The Secret Life of Pronouns and a pop quiz (part 1)

We've been talking, off and on, about students having trouble understanding anaphora.

Come to find out, pronouns, along with conjunctions, prepositions, and auxiliary verbs -- the so-called "function words," or "style words," as James Pennebaker calls them in The Secret Life of Pronouns -- are processed in a different part of the brain from "content words."

Function words are quite different from content words. For one thing, function words, according to Pennebaker, are almost impossible to perceive in speech. Which I assume means they are invisible in written texts as well.

Moreover, function words are extremely difficult to learn after the age of 12. Learning the content words of a foreign language is doable; learning the function words, not really.

And, last but not least, function words are highly 'social.' The meaning of a function word depends upon social context, and damage to the part of the brain that handles function words results in damage to social skills, too. Damage to the part of the brain that handles content words leaves social skills intact.

What might these findings mean for students who have difficulty understanding anaphora in written texts?

I don't know the answer to that, but I think it may mean, in part, that novice readers in college don't experience written text as written speech in the way fluent readers do.* The act of reading academic prose isn't for them a social exchange between a writer who is speaking and a reader who is listening  (a point that may be related to the argument Gerald Graff has been making for lo these many years).

Do students hear the 'voice' of an academic text? It's possible many do not. I can read Spanish and French fairy well, but I've never heard a voice in either language -- is it the same for English-speaking students who've read very little academic prose?

Do they know that academic text has a voice?

I wonder.

In any event, it seems clear to me that understanding pronouns in speech does not lead automatically to understanding the same pronouns in prose. And this problem cannot be solved by teaching vocabulary (although for reasons I'll get to later I think vocabulary instruction would help). Function words take their meaning from context.

I'm wondering whether the difficulty students have understanding anaphora inside academic prose works like this, at least in some cases:

1. Students don't experience the reading of academic prose as a social exchange. 
2. So students don't automatically interpret the anaphora used in academic text in terms of other words in the text, but instead assume that the meaning must be lodged outside the text somewhere. 

This may be a stretch. Still, reading Pennebaker in the wake of attending Morningside's Summer School Institute, I am coming to think that function words are an important piece of the reading comprehension puzzle.

Students who have no problem understanding function words in a face-to-face exchange do have problems understanding the same words in text.

Pop quiz:

How many function words exist in the English language?
How many of the words we use each day are function words?

The Psychological Function of Function Words by Cindy Chung and James Pennebaker
^* Written prose isn't written speech; spoken language and (most) written language are radically different. But a good reader experiences written prose as a form of speech. A good reader hears a 'voice' in prose.

Parents Day

sigh

Colleges are even less accountable than K-12.

If that's possible.

a math revolution too

Barry's in the Atlantic!

why do students have to sit on the floor

I'm watching the Jo Boaler video, which I see was funded by the Educational Advancement Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to imposing its ideology on other people's children (1) the development and implementation of inquiry-based learning at all educational levels in the United States, particularly in the fields of mathematics and science, and (2) the preservation and dissemination of the inquiry-based learning methodology of Dr. R.L. Moore (1882-1974).

Immediately, it struck me: students sitting on the floor. Again. I see this constantly in informational videos about inquiry-based classrooms.

Why?

Has no one in our history managed the feat of inquiring while seated at a desk?

re: the "harrassment and persecution" accusations Boaler has posted on a Stanford University website.

I have been married to a university professor for my entire adult life, and I've never seen anything like this. Stanford should direct Boaler to host her complaints on a personal website, and Milgram and Bishop should consult attorneys.

The Bishop/Clopton/Milgram critique of Boaler's research is entirely professional in content and in tone. The following is an excerpt:

Dr. Boaler kept the names of the schools private and asked that everyone trust that she had faithfully recorded the outcomes of her study. We were able to determine the identities of these schools. Then we studied the considerable amount of data in the California data base relating to these schools, as well as data requested through the Freedom of Information act or the California Public Records Act. This data includes things like school rankings, demographic data, SAT I outcomes, AP outcomes and even student level outcomes. Further, the results of the students from each of these schools on the entry level CSU4 math skills test are available. The totality of this data does not support her conclusions.

Indeed, there is only one year in the last five where any of these various measures for any cohort of students gives any advantage to the Railside students - the CST5 Algebra I exams for the ninth grade students in 2003 - and this is the only test data from that California database which is reproduced in Prof. Boaler’s report even though these data cannot represent the cohort that is the focus of the report.

We also found evidence that Dr. Boaler obtained her results by focusing on essentially different populations of students at the three schools. At Railside, her population appeared to consist primarily of the upper two quartiles, while at the other two schools the treatment group was almost entirely contained in the two middle quartiles.

A Close Examination of Jo Boaler’s Railside Report
Wayne Bishop
Dept. of Mathematics Cal. State University, LA
Paul Clopton VAMC
San Diego
R. James Milgram
Dept. of Mathematics Stanford University

Jo Boaler should provide her data to other researchers.

parents v. schools, Victorian edition

Have stumbled upon a brief history of discipline in British schools. Apparently parents have long been held in low regard by the public servants hired to teach their children:

In the early part of 1890 a teachers’ newspaper, The Schoolmistress, complained that its urban readers were under the constant threat of violence. It noted that the ‘rough language and violence heaped on teachers in some of the low and rough neighbourhoods of London and other large towns can hardly be imagined by those who have not witnessed it’. The image that the paper put forward was of a school system in a state of siege, with teachers fearing that they could be attacked at any time by the parents of their pupils. Though the lurid descriptions that appeared in The Schoolmistress were undoubtedly exaggerated for dramatic effect, they reflected a very real problem that afflicted schools at the time, which was a severe and ongoing hostility between parents and teachers.

The underlying issue in these conflicts was school discipline. By 1890 many parents were objecting to what they saw as the cruel and arbitrary use of corporal punishment then endemic within the school system. Children were not only caned but also subjected to many other forms of physical punishment, from being struck across the knuckles with slates, to receiving blows to the head with metal classroom pointers. In one case the disciplinary regime of a particular school involved a teacher stalking round the classroom, threatening children with a large knife. Parents generally thought that such forms of behaviour were inappropriate and that their children should be protected from such treatment.

Any sense of outrage felt by parents was reinforced by the fact that most of the punishment that occurred in schools was unlawful.

[snip]

The common perception of Victorian schools is that they were primitive and brutal institutions in which children were subjected to violent discipline. Though there is a certain amount of truth in this, it fails to acknowledge the general unpopularity of corporal punishment among parents as well as pupils. Even in the 19th century this type of punishment was seen as an archaic and outmoded disciplinary tool. The negative image was supported by popular literature, such as Charles Dickens’ novel Nicholas Nickleby (1838) and by real-life events, including the infamous Eastbourne Manslaughter of 1860 in which a school boy was beaten to death by his teacher. By this date opposition to corporal punishment was at its height and it was generally believed that the demise of the practice was fast approaching.

