worse than you think

I've mentioned several times our family mottoes:

It's always worse than you think.

and

No common sense-y. (No common sense-y is less apropos now that Jimmy is living in a group home and Chris has graduated high school.)

Under the category of worse than you think: "I'm not writing, I'm drawing."

button

more fun with Terc

Be sure to read the comments.

"Confessions of an Instructional Leader"

excerpt from:
The Learning-Centered Principal by Richard DuFour
Educational Leadership - May 2002

When I entered the principalship a quarter century ago, the research on effective schools warned that without strong administrative leadership, the disparate elements of good schooling could be neither brought together nor kept together (Lezotte, 1997). I heeded the message and embraced my role as a strong leader with gusto. I was determined to rise above the mundane managerial tasks of the job and focus instead on instruction—I hoped to be an instructional leader. I asked teachers to submit their course syllabi and curriculum guides so that I could monitor what they were teaching. I collected weekly lesson plans to ensure that teachers were teaching the prescribed curriculum. I read voraciously about instructional strategies in different content areas and shared pertinent articles with staff members.

But my devotion to the clinical supervision process at the school was the single greatest illustration of my commitment to function as an instructional leader. I developed a three-part process that required me to be a student of good teaching and to help teachers become more reflective and insightful about their instruction.

During the pre-observation conference, I met with teachers individually and asked them to talk me through the lesson I would be observing in their classroom. I asked a series of questions, including What will you teach? How will you teach it? What instructional strategies will you use? What instructional materials will you use? During the classroom observation, I worked furiously to script as accurately as possible what the teacher said and did.

During the postobservation conference, the teacher and I reconstructed the lesson from my notes and his or her recollections. We looked for patterns or trends in what the teacher had said and done, and we discussed the relationship between those patterns and the lesson's objectives. Finally, I asked the teacher what he or she might change in the lesson before teaching it again. I then wrote a summary of the classroom observation and our postobservation discussion, offered recommendations for effective teaching strategies, and suggested ways in which the teacher might become more effective.

The observation process was time-consuming, but I was convinced that my focus on individual teachers and their instructional strategies was an effective use of my time. And the process was not without benefits. As a new pair of eyes in the classroom, I was able to help teachers become aware of unintended instructional or classroom management patterns. I could express my appreciation for the wonderful work that teachers were doing because I had witnessed it firsthand. I observed powerful instructional strategies and was able to share those strategies with other teachers. I learned a lot about what effective teaching looks like.

In Hot Pursuit of the Wrong Questions

Eventually, after years as a principal, I realized that even though my efforts had been well intentioned—and even though I had devoted countless hours each school year to those efforts—I had been focusing on the wrong questions. I had focused on the questions, What are the teachers teaching? and How can I help them to teach it more effectively? Instead, my efforts should have been driven by the questions, To what extent are the students learning the intended outcomes of each course? and What steps can I take to give both students and teachers the additional time and support they need to improve learning?

This shift from a focus on teaching to a focus on learning is more than semantics. When learning becomes the preoccupation of the school, when all the school's educators examine the efforts and initiatives of the school through the lens of their impact on learning, the structure and culture of the school begin to change in substantive ways. Principals foster this structural and cultural transformation when they shift their emphasis from helping individual teachers improve instruction to helping teams of teachers ensure that students achieve the intended outcomes of their schooling. More succinctly, teachers and students benefit when principals function as learning leaders rather than instructional leaders.

[snip]

By concentrating on teaching, the instructional leader of the past emphasized the inputs of the learning process. By concentrating on learning, today's school leaders shift both their own focus and that of the school community from inputs to outcomes and from intentions to results. Schools need principal leadership as much as ever. But only those who understand that the essence of their job is promoting student and teacher learning will be able to provide that leadership.

Professional learning communities: ALL POSTS

AND SEE:
ruining Lemov

pop quiz

re: ruining Lemov

Try this forced-choice exercise: if a principal wants to improve the quality of
teaching and learning in his or her school, which three of these will have the greatest
impact?

