can remember a time when many parents fought to get their kids into special classes for LD, language impairment, Total Communication (for deaf kids) and so forth. Those programs had a record of long-term success in getting students caught up and capable of doing challenging academic work.

Fast forward to now.....the district stopped investing in PD for special ed teachers, most of whom nowadays have learned nothing at all about effective practices, specialized teaching curricula or methods (Orton-Gillingham, DI, Lindamood-Bell, etc. etc.) so results in special classes are no better than in general ed. No surprise there. If you aren't doing something different, why expect a different result?

OTOH, we still do have special programs for very violent kids, for kids with severe or multiple disabilities, and increasingly, for autism. To comply with the laws around least restrictive environment *some* special ed classes remain, even for LD or slow learners, but are hard to get into. That means many children who really need a segregated program may spend a number of years floundering in the full inclusion environment before any other opportunity presents itself.

At the elementary level, teachers are used to a range of development and ability -- but there are limits. If one classroom has several extremely disruptive students, or students 4-7 YEARS below the class norm, it makes effective teaching of the whole class problematic. Much teacher time is diverted to preparing individual lessons and materials for the outlier students (there is NEVER a budget for special materials for them), and these students need much more teacher attention -- which is taken away from other students. Aides also have been cut back so that often they are shared between a number of classrooms.

There are some positive effects of inclusion but the absence of the necessary supports for the learning needs of the included kids is a serious equity issue, IMO. The exceptional students are not getting the teaching theyneed, and the other students are inevitably deprived of some of the instruction -- and much of the enrichment for the high achievers -- that THEY need.

I see this as a false economy.

the joy of corpus studies, part 2

more from Biber and Conrad:

[I]n fiction writing and newspaper writing, the verb say is much more frequent than any other lexical verb; in conversation, the verbs go and know are as frequent as say, and get is more frequent than any of those three verbs; while in academic writing, the only especially frequent verb is BE.
Corpus Linguistics and Grammar Teaching

answer key

Most common verb in spoken English: get

[T]he extremely high frequency of the verb get in conversation is more surprising for most people. This verb goes largely unnoticed, yet in conversation it is by far the single most common lexical verb. The main reason that get is so common is that it is extremely versatile, being used with a wide range of meanings. These include:

• Obtaining something: See if they can get some of that beer.
• Possession: They’ve got a big house.
• Moving to or away from something: Get in the car.
• Causing something to move or happen: It gets people talking again, right?
• Understanding something: Do you get it?
• Changing to a new state: So I’m getting that way now.

Corpus Linguistics and Grammar Teaching
Douglas Biber and Susan Conrad

I missed it by a mile. (I said 'be,' which I gather is right if you're talking about the most common verb used in writing.)

New Blogger post window is not easy, and not fun.

Right-side menu is now stuck open, covering up one or two words at the end of each line.

I wonder how hard it is to move to Wordpress?

I love Wordpress.

books vs 'visuals'

Just found this comment by an AP history teacher:

Videos (DVDs, films, whatever) are overrated. A full-length movie had better be virtual time travel to be worth the time showing it. Bits and pieces are okay. I used a lot of stuff off of YouTube - there are excerpts from everything there.

VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: Students are appallingly jaded when it comes to visuals, and, to be honest, they're so used to watching stuff, that they don't actually pay attention any more. If you show something, you're going to have to explain it much more than you think. What does haunt them is in the books. I always showed a Japan class some propaganda films with heavy atrocities - didn't faze them a bit - and then had them read "Hiroshima" - and they had nightmares from it.

off-topic: While I was in Illinois, Blogger completely reworked the post window.

I don't like it.

At least, not so far.

David Brooks has a really good idea

David Brooks has a really bad idea
David Brooks has a really bad idea, part 2
All is forgiven.

Pop quiz

What is the most commonly used verb in spoken English?