Yet the use of corporal punishment persisted. Teachers felt it had value as a disciplinary tool, believing that it was a quick and simple means by which order could be imposed on a class. Meanwhile many politicians and judges educated at public schools saw corporal punishment as a normal and natural part of childhood and had little sympathy with the objections of parents. Collectively their efforts helped to preserve its use as an educational tool and to institutionalise it as a standard disciplinary measure within schools. From the early 1890s onwards a number of administrative and legal measures were brought into effect that protected the rights of those teachers who wished to strike children. Classroom teachers were permitted to use corporal punishment and the rights of head teachers to inflict punishment were extended considerably. By the time of the First World War the parental protests against disciplinary excesses had been suppressed and corporal punishment was established as a normal and expected form of discipline. The practice was only banned in British state schools in 1987.

Spare the Rod
By Jacob Milddleton History Today | Volume: 62 Issue: 11 2012

So...it took 150 years, give or take, for parents to drive corporal punishment out of the schools.

Successive generations of U.S. parents have been agitating for phonics and a knowledge-based education in the liberal arts for -- is it 110 years now?

Give it another 40, and maybe we'll see some action.

Notice for parents new to KTM

I thought a post might be good for parents new to KTM and this problem.

Kitchen Table Math exists because many K-8 schools don't ensure mastery of basic skills. Parents have to do the work at home. And, as one can see by other posts, it's not just a problem in math. Everyday Math, a common math curriculum, spirals through the same material each year in the hope that students at all levels will master the skills when they are ready. They assume that this works by definition. They tell teachers to keep moving and to "trust the spiral". It doesn't work.

One night long ago, I told my son to stop fooling around and do his EM math homework (from a workbook, not a textbook). Ten minutes later, I saw him doing other things and told him to do his math. He said it was already done. I looked at the workbook and saw only 4 easy problems. When I asked the teacher about this, she said that they will get a chance for more practice when they spiral back to the same material. They talk about how spiraling builds on previous knowledge and skills, but I saw only repeated partial learning. One parent complained that three of her kids were covering the exact same material and they were in three different grades. Either they knew the material already and were bored, or they were still confused.

Parents learn the hard way that it doesn't work. Many schools know that it doesn't work too because they send home blanket notes to parents asking them to work on "math facts". They must know that that some parents can't or won't. Unfortunately, this problem doesn't just stop at basic arithmetic. It continues with things like fractions, percentages, and solving equations. Parents are left reteaching their kids at home or with tutors. Some parents don't see this problem until 7th grade when their bright child gets placed into the "slow" math track. It's unlikely that the student will recover after that point. It could be an ability issue, but too many students respond well to curricula like Singapore Math (as with my son) at home or with tutors. KTM is loaded with examples of how parents had to help their kids.

When my son was in fifth grade, his teacher found bright students who still didn't know the times table. Some were still adding 7+8 on their fingers. She had to stop trusting the spiral to get students back up to speed. This caused her to skip 35% of the material that year, but the focus on mastery did work. However, she did not try to get the lower grade teachers to improve mastery of the basics.

This is not difficult material if mastery of basic skills is ensured starting in the earliest grades. However, the "trust the spiral" attitude pumps problems along until many gaps have built up and teachers can't possibly diagnose and address each one. That’s why Everyday Math includes things called "Math Boxes" to try to get students to fix themselves. This makes math seem much more complicated than it really is. Schools talk about critical thinking and problem solving, but they don't define them exactly and many students can't show them on state tests designed to match these teaching ideas. Those vague skills don't make up for a lack of mastery of the basics. The best students are the ones with the best mastery of skills.

Unfortunately, the new Common Core Standards won't force K-6 schools to fix the problems of mastery. The use of the word "fluent" in the standard is sparse and the word is undefined. The new tests, like PARCC, are unlikely to put much pressure on schools to achieve a level of mastery that will keep all career doors open in K-8. Kids will still be pumped along, and the onus for keeping kids on track will still rest with parents. My advice to parents is to not trust the spiral. You have to ensure that your kids master the material the first time starting in the earliest grades. You have to ask the school when and how they track in math. You have to ensure that learning gets done to meet this tracking decision. You have to realize that "proficient" is not nearly good enough. Even "exceeding expectations" might not be good enough. Schools will talk about how wonderful it is that they get so many kids over a low cutoff proficiency level, but this is not very meaningful for individual students. Many parents quickly figure out that their standards have to be much higher that the state standards. Schools care about statistics, but parents care about individuals. What’s good for schools is not necessarily what’s good for your child.

from the Chairs Survey at the University of New Hampshire

from the report:

3) Disciplinary Disconnect. When asked what the most positive aspect of the UWR [University Writing Requirement] was, one [department] chair from CEPS wrote,

None. Students need technical writing for success and not exploratory writing.

Despite the ambiguity of the term "exploratory writing," one could infer that it points to process-based writing-to-learn procedures such as freewriting, journaling, and drafting. Such techniques tend to delay exactness and preciseness in language, two of the pinnacles of what the respondent above refers to as "technical writing."

Some may disagree with the goals of writing-to-learn and process-writing methodology. However, this comment may point to a wider issue: the disparity between what individual disciplines value as "good writing" and the values espoused by a writing program with roots in composition pedagogy. It is this disparity—what we will refer to as a disciplinary disconnect—that seems prevalent in respondents' perceptions of writing in general and in perceptions of the UWR.

In fact, as some chairs suggested, the genres and forms of writing required in different disciplines—and the way such writing should be taught—vary greatly:

Scientific writing is quite different from composition classes.

[The needs for writing instruction] depend on the specialization of the department.

Spring 2005 Chairs Survey Report
University Writing Program University of New Hampshire

"students working collaboratively to understand Freire"

Welcome to Resources for Teachers links to video posted at the California Acceleration Project, in which "developmental reading" students are discussing "The 'Banking' Concept of Education" by Paulo Freire.



INSTRUCTOR: So how does that relate to oppression?

STUDENT: 'Cuz you know it's down when it's the oppression time.

INSTRUCTOR: It sets you back.

STUDENT: Now you can't get no jobs or nothing. You got a depression, know what I'm saying, Recession.

[snip]

INSTRUCTOR: "It inhibits creative power." You know that word inhibit? Make a guess at what inhibit [unintelligible].

VARIOUS STUDENTS: Advance? Occupy? Allows?

INSTRUCTOR: That's a good guess.

STUDENTS [unintelligible]

INSTRUCTOR: From context. You look at the rest of that sentence and the whole article and what we've learned so far. Make a guess at what inhibits means.

STUDENT: [unintelligible]

INSTRUCTOR: Do you think that banking education ALLOWS creative power? Does that work?

STUDENT: Hell no. It RESTRAINS it.

INSTRUCTOR: Exactly! Exactly.

(Successful student exchanges high five with neighbor.)

INSTRUCTOR: Nice reading from context. Right on.

handwriting and grades and the wisdom of the crowd

Even legible handwriting that's messy can have its own ramifications, says Steve Graham, professor of education at Vanderbilt University. He cites several studies indicating that good handwriting can take a generic classroom test score from the 50th percentile to the 84th percentile, while bad penmanship could tank it to the 16th. "There is a reader effect that is insidious," Dr. Graham says. "People judge the quality of your ideas based on your handwriting."
How Handwriting Boosts the Brain by Gwendolyn Bounds | WSJ | October 5, 2010

I absolutely believe that. And I doubt teachers can turn this bias off. Cognitive biases can't be turned off at will.