• Observing and evaluating full lessons, preceded by a pre-conference with each teacher and followed by a detailed write-up and post-conference;
• Systematic walkthroughs of the entire school focusing on target areas (for example, the quality of student work on bulletin boards);
• Mini-observations of 3-5 classrooms every day (five minutes per visit) with face to face follow-up conversations with each teacher;
• Quick “drive-by” visits to all classrooms every day to greet students and “manage by walking around”;
• Collecting and checking over teachers’ lesson plans every week;
• Requiring teacher teams to submit common curriculum unit plans in advance, and discussing them with each team;
• Having teacher teams use interim assessments of student learning to improve instruction and help struggling students.

What's a Principal to Do? When You Can’t Do It All, What Are the Highest-Leverage Activities?  by Kim Marshall
Education Week September 20, 2006

flip

A taped lecture isn't a lecture.

ruining Lemov...

from Allison's post:

I've now seen schools ruin Lemov's Teach Like a Champion, too. They do this by using it as a micromanagement tool--lesson plans must look exactly like this, word choice must sound exactly like this, etc. to beat the teachers into submission.

Another timely observation.

I've just learned, via another ktm writer & commenter, that "professional learning communities" can be used to exactly the same end: to insure classroom-to-classroom uniformity.

Every teacher teaches the same lesson the same way.

That's fine when we're talking about a relentlessly field-tested, scripted Direct Instruction curriculum that is built to produce results.

It's not fine when we're talking Inputs instead of Outputs.

The entire point of professional learning communities, as I understand it, the reason they were revolutionary, is that Richard DuFour had the revelation that he should stop thinking about teaching and start thinking about learning. In the "PLCs" he invented, teachers didn't write lessons together. Teachers wrote tests together. They wrote tests together, and they essentially designed the curriculum together, in the sense that they decided what would be taught and when. They met on a regular basis, they worked with the state standards and/or the district's curriculum documents, and they decided which (which!) standards they would teach and when they would teach them.

Which and when, not how.

They taught as they thought best, and gave students the common assessments they had written.

Then they analyzed the results together and adjusted their teaching accordingly. As professionals might do.

As far as I can tell, and I've read a fair bit of DuFour's work, in the original PLC model there was no focus on telling the teachers how to teach. "Stop worrying about how the teachers are teaching" was pretty much DuFour's discovery (as I understand it). He had been a hard-charging "instructional leader," he was working around the clock, observing classrooms, reviewing lesson plans, meeting with teachers to provide feedback, and.... nothing. Same results.

Everything changed when he stopped focusing on how the teachers were teaching:

[DuFour] greatly reduced the time he spent trying, frenetically, to be the consummate, traditional “instructional leader.” Instead, he began to focus on the simple elements of learning communities—ensuring that teams met on a regular schedule and documented their progress on self-made formative assessments. And he honored and celebrated every success at every faculty meeting. These simple steps lightened his load, gave him focus, and led to years of dramatic, uninterrupted progress on every kind of assessment— from teacher-made tests, to state assessments, to college entrance exams. The success rate on Advanced Placement exams at his school rose by 800%.

Learning Communities at the Crossroads: Toward the Best Schools We've Ever Had by Mike Schmoker

AND SEE: Confessions of an Instructional Leader

Niki Hayes, part 1: what is constructivism?

I'm insanely late getting a stand-alone post on Niki's article up, but a number of things directly related to Niki's piece have come together in the last few days, so tonight's the night:

Has Constructivism Increased Special Education Enrollment in Public Schools?

As a teacher and administrator for 28 years, I rebelled against the disastrous fad of constructivism that began in the 1980’s. While its drumbeaters declared it was a higher form of intellectualism, it didn’t seem all that “intelligent” to me. Frankly, I thought it would help create failures among all groups of students—regular, special, and gifted.

For those who don’t know what “constructivism” is, it is an educational theory that, in practice, looks like this in America’s classrooms:

It is students from kindergarten through high school “discovering” their own answers by using manipulatives, working in groups, contriving “real world” problems through “project-based’ activities, moving and talking –a lot, and surviving in a hierarchy of those students who can lead and those who must follow according to their skills.

