more data from the Secret Service report

From the 2000 Secret Service report on "targeted school shootings":

The result was the Safe School Initiative, an extensive examination of 37 incidents of targeted school shootings and school attacks that occurred in the United States beginning with the earliest identified incident in 1974 through May 2000. The focus of the Safe School Initiative was on examining the thinking, planning, and other behaviors engaged in by students who carried out school attacks. Particular attention was given to identifying pre-attack behaviors and communications that might be detectable--or "knowable"--and could help in preventing some future attacks.

Thirty seven attacks in 26 years. The investigators looked at all of them.

I read the report cover-to-cover yesterday and recommend it. Strongly recommend. (Among other things, it is a model of clarity up to and including use of bullet points, italicized print, and white space.)

I was surprised by a great deal of what I read -- and I was surprised to be surprised given the amount of reading I do on all things school-related.

One thing I learned: the image of the schizophrenic loner-slash-loser is pretty wide of the mark.

For those incidents for which information on the attackers’ school performance was available, that information indicates that those attackers differed considerably from one another in their academic achievement in school, with grades ranging from excellent to failing (n=34).

• The attackers in the largest grouping were doing well in school at the time of the attack, generally receiving As and Bs in their courses (41 percent; n=17); some were even taking Advanced Placement courses at the time of the incident or had been on the honor roll repeatedly.
• Fewer of the attackers were receiving Bs and Cs (15 percent, n=6), or Cs and Ds (22 percent, n=9).
• Very few of the attackers were known to be failing in school (5 percent, n=2).

Attackers also varied in the types of social relationships they had established, ranging from socially isolated to popular among their peers.

• The largest group of attackers for whom this information was available appeared to socialize with mainstream students or were considered mainstream students themselves (41 percent, n=17).
• One-quarter of the attackers (27 percent, n=11) socialized with fellow students who were disliked by most mainstream students or were considered to be part of a "fringe" group.
• Few attackers had no close friends (12 percent, n=5).
• One-third of attackers had been characterized by others as "loners," or felt themselves to be loners (34 percent, n=14).
• However, nearly half of the attackers were involved in some organized social activities in or outside of school (44 percent, n=18). These activities included sports teams, school clubs, extracurricular activities, and mainstream religious groups.

Attackers’ histories of disciplinary problems at school also varied. Some attackers had no observed behavioral problems, while others had multiple behaviors warranting reprimand and/or discipline.

• Nearly two-thirds of the attackers had never been in trouble or rarely were in trouble at school (63 percent, n=26).
• One-quarter of the attackers had ever been suspended from school (27 percent, n=11).
• Only a few attackers had ever been expelled from school (10 percent, n=4).

Most attackers showed no marked change in academic performance (56 percent, n=23), friendship patterns (73 percent, n=30), interest in school (59 percent, n=24), or school disciplinary problems (68 percent, n=28) prior to their attack.

A few attackers even showed some improvements in academic performance (5 percent, n=2) or declines in disciplinary problems at school (7 percent, n=3) prior to the attack. In one case, the dean of students had commended a student a few weeks before he attacked his school for improvements in his grades and a decline in the number of disciplinary problems involving that student in school.
The Final Report and Findings of the Safe Schools Initiative

"I am Adam Lanza's mother"

C. read this article this morning.

It's incredible:

I live with a son who is mentally ill. I love my son. But he terrifies me.

A few weeks ago, Michael pulled a knife and threatened to kill me and then himself after I asked him to return his overdue library books. His 7- and 9-year-old siblings knew the safety plan—they ran to the car and locked the doors before I even asked them to. I managed to get the knife from Michael, then methodically collected all the sharp objects in the house into a single Tupperware container that now travels with me. Through it all, he continued to scream insults at me and threaten to kill or hurt me.

[snip]

According to Mother Jones, since 1982, 61 mass murders involving firearms have occurred throughout the country. Of these, 43 of the killers were white males, and only one was a woman. Mother Jones focused on whether the killers obtained their guns legally (most did). But this highly visible sign of mental illness should lead us to consider how many people in the U.S. live in fear, like I do.

