Being Tough on Tough

Though I haven't read it, I honestly don't get what the big deal is about Paul Tough's new book, How Children Succeed. From what I gather from various reviews and interviews, Tough's Big Idea is that persistence and curiosity matter more than IQ does for success. But was there ever a time or place when this statement wasn't obvious? Of course IQ means little if you don't apply yourself; of course intelligence leads nowhere interesting if you lack curiosity. Does anyone--especially in this Emotional Intelligence-obsessed world of ours--really think that the successful people out there--even the genuises--achieved what they did primarily because of their IQ scores? Didn't Malcolm Gladwell already write a book back in 2008 on the findings that what makes an expert is 10,0000 hours of practice? What is it about Tough's book that's garnering so much attention?

A slightly different take on Tough's Big Idea is voiced by Joe Nocera in today's New York Times:

Tough argues that simply teaching math and reading--the so-called cognitive skills--isn't nearly enough, especially for children who have grown up enduring the stresses of poverty. In fact, it might not even be the most important thing.

Notice how quickly Nocera slips from the obvious--that teaching teach math and reading isn't nearly enough--to the ridiculous. To say that learning to read and do math might not be the most important elements of success is like saying that adequate food and shelter might not be the most important elements of staying alive (after all one must also breathe oxygen). When it come to essential elements, it's pointless to quibble over what's most important.

In interviews Tough is careful to admit that, while schools need to do more to encourage persistence and curiosity, there are no clear studies on how to do this. Refreshing though this caveat is, it, too, raises the question of what this book has to offer that's new and plausible, or at least useful.

There is one disturbing answer to that last question. To the careless reader who approaches the book from the perspective of the dominant educational paradigm, it offers yet another reason to water down academics in favor of "the whole child." The connections between grit and academic rigor, and between curiosity and well-taught academic subjects, should be as obvious as the inherent importance of grit is. Indeed, I'm guessing these connections are obvious to most people. But they clearly aren't obvious to many of those wielding the greatest power over whether or not our children succeed.

desperately seeking anaphora

At Morningside Academy I learned that many students have difficulty understanding anaphora, which I am (presently) defining as any expression in a text that:

• refers back to something earlier in the text (the antecedent)
• often possesses a meaning that can't be found out by looking the word or words up in a dictionary

e.g.:

But shortly afterwards both Androcles and the Lion were captured, and the slave was sentenced to be thrown to the Lion, after the latter had been kept without food for several days.
source: Tales of Wonder From Many Lands: A Reader for Composition by Howard Canaan and Joel N. Feimer

"Latter" refers to the Lion, and a dictionary can't tell you that.

Yesterday, in class, I found that most of my students were thrown by this passage. I assume the same has been true of students in all of my previous classes, but I never picked up on it. (aaarggh)

This sentence was a problem, too:

Some holidays are greatly overrated, Valentine's Day is one of them.
source: Hunter College Reading/Writing Center Grammar and Mechnics

Nearly all of the class thought this sentence was correctly punctuated, and not because they had no idea what a complete sentence (or clause) is. (I was pleasantly surprised on the 'what is a complete sentence?' front.)

My students easily pegged "Some holidays are greatly overrated" as a complete sentence, but they vehemently denied that "Valentine's Day is one of them" could be complete because it doesn't make sense on its own. I do mean vehement. I had the same reaction from the rising 8th grader I worked with last week.

From the get-go, two falls ago, when I returned to the classroom, I've been trying to teach my students how to write cohesive prose. Writing cohesive prose means connecting sentences to one another, and connecting sentences to one another means using anaphora.

But now I'm going to be paying close attention to anaphora in reading comprehension, too.

Meanwhile, turns out Erica M. has been dealing with this issue forever:

Catherine, that is EXACTLY the kind of sentence my students have trouble with. That's why I do so many "is it a sentence or not?" drills with my students. They can't tell. Even kids at $40,000/year Manhattan private schools (especially kids at $40,000/year Manhattan private schools!) just can't figure it out. They can't separate grammar from context. That's why they write endless comma splices. I have one student right now, a very bright rising senior at a notoriously progressive Manhattan private school, whom I recently spent an entire session just doing "is it a sentence or not?/punctuate the comma splices" with, and the next practice SAT she took, she still got loads of them wrong! I'm going to keep having to write her drills. I bet that in her entire education, no one has ever made her do this. What disturbs me, though, is that her teachers have apparently looked past the problem for years.

and see:
All good writing consists of good sentences properly joined.

Can you spell 'hegemony'?

from the Times:

Catholic schools have been bleeding enrollment and money for years, and many have been forced to close. But some, like St. Stephen of Hungary, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, have found a way to thrive — attracting a more affluent clientele by offering services and classes more commonly found in expensive private schools.

Selling points include small class sizes and extracurricular activities beginning in the youngest grades. And by often charging far less, these schools have been able to stabilize themselves and even grow.

“Our competition or our standard isn’t another good Catholic school,” said the Rev. Angelo Gambatese, the pastor at St. Stephen of Hungary church, which shares a building with the school. “It’s the best independent schools in Manhattan, and we intend to achieve the same level of performance that they do, academically, developmentally.”

[snip]

While 70 percent of the students are Catholic, a figure that has not changed, it has a more Franciscan focus on kindness and respect rather than papal edicts, which makes it more palatable to families not traditionally in the Catholic school market.

“I don’t feel like it’s holy rollers over there,” said Richard Sher, a parent of two at the school who is half Jewish, half Protestant.

Mass is every other week; the homily is more of a discussion than a lesson. When Father Gambatese talked in May to the youngest students at Mass about Adam, he wondered why Adam asked God for more humans. “He wanted people to talk to and play with,” Sabrina Vidal, 8, said. “Yes!” Father Gambatese said. “Don’t you get tired of hugging a lion?”

St. Stephen offers the kind of extras found at far more expensive schools, like French for 3-year-olds, violin for fourth and fifth graders, and iPads for sixth to eighth graders. But some parents, Catholic and non-Catholic, said they were also drawn to the discipline and values-based approach at St. Stephen, elements that have fallen out of fashion at most nonreligious schools.

“We were looking for structure, and that’s what we got,” said Deirdre O’Connell, a parent who works in banking.

In Katherine Peck, the entrepreneurial 33-year-old at the heart of St. Stephen’s revitalization, the parents also got a principal schooled in progressive teaching. Classrooms are no longer teacher-focused, with students at desks, but student-centered, with children at tables. Students have publishing parties every month to showcase their writing, textbooks have been de-emphasized in favor of hands-on learning and every classroom has an interactive projection system.

Mrs. Peck, who is Catholic and attended Teachers College of Columbia University, said Catholic schools gave her more flexibility than the public schools where she had taught. (She also taught at the Epiphany School before coming to St. Stephen.) “Everything I was doing at Teachers College, I could do in the classroom,” she said, compared with the public school where she said everyone had to teach from the same page.

To Survive, a Catholic School Retools for a Wealthier MarketBy JENNY ANDERSON | New York Times | Published: August 19, 2012

I need to start a Catholic school. A real one. A real Catholic school, only with precision teaching.

Of course, I'm not Catholic. So I wouldn't be anyone's first choice to start a Catholic school. Also, the Catholic Church isn't starting new schools, not here in Westchester County anyway. The church is closing them.