It is lots of colorful, jazzy pictures in books and on classroom walls that show many different ethnic groups, women, with gender-neutral stories, and with child-directed activities that only require teacher “facilitation.” Children rule the day.

It is feminized instruction that supports the goal of public education to provide egalitarianism or equity, especially to girls and minorities. That’s the priority placed over building excellence, since excellence smacks of cognitive exceptionalism. That ability is not appreciated nor encouraged where equity is to be the norm in classrooms.

It ridicules practice and repetition as “drill and kill” and believes anything that requires memorization is a waste of time that should be used for “creative” thinking.

It focuses on process, not results. “Process” is the actual “product” of learning.

It believes that if students are having fun, according to perceived “learning styles,” they will like going to school and they will learn the academics they need to prepare for the world of work.

No one will ever be able to determine how many hundreds of thousands of children, who came from dysfunctional, even chaotic, home environments and who entered the constructivist classroom with its lack of boundaries, no right or wrong answers, and the expectation to “discover” their own answers, were shuffled from the “feel-good, tolerant, and fun system” into special education programs. For some strange reason, these kids were declared “discipline” problems.

AND SEE:
Mathematics Education: Outwitted by Stupidity by Barry Garelick
Growth of Special Education Spending and Enrollment in New York since 2000-01

Our schools do ruin Singapore Math

SteveH has said a few times "Our schools would ruin Singapore Math." Well, we can dispense with the "would". Schools routinely ruin Singapore Math, just as they ruin every other initiative brought in. Not all schools do, of course, but badly run schools ruin everything --professional development, curricula, assessment, leadership initiatives. Bringing in good materials to a bad school doesn't work at fixing the school. (Whether it saves an individual student here or there is an open question.)

I have now seen schools ruin Singapore math. They do this by not reading Primary Math's own materials, not understanding or seeking out anything about how Singapore taught using Primary Math, by not getting their staff any professional development at all for using Singapore Math. So their teachers know nothing about how the lessons are supposed to be taught, what "Concrete->Pictorial->Abstract" means, and teach math the same way they taught before. Typically, they don't even get them a full complement of materials. I've seen schools where the teacher NEVER read the teacher's guide, and just assumes that since the textbook looks simple to them, there's nothing more to it.

Then they ruin it some more by teaching it out of order to "match the state standards"(more on this in an upcoming post next week.) Since nearly everything in Primary Math is carefully predicated on what has been taught before, this makes no sense at all.

I've now seen schools ruin Lemov's Teach Like a Champion, too. They do this by using it as a micromanagement tool--lesson plans must look exactly like this, word choice must sound exactly like this,   etc. to beat the teachers into submission. Then they ruin it some more by using the lack of techniques present during a class to penalize a teacher during an evaluation.  Nothing like making the teachers hate the administration, or that their lesson planning is a waste, or that all "teacher improvement" is really just a cover for a method for trying to fire a teacher to make the school function!

I've now seen schools ruin PLCs, too.

What is the common denominator?  cargo cult education.  To shamelessly quote myself:

Unless they understand what's underneath the "lessons of the high performing school" (the high performing parents, the high performing teachers, the high performing students) then it won't matter. Unless the "lessons" they grab are that they need teachers who already know classroom management skills and content, need solid curricula that can be built to mastery, need ability grouping rather than differentiated instruction, need schools that already enforce discipline and control their students' behavior, need raised expectations for all students, and more, then they will be missing something essential."

In each case, these schools have no idea what the actual function of teaching is, what knowledge you're supposed to impart to the students. So they grab PLCS, or TLAC, or Singapore Math, but it's just coconut shell headphones. Their teachers don't know that their students don't know 10/9 is a fraction; their teachers don't know that you can't teach the chapters of a math book in another order; their teachers don't know why place value works. Their principals don't know that their teachers haven't read the Teacher's Guide at all; their principals don't know that "accountable talk" isn't the same thing as explaining your bar model; their principals don't know that their teachers didn't follow any scope and sequence this year; their principals don't know what their teachers and students don't know. And they may test prep their way to better scores, but their students will still not know enough to succeed in high school, let alone college.