Grades and grading are a mess. Probably for writing especially.

Speaking of writing and grades, I had a thought the other day. It's not possible, under the current system, for teachers to grade papers according to an objective standard. An A paper for one teacher is a B paper for another teacher is a C paper for a third.

In theory, a testing company can achieve 'rater reliability' by dint of extensive training sessions, although Todd Farley's account of his experience in the industry makes me wonder.

But is training-up individual graders to apply the same standards as their colleagues (even if it's possible) the best approach?

Maybe not.

Any teacher can (or should be able to) correct a paper's grammar, punctuation, and spelling. I assume teachers are going to agree on grammar, punctuation, and spelling far more often more than they disagree.

Beyond that, however, I'm not sure you actually want a uniform response across teachers. "Writing" as a profession or a business obligation means writing for an audience of more than one reader, and the individuals who make up that audience don't necessarily agree amongst themselves that you've said what you've said or that you've said it well. Writers learn from these disagreements.

Maybe students would also benefit from a 'diversity' of reader reaction?

If I had my druthers, I would scrap the letter-grading of writing altogether, apart from scoring punctuation, grammar, and spelling, simply on grounds that the letter-grading of student writing is simply too inconsistent to be credible.

I would experiment with some kind of Intrade or Wisdom of the Crowd approach. Farm papers out to a bunch of readers who read quickly and check off a thumbs-up or thumbs-down option. Something simple. Then give everyone the results for everyone.

Students would receive a kind of polling or survey result instead of a grade: a rough sense of how well their papers worked for an audience compared to papers written by their peers.

Of course, students would need to be able to read the work of their peers to see what kind of paper produced what kind of global response.

Or -- here's a thought -- perhaps schools could create an extensive set of exemplar student papers that have been 'voted on' by a large number of instructors. As a teacher of freshman writing I would kill to have such a resource myself.

I don't know whether a system along these lines would offer useful or 'actionable' information to students.

But I think it might.

Mark Helprin on writing by hand

In the Wall Street Journal's Word Craft series:

This brings up Levenger, which sells "tools for writers." The fewer tools the better, and they need not be costly or complicated. Whether you use a pencil, a pen, an old typewriter or something electrical is largely irrelevant to the result, although there is magic in writing by hand. It's not just that it has been that way for 5,000 years or more, and has engraved upon our expectations of literature the effects associated with the pen—the pauses; considerations; sometimes the racing; the scratching out; the transportation of words and phrases with arrows, lines and circles; the closeness of the eyes to the page; the very touching of the page—but that the pen, not being a machine (it does not meet the scientific definition of a machine), is a surrender to a different power than those of mere speed and efficiency.

In short, a pen (somehow) helps you think and feel. And although once you find a pen you like you'll probably stick with it the way an addict sticks with heroin, it can be anything from a Mont Blanc to a Bic. The same for paper. There are beautiful, smooth, heavy papers, but great works have been written on ration cards, legal pads and the kind of cheap paper they sell in developing countries—grayish white, almost furry, with flecks of brown and black that probably came from lizards and bats that jumped into the paper makers' vats.
Skip the Paris Cafés And Get a Good Pen by Mark Helprin

I can't help but feel there's something to this, although I don't write by hand myself. Still, I started out writing by hand, and that may be what matters. Temple told me that older architects who'd learned to draw by hand before switching to CAD continued to make good drawings. It was the younger architects, she said, who sent her blueprints with two-foot wide passageways for cattle and the like. They had never learned to draw, and their CAD drawings were severely flawed.

I don't generally give a lot of credence to intuition, but in this case my intuition coincides with a century-old belief in the value of good handwriting (at least a century). Seeing as how our predecessors seem to have known more than a few things we've forgotten, the fact that they valued fluent and beautiful handwriting strikes me as one more reason not to simply assume that "keyboarding" is to writing what washing machines are to doing your laundry in the creek.

But of course I could be completely wrong. Maybe one of these days I'll get around to reading The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture.

In the meantime, I'm going to see what Lifehacker and the Wall Street have to say about it:

• Why You Learn More Effectively By Writing Than Typing by Melanie Pinola 22 JANUARY, 2011 8:00 AM
• A Defence of Writing Longhand
• How Handwriting Boosts the Brain By GWENDOLYN BOUNDS October 5, 2010 WSJ

A few years ago, I used Betty Dubay's Write Now to try to improve C's handwriting as well as my own. My printing improved quite a bit.



image from WSJ

help desk - 2nd grade mode question

A ktm reader sends this question from her daughter's 2nd grade math book.

testing, testing

Kathleen Scalise, an associate professor at the University of Oregon who studies how computers can be used in learning, has mapped out a taxonomy of testing innovations that includes a range of nontraditional types of questions. One...shows 15 bubbles containing words like “Congressmen,” “President,” “Supreme Court,” and “Justices,” and asks students to connect them to each other using arrows and arrange them in clusters. ^*
What to Test Instead by Leon Neyfakh | Ideas | Boston Globe | September 16, 2012

Or, alternatively, you could ask students to write a coherent paragraph deploying the principles of coordination, subordination, and sentence end-focus to express the relationships among these terms.

But whatever.

^* The other one "asks students to move a pair of street lights around so that a woman shown on the screen casts two shadows."

Is this true?

Each school day, millions of students move in unison from classroom to classroom where they listen to 50- to 90-minute lectures. Despite there being anywhere from 20 to 300 humans in the room, there is little actual interaction. This model of education is so commonplace that we have accepted it as a given. For centuries, it has been the most economical way to “educate” a large number of students.
Why School Should Focus on Engagement Instead of Lectures by Salman Khan

I'm trying to think how long I talk at a stretch, with no word from my students.

Five minutes? (For passersby, I teach freshman composition in the context of an English class.)

I'll have to time myself.

It strikes me as unlikely in the extreme that "millions of students" are spending entire school days listening to 50- to 90-minute lectures 6 hours a day.

In fact, it strikes me as being at least somewhat unlikely you could force millions of students to listen to 50- to 90-minute lectures 6 hours a day even if you tried. But I could be wrong.

My impression (and again, I don't know) is that the only teachers using straight lecture as their predominant or exclusive method of conveying knowledge to students are college professors teaching lecture courses. And lecture courses in my experience typically have "recitation" or "discussion" sections where the content of the lecture is elaborated and questions answered.

Plus college students take four courses, or thereabouts, each of which meets typically 2 to 3 times a week, so college students aren't spending 6 hours a day listening to lecture even when they're taking 4 lecture courses.

Besides which, I object to the blanket assumption that lecture is somehow an intrinsically bad form. The lecture is a time-honored, efficient, and often inspiring means of organizing and communicating material from an expert to a novice -- or from an expert to a colleague.....

And with that, I see I've veered off-topic.

A school would play heck getting me to pay attention to 6 hours of lecture a day, that's for sure. I don't have the focus.

Good thing no school I attended ever tried it.