Yesterday I taught my first class (freshman composition) in Victory Hall, a building that up until two or three years ago housed a Catholic girls high school. I love teaching in Victory Hall, and I was happy to be assigned a room there again. The place has an aura.

Jimmy's group home, originally built to serve as a convent, has an aura, too.

But when I arrived at Victory Hall, I discovered that I wasn't teaching in the building itself; I was teaching in one of the ancient modulars out back. I didn't even know the modulars were there, and now I'm teaching in one.

Catholic schools used to have so many students they had to buy trailers to expand the plant.

Now they're all going or gone.

Ed has often asked how much longer Chris's Jesuit high school can hold out. It's housed on the same campus with a major education school, and major education schools have no truck with the Jesuit tradition.

and see:
cultural hegemony

good writing

All good writing consists of good sentences properly joined.

- Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg in Higher Lessons in English. A work on English grammar and composition, in which the science of the Language is made tributary to the art of expression. Revised edition, 1896.

I've been talking to Katharine Beals about writing instruction, grammar, and the sentence. (Here's Katharine's post on the erasure of the sentence).

At least since the 1980s (the 1980s again!) writing instruction has been about process, not sentences: process, voice, and the production of personal narratives and opinion pieces. Pick up nearly any college composition textbook and you will find in its pages a slew of sample student essays all written in the first person, with discussion of the sentence pushed to the back of the book. There you will find "sentence fragments" and "run ons" and "misplaced modifiers" bundled together in a chunk of pages devoted to grammar and punctuation. The sentence, in today's writing class, is mostly a source of error.

Of course, "process writing" seemed wrong to me from the get-go. I myself never, ever 'free-write,' and since I actually am a writer, I feel I'm on solid ground drawing the conclusion that 'free-writing' is a waste of instructional time.

But I became more convinced that the process approach is misguided after working with Kerrigan's X-1-2-3 method, which gives novice writers a method of building an essay on a stack of sentences with identical subjects and identical sentence structure (Subject-Verb-Object or Subject-Verb-Complement). e.g.:

X Power corrupts.
1 It corrupts the weak.
2 It corrupts the strong.
3 It corrupts all the relations between the two.

By the time I returned to the classroom to teach freshman writing, I had begun to feel that the sentence is key. Not just because sentences -- not words -- are the raw material of writing, but because the sentence is the essay in some sense. The essay makes an argument, and a sentence is an argument.

The sentence is an essay in miniature.

and see:
Cost of College on William J. Kerrigan's X-1-2-3 method

today's factoid

All but five states no longer require the teaching of cursive handwriting in public elementary schools.
With Pen in Hand, He Battles On
By GENA FEITH | September 3, 2012, 4:38 p.m. ET

Another executive decision from central administration.

Oh well. It's not as if handwriting matters, or anything.

what paradox?

ABSTRACT

Chinese classrooms present an intriguing paradox to the claim of self-determination theory that autonomy facilitates learning. Chinese teachers appear to be controlling, but Chinese students do not have poor academic performance in international comparisons. The present study addressed this paradox by examining the cultural differences in students' interpretation of teacher controlling behaviors. Affective meanings of teacher controlling behaviors were solicited from 158 Chinese 5th graders and 115 American 5th graders. It was found that the same controlling behaviors of teachers had different affective meanings for different cultural groups (Chinese vs. American) and for groups with different levels of social-emotional relatedness with teachers (high vs. low). Chinese children perceived the behaviors as less controlling than American children and, in turn, reported that they were more motivated in their teachers' class than American children. Regardless of culture, children with high social-emotional relatedness with teachers perceived the behaviors as less controlling than children with low social-emotional relatedness with teachers. It was also found that internalization mediated the relation between social-emotional relatedness and children's learning motivation in both cultures. The findings revealed cultural differences as well as similarities in the psychological process of internalization.
The Chinese Classroom Paradox: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Teacher Controlling Behaviors
Zhou, Ning 1; Lam, Shui-Fong 1; Chan, Kam Chi 2
Journal of Educational Psychology
Publish Ahead of Print, 19 March 2012

High discipline/high joy.

The secret of success.

The Jesuits figured it out 400 years ago.

US public schools forgot it back in the 1960s, I think. The 60s, or maybe not 'til 1985.

update 9/11/2012:
Doug Lemov on warm/strict
all Teach Like a Champion posts

Why rich suburban school districts are the wrong choice for 90% of the kids attending them

ABSTRACT

Being schooled with other high-achieving peers has a detrimental influence on students' self-perceptions: School-average and class-average achievement have a negative effect on academic self-concept and career aspirations-the big-fish-little-pond effect. Individual achievement, on the other hand, predicts academic self-concept and career aspirations positively. Research from Western and developed countries implies that the negative contextual effect on career aspirations is mediated by academic self-concept. Using data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2006 (a total of 398,750 15-year-old students from 57 countries), we test the generalizability of this mediation model in science using a general multilevel structural equation modeling framework. Individual achievement was positively related to academic self-concept (52 countries) and career aspirations (42 countries). The positive effect on career aspirations was mediated by self-concept in 54 countries. The negative effects of school-average achievement on self-concept (50 countries) and career aspirations (31 countries) also generalized well. After controlling for self-concept at both the individual and the school level, there were significant indirect contextual effects in 34 countries-evidence for mediation of the contextual effect of school-average achievement on career intentions by academic self-concept.
Big Fish in Little Ponds Aspire More: Mediation and Cross-Cultural Generalizability of School-Average Ability Effects on Self-Concept and Career Aspirations in Science
Nagengast, Benjamin 1 2; Marsh, Herbert W. 2 3 4 | Journal of Educational Psychology |
Publish Ahead of Print, 9 April 2012

Absolutely true.

Absolutely true.

I have seen the damage in my own child and in the children of other parents here and in neighboring towns where I tutor.

To this day, C. sees himself as stupid in math. Stupid. Not: OK in math, really good in verbal. Stupid. Can't do math.

When you're a little fish in a big pond AND YOU ARE A CHILD, WITH A CHILD'S BRAIN, AND A CHILD'S BLACK-WHITE WAY OF PUTTING TWO AND TWO TOGETHER, that's what you think.

Maybe I'll strike those all-caps later, when I read this again.

But maybe I won't.

AND SEE:
nominally high-performing schools
grade deflation and winner-take-all "star schools"

thought for the day

I want to open a Catholic school.

Seriously.

teaching math facts: equivalent sums or iterative grouping?