The real question is: can you find a school that isn't practicing cargo cult education? How would you know?

Project

I attended a meeting today as an advocate for a student, something I've never done before. It was great. I think the outcome was very good --- I sure hope so.

One of the central issues was projects. The student cannot handle projects. Period. He is a SPED kid, and he can't handle projects. Can't handle projects is plainly stated on the IEP, the help on projects that will be provided is specified, etc., etc ... and the upshot is that his mother has spent the entire school year trying to find out whether there is a project due, what the project is, what the instructions are, where the instructions are, what the instructions mean, and on and on and on. She's been run ragged, and she's extremely stressed juggling middle-school projects and a full-time job (in a business with daily lay-offs and salary cuts and all the anxiety that entails).

On top of all this, the grading of projects is bizarrely harsh, so harsh that a student who has had a string of 100s on tests gets bumped down to a B or a C entirely on the basis of an F- or two on projects. Projects trump tests.

So, in the meeting, we went round and round on the question of projects. (I won't get into anything else because I don't want to give away identities.)

After traveling down a number of blind allies, I asked whether the student could just stop doing so many projects. Could we solve the problem that way? I said I didn't see how failing a project was contributing to his education; if he is failing projects then he isn't actually doing the projects, not really (leaving aside the issue of grade deflation, of course).

No one expected to hear that, and at first no one knew what to say other than "No."

When I persisted, the chair of the meeting explained to me that American schools are moving away from teachers standing at the front of the classroom and teaching content: today classes are interactive. Someone else said that the goal is for students to learn to work collaboratively, and another person said it's important for students to solve problems.

I said I didn't do projects when I was in school, I don't assign projects in my classes at the non-selective college where I teach, my husband doesn't assign projects in the selective college where he teaches, and I just wasn't seeing the value in XXXX being assigned projects he couldn't do and then receiving failing grades when he didn't do them.

The chair got hot under the collar. "You come in here and you question our philosophy ----- !"

We got past that, and continued to go round and round on the project issue .... and quite a bit later I asked a teacher in the room, who had taught in the high school, how many projects students actually do in grades 9-12, which is where XXXX is headed. It had suddenly occurred to me that the high school kids probably weren't doing nearly the number of projects the middle school kids are doing.

This turned out to be the case. The middle school kids do many projects; the high school kids do far fewer.

The chair explained that, in the high school, students have to pass Regents exams, so, unfortunately, teachers must spend a fair amount of time preparing students to pass the test.

The flipped classroom is going to sweep.

That's what I'm thinking at the moment.

AND SEE:
Has Constructivism Increased Special Education Enrollment in Public Schools? By Nakonia (Niki) Hayes
Mathematics Education: Outwitted by Stupidity by Barry Garelick
Growth of Special Education Spending and Enrollment in New York since 2000-01

leafy

Last week’s speech by Mitt Romney, in which he presented his education reform plan to a group of Latino leaders in Washington, drew attention mainly because he criticized teachers’ unions and endorsed private school vouchers. But those points were perfectly predictable for a Republican candidate and not especially newsworthy.

But another part of his plan that potentially veers far from the usual conservative talking points received almost no attention: Mr. Romney would give poor students and those with disabilities the right to attend any public or charter school in their state.

Romney's School Surprise
By JAMES E. RYAN

So, first of all, this is a NONPARTISAN BLOG. (I mean it!)

Second: given what I've been dealing with here in the leafy suburbs, I experienced a moment of glee, reading this. A couple of them. No one's gonna be happy to hear that out here in the leafy suburbs---

Ed, on the other hand, was grumpy: "Obama could never get away with that!"

True.

... Mr. Romney’s proposal would target the real source of educational inequality in this country: school district boundaries, which wall off good school systems from failing ones. The grossest inequalities in educational opportunity today exist between school districts, not inside them.