I have discovered the joys of corpus studies.

answer

Gone fishing

In Illinois for a couple of days.

do general ed parents really want relief from special ed mandates?

from Eastchester School District's Letter to Representatives Regarding Mandate Relief

Mandate relief would provide districts with greater flexibility to meet student needs and to control spending without reducing the quality of education. A revised system without these costly (and in many ways outdated) mandates would better serve all of our students. Overall, enacting legislation to eliminate or modify mandates would provide much needed relief to taxpayers. [emphasis added]

In a town of 19,000 people, 4000 have signed this letter, many or most of them parents, presumably. (Simply because parents are more likely to know about the letter).

I'm guessing that few of those who signed know what the words "in many ways outdated" signify.

I don't know what the words "in many ways outdated" signify, either, but I can guess. And my guess is that differentiated instruction, team teaching, and full inclusion for the most disruptive students (kids like my own two) is involved.

Granted, Eastchester could simply be angling to increase class size for the most disabled children (New York state regs here). I'm pretty sure I myself support some flexibility in a school's application of the law.

But the word outdated is a flag. As far as I know, Westchester administrators don't particularly believe that small class size is "outdated."^*

Westchester administrators do believe that homogeneous grouping is outdated.

Do general education parents believe that special classes for children with severe disabilities, children who can tantrum and hit themselves for hours, are outdated?

^* I have the sense that many administrators are frustrated by parent insistence on the smallest possible classes, but that is a different matter.

David Brooks has a really bad idea, part 2

Ed is reading David Brooks has a really bad idea, part 1, and has just come to this part:

...Waronker says the academy has learned to get better control over students, and, on the day I visited, the school was well disciplined through the use of a bunch of subtle tricks.

For example, even though students move from one open area to the next, they line up single file, walk through an imaginary doorway, and greet the teacher before entering her domain.

Ed: The children need walls, so why not give them real walls?

Right!

Right!

I hadn't quite thought of it that way!

These kids need walls, but the Harvard-ed-school / Columbia Teachers College / UFT grownups, in their collective wisdom, have declined to provide them with walls. And David Brooks approves!

Does David Brooks live in a house without walls?

Work in an office without walls?

I bet he doesn't!

Why do we have walls, anyway? Why were walls invented? Does David Brooks ask himself these questions before he writes a column extolling giant classrooms with no walls? If rooms with no walls are such an all-fire great idea, how come nobody lives in geodesic domes? Answer me that, David Brooks!

And while we're on the subject of making disadvantaged children imagine the walls they need but don't have, how about imaginary books?

Imaginary teachers?

Imaginary learning?

They've probably got all those things at the New American Academy. I wouldn't be surprised.

Ed says he visited an open classroom in California years ago. It was chaos, a din. No one could learn anything in that environment.

Of course, they hadn't hit on the idea of training the kids to pretend they were inside a room with walls.

P.S. I do like this column by David Brooks very much.

and see:
the founder, chair, and CEO of Netflix has a really bad idea
Larry Summers has a really bad idea
Wash U professor on Reed Hastings' really bad idea

David Brooks has a really bad idea
David Brooks has a really bad idea, part 2
David Brooks has a really good idea

Eastchester School District protests special education mandates

Letter to Representatives Regarding Mandate Relief

4000 signatures, I'm told.

Our schools, having grown the numbers of children who 'qualify' for 'services,' now complain that these kids cost too much.

Well, yes. Bad education costs more. Hiring "literacy specialists" to provide Tier 2 intervention to 20% of your grade school population is more expensive than hiring one special education teacher to teach the 5% (or so) who would be struggling if the school used a valid "Scientifically Based Reading Research" program.

But no one's ever worried about that in the past, not that I've heard, and no one's bringing it up today, either. The problem is the mandates, not the teaching, not the curriculum, not the ideology.

Eastchester has misdiagnosed its budget problem, in any event. Eastchester's budget problem is the same as Irvington's budget problem is the same as every other NY school district's budget problem: thanks to the Triborough Amendment, our union contracts oblige us to pay an annual rate of increase in compensation that exceeds the two percent tax cap. The contracts break the tax cap before we even get to budget season, and all the rest is sidebar. But nobody seems to understand this as yet.

Here in Irvington, although some of us do realize that the contract violates the tax cap (a friend laid it out for me), nobody knows by how much the contract exceeds the tax cap. The Chair of the Budget Task Force has asked the question, but no one has answered the question, or even acknowledged the question. What is our projected rate of increase? That is what we need to know.