ABSTRACT

This experiment tested the hypothesis that organizing arithmetic fact practice by equivalent values facilitates children's understanding of math equivalence. Children (M age = 8 years 6 months, N = 104) were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 practice conditions: (a) equivalent values, in which problems were grouped by equivalent sums (e.g., 3 + 4 = 7, 2 + 5 = 7, etc.), (b) iterative, in which problems were grouped iteratively by shared addend (e.g., 3 + 1 = 4, 3 + 2 = 5, etc.), or (c) no extra practice, in which children did not receive any practice over and above what they ordinarily receive at school and home. Children then completed measures to assess their understanding of math equivalence. Children who practiced facts organized by equivalent values demonstrated a better understanding of math equivalence than children in the other 2 conditions. Results suggest that organizing arithmetic facts into conceptually related groupings may help children improve their understanding of math equivalence.
It Pays to be Organized: Organizing Arithmetic Practice Around Equivalent Values Facilitates Understanding of Math Equivalence.[Article]
McNeil, Nicole M. 1; Chesney, Dana L. 1; Matthews, Percival G. 1; Fyfe, Emily R. 1; Petersen, Lori A. 1; Dunwiddie, April E. 1; Wheeler, Mary C. 1
Journal of Educational PsychologY | Publish Ahead of Print, POST AUTHOR CORRECTIONS, 25 June 2012

grade-skipping & STEM

ABSTRACT

Using data from a 40-year longitudinal study, the authors examined 3 related hypotheses about the effects of grade skipping on future educational and occupational outcomes in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). From a combined sample of 3,467 mathematically precocious students (top 1%), a combination of exact and propensity score matching was used to create balanced comparison groups of 363 grade skippers and 657 matched controls. Results suggest that grade skippers (a) were more likely to pursue advanced degrees in STEM and author peer-reviewed publications in STEM, (b) earned their degrees and authored their 1st publication earlier, and (c) accrued more total citations and highly cited publications by age 50 years. These patterns were consistent among male participants but less so among female participants (who had a greater tendency to pursue advanced degrees in medicine or law). Findings suggest that grade skipping may enhance STEM accomplishments among the mathematically talented. (C) 2012 by the American Psychological Association
When Less Is More: Effects of Grade Skipping on Adult STEM Productivity Among Mathematically Precocious Adolescents.
Park, Gregory 1; Lubinski, David 1; Benbow, Camilla P. 1 | Journal of Educational Psychology | Print ahead July 9, 2012

My dad skipped a grade when he was a child. My mom always thought that was a mistake; she attributed his social awkwardness to that event.

Later on we all attributed it to what we believe to have been his undiagnosed Asperger syndrome.

Why aren't educational games any better?

I saw this article, and thought it was a terrific explanation why it's hard to find video games that are both compelling and educational.  (This link is for Myth 3. . . the whole series hasn't been published)

get the MESAG, part 2

Back from the Open, so summer is officially over, as opposed to emotionally over, which it was the instant Chris set foot inside his dorm.

Hate the empty nest! hate! hate! hate!

Anyway, getting back to my interrupted post on precision teaching, when you learn something to fluency, you "get the MESAG":

Maintenance	"You never forget how to ride a bicycle." When you learn content or skills to fluency, you remember them.
Endurance	This one surprised me. Fluency in content and skills means you can perform the content or skill for as long as you need to perform them. You have stamina.
Stability	Another surprise, rife with implications for our ADHD epidemic. Fluent knowledge and skills  are impervious to distraction. A noisy classroom has no effect on skills a child knows so well he can do them in his sleep. If he can do long division in his sleep, he can do long division inside Penn Station.
Application	Transferring semi-old knowledge to new contexts is hard. My favorite story re: transfer of knowledge is the little autistic boy whose parents and teachers spent months painstakingly teaching him to butter his bread. Finally he learned! Everyone was happy until, a few weeks later, they discovered that the little boy had no idea how to spread peanut butter on bread. Spreading butter on bread and spreading peanut butter on bread were two different things, and they had to start all over again. Fluency allows you to apply your bread-buttering skills to peanut-buttering bread. Autistic children, by the way, are rarely taught anything to fluency. "Discrete trial" teaching puts a ceiling on the number of repetitions a child can do in a minute. 80% correct does not equal fluency.
Generativity	Fluent knowledge and skill "repertoires" readily recombine to produce new skills that don't have to be directly taught.

Is fluency the magic that makes inflexible knowledge flexible?

why there are no child prodigies in literature, history, or philosophy

Abstract: Writing skills typically develop over a course of more than two decades as a child matures and learns the craft of composition through late adolescence and into early adulthood. The novice writer progresses from a stage of knowledge-telling to a stage of knowledge-transforming characteristic of adult writers. Professional writers advance further to an expert stage of knowledge-crafting in which representations of the author's planned content, the text itself, and the prospective reader's interpretation of the text are routinely manipulated in working memory. Knowledge-transforming, and especially knowledge-crafting, arguably occur only when sufficient executive attention is available to provide a high degree of cognitive control over the maintenance of multiple representations of the text as well as planning conceptual content, generating text, and reviewing content and text. Because executive attention is limited in capacity, such control depends on reducing the working memory demands of these writing processes through maturation and learning. It is suggested that students might best learn writing skills through cognitive apprenticeship training programs that emphasize deliberate practice.
Kellogg, R.T. (2008). Training writing skills: A cognitive developmental perspective. Journal of writing research, 1(1), 1-26

Is Handwriting Causally Related to Learning to Write?

The contribution of handwriting to learning to write was examined in an experimental training study involving beginning writers with and without an identified disability. First-grade children experiencing handwriting and writing difficulties participated in 27 fifteen-min sessions designed to improve the accuracy and fluency of their handwriting. In comparison to their peers in a contact control condition receiving instruction in phonological awareness, students in the handwriting condition made greater gains in handwriting as well as compositional fluency immediately following instruction and 6 months later, The effects of instruction were similar for students with and without an identified disability. These findings indicate that handwriting is causally related to writing and that explicit and supplemental handwriting instruction is an important element in preventing writing difficulties in the primary grades.

Is handwriting causally related to learning to write? Treatment of handwriting problems in beginning writers.
Graham, Steve; Harris, Karen R.; Fink, Barbara
Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol 92(4), Dec 2000, 620-633

"Do Academic-Track Schools Make Students Smarter?"

ABSTRACT

Prior research has shown that quantity of schooling affects the development of intelligence in childhood and adolescence. However, it is still debated whether other aspects of schooling-such as ability tracking or, more generally, school quality-can also influence intelligence. In this study, the authors analyzed intelligence gains in academic- and vocational-track schools in Germany, testing for differential effects of school quality (academic vs. vocational track) on psychometric intelligence. Longitudinal data were obtained from a sample of N = 1,038 Grade 7 and 10 students in 49 schools. A nonverbal reasoning test was used as an indicator of general psychometric intelligence, and relevant psychological and social background variables were included in the analyses. Propensity score matching was used to control for selection bias. Results showed a positive effect of attending the academic track.

The Differential Effects of School Tracking on Psychometric Intelligence: Do Academic-Track Schools Make Students Smarter? Becker, Michael 1 2 3; Ludtke, Oliver 4; Trautwein, Ulrich 5; Koller, Olaf 6; Baumert, Jurgen 2
Journal of Educational Psychology | 104(3):682-699, August 2012

Salman Khan on 60 Minutes shortly

7pm Eastern time.

"He built a platform that could completely change education."

I'm taking the other side of that bet.

get the MESAG

Another dispatch from my two weeks at Morningside's Summer School Institute:

"Get the MESAG" is Morningside's acronym for the results of fluency: get the MESAG.

Maintenance
Endurance
Stability
Application
Generativity

More tomorrow ---

let them eat iPads

I've been talking to a teacher in Manhattan who seconds Barry's argument re: the destruction of education and the preservation of inequality via technology. The more 'technological' the school, she says, the worse it is, especially when the word 'technology' and/or its synonyms appear in the school's name.

She told me about a school so bad the city was going to close it and then re-open it as the Creative Digital Minds High School. (Of course, the original name appears to have been High School of Graphic Communication Arts, which isn't a whole lot better. Although the phrase "graphic communication arts" does signal, to me, an actual skill.)