Back to K-12. My intended topic is not to ask: Do students listen to lecture? I'm sure they do.

My intended topic is to ask: Do students in K-12 spend 6 hours a day moving in unison from classroom to classroom where they listen to 50-to 90-minute lectures?

(And, if they do, my follow-up question is: how is that possible?)

People seem to think "explicit instruction" means lecture, which is not remotely the case.

See, e.g.:
Barak Rosenshine, Five Meanings of Direct Instruction and Principles of Instruction; and Doug Lemov, Teach Like a Champion.

Not only does "explicit instruction" not mean "lecture," it means almost the opposite. I recall watching a professional development video on direct instruction a few years back (no longer available online, it appears) in which the presenter gave teachers an explicit figure for the number of questions they were advised to ask per each 20 minute segment of class time.

It was a lot.

[pause]

OK, here we go. The Use of Questions in Teaching, 1970:

Certainly teachers ask many questions during an average school day. A half-century ago, Stevens (1912) estimated that four-fifths of school time was occupied with question-and-answer recitations. Stevens found that a sample of high-school teachers asked a mean number of 395 questions per day. High frequencies of question use by teachers were also found in recent investigations: 10 primary-grade teachers asked an average of 348 questions each during a school day (Floyd, 1960); 12 elementary-school teachers asked an average of 180 questions each in a science lesson (Moyer, 1965); and 14 fifth-grade teachers asked an average of 64 questions each in a 30-minute social studies lesson (Schreiber, 1967). Furthermore, students are exposed to many questions in their textbooks and on examinations. [emphasis added] 

This is what everyone on the planet (our current planet, I mean) seems to have forgotten: old-time teaching wasn't about teachers standing on a stage delivering a lecture for 50 or 90 minutes.

How could it have been?

How would that work in a one-room schoolhouse?

Old-time teaching, as far as I can tell, was highly interactive and fundamentally social. Probably most effective teaching is fundamentally social; at least, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it is.

And that's the problem with trying to learn math from a math video. It's lonely!

I'm pretty sure that reforms whose purpose is to topple straw men are the wrong reforms.

revenge of the nerds, part 2

This is for all you parents out there who have tried to forced your teenage kids to watch Khan videos to figure out their homework.

revenge of the nerds

Had never heard of this video and am guffawing as I watch. I LOLLed, literally, when I reached the part where one of the math guys says Salman Khan "really ought to do a handwriting video, too."



Karim Kai Ani (Khan Academy: The Hype and the Reality) says Khan replaced the video, but quotes Khan's reaction as: “It’s kind of weird...when people are nitpicking about multiplying negative numbers.”

Question: Why is Salman Khan a rock star?

Seriously.

Because that's what he is. He was the keynote at this year's so-called Celebration of Teaching and Learning, and he was a rock star. They had to post guards outside the room where he gave his workshop to keep the crowds out.

I blame the multi-verse.

writing is thinking, part 2

I was talking to my friend R., an attorney, about 'Writing is thinking.'

She says, Absolutely, writing is thinking: if you can't explain something in writing, you don't understand it.

I believe that myself^* and have experienced it many times. For me, writing is a diagnostic. When I discover that I can't put a concept or argument into words, I realize that I don't understand the concept. I don't know what I'm talking about, literally.

But I didn't know that going in.

^* For verbal disciplines -- this idea has been wildly over-generalized to math.

impulse

I'm thinking of starting a new blog called Rolling Calamity.

A spin-off.

the rules

At breakfast: Ed's talking about last night's game (Eagles v. Giants). Ed says the refs -- the regular refs, who are back on the job -- were making calls the replacement refs didn't, and the game was a thriller as a result.

What's been interesting about the replacement ref situation, to me, is the fact that the whole game of football -- almost the whole enterprise of professional football -- seemed to pretty much fell apart the instant the real refs left the field and the rules of football were being unpredictably observed and enforced. This episode has been an object lesson in the foundational importance rules: without the rules, you don't have a game.

Of course we all know that at some level, but ... we don't know the way we should. At least, I don't, or didn't. I was pretty gobsmacked by the misery of the fans over the past month.

Ed's reading to me now: 'when the officials walked onto the field they received a rousing standing ovation.'

Ed says: the rules have to be enforced, and they have to be enforced strongly.

It's the same thing with writing.

You need the "rules" -- and you need "strong' rules: rules teachers and students take seriously.

Writing without "rules" isn't writing.

And writing with only the faintest notion of what the rules are is bad writing.

and see:
American has survived the NFL's replacement refs
NFL officials receive loud cheers in first night back
David Foster Wallace on the seamy underbelly
speaking of grammar to enhance and enrich writing

David Foster Wallace on the seamy underbelly (and The Writing Revolution)

Did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of U.S. lexicography reveals ideological strife and controversy and intrigue and nastiness and fervor on a nearly hanging-chad scale? For instance, did you know that some modem dictionaries are notoriously liberal and others notoriously conservative, and that certain conservative dictionaries were actually conceived and designed as corrective responses to the "corruption"and "permissiveness" of certain liberal dictionaries? That the oligarchic device of having a special "Distinguished Usage Panel of outstanding professional speakers and writers" is an attempted, compromise between the forces of egalitarianism and traditionalism in English, but that most linguistic liberals dismiss the Usage Panel as mere sham populism!

Did you know that U.S. lexicography even had a seamy underbelly?
Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars Over Usage by David Foster Wallace | Harper's Magazine | April 2001

I was talking to Ed about this last night: my answer is, No I did not know (until just a couple of months ago) that U.S. lexicography had a seamy underbelly, and I am semi-sorry to learn that it does.^*

"Semi-sorry" because, in theory, I think discord and debate are good things in a democracy (and in a discipline). But "sorry" because I don't agree with the terms of the debate.

Scratch that. It's not that I don't agree with the terms of the debate. (The debate being: prescriptivist v. descriptivist.) It's that I don't relate to the terms of the debate. And I am a professional writer. I live by words (sentences and paragraphs, actually); I eat, breathe, and sleep words; I am an obsessive reader....

And I don't relate.

I don't care about prescriptivist, and I don't care about descriptivist. Not as battle stations in a shooting war. Not as anything, really. Where expository writing is concerned, I don't care about prescriptivist/descriptivist because prescriptivist/descriptivist is the wrong way to order the universe.

Which brings me back to the Atlantic piece:

The Hochman Program, as it is sometimes called, would not be un­familiar to nuns who taught in Catholic schools circa 1950. Children do not have to “catch” a single thing. They are explicitly taught how to turn ideas into simple sentences, and how to construct complex sentences from simple ones by supplying the answer to three prompts—but, because, and so. They are instructed on how to use appositive clauses to vary the way their sentences begin. Later on, they are taught how to recognize sentence fragments, how to pull the main idea from a paragraph, and how to form a main idea on their own. It is, at least initially, a rigid, unswerving formula. “I prefer recipe,” Hochman says, “but formula? Yes! Okay!”