When I asked my son's social worker about my options, he said that the only thing I could do was to get Michael charged with a crime. "If he's back in the system, they'll create a paper trail," he said. "That's the only way you're ever going to get anything done. No one will pay attention to you unless you've got charges."

I don't believe my son belongs in jail. The chaotic environment exacerbates Michael's sensitivity to sensory stimuli and doesn't deal with the underlying pathology. But it seems like the United States is using prison as the solution of choice for mentally ill people. According to Human Rights Watch, the number of mentally ill inmates in U.S. prisons quadrupled from 2000 to 2006, and it continues to rise—in fact, the rate of inmate mental illness is five times greater (56 percent) than in the non-incarcerated population.

With state-run treatment centers and hospitals shuttered, prison is now the last resort for the mentally ill—Rikers Island, the LA County Jail and Cook County Jail in Illinois housed the nation's largest treatment centers in 2011.

No one wants to send a 13-year-old genius who loves Harry Potter and his snuggle animal collection to jail. But our society, with its stigma on mental illness and its broken healthcare system, does not provide us with other options. Then another tortured soul shoots up a fast food restaurant. A mall. A kindergarten classroom. And we wring our hands and say, "Something must be done."

I agree that something must be done. It's time for a meaningful, nation-wide conversation about mental health.
I am Adam Lanza's Mother by Liza Long

Number one, I personally would put police officers in schools.

Number two, I have no idea whether some form of gun control -- or ammunition control -- would prevent mass killings, or at least reduce the carnage. (I've always been intrigued by Pat Moynihan's scheme to impose a 10,000% tax on ammunition.)

But number three, the mental health system, to the extent that we can be said to have a mental health system, is not working, and I'm grateful to Gawker for publishing this mother's account.

For parents like me, who have children with classic developmental disabilities, there is a pretty well-developed system in place. Obviously, that system has its problems in the form of abusive aides and very low funding, but that's not the issue here. The system exists, and the assumptions that undergird it are rational, at least in my experience.

The situation is radically different for children and adults with mental illnesses -- or, even worse -- dual diagnoses, which is what I'm going to guess we're talking about with Adam Lanza. Individuals with dual diagnoses are a very challenging population.

Speaking of ---- we're just back from the Christmas party at Jimmy's group home. The head of the house is leaving to work with women aged 40 to 60 who have dual diagnoses.

As he put it: These are people who are independent enough to go out in the community on their own, but not make good decisions.

Here is E. Fuller Torrey:
A Predictable Tragedy in Arizona
Bureacratic Insanity

from the Secret Service report - "signaling the attack"

I'm not sure whether this passage is apropros to the Newtown murders since the killer was an adult. Have just begun to look at it.

I find the first paragraphs astonishing.

Signaling the Attack

Finding
Prior to most incidents, other people knew about the attacker’s idea and/or plan to attack.

Explanation
In most cases, other people knew about the attack before it took place. In over three-quarters of the incidents, at least one person had information that the attacker was thinking about or planning the school attack (81 percent, n=30). In nearly two thirds of the incidents, more than one person had information about the attack before it occurred (59 percent, n=22). In nearly all of these cases, the person who knew was a peer–a friend, schoolmate, or sibling (93 percent, n=28/30). Some peers knew exactly what the attacker planned to do; others knew something "big" or "bad" was going to happen, and in several cases knew the time and date it was to occur. An adult had information about the idea or plan in only two cases.

In one incident, for example, the attacker had planned to shoot students in the lobby of his school prior to the beginning of the school day. He told two friends exactly what he had planned and asked three others to meet him that morning in the mezzanine overlooking the lobby, ostensibly so that these students would be out of harm’s way. On most mornings, usually only a few students would congregate on the mezzanine before the school day began. However, by the time the attacker arrived at school on the morning of the attack, word about what was going to happen had spread to such an extent that 24 students were on the mezzanine waiting for the attack to begin. One student who knew the attack was to occur brought a camera so that he could take pictures of the event.