Apparently the closing-and-reopening scheme is on hold for the time being.

I think somebody should start a brand new school & call it Old School.

Chart of proposed name changes for 24 struggling schools

Mumford High, RIP

A beautiful piece from Barry on The Destruction of Education and the Preservation of Inequity:

From the fall of 1964 through June 1967, I attended Mumford High School in Detroit.... My brother and sister also attended Mumford and graduated in 1962 and 1958. As I write this, Mumford is in the process of being demolished. The demolition is part of the $500 million Detroit Public Schools Capital Improvement Program started in 2009. Because of a shrinking student population, the state is in the process of shutting down almost half the schools in Detroit. The school district is attempting to sell the shut down schools for redevelopment, an effort that has earned over $10 million since 2009.

But although Mumford is being destroyed, a new version of the high school has been built on what had been the original Mumford’s athletic field. The new school cost $52 million to build, secured by a bond issue in a city where almost half of its schools have been shut down. From the web page for the new Mumford, it is described as a “LEED Silver Certified state-of-the-art facility and will offer academic core areas, a high-tech media center, modern science laboratories, a courtyard student quad, and a community health clinic.” Mumford is one of 15 schools that has been taken out of the Detroit Public School system and assigned to Michigan’s Educational Achievement Authority–a statewide district set up for managing struggling schools. The new Mumford will open in the fall.

For those of us who grew up in a city that was at one time vibrant and had one of the best school systems in the country, it has been difficult to watch its decay.

[snip]

It is fairly easy to dismiss the decline of education in Detroit on its failing economy and its accompanying social ills and even for some to make sweeping accusations about the low cognitive ability of Detroit’s student population. But the decline of education is not limited to Detroit. It has been happening across the U.S. for quite some time, although not as catastrophically as in Detroit. The vision of education in this country for many decades has been education and equity for all. In fact, the history of the equity problems and their solutions in the U.S. has its parallels in the history of education in Detroit. It is a story of how the fight to eliminate inequity in education has actually increased it.

[snip]

During the period of the 50’s and early 60’s, Mumford had been one of the premier high schools in Detroit, competing with Cass Tech—a magnet school in the downtown area that had admission requirements—for the academic achievements of its students. Mumford was located in northwest Detroit which was a mix of working class, middle and upper middle class neighborhoods. Though predominantly Jewish, the northwest section was also home to upper middle class African Americans who attended Mumford (Graham; 1999).

[snip]

Mirel (1993) (an education professor at University of Michigan who has done much research in the history of the Detroit Public School system) points out that during the depression of the 30’s in Detroit as in the U.S as a whole, the push in education was to keep graduation rates steady and prevent drop outs. With the deficit of work, the thinking was that it was better to have young people in school than out with nothing to do. The general curriculum in Detroit at that time was experiencing a large number of failure rates. To keep the students off the streets, courses were made easier. “Descriptive” science courses were introduced in lieu of lab-based courses and focused on useful topics such as how vacuum cleaners worked. “Relevance” was the watchword just as “engagement” is now. Topics such as traffic safety were woven into classes such as civics, and schools offered courses in personal standards, focusing on topics such as diet, dress, etiquette and personal hygiene. Girls were offered courses on “Appearing to Advantage, “Homemaking”, “Use of Leisure Time” and “Bride and Trousseau”.

This pattern continued long past the depression, past World War II and into the 50’s and 60’s, during which time the influx of African Americans from the south into Detroit continued because of the well-paying factory jobs. Curricula in high schools had evolved into four different types: college-preparatory, vocational (e.g., plumbing, metal work, electrical, auto), trade-oriented (e.g., accounting, secretarial), and general.

[snip]

During the period of the 50’s and early 60’s, Mumford had been one of the premier high schools in Detroit, competing with Cass Tech—a magnet school in the downtown area that had admission requirements—for the academic achievements of its students. Mumford was located in northwest Detroit which was a mix of working class, middle and upper middle class neighborhoods. Though predominantly Jewish, the northwest section was also home to upper middle class African Americans who attended Mumford (Graham; 1999).

[snip]

Northwest Detroit started to experience the phenomenon of white flight starting in the late fifties. The flight began in the twenties, starting in a more central area of Detroit—an area that would be the site of the riots to occur in the summer of 1967—that had also been predominantly Jewish in the 20’s through the 40’s. The flight’s trajectory continued and by the 60’s included northwest Detroit where I was living, and would continue to the suburbs. The demographic of Mumford was changing as well. According to Mirel (1993), 22 percent of black students were in the general track by 1967 with whites making up only 2 percent of the general track despite it being one of the most academically oriented high schools in the city.

After graduation, most boys who were in the general and vocation tracks in Detroit were drafted and sent to Viet Nam. Boys in the college prep track who went on to college, on the other hand, were given a draft deferment status which students in the general and vocational tracks did not receive. The role of the draft policies at the time of Viet Nam played no small part in contributing to the recognition of inequity between white and blacks.

[snip]

The summer of 1967 brought the riots that ultimately escalated the white flight to the suburbs, and brought in its wake racial rifts from which some say Detroit has never recovered. In the years shortly following the riots, there were efforts to decentralize and desegregate schools—met with protest from the white communities that would be affected. A friend of mine attended Cooley High School (located a few miles away from Mumford). In 1968 he witnessed a race riot that occurred at the school in April of that year, shortly after Martin Luther King was assassinated. He described it as follows:

“It really was a travesty, particularly in that the kids fighting were the ones in tech programs, being streamed into Viet Nam. Cooley was half black, half white and a powder keg as long as I was there. I went back to visit a year after I graduated — the white exodus occurred and Cooley had become almost entirely black. Achievement was up, violence was down — it had transformed into a 50!s middle class school.”

My friend’s description is apt in a way that he may not have realized when he wrote it. To his eyes, achievement looked like it was on the rise as it did in many schools. Change had in fact come to Northern to address the protest of a few years back and it came to Cooley, Mumford and other predominantly black schools in Detroit. But the change came in the form of more “relevance”, focusing on black history, black culture, the arts, dance, and creative writing.

[snip]

The reforms in the Detroit schools were consistent with reforms brought about across the U.S. during the 60’s and 70’s, by the prevalent radical critics of schools at that time.... “Traditional” schooling was seen as an instrument of oppression and schools were recast in a new, “hipper” interpretation of what educational progressivism was supposed to be about. In moving away from the way things were, the education establishment’s goal was to restore equity to students rather than maintaining the tracking that created dividing lines between social class and race. The end product however was a merging of general track with college prep with the result that college prep was becoming student-centered and needs-based with lower standards, and less homework assigned. Classes such as Film Making and Cooking for Singles were offered, and requirements for English and History courses were reduced if not dropped. Social class and race were no longer a barrier for such classes as evidenced by the increasing numbers of white students who began taking them. With the requirements for graduation being diminished in the “general” track as a result of the student-centered fad, this track saw an increase in students from 12 percent in the late 60’s to 42 percent by the late 70’s. (Ravitch, 2003).