But instead of being apprised of what our situation actually is, we're told that the new contract is "fair and equitable" for the union and "fiscally responsible" for the taxpayers, with 1.75% "increments" and two new "half-steps" and a limit on "column movement" and the like, and these are all good things. But what it all adds up to, no one is saying. There is an elephant in the room.

The problem is the contract, and the contract is the union, and nobody wants to say boo to the union.

So Eastchester has decided to say boo to the parents of children with special needs instead.

Rote Reading Skills

Reading is an old-fashioned rote skill. With 21st century technology, we can scan in text and immediately convert it to audio. As with the calculator in math, there is no need for drill and kill when it comes to reading. Soon, all books will be on your portable Kindle, Nook, or iPad. They can read to you via headphones. Menus in restaurants can include chips (like greeting cards) that read the choices. All you would have to do is press the picture. Think of how fun it would be with Hoops & Yoyo talking to you. This would allow schools to focus immediately on comprehension and interpretation, not rote reading skills. Some kids may learn to read early, but the lack of rote reading skills won't slow down the learning process. In most cases, kids will learn to read when they are ready.

On Teaching/Learning STEM Fields

From Becoming an Expert Statistician (or Mathematician or Programmer):

First, it kicks off with a quote from Douglas Kranch ("Teaching Novices Online: Does Presentation Order Matter?"):

“Expertise develops in three stages. In the first stage, novices focus on the superficial and knowledge is poorly organized. During the end of the second stage, students mimic the instructor’s mastery of the domain. In the final stage, true experts make the domain their own by reworking their knowledge to meet the personal demands that the domain makes of them.”

And later ends with:

If you want to learn programming, statistics, chemistry then DO that. Don’t just read about how to do it and for the love of God, don’t do something else, like stupid charts of TV shows or biographies of women mathematicians and pretend you’re doing STEM education.

disciplinary specialists in charge of tests ---- ??!!

at Education Week

reading without teaching

in Education Week:

"A federal study has found no learning gains from a summer reading program that provided books to students, but little else.

The report, by the Institute of Education Sciences, explores whether fall reading-comprehension scores could be improved through a summer reading initiative for economically disadvantaged children with below-average reading skills. The randomized, controlled study involved 1,571 students in 112 schools during the summer between 3rd and 4th grades. Students received eight books appropriate to their reading levels and their interests.

Unlike some other summer reading efforts, though, this one offered no interventions beyond six postcard reminders throughout the summer. The aim was to learn if the program could close reading gaps without additional strain on parent and teacher resources."
Summer Reading By Hannah Rose Sacks

As far as I can tell, and contrary to what parents and schools universally believe, "reading a lot" doesn't work particularly well. To get better at something, you have to engage in deliberate practice, and deliberate practice is pretty much the opposite of reading for pleasure. More-reading-less-Facebook isn't the answer to our nation's reading problems.

Btw, I had no idea that more-reading-less-Facebook wasn't the answer to our nation's reading problems until I read Tom Fischgrund's book on students who scored perfect 1600s on their SATs.

I think there's another problem with independent reading as well, but that is for another day.

Yonkers bites the dust

Ed just told me about the Yonkers report. I'd been wondering when that shoe was going to drop.

The unreality around here is .... harrowing. You hear people say that "we" ("we" as in the school district) don't pay pensions (the state does), and the state should begin paying for mandates, too.

Of course, if the state were to begin paying for mandates, we'd be spending more on mandates, not less, because we'd be paying for mandates in Yonkers as well. Yonkers is broke, but they've still got mandates.

Nobody understands retiree benefits, either, including me. The Irvington school district, population roughly 7000, has a liability of $101 million for retiree health care. A friend of mine, an accountant, says that we are "fundamentally bankrupt."

What I don't understand is: when does the shoe drop?

Does it have to drop?

Or can we just go on like this forever, paying health care for all current teachers and all retired teachers as we go?

If we can't go on like this forever, when do we end up like Stockton?