Hochman, 75, has chin-length blond hair and big features. Her voice, usually gentle, rises almost to a shout when she talks about poor writing instruction. “The thing is, kids need a formula, at least at first, because what we are asking them to do is very difficult. So God, let’s stop acting like they should just know how to do it. Give them a formula! Later, when they understand the rules of good writing, they can figure out how to break them.”

I don't get this!

If a rule is really a rule, why would you break it?

Why would you write "a white small house" instead of "a small white house" just because you've mastered the rule that says size comes before color?

You wouldn't.

Good expository prose isn't fundamentally about breaking the rules. I'd put money on it Ms. Hochman doesn't encourage a lot of expository rule-breaking in her students; I'd also put money on it Ms. Hochman is friendlier to "1950s drill and kill" than she's willing to admit.^** At least, I hope she is.

Poetry and fiction may depend importantly upon rule-breaking. (I don't know.) But expository writing does not.

So why do we chronically have to come back to solemn invocations of "1950s" drill and kill accompanied by the inevitable assurance that, Don't worry, students who are actually being taught to write will get to 'break the rules' later on?

Answer: we chronically have to come back to solemn invocations of 1950s drill and kill, and to assurances that students will get to break the rules later on, because the terms of the debate are wrong.

Expository writing is not properly understood as a tension between prescriptivism (following the rules) and descriptivism (ignoring the rules, breaking the rules, and/or believing that the rules are whatever everyone happens to be doing now, whether they're any good at doing what they're doing or not).

Expository writing is properly understood as a practice akin to tennis, or to music. The "rules," so-called, aren't rules at all; they are techniques. Time-honored techniques that exist because they work.

Take the rule about putting a topic sentence at the beginning of a paragraph. Putting a topic sentence at the beginning of a paragraph; having a topic sentence in the first place; writing in paragraphs at all: these are techniques for thinking, communicating, and persuading that were invented by humans and,  subsequently, imitated by other humans because they work. A topic sentence at the beginning of a paragraph helps you communicate, helps you persuade, and probably helps you think as well.

In short, putting a topic sentence at the beginning of a paragraph is the most effective mode of expository paragraph writing we've come up with to date. If and when somebody else comes up with a better way to think, communicate, and persuade in writing, a new rule will be born, and the topic-sentence-at-the-beginning-of-a-paragraph rule will cease to exist.

Part 2. Writing instruction, in this country, is a rolling calamity.^*** One reason why it's a rolling calamity, I'm convinced, is that people are fighting about the wrong thing. Good writing isn't about following the rules AND good writing isn't about breaking the rules, ignoring the rules, or not knowing any rules in the first place. Good writing isn't about rules.

Good writing is about technique.

Back to the topic sentence. The writers who invented the topic sentence didn't invent a rule. In fact, the writers who invented the topic sentence didn't invent the topic sentence. Not consciously. They didn't have a name for the new sentence they were using. (At least, I don't think they did.) They developed the topic sentence through trial and error, and when they saw how well it worked they used it more and more often until the topic sentence became an established and favored technique.

Other people - teachers? scholars? - observed what writers were doing, characterized it in formal terms, and gave it a name: topic sentence. That was the moment the topic sentence became a 'rule': the moment it was observed, described, and named. But it's not a rule in the prescriptivist/descriptivist sense of the word 'rule.' The Topic Sentence 'rule' is an empirical observation of the way actual writers actually write. Actual writers (tend to) put topic sentences at the beginning of their paragraphs.^**** Hence the rule. The prescriptivist rule is a descriptivist description.

The proper goal of teaching expository writing in school, as every parent and taxpayer understands, is to teach effective expository writing, same as teaching tennis or how to play the piano. In tennis and piano, no one teaches "rules" they don't believe in -- no one teaches "rules" at all. Tennis instructors don't teach students a decent groundstroke while assuring parents and the broader public that: Don't worry, they can forget about their groundstroke down the line. A good tennis player never forgets about his groundstroke. A good tennis player practices his groundstroke and makes it better. Ditto good writers. A good writer doesn't forget about topic sentences once s/he knows how to write one. A good writer writes better topic sentences.

(Or, yes, maybe a good writer plays with the form. Maybe a good writer writes a two-part topic sentence using two sentences, not one, or maybe s/he divides a paragraph into 3 or 4 short, one-sentence paragraphs, with just the one topic sentence up at the top of the sequence. These are variations on a theme, serving the same purpose: effective communication, persuasion, and thought achieved via a topic sentence.)

Here is my frustration, reading an otherwise invaluable articles like Peg Tyre's The Writing Revolution.

I don't care what Lucy Calkins thinks about Judith Hochman.

I want to know what the people at Morningside think about Judith Hochman. I want to know what the people at Well-Trained Mind think. I want to know what Stanley Fish thinks.

I want to hear an argument and a debate between and among the practitioners of effective writing instruction that explicitly teaches effective writing.

And I don't want to hear another word about rules.

The rules aren't rules.

The rules are techniques.

^* Ed did not know that prescriptivists and descriptivists exist until last night. Lucky him.
^** I didn't notice any instances of creative rule-breaking in "The Writing Revolution."
^*** Homage to Peggy Noonan.
^**** I think it's possible the Topic Sentence rule is changing with the shift to shorter paragraphs. It's a possibility.

Benjamin Cardozo on metaphors in law

Justice Rehnquist cites Cardozo in his Dissent in Wallace v. Jaffree:

Metaphors in law are to be narrowly watched, for starting as devices to liberate thought, they end often by enslaving it.
- Benjamin Cardozo 1926

and see:
the Establishment Clause
Free Exercise Clause
Wallace vs Jaffree
the Lemon test
Lemon v. Kurzman 
Lemon test

Justice Rehnquist lists "unprincipled" and "inconsistent" decisions
Justice Rehnquist on school prayer and the Constitution
Jefferson's "wall of separation"
Justice Burger's dissent in Wallace v. Jaffree
Benjamin Cardozo on metaphors in law

Justice Burger's dissent in Wallace vs. Jaffree

from Justice Burger's dissent in Wallace vs. Jaffree

Some who trouble to read the opinions in these cases will find it ironic-perhaps even bizarre-that on the very day we heard arguments in the cases, the Court's session opened with an invocation for Divine protection. Across the park a few hundred yards away, the House of Representatives and the Senate regularly open each session with a prayer. These legislative prayers are not just one minute in duration, but are extended, thoughtful invocations and prayers for Divine guidance. They are given, as they have been since 1789, by clergy appointed as official chaplains and paid from the Treasury of the United States. Congress has also provided chapels in the Capitol, at public expense, where Members and others may pause for prayer, meditation--or a moment of silence.

[snip]

I make several points about today's curious holding.