[snip]

Currently, high schools have an honors/AP track, and a general track. The general track consists of less rigorous courses and represents a lower level of education. Qualification for the honors/AP track starts before high school, and in elementary and middle schools, there is also a two-tier system. The higher tier (starting at about third grade) is the gifted and talented track. In general, this track provides teacher-directed traditional instruction at or above grade level. For students who do not qualify (and the criteria for qualifying vary, with differing definitions of what constitutes “giftedness”), they are placed in classes with students of varying abilities. As such, they are subjected to a one-size-fits-all curriculum that involves student-centered group activities, and project-oriented approaches to learning. This educational approach is guided by an undying faith led by the educational establishment that all we need to do is teach students how to learn, how to think critically and that facts and content are things they can look up (on Google) on a “just in time” basis whenever they really need to know. For many students, the approach is a guarantee that they will not be able to handle honors or AP courses in high school.

The elimination of inequity and tracking, therefore, has evolved to a two track system starting in lower grades and continuing on in high school. Those students not considered “smart enough for the gifted programs” are consigned to the lower track.

[snip]

In the meantime, there is a push for more technology in the schools, as if SmartBoards in every classroom and an iPad for every student is the answer. The tearing down of Mumford and the building of a state-of-the-art high school are indicative of what education has now become.

The complete article here.

off-topic: Michael Woodford endorses NGDP-targeting today at Jackson Hole

Sorry -- again -- to be so absent. I went straight from empty-nest trauma (hate the empty nest!) to a 5-day "precision teaching practicum" Erica M helped put together...and the days have gone by.

Looking forward to getting back to ktm, but before I do, I'm posting news from my other preoccupation in life: NGDP level targeting.

Until now, the campaign for NGDP level targeting has been mostly a David-and-Goliath affair. But with Michael Woodford's endorsement of NGDP-targeting today at Jackson Hole, that may have changed.

Bloomberg has also endorsed.


The merry band (alphabetical order):
David Beckworth
Lars Christensen
David Glasner
Joshua Hendrickson
Marcus Nunes: Historinhas
Evan Soltas
Bill Woolsey
Matthew Yglesias: Michael Woodford Makes The Case For NGDP Targeting

Academic Sways Central Bankers
Market Watch: Columbia University’s Woodford is key presenter at Jackson Hole

The Great Recession: Market Failure or Monetary Policy Disorder? by Robert L. Hetzel 

Another School Year - Any Surprises?

Our first day of school was canceled due to a strike by the service workers union. Of course this issue existed back in June, and of course everyone knew it will have to be decided in the courts, but there they were the night before trying to come to an agreement which both sides knew would never come. If the town canceled school the night before, the workers were prepared to show up for work the next day, so the town decided to wait until they saw the picket signs the next morning. By the time that happened, some kids were already on their busses. The union then claimed that the pickets were only informational. In then end, it didn't matter. The town went to court and the workers went back to work the next day, as everyone knew they would. This drama was supposed to get more parents on the side of the union? The problem has to do with outsourcing of the janitorial staff. This reminds me of some of the things Catherine was talking about in terms of controlling costs. It's tough to get back what you've given away for many years.

The other surprise was the real effect of cutting two busses. This meant longer routes and a need to move the earliest pickup back 10 min to 6:20am. It also meant that school would start 10 minutes earlier in the high school and the elementary school kids would get out 10 minutes later. They forgot to talk about that when they were cutting costs in the spring.

My son (junior) likes his teachers, but the intro talks by his AP teachers give him the impression that their goal is to teach these lazy kids all about hard work. This seems to be a common control meme in high school. Although the school pushes AP classes, one of his teachers claimed that they were in the class because either they thought very highly of themselves, or because their mommies and daddies told them to take the course.

two-fifths

re: oops

Here's the original image from Smarter Balanced Assessment Corporation:



And here is the Education Week adaptation of the original:


Presumably at least two people vetted this image: the person who created it and the editor who signed off on it.

Apparently neither one noticed that Figures A and C changed significantly from the first version to the second.

In the Smarter Balanced Assessment Corporation image, only Figure B. represents 2/5.

In the Ed Week image, A, B, and C all represent 2/5. (At least, Figure A. now looks as if it does to me.) As a result, the question Which model best represents 2/5? has become nonsensical.

I'm guessing this is a case of humanities-trained people -- people who 'don't use math' in real life -- knowing so little about fractions that they didn't 'see' the difference between the original image and the adaptation.

I read the news today

Just got back from taking Chris to college, boo hoo. Not a day I was looking forward to.

Now, sitting down at my computer, I find this headline: Father’s Age Is Linked to Risk of Autism and Schizophrenia.

And this, in the body:

The age of mothers had no bearing on the risk for these disorders, the study found.

I read the words aloud to Ed, who said, "We're a long ways away from refrigerator mothers."

Common Core re-defines fluency

More from the Education Week article on Common Core assessments:

He pointed to one illustrative example in PARCC’s materials that tries to gauge students’ fluency in division and multiplication. It offers five equations, such as 54÷9=24÷6, and asks 3rd graders to specify whether each is true or false.

“I like that it does multiple assessments in one item,” he said. “It asks kids to work each of those problems easily and be comfortable with it, which is what fluency is.”
Published in Print: August 22, 2012
Consortia Provide Preview of Common Assessments
By Catherine Gewertz

Offhand, I don't see how a set of five equations like these can test fluency. Fluency isn't simply a matter of accuracy, ease, and comfort. Fluency includes speed, and to assess fluency you need fluency aims, or standardized rates of performance.

How fast should a third grade student be able to answer these 5 questions? That's what you would need to know to use these equations to assess fluency, and one set of 5 simple equations probably isn't enough to measure speed.

Beyond that, I'm skeptical this is a fluency test at all. Seems to me it's more an application-of-knowledge test than a test of fluency per se.

Here's the list of fluency aims Rick Kubina culled from the precision teaching literature.

Maybe I should send a copy to PARCC.

oops

Sorry to be out of touch -- our Long Goodbye (Chris goes to college tomorrow) is taxing, and taxing is time-consuming.

Am checking in to leave this image from the new issue of Education Week. The legend says it was "adapted from Smarter Balanced Assessment Corporation."

Apparently something was lost in translation. (Page 5)

Like the meaning of two-fifths.



Consortia Provide Preview of Common Assessments
By Catherine Gewertz
Published in Print: August 22, 2012

Karen H recommends a Gettysburg address lesson in rhetoric

re: Jen's Star Spangled Banner reading comprehension lesson, Karen H points out that the Gettysburg address offers a terrific example of parallelism. Check out the Teacher Resource Guide Karen pointed me to:

Parallelism Parallelism is a rhetorical technique in which a writer emphasizes the equal value or weight of two or more ideas by expressing them in the same grammatical form. Example, “that nation so conceived,” and “any nation so dedicated.”
List all the examples you can find.

Antithesis Antithesis is a rhetorical technique in which words, phrases, or ideas are strongly contrasted, often by means of a repetition of grammatical structure. In literature, the use of antithesis as a figure of speech, results in two statements that show a contrast through the balancing of two opposite ideas. Example, “the brave men,” and “our poor power.”
List all the examples you can find.

Alliteration The repetition of the same sounds or of the same kinds of sounds at the beginning of words or in stressed syllables. Alliteration is fun to say and enjoyable to hear, and used to call attention to certain words. Alliteration is an important sound technique for mak- ing particular words stand out. It also connects the words to be emphasized. Example, “Fondly do we hope—fervently do we
pray."
List all the examples you can find.