Stockton: 292,000 citizens; $400 million retiree health care liability
Irvington: 7000 citizens; $100 million retiree health care liability for the school district alone

"Stockton officials awarded [retiree health care benefits] to city employees in a series of votes in the 1990s but made no effort to fund them, intending simply to pay costs out of their budget as workers retired. As hundreds did just that over the years, the costs grew. Next year, the city's fiscal documents project, retiree health costs will surpass those of the city's regular work force. At last count the city's unfunded liabilities for retiree health care are above $400 million.

Stockton Mayor Ann Johnston voted for these expensive measures when she served on the city council. "We didn't have projections into the future what the costs might be," she told the Record, a Stockton newspaper, earlier this month. She added, "I learned that you don't make decisions without looking into the future."

Council votes to approve ever-greater benefits were often unanimous, according to Record columnist Michael Fitzgerald. "Nobody gave thought to how it was eventually going to be paid for," says Mr. Deis, the city manager."
How Stockton, California Went Broke in Plain Sight by Steven Malanga

I gather we've got at least one current board member who thinks retiree health care costs are nothing to worry about; that $101 million is a paper liability, not a real one.

I fear we've also got at least one person running for school board who has told parents that 'we don't pay pensions,' and another who told me personally, when she was serving on the board two years ago: "We're parents. We can't deal with unions."

My accountant friend tells me that when he ran the figures he found that Irvington teachers in the first 17 years of their careers receive average 5% raises each year, not counting "grid increases." ("Grid increases" are the across-the-board increases in everyone's pay the union negotiates every 3 years when the contract expires.) Add in the grid increases and teachers have been averaging something in the neighborhood of 7%, I think. Year in, year out. With inflation running at 2% until the crash, below 2% since.

I gather, too, that NY has some kind of law forbidding local school boards from working together with other boards in union negotiations. The union has national backing and expertise to draw upon; the volunteers who serve on local boards are on their own.

David Brooks has a really bad idea

"When you visit The New American Academy, an elementary school serving poor minority kids in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, you see big open rooms with 60 students and four teachers. The students are generally in three clumps in different areas working on different activities. The teachers, especially the master teacher who is floating between the clumps, are on the move, hovering over one student, then the next. It is less like a factory for learning and more like a postindustrial workshop, or even an extended family compound.

The teachers are not solitary. They are constantly interacting as an ensemble. Students can see them working together and learning from each other. The students are controlled less by uniform rules than by the constant informal nudges from the teachers all around.

[snip]

[The principal] revitalized one of the most violent junior high schools in the South Bronx and with the strong backing of both Klein and Randi Weingarten, the president of the teachers’ union, he was able to found his brainchild, The New American Academy.

[snip]

He has a grand theory to transform American education, which he developed with others at the Harvard School of Education. The American education model, he says, was actually copied from the 18th-century Prussian model^* designed to create docile subjects and factory workers. He wants schools to operate more like the networked collaborative world of today.

He talks fervently like a guerrilla leader up in the mountains with plans to take over the whole country."
The Relationship School By DAVID BROOKS
Published: March 22, 2012

Yes, I just bet he does. Other people's children are always a tempting target of world conquest, it seems.

I wish David Brooks would stop writing about public schools. He doesn't seem to know anything about education per se, and what he thinks he knows about "the social animal" appears to have blinded him to seemingly every aspect of school apart from its social and moral elements. Learning, memory, knowledge, curriculum, the importance of deliberate practice: I've never seen David Brooks venture an opinion about the actual knowledge that does or does not get transmitted to the next generation inside a public school, or about the processes by which students do or do not acquire that knowledge.

As to classroom management, which Mary Damer once told me was the single most critical challenge facing any new teacher even if he's a Marine just coming out of the service (I agree), here is Brooks:

The New American Academy takes a different approach than the other exciting new education model, the “No Excuses” schools like Kipp Academy. New American is less structured. That was a problem at first, but Waronker says the academy has learned to get better control over students, and, on the day I visited, the school was well disciplined through the use of a bunch of subtle tricks.

For example, even though students move from one open area to the next, they line up single file, walk through an imaginary doorway, and greet the teacher before entering her domain.