Finding
Most attackers did not threaten their targets directly prior to advancing the attack.

Explanation
The majority of the attackers in the targeted school violence incidents examined under the Safe School Initiative did not threaten their target(s) directly, i.e., did not tell the target they intended to harm them, whether in direct, indirect, or conditional language prior to the attack. Only one-sixth of the attackers threatened their target(s) directly prior to the attack (17 percent, n=7).

Finding
Most attackers engaged in some behavior, prior to the incident, that caused others concern or indicated a need for help.

Explanation
Almost all of the attackers engaged in some behavior prior to the attack that caused others–school officials, parents, teachers, police, fellow students–to be concerned (93 percent, n=38). In most of the cases, at least one adult was concerned by the attacker’s behavior (88 percent, n=36). In three-quarters of the cases, at least three people–adults and other children–were concerned by the attacker’s behavior (76 percent, n=31). In one case, for example, the attacker made comments to at least 24 friends and classmates about his interest in killing other kids, building bombs, or carrying out an attack at the school. A school counselor was so concerned about this student’s behavior that the counselor asked to contact the attacker’s parents. The attacker’s parents also knew of his interest in guns.

The behaviors that led other individuals to be concerned about the attacker included both behaviors specifically related to the attack, such as efforts to get a gun, as well as other disturbing behaviors not related to the subsequent attack. In one case, the student’s English teacher became concerned about several poems and essays that the student submitted for class assignments because they treated the themes of homicide and suicide as possible solutions to his feelings of despair. In another case, the student worried his friends by talking frequently about plans to put rat poison in the cheese shakers at a popular pizza establishment. A friend of that student became so concerned that the student was going to carry out the rat poison plan, that the friend got out of bed late one night and left his house in search of his mother, who was not home at the time, to ask her what to do.

The Final Report and Findings of the Safe Schools Initiative

from 2000 - "Rampage Killers" - & Secret Service report on school killings

I think this is probably the Secret Service report discussed in the TIME article:
THE FINAL REPORT AND FINDINGS OF THE SAFE SCHOOL INITIATIVE: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE PREVENTION OF SCHOOL ATTACKS IN THE UNITED STATES

from 2000:

An examination by The New York Times of 100 rampage murders found that most of the killers spiraled down a long slow slide, mentally and emotionally. Most of them left a road map of red flags, spending months plotting their attacks and accumulating weapons, talking openly of their plans for bloodshed. Many showed signs of serious mental health problems.

But in case after case, the Times review found, the warning signs were missed: by a tattered mental health care system; by families unable to face the evidence of serious mental turmoil in their children or siblings; by employers, teachers and principals who failed to take the threats seriously; by the police who, when alerted to the danger by frightened relatives, neighbors or friends, were incapable of intervening before the violence erupted.

[snip]

In 34 of the 100 cases, however, families or friends of the killers desperately did try to find help for a person they feared was a ticking time bomb, but were rebuffed by the police, school administrators or mental health workers.

Sylvia Seegrist caromed in and out of mental institutions 12 times in 10 years, while her parents searched for a residential program where she could stay in treatment. They knew she was dangerous. She had stabbed a psychologist and tried to strangle her mother, and had hidden a gun in her apartment. But each time, she was released from the hospital when she seemed to improve.

"We were always fearful that maybe some tragedy would happen," said Ruth S. Seegrist, Sylvia's mother. "She threatened it: 'Someday before I kill myself, I'll bring some people down with me.' " Sylvia opened fire in a suburban Philadelphia shopping mall in 1985, killing three people and wounding seven.

The Well-Marked Roads to Homicidal Rage
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN and WILLIAM GLABERSON | April 9, 2000
Sylvia Seegrist's letter

and from TIME last summer:

[T]he Holmes case raises a crucial question: Is there a way to identify and stop mass killers before they unleash themselves?