Repetition Repetition is a classic technique in presentation and speech making. It helps tie the theme together and it creates clarity for the listener. Additionally, we remember words and phrases more readily when they are packaged in threes. Example, “We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground."
List all the repetitive examples you can find.

································

Address delivered at the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives so that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow-this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far sp nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain-that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

November 19, 1863. ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Using speeches and other historical documents to teach reading comprehension and writing:
In the Event of Moon Disaster: parallelism, cohesion, the semicolon
Karen H recommends the Gettysburg Address for a lesson in parallelism
Jen on teaching the Star Spangled Banner to her 10-year old (and see Comment thread for more)
Glen on Daniel Boone's autobiography

ktm Commenter on a jumbled sentence

Back in March (!) I posted a "jumbled sentence" from Carol Jago's book:

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 am still trying to get a handle on these sentences. How do they come to be?

What are the rules?

These sentences so foreign to me that I can't imitate them, which annoys me to no end. We need a corpus linguistics of student writing. Either that or it's time for me to finally read Mina Shaugnessey.

In the meantime, this analysis by a ktm Commenter is very helpful:

The logical flow of ideas within that sentence is actually not too bad. It's the proper referents and transitions between the sections (is there a technical term I want here?) that are lacking. It can be fixed easily so:

"If you just stop and look at things and ideas, even those you don't like, or that scare you--if you stop to explore them, then you will be a knowledgeable person who makes good decisions because you will know all the bad and all the good about the situation."

I can easily imagine the original being perfectly understood as my above translation in conversation if "and" and "ideas" were swapped (probably the author's sad attempt to be literary).

Next challenge:

These two Charater have very different mind Sets because they are creative in away that no one would imagen just put clay together and using leaves to create Art.
Is Our Children Learning Enough Grammar to Get Hired?

email from Jen re: reading comprehension & the Star Spangled Banner

I love this lesson ----

I do SAT tutoring and closely followed the posts about reading comprehension (and the lack of skills given to build it in most HS English classes). I also have a 10 yo who mentioned that he didn't really know the words to our national anthem. I pulled up the lyrics to show him and, wow, there was a perfectly sized reading comprehension lesson for a 10 year old. It could be read for understanding, visualized, and then paraphrased and summarized. (As you might imagine, he was just delighted.)
While he may still not know the lyrics perfectly in order, it was a great reading comprehension lesson. It occurred to me that it would be an excellent lesson to have in my pocket as a sub as well.

And after all that, the point of the email! I'd love to see if others on KTM can come up with other similar length or up to a page or two in length selections that could be used as effectively for comprehension, paraphrase, and summary purposes (about age 8 on up). If the passage also hits on cultural/historical/scientific knowledge like this did, even better.

····················

O say can you see by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

update 8/17/2012: Karen H points out that the Gettysburg address offers a terrific example of parallelism and other rhetorical techniques.


Using speeches and other historical documents to teach reading comprehension and writing:
In the Event of Moon Disaster: parallelism, cohesion, the semicolon
Karen H recommends the Gettysburg Address for a lesson in parallelism
Jen on teaching the Star Spangled Banner to her 10-year old (and see Comment thread for more)
Glen on Daniel Boone's autobiography

2 + 2

3 factoids:

• Public schools stopped teaching grammar decades ago because the NCTE believes teaching grammar in isolation does not improve writing. In lieu of explicit instruction, students are expected to acquire their knowledge of grammar via reading and writing. Grammar is "caught, not taught." (Phyllis Davenport)
• Reading comprehension falls apart in the 4th grade. The 4th grade slump was identified and named by Jeanne Chall in the early 1980s. 

• The syntactic complexity of the texts children read increases each year, eventually becoming more complex than anything children hear in conversation. This point is reached in the 4th grade. We have Jeanne Chall to thank for this insight, too.

So, starting in 4th grade children are supposed to learn grammar by reading texts written in a grammatical register they have never heard in conversation and never will hear in conversation. Writing is not talking, no matter how smart your parents are.

And, also starting in 4th grade, children's rate of progress in reading comprehension collapses.

Nobody seems to have noticed the coincidence. The National Reading Panel doesn't talk about syntax, E.D. Hirsch doesn't talk about syntax, and the NCTE is interested only in the question of whether formal instruction in grammar improves writing. Not reading.

No one seems to have asked himself whether it was all those precision diagrams of yore that brought children to the level of syntactical fluency that allowed 4th graders to read McGuffy Readers and 10th graders to read Dickens.

Instead, it's been left to speech-language pathologists to discover the fact that if you want children to read, you had better teach them how to read sentences, not just words.

reform writing (Robert Connors on the Erasure of the Sentence)

The War Against Grammar: Chapter 1

It's online!

One of my very favorite books.

Happy Birthday, Andrew & Chris ---

18 years old today.

I woke up in the middle of the night, thinking about their birthdays. I thought about kitchen table math, too.

This morning I told Chris that now he's 18 and going off to college, I'm not going to be his frontal lobes any more. Siri's going to have to handle that.

Siri was supposed to remind Chris to wash the car after work today. So we'll see.

• annals of Andrew
• annals of Chris
• kitchen table math begins (the page is frozen - can't be edited - so I can't fix the broken links or replace the missing images)

and

• I like math

First College Visit

I thought people might like to hear about college visits. (BTW, our son is a rising junior.) Perhaps others would like to add their experiences. We stopped at Oberlin on the way back from Interlochen to see their music conservatory. A tour of the college is a separate tour. You can apply to either or both. You can be accepted to the conservatory but not the college. Only about 20 percent of the total 2800 students are in the conservatory, and of those, maybe 25 percent are doing dual degrees - in both sides. Oberlin is very comfortable. You can see everything in about a half-hour of driving around. The college tours take longer. There really is only one hotel (so-so) in town. After about 10 blocks in any direction, the curbs stop and the farms take over. It's a small school lovers dream. The best part of the college is the complete focus on undergraduates. The downside is that maybe it's a little bit too insular. What feels initially comfortable might end up feeling quite different later on. Then again, it was summer and the place was dead. Also, some non-music students like the idea of going to a college with a conservatory attached. My niece is one of those, and she also went to look at Lawrence University in Appleton, WI. My brother-in-law really liked Lawrence. My niece liked Oberlin, but chose the College of Wooster. I think that a little snootiness slips out at times. My niece gave one example about Oberlin, and at a college fair, my son said the recruiter talked to him like a child. However, our tour host (student) was very nice. That variation is probably normal, but my brother-in-law talked about the Oberlin aura that exists in the midwest. We're from New England and Boston casts a bigger influence. I don't think my son sees himself in the very flat middle of farmland. We also did a drive by of Yale. We did their on-line virtual tour, but not the real tour. Our son liked their use of separate colleges and could see himself there, but what are the details? We don't know yet. It seems that one can make very little of any college. The question is what opportunities do you have if you try? How much do you have to compete for those opportunities?