That, my friends, is what you call a red flag.

They put the kids in an open classroom (remember those?), chaos ensued, so they invented imaginary doorways inside the big open classroom: imaginary doorways the kids had to be trained to imagine and use. Instructional time was taken away from reading, writing, and arithmetic and redirected to teaching disadvantaged kids to pretend to walk through a doorway that isn't there -- and all because the folks at Harvard School of Education couldn't be bothered to read up on the history of the open classroom or on anything behaviorists have figured out in the past 50 years.

And Brooks approves.

The New American Academy has two big advantages as a reform model. First, instead of running against the education establishment, it grows out of it and is being embraced by the teachers’ unions and the education schools. If it works, it can spread faster.

Second, it does a tremendous job of nurturing relationships. Since people learn from people they love, education is fundamentally about the relationship between a teacher and student.

Union-slash-Teachers College charter public schools with imaginary doorways and no curriculum! Yes, that should spread like wildfire. Parents have been clamoring for no curriculum and no doorways  for years.

Brooks's own children have all attended Jewish day schools in the D.C. area.

and see:
the founder, chair, and CEO of Netflix has a really bad idea
Larry Summers has a really bad idea
Wash U professor on Reed Hastings' really bad idea

David Brooks has a really bad idea
David Brooks has a really bad idea, part 2
David Brooks has a really good idea

which century is it?

Heard at the "Celebration":

"We have 21st century students, 20th century teachers, and 19th century schools."

This witticism was a special favorite of the empaneled Celebrants, though how exactly a sweeping condemnation of the entire U.S. public school system and its teachers jibes with the theme of Celebration, I don't know. Each time I heard it (we heard it often), I was reminded of Ed's observation, lo these many years ago, that since schools are teaching the 21st century skills, it falls to us, the parents, to teach the 19th century ones. True.

In any event, according to the panelists, the solution to our 3-century mix-up seemed to be, variously, more technology, less content, much less testing, Finnish levels of respect for teachers, accountability for parents, a focus on equity instead of excellence (Finland again), and taxpayer funding of college degrees for teachers. Plus lots and lots of Salman Khan videos for students to watch at home, freeing teachers to do the fun discussions and group projects at school. Whoopee!

I'm sure that will work.

writing isn't talking, part 1

"[A]ny written language, whether English or Chinese, results from centuries of development and elaboration by a small number of users – clerics, administrators, lawyers and literary people. The process involves the development of complex syntactic constructions and complex vocabulary. In spite of the huge prestige enjoyed by written language in any literate society, spoken language is primary..."

- Miller, Jim. An Introduction to English Syntax. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002. xii-xiv. Print.

Longer excerpt here

teach clauses first

A lot of my students have been told never to start a sentence with the word "because."

I assume they've been told this because they write so many sentence fragments that start with subordinating conjunctions.

Because the sky is blue.
Because money doesn't grow on trees.
Because I said so.

If you tell students never to begin a sentence with because, you don't get sentence fragments that start with because. That's good.

Unfortunately, if you tell students never to begin a sentence with because, you also don't get any real sentences that start with because, and that's bad:

Because the sky is blue, it makes me cry.
Because money doesn't grow on trees, I am canceling your data plan.
Because I said so is why.

These are all excellent sentences, perfectly legal, and English teachers oughtn't to be ruling them out of bounds. But they have, and it falls to me to enlighten my students as to the acceptability of the word 'because' at the beginning of sentences.

However, trying to explain to a class-full of college freshman that, yes, it is OK to begin a sentence with the word "because," just so long as the because-clause is connected to an independent clause, is hopeless.^* They've never heard of clauses, and they've certainly never heard of coordination or subordination. (pdf file) Neither had I when I started teaching the class. Not really.

As far as I can tell, the best way to teach the grammar of writing, which is to say the best way to teach the grammar of the sentence, is to forget about sentences and teach clauses instead. Or, rather, teach the clause first and the sentence second.^**

Sentences are made of clauses, so start with clauses!