.... After Columbine, the Secret Service and the FBI undertook months-long projects that were designed to create methods to spot mass killers before they act. The Secret Service study, the more influential one, looked at 41 attackers in 37 school massacres. The data showed that mass shooters don't usually act impulsively and rarely make threats against enemies. But they do tend to have experience with firearms.

In short, mass murderers are a vexing and diverse lot. For instance, the typical mass killer said nothing suspicious to friends or family members but signaled his intent to third parties--especially, in the cases of the kids who shot up their schools, classmates they liked. On July 25, a report emerged, citing a law-enforcement source, that Holmes had taken the time to send a troubling package to a psychiatrist at the University of Colorado at Denver, where Holmes worked. He apparently sent drawings of his intended massacre.

In 2004 the journal Behavioral Sciences & the Law published an authoritative paper by a team of psychologists led by Reid Meloy, a professor at the University of California, San Diego. For the past decade, Meloy has been a consultant for the FBI's counterintelligence division.

In the paper, Meloy and his colleagues offered both sociological traits and behavioral clues that are associated with mass violence. Some of the factors they identified: A criminal history. The No. 1 predictor of violent crime is previous violent behavior. (For his part, Holmes had only a speeding ticket.)

A sense of victimization.

Most adolescents who shoot up their schools say they were bullied. Most adult mass murderers say girlfriends or relatives had recently rejected them or that they had been persecuted at work.

An age in the 20s.

According to the Meloy paper, the average age of mass killers is 27. (Holmes is 24.)

Other factors come up as well--for instance, preoccupation with fantasy is a common feature of mass killers, and Holmes is reported to have played video games ad libitum. But none of these facets can distinguish a burnout from a psychopath....

Preventing Mass Murder
By John Cloud | Monday, Aug. 06, 2012

lockdown - from the Comments - and an experience on my campus

from the Comments:

Crimson Wife said...
When my DH was in the Army, the S.O.P. was to do a lockdown of the unit whenever sensitive materials (usually weapons or night-vision goggles) were unaccounted for. No one was allowed in or out but while there were armed military police guarding the exits, I'm 99% sure that those inside were not physically locked in.

FormerCTMom said...
Lockdown is what may have saved lives in that school. It means that the teachers shove their kids into the safest possible space in the room and LOCK the door. This keeps the killer out of the room. The reason that the toll was so high at VA Tech was because they didn't have a lockdown, and the gunman visited classroom after classroom.

[snip]

A quote from coverage of the shooting
"Music teacher Maryrose Kristopik was hailed as a hero for barricading 15 children in one closet, where they could hear the bloodthirsty Lanza screaming, “Let me in!”"
This is how a lockdown can save lives

lgm said...
The timing on this incident meant that many students were likely traveling between their classroom and the office bringing down attendance and lunch reports, as well as visiting the library for SSR material. Going in to hard lockdown meant that each child was immediately placed under direct adult supervision and moved to the safest position in the room possible - staff checks the hallway, pulls in any nearby person, and locks the door. Any unlocked windows are locked. The corridors are clear. Anyone that was outdoors will be moved to the designated safe location, which is not necessarily the school bldg. Doors and windows are locked.

A soft lockdown is also used in certain situations. Students with urgent needs can use the bathroom w/supervision if they are not in the affected zone, but everyone else stays in position and the classroom learning proceeds. Outdoor activities are cancelled.Doors and windows are locked.

People can still exit the bldg, by unlocking the windows, just as they would if the fire alarm was pulled in the winter, but the situation will tell if that is in their best interests.

It seems clear to me that our mental health system needs revamping.

[snip]

To answer your original question -- a hospital lockdown means that perimeter is secured and visitor access is restricted or screened more than usual. The police are involved.

palisadesk said...
We have two types of lockdown, depending on whether the perceived threat is external or internal. They have different names (which escape me at the moment), but we have drills for both and the rationale is calmly explained to students.