(a) It makes no sense to say that Alabama has "endorsed prayer" by merely enacting a new statute "to specify expressly that voluntary prayer is one of the authorized activities during a moment of silence," ante, at 77 (O'CONNOR, J., concurring in judgment) (emphasis added). To suggest that a moment-of-silence statute that includes the word "prayer" unconstitutionally endorses religion, while one that simply provides for a moment of silence does not, manifests not neutrality but hostility toward religion. For decades our opinions have stated that hostility toward any religion or toward all religions is as much forbidden by the Constitution as is an official establishment of religion. The Alabama Legislature has no more "endorsed" religion than a state or the Congress does when it provides for legislative chaplains, or than this Court does when it opens each session with an invocation to God. Today's decision recalls the observations of Justice Goldberg:

"[U]ntutored devotion to the concept of neutrality can lead to invocation or approval of results which partake not simply of that noninterference and noninvolvement with the religious which the Constitution commands, but of a brooding and pervasive dedication to the secular and a passive, or even active, hostility to the religious. Such results are not only not compelled by the Constitution, but, it seems to me, are prohibited by it." Abington School District v. Schempp, 374 U. S. 203, 306 (1963) (concurring opinion).

[snip]

(c) The Court's extended treatment of the "test" of Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U. S. 602 (1971), suggests a naive preoccupation with an easy, bright-line approach for addressing constitutional issues. We have repeatedly cautioned that Lemon did not establish a rigid caliper capable of resolving every Establishment Clause issue, but that it sought only to provide "signposts." "In each [Establishment Clause] case, the inquiry calls for line-drawing; no fixed, per se rule can be framed." Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U. S. 668, 678 (1984)....In any event, our responsibility is not to apply tidy formulas by rote; our duty is to determine whether the statute or practice at issue is a step toward establishing a state religion.

Given today's decision, however, perhaps it is understandable that the opinions in support of the judgment all but ignore the Establishment Clause itself and the concerns that underlie it.

(d) The notion that the Alabama statute is a step toward creating an established church borders on, if it does not trespass into, the ridiculous. The statute does not remotely threaten religious liberty; it affirmatively furthers the values of religious freedom and tolerance that the Establishment Clause was designed to protect. Without pressuring those who do not wish to pray, the statute simply creates an opportunity to think, to plan, or to pray if one wishes--as Congress does by providing chaplains and chapels.

[snip]

If the government may not accommodate religious needs when it does so in a wholly neutral and noncoercive manner, the "benevolent neutrality" that we have long considered the correct constitutional standard will quickly translate into the "callous indifference" that the Court has consistently held the Establishment Clause does not require. The Court today has ignored the wise admonition of Justice Goldberg that "the measure of constitutional adjudication is the ability and willingness to distinguish between real threat and mere shadow." Abington School District v. Schempp, 374 U. S., at 308 (concurring opinion). The innocuous statute that the Court strikes down does not even rise to the level of "mere shadow." JUSTICE O'CONNOR paradoxically acknowledges: "It is difficult to discern a serious threat to religious liberty from a room of silent, thoughtful schoolchildren." Ante, at 73. 5 I would add to that, "even if they choose to pray."

The mountains have labored and brought forth a mouse.

and see:
the Establishment Clause
Free Exercise Clause
Wallace vs Jaffree
the Lemon test
Lemon v. Kurzman 
Lemon test

Justice Rehnquist lists "unprincipled" and "inconsistent" decisions
Justice Rehnquist on school prayer and the Constitution
Jefferson's "wall of separation"
Justice Burger's dissent in Wallace v. Jaffree
Benjamin Cardozo on metaphors in law

Jefferson's "wall of separation"

from Rehnquist's Dissent, in Wallace vs. Jaffree:

Thirty-eight years ago this Court, in Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1, 16 (1947), summarized its exegesis of Establishment Clause doctrine thus:

"In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect 'a wall of separation between church and State.' Reynolds v. United States, [98 U. S. 145, 164 (1879)].

This language from Reynolds, a case involving the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment rather than the Establishment Clause, quoted from Thomas Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptist Association the phrase "I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole Americanpeople which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and State."  Writings of Thomas Jefferson 113 (H. Washington ed. 1861).

It is impossible to build sound constitutional doctrine upon a mistaken understanding of constitutional history, but unfortunately the Establishment Clause has been expressly freighted with Jefferson's misleading metaphor for nearly 40 years. Thomas Jefferson was of course in France at the time the constitutional Amendments known as the Bill of Rights were passed by Congress and ratified by the States. His letter to the Danbury Baptist Association was a short note of courtesy, written 14 years after the Amendments were passed by Congress. He would seem to any detached observer as a less than ideal source of contemporary history as to the meaning of the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment.

Jefferson's fellow Virginian, James Madison, with whom he was joined in the battle for the enactment of the Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty of 1786, did playas large a part as anyone in the drafting of the Bill of Rights. He had two advantages over Jefferson in this regard: he was present in the United States, and he was a leading Member of the First Congress. But when we turn to the record of the proceedings in the First Congress leading up to the adoption of the Establishment Clause of the' Constitution, including Madison's significant contributions thereto, we see a far different picture of its purpose than the highly simplified "wall of separation between church and State."

After this opening, Rehnquist reviews the process by which the Establishment Clause came to be included in the Bill of Rights. Rehnquist shows that the notion of state neutrality toward religion did not come up in the deliberations of the First Congress.

Ed says that if you read our friend Ruth Bloch's Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756-1800, you understand that it would not have been possible for the founders to have intended that the state be neutral on the subject of religion. The founders lived in a religious world. Secularism had yet to be invented, and neutrality did not exist. In fact, the Representatives spent time considering how to write an Establishment Clause so that it did not interfere with the state-established churches in New England, which were then "the rule rather than the exception" according to Rehnquist.

My favorite bit of historical evidence from Rehnquist's dissent is the fact that on the very day Madison introduced his proposed language for the Establishment clause, the First Congress reenacted the Northwest Ordinance. The Northwest Ordinance provided that:

"[r]eligion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged."

and see:
the Establishment Clause
Free Exercise Clause
Wallace vs Jaffree
the Lemon test
Lemon v. Kurzman 
Lemon test

Justice Rehnquist lists "unprincipled" and "inconsistent" decisions
Justice Rehnquist on school prayer and the Constitution
Jefferson's "wall of separation"
Justice Burger's dissent in Wallace v. Jaffree
Benjamin Cardozo on metaphors in law

Justice Rehnquist on school prayer and the Constitution

My first post on Wallace vs. Jaffree did not make clear that Justice Rehnquist supported Alabama's statute § 16-1-20.1, which authorized "a 1-minute period of silence in all public schools 'for meditation or voluntary prayer.'"

An Appeals Court found 16-1-20.1 unconstitutional; the Supreme Court upheld.

Justices Rehnquist, White, and Burger dissented. They argue that prayer in public schools is constitutional.

Here is Rehnquist:

The Framers intended the Establishment Clause to prohibit the designation of any church as a "national" one. The Clause was also designed to stop the Federal Government from asserting a preference for one religious denomination or sect over others. Given the "incorporation" of the Establishment Clause as against the States via the Fourteenth Amendment in Everson [1947], States are prohibited as well from establishing a religion or discriminating between sects. As its history abundantly shows, however, nothing in the Establishment Clause requires government to be strictly neutral between religion and irreligion, nor does that Clause prohibit Congress or the States from pursuing legitimate secular ends through nondiscriminatory sectarian means.