Starting with clauses works because all clauses have subjects and predicates, which is the essential point you're trying to get across about sentences anyway -- but when you start with clauses you can talk about dependent marker words from the get-go, giving everyone a shot at writing complete sentences that start with because, instead of incomplete sentences that start with because.

P.S. I think the Grumpy Grammarian was Philip Keller's father-in-law. (Unless...I've mixed up Grumpy Grammarian with The Underground Grammarian. Will have to ask Phillip.)

P.P.S. I like Richard Nordquist's way of putting it.

^*I'm avoiding the possibility that, in the third example, Because I said so is a dependent clause acting as a noun phrase....as well as the possibility that Because the sky is blue is also a noun phrase....
Math is much easier than grammar, I think.

^**Actually, I think the best approach is probably to start with words-and-phrases. Nouns and noun phrases specifically, I'm thinking.

Allison on Khan-love in Minnesota

I'm seeing the same thing as Catherine: schools love khan.

Khan isn't going to teach k-8 kids anything, but schools love it anyway.

a) now they think they don't have to spend money on textbooks for elementary kids (first hand have heard that directly from a curriculum director)

b) now their teachers don't need to know how to do the math, khan will do it for them. (heard that directly from an instructional coach who champions Teach Like a Champion)

I know 2 other elementary teachers who love it because now they can do fun Terc things.

I only know one person who is anti Khan here in the establishment. Her very sane complaint: the man teaches completing the square without even drawing a square. It's nothing but computational and procedural fluency for him. It's the opposite of actual instruction, but now schools will use it and instruct even less.

I'm surprised nobody said one of Khan’s most significant achievements is that he has enormously expanded the world’s access to a master teacher.

Google is not a curriculum

...But a closer look through the lens of the Common Core standards reveals another challenge to ramping up the quality of high school reading.

[Carrie Heath] Phillips [of CCSSO] says high schools should be pushing students to read long, challenging, college-level texts.

But for their class presentation, Morales and his partner visited a Wikipedia page and a couple of websites. The bulk of the information came from Morales’s recollection of prior reading.

Christopher Meile, the philosophy teacher, is a dedicated and engaging 10-year veteran, but he’s skeptical about using more rigorous texts.

Even if he assigned readings from Plato, says Meile, students “don’t really follow it unless you break it down into a lot of little pieces and say this is exactly what [the author] is talking about.”

That’s precisely what Phillips doesn’t want to hear.
Education Week
New Literacy Standards Could Challenge Even Passionate Readers
By Benjamin Herold, Philadelphia Public School Notebook/NewsWorks

That is precisely what I don't want to hear, either.

Christopher-Meile-the-philosophy-teacher is right: if you're going to have high school students read Socrates, you're going to have to break it down into a lot of little pieces and say this is exactly what [the author] is talking about.

So why isn't he doing that?

and see:
global shmobal
'Technology and Islamophobia in France'

a jumbled sentence

Here is a jumbled student sentence cited by Carol Jago in her book Cohesive Writing: Why Concept Is Not Enough:

To just stop and look at things, ideas and even if you don't like them, or they scare you, stop and explore them you will be a knowledgeable person and make good decisions because you will know all the bad and all the good about the situation.

I've got to get Katharine to come tell us what's going on here. This may be what she calls a left-handed sentence, although I'm not sure.

From Legal Writing Tips:

Sentences that place an excessive amount of qualifying (or descriptive) information before the main subject and its verb are called “left-handed” sentences by LeClercq.

[snip]

LeClercq says that left-handed sentences are the hardest sentences to read because readers have difficulty processing introductory dependent material before they have a context for it. Readers are forced to read through the introductory material, hold it in abeyance, and then place those introductory words in context.

Consider the following sentence that LeClercq provides as an example:

Based on a review of the material regarding the Worker’s Compensation Joint Insurance Fund that resulted in the Agency’s granting of an exemption for a similar fund in 1984 and the material submitted by the expert at our meeting, in my opinion the above-captioned funds meet the requirements for exemption as a government entity organization.

To reach the point of this sentence, readers have to absorb 39 words before the beginning of the main clause - and the main subject is still hidden behind the superfluous phrase “in my opinion.”

That is one whopper of an impossible sentence to read, I must say.