When the threat is external -- usually, a police action somewhere in the vicinity -- all entrances to the building are locked, external windows are locked and shades drawn, and first-floor classrooms with windows fronting on the exterior of the building are required to have lights turned off and students moved away from the windows as a precaution. Learning activities can continue, although sometimes what the students are doing is affected by the lights being turned off. I was in one classroom where the teacher switched from guided reading activities to choral music during this lockdown. Doors to the classrooms were not locked, and students could use the rest rooms under supervision -- administrators and support personnel patrolled the halls to ensure students could be hustled to safety should the situation escalate.

When the threat is inside the building (I was in the computer lab during one such incident), teachers are asked to lock their doors if possible - many classroom doors cannot be locked from the inside however, and teachers using resource rooms, conference rooms or offices may not have keys to those rooms - but students or staff were not to leave the rooms for any reason until an all-clear was announced. One of my students wanted to use the restroom but I had to tell her NO. In our case it was a middle school student having a major meltdown in the hall and armed with a baseball bat or hockey stick threatening mayhem. After leading several burly staff on a merry chase he fled the building and was apprehended in the parking lot. Mental health issues were involved.

I did not have keys to the computer lab however, so had an armed intruder been involved I would have had no way of locking the door. In my experience, which is limited in these matters, the lockdowns have all been brief and care taken to keep the staff and students informed in a calm and matter-of-fact way.

We have no lockdown procedures on my campus that I'm aware of. Last week I drove to school and  noticed while parking that multiple police cars were roaring onto campus with sirens blaring. No one had any idea what was going on, and students were walking calmly along to class as they normally do, so I did the same, all the while thinking to myself: I don't have to be here. I could get back in my car and drive home. 

That line of thinking competed with my second line of thinking, which had to do with the size of the campus: quite large from one end to the other. Because all the police cars were headed to the other side, opposite from me (and my car), I found myself thinking: Is whatever is happening going to stay there and not come here?

Which instantly made me feel guilty because if there was something bad happening there, I was now actively hoping that it would continue happening there, not here, where I was.

The whole thing was crazy.

Finally, after I'd arrived at my classroom (which may or may not have locks on the doors, I don't know) and was now too far from my car to return to it quickly, a student outside the room told me there was smoke coming from a building at the other side of the campus, and that's why the police had come.

school security - just a question

I'm reading that the Newtown hospital is on lockdown -- what is lockdown, exactly?

My school district (which I'm assuming is similar to Newtown) began regular lockdown drills years ago, I think because the then-new superintendent was focused on security.

Does a lockdown mean no one can get out? Are people locked in as well as locked out?

How does it work?

in Newtown

I was about to write a post about grammar when the news came in.

Writing about grammar at this moment feels wrong.

The pain these families are in.

changing "what and how teachers deliver particular instruction"

District-wide
Monday, 12/10 - Workshop for Parents on the Common Core Learning Standards - 7:00-8:00 pm; Alexander Hamilton HS Auditorium, 98 S. Goodwin Avenue, Elmsford, NY. You have heard much about the many changes to the landscape of NY public education. Many of them are rooted in the newly adopted Common Core Learning Standards which will change what and how teachers deliver particular instruction. If you are interested in learning more about this shift in curricula, you may be interested in attending this workshop entitled Introduction to the Common Core Learning Standards for Parents which is sponsored by Southern Westchester BOCES. Click here for more information.

As far as I'm concerned, the Common Core standards have been well and truly hijacked.

Bill McBride says things are looking up

Interview at Business Insider

I love the Calculated Risk charts.

today in College Composition

Avoiding the Difference Fixation: Identity Categories, Markers of Difference, and the Teaching of Writing
Stephanie L. Kerschbaum

Abstract: In order to show difference as a dynamic, relational, and emergent construct, this article introduces “markers of difference,” rhetorical cues that signal the presence of difference between one or more interlocutors, and suggests practical means by which teachers can engage this concept to improve their teaching practice.

College Composition and Communication | Vol. 63, No. 4, June 2012

These are the people running college writing programs.