The Court strikes down the Alabama statute because the State wished to "characterize prayer as a favored practice." Ante, at 60. It would come as much of a shock to those who drafted the Bill of Rights as it will to a large number of thoughtful Americans today to learn that the Constitution, as construed by the majority, prohibits the Alabama Legislature from "endorsing" prayer. George Washington himself, at the request of the very Congress which passed the Bill of Rights, proclaimed a day of "public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God." History must judge whether it was the Father of his Country in 1789, or a majority of the Court today, which has strayed from the meaning of the Establishment Clause.

The State surely has a secular interest in regulating the manner in which public schools are conducted. Nothing in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, properly understood, prohibits any such generalized "endorsement" of prayer. I would therefore reverse the judgment of the Court of Appeals.

I'll post excerpts from Justice Burger's dissent as well.


and see:
the Establishment Clause
Free Exercise Clause
Wallace vs Jaffree
the Lemon test
Lemon v. Kurzman 
Lemon test

Justice Rehnquist lists "unprincipled" and "inconsistent" decisions
Justice Rehnquist on school prayer and the Constitution
Jefferson's "wall of separation"
Justice Burger's dissent in Wallace v. Jaffree
Benjamin Cardozo on metaphors in law

bad writing, bad thinking

From the Atlantic article (Grace's post  here):

And so the school’s principal, Deirdre DeAngelis, began a detailed investigation into why, ultimately, New Dorp’s students were failing. By 2008, she and her faculty had come to a singular answer: bad writing. Students’ inability to translate thoughts into coherent, well-argued sentences, paragraphs, and essays was severely impeding intellectual growth in many subjects.

"Writing is thinking."

You hear that, and, if you're me, you believe it.

But what does it mean, exactly?

I'm thinking Douglas Biber's work on corpus linguistics has light to shed. Will try to translate my thoughts re: Biber into a set of coherent sentences in the not too distant future.

'good writing matters'

in the Atlantic:

I have an MBA and was a turnaround corporate and real estate banker for over 23 years. My husband also has an MBA and is a senior-level manager in the financial services industry. What we've both seen, in the course of our careers, is that good writing matters. While the weak writers may get hired -- job interviews rarely require a writing sample -- once the candidates get the job, they don't tend to go far. Soon after they start work, they are asked to prepare a presentation or simply send an email. Then, the trouble begins.

Writing longer pieces -- presentations, for example -- only confirms the negative impression weak writers make in the workplace. While they might be very intelligent, their inability to clearly and concisely advocate their position on paper completely undermines their reputation. As a result, others become reluctant to have them on their team. Even individuals in verbally focused careers such as sales need to write pitches and send frequent follow-up correspondence.

When my husband and I were children in the public education system, we routinely wrote five to six paragraph essays across several subjects. We also learned proper handwriting, a skill that's far too underrated today. (One cannot use the computer to fill out a worksheet or critique a colleague's hard-copy document.) In addition, we rarely took multiple choice tests, instead tackling open-ended questions that required at least full-sentence answers. None of this is the case in many schools today. What's particularly frustrating to us is seeing these shortcomings in a school district like ours, one that has far fewer obstacles than a lower-income school like New Dorp.
Why I Took My Child Out of Public School

As long as process pedagogy rules the day, matters will not improve.

Of course, it could always be worse:

Pedagogical resistance is perhaps most apparent in the claim that writing cannot be taught, which stems from the argument forwarded by Kent that writing is a situated, interpretive, and indeterminate act. In Paralogic Rhetoric, Kent suggests that accepting a post-process perspective (at least in a paralogic sense) means rejecting process as the ultimate explanation for the writing act and instead recognizing the role of interpretation and indeterminacy in the writing act. Consequently, if we consider writing as an indeterminate and interpretive activity, he asserts, then "writing and reading -- conceived broadly as processes or bodies of knowledge -- cannot be taught, for nothing exists to teach" (161).
Post-Process "Pedagogy": A Philosophical Exercise by Lee-Ann M. Kastman Breuch

I wonder how post-process people feel about comma splices.

all teachers should pay attention to anaphora

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that Morningside teaches students how to read anaphora, and that my own freshmen students seem to have difficulty understanding anaphora.

I saw another example this week (post here).

Some combinations of words are possible in English, while others are not possible. Every native speaker of English can easily judge that ‘Home computers are now much cheaper’ is a possible English sentence, whereas “Home computers now much are cheaper” is not, because they know that “much” is wrongly positioned in the second example. The ability to recognise such distinctions is evidence that in some sense native speakers already know the rules of grammar, even if they have never formally studied grammar….”
An Introduction to English Grammar by Sidney Greenbaum and Gerald Nelson

Most of my students did not know what the words "such distinctions" referred to. They did not know that the authors were alluding to the distinction they had just made, in the previous sentence, between ‘Home computers are now much cheaper’ and 'Home computers now much are cheaper.'

My students understood the first two sentences of the paragraph perfectly. That wasn't the problem.

They were having a specific problem with the words "such distinctions." They believed that the author had brought up a new issue referring to something 'out in the world,' and they were stumped because they couldn't tell what that new issue might be. What distinctions, out in the world, were the authors talking about?

So now we're focusing directly and explicitly on anaphora in the texts we read.

At the moment I'm thinking you could produce a huge jump in reading comprehension in an awful lot of students just by teaching anaphora comprehension explicitly and making sure students become fluent in reading and understanding anaphora.

I'm also thinking this may be a skill students can pick up quickly.

We'll see.

Revolutionary writing instruction that is 'an old idea done better'

Here's another case of everything old is new again.  A New York City school finds that returning to fundamentals like explicit grammar instruction and formulaic writing has succeeded in turning around the dismal performance of high poverty students.  No iPads were required.

The problems at New Dorp High School were similar to many that afflict other lower-income public schools.

... students from poor and working-class families. In 2006, 82 percent of freshmen entered the school reading below grade level. Students routinely scored poorly on the English and history Regents exams....

Students’ inability to translate thoughts into coherent, well-argued sentences, paragraphs, and essays was severely impeding intellectual growth in many subjects....

... the students’ sentences were short and disjointed.

... These 14- and 15-year-olds didn’t know how to use some basic parts of speech. With such grammatical gaps, it was a wonder they learned as much as they did. “Yes, they could read simple sentences,” but works like the Gettysburg Address were beyond them—not because they were too lazy to look up words they didn’t know, but because “they were missing a crucial understanding of how language works.

This writing skills problem is widespread.

According to the Nation’s Report Card, in 2007, the latest year for which this data is available, only 1 percent of all 12th-graders nationwide could write a sophisticated, well-­organized essay. Other research has shown that 70 to 75 percent of students in grades four through 12 write poorly. ... for decades, achievement rates in writing have remained low.

There appears to be a massive failure in learning writing skills.  What type of writing instruction is used in most public schools?

... elementary-­school students ... today mostly learn writing by constructing personal narratives, memoirs, and small works of fiction ...

... pedagogical pendulum that has swung too far, favoring self-­expression and emotion over lucid communication....

For most of the 1990s, elementary- and middle-­school children kept journals in which they wrote personal narratives, poetry, and memoirs and engaged in “peer editing,” without much attention to formal composition....