But it's not jumbled!

project-based assessment at the "Celebration"

The lead presenter in the Workshop on "project-based assessment" told us that, in college, half the knowledge a "technology major" learns freshman year is obsolete by the middle of sophomore year, so "content doesn't matter."

That is a direct quotation. I wrote it down.

"Content doesn't matter."

Also "technology major."

writing is hard, talking is easy

A few weeks ago, one of my students asked me why we're doing sentence combining exercises in class.

Good question.

In theory, the reason we're doing sentence combining exercises is that the research on sentence combining is positive, which is what I told my class. However, I have not actually read any of this research myself, so the real reason(s) we are doing sentence combining exercises are:

a) Arthur Whimbey recommended doing them

b) Robert Connors thought sentence combining was a good idea

and

c) a commenter here at ktm once reported that Morningside Academy uses sentence combining, which indeed appears to be the case. (I love ktm commenters.)

Still, although my faith in these sources is high, and although the notion of giving students practice combining sentences makes a kind of gut-level sense to me, I have the same question my student had, only I phrase it a bit differently.

My question is:  What is it about writing, anyway?

Why is it so hard?

And why is talking so easy?

Talking is easy, writing is hard ---- Why?

I've been mulling this over for at least a year now, and today I'm thinking one of the main reasons  writing is hard is that writing IS sentence combining. Sentence combining isn't just an exercise designed to help students learn to write; sentence combining is writing. It's what writers do.

Of course, people combine sentences all the time when they talk. It's perfectly natural and normal (and easy) for a person to say "I went home because I felt sick," which is a combination of the sentences "I went home" and "I felt sick."

It's perfectly natural and normal for a writer to write "I went home because I felt sick," too. However, arguably it is just as natural and normal for a writer to write, "Because I felt sick, I went home," whereas I have never heard a person actually say, out loud, "Because I felt sick, I went home" or its syntactic equivalent.

And I have certainly never heard a person say, out loud, anything on the order of "Weeping, shuddering, he sat on the edge of the bed." (Lois Lowry, The Giver)

Nobody talks that way, but everybody writes that way (everybody who knows how to write, that is). I don't know what writers do, exactly, that makes writing so different from speaking, but we do seem to move "sentence constituents" around a whole lot more than talkers do.

Which brings me back to my students. I can't remember whether I've talked about this before, but one of the issues you see in freshman writing is something I call "jumbled sentences." When I first encountered jumbled sentences, I didn't know what to make of them; they are so strange to me that I can't (yet) imitate them myself. I can't imitate them because I don't understand how they're put together.

I'll try to come up with some examples I can disguise well enough to post.

update: Here's one.

My impression is that often these sentences start out fine, but then the wheels come off somewhere along the line.

I'm thinking perhaps novice writers produce jumbled sentences because they're trying to combine lots of short, declarative sentences (or short declarative thoughts, more likely) into much longer constructions -- which is exactly the right impulse -- but they've had so little practice writing (and reading) complicated sentences that they lose control after the first clause or so.

But I don't know.

Here is Jim Miller on talking versus writing:

Many kinds of spoken language, not just the spontaneous speech of domestic conversation or discussions in pubs, have a syntax that is very different from the syntax of formal writing. It is essential to understand that the differences exist not because spoken language is a degradation of written language but because any written language, whether English or Chinese, results from centuries of development and elaboration by a small number of users – clerics, administrators, lawyers and literary people. The process involves the development of complex syntactic constructions and complex vocabulary. In spite of the huge prestige enjoyed by written language in any literate society, spoken language is primary in several major respects. There are, or were until recently, societies with a spoken language but no written language, but no societies with only a written language; children usually learn to speak long before they learn to read and write; and the vast majority of human beings use speech far more often than writing.

The syntax of spontaneous spoken language has been ‘designed’ or ‘developed’ to suit the conditions of speech – little planning time, the possibility of transmitting information by loudness, pitch and general voice quality, and support from hand gestures, facial expressions and so on (what is known as ‘non-verbal communication’). For a particular language, the syntax of spontaneous speech overlaps with the syntax of formal writing; there is a common core of constructions. For instance, "The instructions are useless" could be spoken or written. However, many constructions occur in speech but not in writing, and vice versa. "She doesn’t say much – knows a lot though" is typical of speech, but typical of writing is "Although she does not say much, she knows a lot."