Morningside error correction procedure

From my notes from the Morningside Academy Summer School Institute, in this scenario students are reading words on the board out loud:

Common error patterns

• Guessing
• Attending to shape of word
• Attending to only part of the word

Error correction

• NAÏVE LEARNERS: Pre-correct by underlining part of word you predict will be an error
• NAÏVE LEARNERS: Focus & change only the error portion (“I heard something else”) - DON'T write a whole separate word beside the word that was misread
• Erase only part of word and write in what you heard
• Erase multiple times – go back & forth between the word written correctly & the word written incorrectly
• EXPERIENCED LEARNERS: Discrimination correction [see below]
• Rule of thumb: 5 correct practices for every error

To explain, with naïve learners," which I take to mean beginners, if the word on the board is "tree" and a student read "tray," you would erase the double-e and write in 'ay.' You would not write the word "tray" beside the word "tree."

With experienced learners, you do write the word "tray" beside the word "tree," and then have students go back and forth between the two, reading each correctly.

Unfortunately, I no longer recall the reason for this distinction between beginners and more advanced students. I think it had to do with making sure beginners focus on the exact part of the word they are misreading.

update 8/13/2012: Children with developmental disabilities who have been taught to read with sight words may not be able to learn well from either of these discrimination procedures.

palisadesk on students reading different words than the ones on the page

I write this post to another board a few years ago to explain a major cause of these errors as in Catherine's example:

In fact there has been some solid research on this phenomenon. I can't cite chapter and verse off the top of my head, but it was done by Engelmann or perhaps others in the DI community, and investigated just that pattern you mention: children who consistently misread when for then, of for from, where for there, and similar errors of words that are usually both syntactically and visually similar. [Catherine here, interrupting for a moment: the problem I was asking about mostly involved substituting one preposition for another.]

I may not be summarizing the research 100% correctly, but the gist of it is that what we are seeing is the result of the learner having been presented with two very similar things at the same time (or almost the same time), and not having been taught either one to mastery, so that the two became fused in memory in an indistinct way, and one would be randomly substituted for the other. In the case of most of these word substitution errors, the child is correct some of the time and incorrect some of the time -- so s/he doesn't ALWAYS read "when" for "then" or vice-versa. S/he randomly says one word or the other whenever s/he is presented with either of the duo. Over time, this habit becomes a neural circuit and a learned response that is very resistant to change. It rarely is self-corrected, the way some other decoding errors are, because the misreading usually makes sense even if it is incorrect (it may not make the CORRECT sense, but it is not unintelligible). "Julia talked to Edith when she went to the mall" means something different from "Julia talked to Edith then she went to the mall", but the inaccurate reader is unlikely to notice. It's not like the horse/house instance, where if a child reads "The rider mounted his house" s/he will usually recognize that can't be right.

The DI research indicated that children easily learn what they called misrules (usually due to poor or misleading initial presentation) , and these word substitution errors fall into that category. The more the error is practiced, the harder it is to supplant it and engrave a correct response. It may take hundreds of corrections of when/then errors before the reader reliably gets those words right (has a new neural pathway). Many examples of b/d confusion are the same thing - they are not visual discrimination errors in most cases, but are simply instances of children not having learned one of the pair thoroughly before the other was introduced. When words *are* visually similar, the likelihood of confusion is increased, but the visual similarity is not the cause of the confusion. Some children, for instance, repeatedly confuse other letter pairs, or words, that bear no resemblance to each other -- r and g, for instance, and further inquiry usually finds these were introduced about the same time, the child was not provided with adequate practice to mastery, DID remember that it was either one sound or the other, and would randomly say either /g/ or /r/ when presented with either stimulus (leading teachers to say "he knew it yesterday!" when they don't appreciate the randomness of the response -- but randomness within a very narrow range of options, usually only 2 or 3). One student I had consistently confused the words "and" and "said" which had no relation or resemblance to each other, but were introduced the same week on his classroom "word wall."

One effective remedial strategy -- not the only one -- is to teach these pairs explicitly, but first one word at a time. With when/then, for instance, practice writing the word, dictating "when" sentences, reading phrases and sentences with "when" and stories with "when" (reminding the student at the outset that /when/ is the word s/he will encounter, and no discrimination between when and then will be required); then do the same with the other in the pair, then mix them up -- but have the student slowly and carefully sound out each word if necessary. The solution to those misrule/misreading learned errors is careful and targeted practice to mastery.

One analogy I use (if someone thinks of a better one, please share) is to compare the student's experience confusing when/then to someone with a drawer full of socks -- let's say 30 pairs of socks, half of them grey and half of them black. If you pull two random socks out of the drawer, you will get a matched set half the time. It may not matter much that you get a mismatched pair the other half. Unless you have some reason to pay attention, you don't need to change anything. A grey sock and a black sock keep your feet warm, so what?

I had an experience a couple of years ago that made me aware of how this process works. I had to go around and do an attendance-taking chore first thing in the morning and check off two or three students in several classrooms (long story why -- not interesting). Most of the students I knew, and I would just look in the door and see if they were there and mark the attendance sheet. One Grade 4 class, however, had 2 girls on this list, both of whom were new to me. They did not look anything alike, really -- different ethnicities, one much taller, but both wore hijab and had very unusual first names. When I was first introduced to them, I failed to ensure I knew which one was which by solidifying identifying details in my mind. Usually, both were present, and I'd look in and say to myself, There's N. and there's F -- good -- but I could have N and F mixed up, I just noted they were both there. They would straighten me out when I met them in the hall, if I addressed them by the wrong name, but I continued to mix them up for months. I realized partway through the year that this was a similar error to the mislearning children sometimes do:

--I was introduced to 2 new items to learn at the same time, and they shared some common features but I did not spend time to adequately solidify recognition of the special features of each

-- I was frequently required to rehearse my mislearning but not in a situation where it mattered if I was correct or not, and where I rarely received corrective feedback so that I could stop myself and say, Wait a minute, N is the shorter one, or some other identifying factor.

-- The more times I repeated my random error (it was random because half the time I got their names right), the more likely I was to repeat it in the future.

-- the problem was solved by one girl moving, so after that I knew the remaining girl's name. Even so, a year later, I sometimes addressed that girl by the other girl's name. The experience did provide me with an insight into how these misrules/ mislearnings happen.

The DI research into this was part of their development of the Corrective Reading Program. They did a lot of empirical testing to find out how many times students needed to get those confusions corrected before they would master them and be error-free. The number of correction required varied with the age of the student -- the longer s/he had been making the error, the more correction required. Secondary students needed many more corrections than primary students. They have published some of this data, but it is not (probably) of that great an interest to most people. The principle of mislearning and misrules and how to correct them is of general interest, however.

So is the preventative measure, one of which is to introduce the items separately (sometimes separated by long periods, days or weeks or months), ensuring each is learned to mastery (in the case of word reading, by sounding-out all through the word, and segmenting all-through-the-word for spelling). At the upper grade levels, the DI programs also have students spell the words aloud in addition to blending and segmenting them. I've been meaning to look up the research on this (I know they included it because it improved results in large-scale field trials) but don't remember the details. Oral spelling of the words is not a feature of the programs for beginning readers.

Other programs I have heard of (not the DI ones) take the bull by the horns and DO introduce commonly confused items together -- but emphasize practice to mastery right at the start, so that the confusion and "practicing mistakes" does not have a chance to occur.

No doubt there are many other reasons why individual students get particular words wrong, but many of these common substitution errors do seem to share the same features and have similar origins. Many beginning readers are not expected to master correspondences or be accurate in their word reading (if they "make meaning" it is enough) so the Engelmann hypothesis and experimental data explain the phenomena I usually see.