White schools good, black schools bad: people take this as a given, and talk of busing is back. (Folks are really not gonna like talk of busing out here in the leafy suburbs, and, by the way, I agree.)

No one seems to understand what is actually happening inside suburban schools. Certainly no one seems to have absorbed the evidence that good teachers are everywhere:

...there was no relationship between a school’s demographics and its number of high- or low-performing teachers: 26 percent of math teachers serving the poorest of students had high scores, as did 27 percent of teachers of the wealthiest.
Teacher Quality Widely Diffused, Ratings Indicate By Fernanda Santos and Robert Gebeloff February 24, 2012

Mitt Romney can send urban kids to the suburbs; I hope he does.

But he better make sure they've got money for tutors.

News flash: my own extremely well-funded suburban school district is going to be implementing a rigorous and enriching 21st century curriculum.

Jen on not teaching in her district

"Teachers CAN'T assign whole-class books, but CAN be held accountability for reading scores?"

That sums up why I won't teach in my district now. I can either teach the kids the concepts needed for their grade OR I can follow your curriculum script in the way you want it followed.

They do not lead to the same outcomes, however. And to require the script and then say it must not have been followed assiduously enough if your scores don't go up is a no-win situation for a teacher, especially a newer teacher who hasn't had years of experience in subverting the requirements!

I'd be careful though of referring to yourself as "reform-minded" -- the word reform itself has been co-opted by larger forces than yourself (not in suburbia, but in urban areas) -- and they too are pushing policies like you want to change. Content free understanding, knowledge not something you need to impart, they can google it, etc.

Teachers should run schools. Or else we should forget about schools, and just have teachers.

vouchers boo hiss

sigh

In just the past couple of days I've come across two Bad Things about vouchers ....

From 2003, this is one; and there's something going on in Indiana re: Catholic schools, vouchers, and state accreditation of Catholic schools receiving vouchers....

I have to say, there are times when I simply think that schools, as in schools per se, are unworkable, with notable exceptions of course. Around these parts I'm hearing stories about the two local private schools ... hedge fund owners joining boards, athletic directors being fired because hedge fund owners have joined the board -- and this in a school that until recently was a) a girls school; b) an arts school; and c) the safe and nurturing school where kids who were getting bullied in their public schools went for middle school....

Now it's got hedge fund owners on the board firing the athletic director because hedge fund owners on the board want a sports school, not the art school that used to be a girls school they've got.

(Have I mentioned I don't like boards?)

Back on topic. I remember, years ago, when a friend of mine was getting married, talking to her fiance's best friend about the blessed event. He was a semi-confirmed bachelor, and he said to me: "Marriage is a great institution, if you like living in an institution."

As it turns out, marriage is a great institution (marriages don't have boards!), but I think the quasi-bachelor's 'living in an institution' observation applies to and awful lot of schools.

Schools are a great institution if you like living in an institution.

They all do what they do, it's just that some of them do it well.

children choosing books

It goes without saying that when children choose their own reading material, they don't select "Charge of the Light Brigade."

onward and upward

student achievement in my district

Help Desk: retaking the SATs?

800 - critical reading; 750 - math; 590 - writing

These are the scores obtained by the son of a friend of mine when he took the SATs for the first time this year as a high school junior. I should mention that he's no longer a high school junior: a few weeks ago he decided to drop out of school because he found it too boring. (The school in question is one of the very top public high schools in Philadelphia). He hasn't taken the PSATs, or done any test prep whatsoever. Nor, as of yet, has he taken any SAT IIs.

So here's the question: given this boy's current scores, would it be a good idea for him to retake the SATs?

5% a year

what happens if we increase taxes 5% a year every year? 

I must say, the Wu Wei Wordpress theme is fabulous.