The special syntax of spontaneous spoken language is not produced just by speakers with the minimum of formal education. One of the most detailed investigations of spoken syntax was carried out in Russia in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The speakers recorded on tape in all sorts of informal situations were doctors, lawyers and academics, but their speech turned out to be very different in syntax from written Russian. Moreover, their syntax had general properties which have turned up in bodies of spontaneous spoken English, French and German.

This book deals with concepts suitable for the analysis of all types of language, from spontaneous unplanned conversation to planned and edited formal writing. The one exception is the unit that we call ‘sentence’. Attempts to apply this unit to spontaneous speech have not been successful; speakers disagree, sometimes spectacularly, on where sentences begin and end in recordings of spontaneous speech in their native language. The sentence appears to be a unit developed for formal writing. It is also appropriate for the analysis of planned speech where the syntax is that of writing.

People learn the syntax and vocabulary of formal writing from books and in school in a process that lasts into the early twenties for university graduates and can continue much longer. In general, the more exposure speakers have to formal schooling, the more easily and frequently they use in speech the syntax and vocabulary that are typical of formal writing.
Miller, Jim. An Introduction to English Syntax. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002. xii-xiv. Print.

Look it up

Have just this moment realized I forgot to post an account of my exchange with the WNET staffer at the "Celebration."

Unfortunately, I'm fresh out of energy.

Boiled down, the encounter began with the WNET person saying Salman Khan should not be "allowed" to teach in New York schools because "he's 19th century."

It ended with the WNET person saying there's no reason for people to memorize things because—and here she held her cell phone aloft—"I can look things up on my phone."

When I said, "Can you look up calculus on your phone?" she made a face.

English 109 has an index!

One of my favorite things about the old kitchen table math site was the index. The book index is a brilliant invention; Google doesn't come close. After the first ktm froze, we moved to Blogger, and I've missed the index ever since.

Now I've got a new one.

Actually, Blogger has been offering the option of creating stand-alone pages for a while now, so I could probably start putting together an index for ktm, too.

In my spare time.

Admission Matters

I just finished reading this book by Springer, Reider, and Franck. (2nd ed.) I recommend it. It provides many specific details about the process. It discusses how to select colleges in terms of fit and whether one would be a stretch, a good fit, or a safety school. They discuss this process using GPA vs. SAT "scattergrams". It also goes into great detail on the pros and cons of Early Decision, Early Action, or just going with the normal application cycle. It also provides forms you can use to collect information about schools of interest, and it includes full Common App and recommendation forms. Finally, it provides a general four-year timeline of steps one should follow. The book is worthwhile just for describing these details of the process.

From a more philosophical standpoint, the book tries to put the whole process into perspective. However, one of key problems is the higher probability of acceptance with Early Decision. This forces many to pick one school as if it is the perfect school for them. However, the book goes on in length about how acceptance is a crap shoot and how it's not good to get caught up thinking that only one school will fit. You can't have it both ways. Colleges know darn well that the differences between many schools are subtle. They just want to reduce competition. Once they've gotten students to really want one college as if it's the only one, the crap shoot acceptance/rejection letters arrive on Dec. 15. Most kids are devastated just in time for the holidays with no other acceptance letters to balance the rejection. I suppose it wouldn't be good to say that you are only selecting that college because it's a stretch school and you want to increase your probability. Actually, the book includes a "letter" from an admissions officer who talks about how students should look at all schools in terms of probability of fit and acceptance. No one school is best.

It seems to me that the packaging of students is all for the benefit of the college and not the students. It's nice to think that schools wants a balanced or well-rounded community, but I see more of a "Slug Club" process (see Harry Potter, book 6) where schools try to cherry pick winners. Not only do you have to pay huge amounts of money for a college education, but you have to not seem packaged and be truly sincere about why college 'X' is so special. Then, the college will pick students based on what's best for them, not you.