The explicit instruction of previous times has morphed into discovery learning, where students are encouraged to figure it out themselves, to "construct" their own learning.  Being creative has become more important than following formal rules.

... Fifty years ago, elementary-school teachers taught the general rules of spelling and the structure of sentences. Later instruction focused on building solid paragraphs into full-blown essays....  About 25 years ago, in an effort to enliven instruction and get more kids writing, schools of education began promoting a different approach. The popular thinking was that writing should be “caught, not taught,” explains Steven Graham, a professor of education instruction at Arizona State University. Roughly, it was supposed to work like this: Give students interesting creative-writing assignments; put that writing in a fun, social context in which kids share their work. Kids, the theory goes, will “catch” what they need in order to be successful writers. Formal lessons in grammar, sentence structure, and essay-writing took a back seat to creative expression.

Low-income students have particularly suffered from the current approach.

The catch method works for some kids, to a point... Kids who come from poverty, who had weak early instruction, or who have learning difficulties, he explains, “can’t catch anywhere near what they need” to write an essay....

New Dorp High School tried something different.

Education schools don't spend much time on how to teach writing, so it's not surprising that New Dorp teachers were unaware of their own teaching failures.  They blamed the students' poor performance on poverty, low intelligence, or laziness.  The school tried 'innovative' methods, like small learning communities and special after-school programs.  Nothing worked, until they carefully explored the missing skills and took specific steps to address the gaps.  Deirdre DeAngelis, the school principal, learned of the acclaimed writing program used by principal Judith Hochman of the Windward School, a private school for learning disabled children.

The way Catholic schools used to teach, using explicit instruction and a writing "formula"

The Hochman Program, as it is sometimes called, would not be un­familiar to nuns who taught in Catholic schools circa 1950. Children do not have to “catch” a single thing. They are explicitly taught how to turn ideas into simple sentences, and how to construct complex sentences from simple ones... It is, at least initially, a rigid, unswerving formula. “I prefer recipe,” Hochman says, “but formula? Yes! Okay!”

... “The thing is, kids need a formula, at least at first, because what we are asking them to do is very difficult. So God, let’s stop acting like they should just know how to do it. Give them a formula! Later, when they understand the rules of good writing, they can figure out how to break them.”

... Teachers stopped giving fluffy assignments such as “Write a postcard to a friend describing life in the trenches of World War I” and instead demanded that students fashion an expository essay describing three major causes of the conflict.

The successful results of the back-to-basics (revolutionary) writing program at New Dorp

... This spring, the graduation rate is expected to hit 80 percent, a staggering improvement over the 63 percent figure that prevailed before the Writing Revolution began.

... newfound ability to write solid, logically ordered paragraphs about what she’s learned, citing examples and using transitions between ideas.

Reading comprehension also improved.

As her understanding of the parts of speech grew, Monica’s reading comprehension improved dramatically. “Before, I could read, sure. But it was like a sea of words,” she says. “The more writing instruction I got, the more I understood which words were important.”

More schools should try this '"old" way of instruction.
The Hochman Program being used at New Dorp High School is writing instruction that offers direct and precise guidance incorporated into a systemic process, along with explicit grammar instruction and a strong focus on sentence  composition.  This is very similar to the Kerrigan method of Writing to the Point, a personal favorite of mine.  I strongly believe this type of instruction would benefit most types of students, offering better preparation for college or career than the fluffy free-for-all type of writing instruction now popular in many public schools.  Perhaps this New Dorp success story will help fuel a change with more schools following in their footsteps.

(Cross-posted at Cost of College)

Related:

• Creating a Facebook page is high on list of high school writing lessons (Cost of College)
• ‘Writing, writing, writing’ – a skill lacking among too many college graduates (Cost of College)

tour de force

C. is taking John Sexton's "The Supreme Court and Religion." Last week the class read Wallace vs Jaffree, which includes this passage from Justice Rehnquist's dissent:

For example, a State may lend to parochial school children geography textbooks that contain maps of the United States, but the State may not lend maps of the United States for use in geography class. A State may lend textbooks on American colonial history, but it may not lend a film on George Washington, or a film projector to show it in history class. A State may lend classroom workbooks, but may not lend workbooks in which the parochial school children write, thus rendering them nonreusable. A State may pay for bus transportation to religious schools 10 but may not pay for bus transportation from the parochial school to the public zoo or natural history museum for a field trip. A State may pay for diagnostic services conducted in the parochial school but therapeutic services must be given in a different building; speech and hearing "services" conducted by the State inside the sectarian school are forbidden, Meek v. Pittenger, 421 U. S. 349, 367, 371 (1975), but the State may conduct speech and hearing diagnostic testing inside the sectarian school. Wolman, 433 U. S., at 241. Exceptional parochial school students may receive counseling, but it must take place outside of the parochial school,12 such as in a trailer parked down the street. Id., at 245. A State may give cash to a parochial school to pay for the administration of state-written tests and state-ordered reporting services, but it may not provide funds for teacher-prepared tests on secular subjects. Religious instruction may not be given in public school, but the public school may release students during the day for religion classes elsewhere, and may enforce attendance at those classes with its truancy laws.
WALLACE, GOVERNOR OF ALABAMA, ET AL. v. JAFFREE ET AL. APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE ELEVENTH CIRCUIT No. 83-812. Argued December 4, 1984-Decided June 4, 1985. (110-111).

All of these inconsistencies could be easily resolved with vouchers and tax credits! update: In an ideal world, that is. Not inside the actual world we live in.

update 9/29/2012: Rehnquist compiled the list above to support his argument that the Court's 1971  "Lemon test"^* had resulted in unprincipled and inconsistent decisions.

...[T]he wall [of separation between church and state] idea might well have served as a useful albeit misguided analytical concept, had it led this Court to unified and principled results in Establishment Clause cases. The opposite, unfortunately, has been true; in the 38 years since Everson [1947] our Establishment Clause cases have been neither principled nor unified. Our recent opinions, many of them hopelessly divided pluralities, have with embarrassing candor conceded that the "wall of separation" is merely a "blurred, indistinct, and variable barrier," which "is not wholly accurate" and can only be "dimly perceived." Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U. S. 602, 614 (1971); Tilton v. Richardson, 403 U. S. 672, 677-678, (1971); Wolman v. Walter, 433 U. S. 229, 236 (1977); Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U. S. 668, 673 (1984).

^* Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U. S. 602, 612-613 (1971)

and see:
the Establishment Clause
Free Exercise Clause
Wallace vs Jaffree
the Lemon test
Lemon v. Kurzman 
Lemon test

Justice Rehnquist lists "unprincipled" and "inconsistent" decisions
Justice Rehnquist on school prayer and the Constitution
Jefferson's "wall of separation"
Justice Burger's dissent in Wallace v. Jaffree
Benjamin Cardozo on metaphors in law

onward and upward

In today's paper:

In 2011 the Legislature passed, and Mr. Otter signed, a regulatory overhaul of public education: eliminating tenure and stripping teachers of most collective bargaining rights, yet promising hand-held computers for students.

What Do Teachers Deserve? In Idaho, Referendum May Offer Answer
By KIRK JOHNSON
Published: September 23, 2012 | New York Times