I'm going to look through my notes from Morningside re: "close-in non-examples." I remember them having a distinct procedure for teaching two mixed-up words.

Jeff Hawkins: memory is intelligence, intelligence is memory

I've just read the transcript of Hawkins' talk, which is posted along with the video.

Maybe this is overstating matters, but on a quick read-through of the transcript my impression is that pretty much everything Hawkins says it as odds with pretty much everything constructivist educators believe:

Intelligence is not behavior.

Intelligence is not computation.

Intelligence is memory.

Memory is memory of sequence.

The point of memory is to predict what comes next.

"[T]he neocortex is just memorizing."
"You cannot learn or recall anything outside of a sequence."
"[I]ntelligence is defined by prediction."
"[P]rediction of future inputs is the desired output."

The education establishment has for many years denigrated both memory and sequence in favor of critical thinking, problem solving, spiraling and history taught as themes instead of narratives.

Meanwhile actual experts persist in knowing stuff and in organizing the stuff they know in coherent sequences.

On the other hand, constructivists have picked up on the idea of 'pattern' and 'prediction' in a way instructivists arguably have not....but the injunction that students must 'look for a pattern' (math) and 'make predictions' (reading) seems often to be a means of avoiding sequence (math) and the kind of ordinary nouns-come-after-prepositions-type prediction Hawkins is talking about.

I don't know whether Hawkins is right, of course. Reading the transcript, I wanted to hear him talk about cognitive illusions and the invisible gorilla. (I don't remember whether he discusses illusions in his book with Sandra Blakeslee.)

From the transcript :

So what is the intuitive, but incorrect assumption, that's kept us from understanding brains? Now I'm going to tell it to you, and it's going to seem obvious that that is correct, and that's the point, right? Then I'm going to have to make an argument why you're incorrect about the other assumption. The intuitive but obvious thing is that somehow intelligence is defined by behavior, that we are intelligent because of the way that we do things and the way we behave intelligently, and I'm going to tell you that's wrong. What it is is intelligence is defined by prediction.

[snip]

The AI people said, well, the thing in the box is a programmable computer because that's equivalent to a brain, and we'll feed it some inputs and we'll get it to do something, have some behavior. And Alan Turing defined the Turing test, which is essentially saying, we'll know if something's intelligent if it behaves identical to a human. A behavioral metric of what intelligence is, and this has stuck in our minds for a long period of time.

Reality though, I call it real intelligence. Real intelligence is built on something else. We experience the world through a sequence of patterns, and we store them, and we recall them. And when we recall them, we match them up against reality, and we're making predictions all the time. It's an eternal metric.

[snip]

You're all being intelligent right now, but you're not doing anything. Maybe you're scratching yourself, or picking your nose, I don't know, but you're not doing anything right now, but you're being intelligent; you're understanding what I'm saying. Because you're intelligent and you speak English, you know what word is at the end of this -- (Silence) sentence.

[snip]

You still have that alligator brain. You do. It's your emotional brain. It's all those things, and all those gut reactions you have. And on top of it, we have this memory system called the neocortex. And the memory system is sitting over the sensory part of the brain. And so as the sensory input comes in and feeds from the old brain, it also goes up into the neocortex. And the neocortex is just memorizing. It's sitting there saying, ah, I'm going to memorize all the things that are going on: where I've been, people I've seen, things I've heard, and so on. And in the future, when it sees something similar to that again, so in a similar environment, or the exact same environment, it'll play it back. It'll start playing it back. Oh, I've been here before. And when you've been here before, this happened next. It allows you to predict the future. It allows you to, literally it feeds back the signals into your brain; they'll let you see what's going to happen next, will let you hear the word "sentence" before I said it. And it's this feeding back into the old brain that'll allow you to make very more intelligent decisions.

[snip]

So what is the recipe for brain theory? First of all, we have to have the right framework. And the framework is a memory framework, not a computation or behavior framework. It's a memory framework. How do you store and recall these sequences or patterns?

Jeff Hawkins TED talk

Haven't watched it yet, but it's probably worth the time.

Here's the blurb:

Treo creator Jeff Hawkins urges us to take a new look at the brain -- to see it not as a fast processor, but as a memory system that stores and plays back experiences to help us predict, intelligently, what will happen next.

Jeff Hawkins pioneered the development of PDAs such as the Palm and Treo. Now he's trying to understand how the human brain really works, and adapt its method -- which he describes as a deep system for storing memory -- to create new kinds of computers and tools.

dialect mismatch & the achievement gap

One current [research] focus is on the so-called "achievement gap," which refers to the lower achievement of poor and minority children in school, particularly in areas such as reading. We have begun a project that examines factors that affect African American children's early school achievement, funded by a significant seed grant from the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery. This research is being conducted by Julie Washington and Jan Edwards (Comm Dis), David Kaplan (Ed Psych), Maryellen MacDonald, Jenny Saffran, and myself (Psychology), as well as several other faculty. The focus is on ways in which language background affects early school achievement. Most African American children speak the dialect termed African American English, whereas the language in the school is some version of "standard" (also called "mainstream") American English. This dialect mismatch has many effects on the African American child's school experience; it makes tasks such as learning to read literally more difficult than for children for whom there is no dialect mismatch. Our studies focus on young children's knowledge of the alternative dialects, factors that affect ability to switch between dialects, and ways that negative effects of the mismatch can be ameliorated. The idea is to provide supplementary language experiences early, when the child's plasticity for language is high. We can also use our computational models of reading to predict where dialect differences will interfere with progress, and how experience can be structured to improve performance.

Mark S. Seidenberg
Donald O. Hebb Professor
Hilldale Professor
Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience
Overview of Research

Seidenberg's "connectionist" model of language learning and grammar contradicts Chomsky:

[S]ince Chomsky's early work, knowledge of language has been equated with knowing a grammar. Many consequences followed from this initial assumption. For example, if the child's problem is to converge on the grammar of a language, then the problem does seem intractable unless there are innate constraints on the possible forms of grammar. What if we abandon the assumption that knowledge of language is represented as a grammar in favor of, say, neural networks, a more recently developed way of thinking about knowledge representation, learning, and processing? Do the same conclusions about the innateness of linguistic knowledge follow? The answer is: not at all.

Our goal, then, has been to articulate an alternative framework for thinking about the classic questions listed above. This is not easy: traditional grammarians have about a 40 year lead on us, and only a few linguists actually think the alternative approach will succeed. However, it's a very interesting moment in the study of language. For many years the study of language was dominating by theoretical linguistics, particularly syntax. More recently, there have been important insights coming from outside of traditional grammatical theory: from computational modeling, from studies of the brain bases of learning and neurodevelopment, from renewed interest in the statistical properties of language (which were ignored for many years following Chomsky's famous observations about the statistical triviality of sentences such as "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously").

Chomsky and his followers have always had their critics. However, there was never an alternative theory that could explain basic facts, such as how children acquire language under the conditions that they do. I think for the first time we have the major components of such a theory in hand. And they suggest the remarkable possibility that the standard conclusions about the nature of language and how it is acquired are just dead wrong. This would be an incredible turn of events, a major development in the intellectual history of the study of language.

That's why it's an interesting moment to be studying language.

publications