It's pretty in black, too.

union negotiations in another small town

Steve H writes:

Our issue is that the union contract is negotiated separately from the annual budget crisis. When the budget battle begins, this leaves only other smaller areas for cuts. The town council gives the school committee and the school a dollar figure for the cuts, and they come up with cuts that push the most hot buttons for parents. They fire up their automated phone system and email list to rile up the parents and get them to the meetings. We get automated phone messages not just from the school, but from the chair of the school committee about the budget. The town council threatens to take control over the selection of the line items. However, the town council pays little attention when the school committee negotiates the terms of the union contract. Many towns desperately need professional help when those contracts are negotiated.

We have nothing this complicated.

In the spring, one or two members of the Board of Education announce that Next year we won't have layoffs. Then the next year we have layoffs.

This spring the same guy who announced that we wouldn't have layoffs said we will break the tax cap in 2013. ("The folks in the press can quote me.")

So maybe that means we won't break the tax cap.

Thank God this guy isn't on the Federal Reserve.

come to Ed's talk!

Ed Berenson at the 92nd Street Y

Ed's new book!

Take it out on the students

My son is finishing up a multi-subject portfolio for his sophomore US Lit honors class. Exemplars from each subject must be collected and put into a notebook. Students are required to list a specific CCSS standard and then explain how each piece of work relates to that standard. One that my son used was: "F-TF.1. Understand radian measure of an angle as the length of the arc on the unit circle subtended by the angle." He then had to explain how the work fit this standard. This project came, of course, after the teacher complained about how he was required to do this for all of his lessons. My son has to do this for all of the subjects in the portfolio, even those (like music) that don't have a specific standard defined. This is a teacher who doesn't hand back homework with any explanations. You have to make an appointment to meet with him after school to find out why he graded the way he did. And, if you somehow fail to get to this appointment, he will create a new grade of zero for you in his gradebook. This is a teacher who prides himself on grading 10 points lower than all other teachers. Got to toughen up those soft little honors kids. Also, this portfolio has to include your resume to be accepted into the junior class. You are interviewed and have to orally convince the teacher (or some volunteer parent) that you should be accepted. You also have to create a resume for an imaginary job sometime in your future, listing all of your degrees and experience. It has to include imaginary letters of recommendation. I told him that he is learning creative resume enhancing skills. Of course, he has a PhD from Harvard. It reminds me of how some teachers ask students what grade they would give to themselves. I told my son to always say 'A'.

one year later

Peter Meyer on the Parents Forum

wrong again

technology

4 is not 2

Needless to say, my district has been embroiled in budget misery and strife for lo these past four years: ever since the crash of 2008.

(Horrifying that I feel compelled to write "crash of 2008." As if it's in the past, which it ... isn't.)

Anyway, the budget.

Every year since the crash, come January, when budget season begins, the district blows up. Without fail. For the next four months we stagger through a war of all against all until May, when we vote on the budget, and the budget passes. Then we do the same thing again the next year, and it doesn't get better; it gets worse. This year's vote was May 15, and I'm still recovering.

After the vote, calm returns and the summer comes, then the fall, then Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas -- and then bam! January is here again, and Oh no! Cuts! Layoffs! Oh no! 


Of course everyone is expecting (and dreading) the news, but then, too, everyone is surprised and aghast, and the town convulses.

Why do we have to keep doing this?

I mean, I know why we have to keep doing this (because 4 is not 2), but why do we have to keep being surprised and bushwhacked each January when we find out which beloved young new teacher/guidance counselor will be saying goodbye this year?

Why can't we at least develop a clear picture of what the problem is, show it to everyone, let the truth sink in, and then go from there? With a shared understanding of reality (that being: 4 is not 2) if not a shared agreement on the solution.

Seeing as how nothing so informational seems likely to emerge from the administration or school board, I've decided to take matters into my own hands.

Get the party started.

free GOTV for parents

gasstation reminded me of an issue we've just discovered in my town: free GOTV for parents, but not for anyone else.

Must fill you in on the Workshop for superintendents and BOE members on how to pass the budget.

Needless to say, it involved free GOTV for parents.

charts and graphs

I have mastered Excel!

Sort of.

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.