Next Action:

a) teach your child to write before he/she gets to college (Susan S did it! ... I have some ideas; Katharine does, too)
b) check into the freshman composition program at the schools your child is considering
c) if the required freshman writing courses are run by a program called "Composition Studies," or taught by people with degrees in "Composition Studies," considering choosing another school
d) if that's not possible, move heaven and earth to get your child excused from all required writing course(s)
e) if exemption from a required writing course is not possible, make your child promise to visit the college's Writing Center for help with all assignments in the required course
f) also extract a promise from him/her to request frequent meetings with the instructor of the required course
g) plan on seeing a C on the transcript

south of the border

Ed was reading an article in The Economist this morning when he came across this:

He also announced plans to take on the teachers’ union, a fearsome organisation that long enjoyed a cosy relationship with the PRI. Mexico’s schools are the worst in the OECD, a club of mainly rich countries, largely because the union controls teacher recruitment and training. The president says he wants to professionalise training and to ban hereditary teaching jobs...
With a little help from my friends
The Economist | Dec 8th 2012 | MEXICO CITY

Hereditary teaching jobs.

That's a new one on me.

Something happened

I've been saying for a while now that 'something happened' in 1985. Things changed.

It hadn't occurred to me that Goldin and Katz's timeline in The Race between Education and Technology corresponds directly to mine.

Goldin and Katz find the schools somewhat abruptly ceasing to function as producers of greater equality via educational attainment in the early 1980s.

I find the composition journals abruptly ceasing to function as producers of useful observations re: teaching students how to write, also in the early 1980s.

I don't think that's a coincidence.

"this road is now closed"

A number of us, over the years, have observed that it no longer seems possible for US public schools to be the engines of social mobility they once were, what with the requirement that parents "help with homework" right up through AP Calculus senior year if their children are to succeed.

Actually, scratch that. "Help with homework" continues apace in Grade 13, sad to say. Ed was up 'til 2am Thursday night dealing with an indecipherable writing assignment C. was trying to complete--indecipherable to Ed, not just to C. I hear the same from other parents.

Anyway, back to K-12. Many decades ago, when schools grouped students according to what they knew, and teachers drilled, killed, chalked, and talked, immigrant children whose parents did not speak the language could learn to read, to write, and to do arithmetic at school. Ditto for working class children and children living in poverty.

As Goldin and Katz show in The Race between Education and Technology, the country's public schools directly increased economic equality until the 1980s.

Then things changed.

Goldin and Katz say essentially nothing about what changed or why, and reviews of the book have also tended to dance around the issue of just what exactly went wrong circa 1980.

Now Brad DeLong has written a post about Goldin and Katz's book that expresses the change in the starkest terms I've seen in any account of the book:

...My teachers Claudia Golden and Larry Katz make an impressive and largely convincing argument that the trends in inequality between the top twenty percent and the bottom eighty percent in the United States, at least, have been overwhelmingly driven by the race between technology and education. Technology has kept running at a more or less constant pace. Education has not. From, say, 1920 to 1980, the United States essentially followed the recipe of Berkeley chancellor Clark Kerr: the United States ought to provide as much education for free to its citizens as they wanted.

Devotees of the right approved of this policy....People on the left noted that if you make education free you get an awful lot of educated and well-trained people, so the return to human capital goes down, the education premium that those who have been to college and have been trained in the professions can demand becomes a lot lower. And as your accountants and lawyers and doctors facing competition in the labor market can demand lower salaries, that leaves more money for the assembly line workers and the janitors and the home health aids and the nurses and the waitresses.

Around 1980, this strategy of growth and equality through education in the United States breaks down. Since then the costs of higher education have been rising at an extraordinarily rapid pace in the United States, as government subsidies are withdrawn, and as private colleges react to rising sticker costs of public colleges by raising their own sticker prices. In addition the universal commitment to pre-college high quality education has been in decline. This has stuck. Thus, unless we see a major change in American political economy, this education road that appears to have been very effective at promoting equality between the 1920s and the 1970s is now closed to the United States.

I've never seen that before.

I've never seen someone say, simply, this road is closed.

"topic progression" in new and old history textbooks

I've just read Katharine's post comparing a 1914 history textbook to a textbook published in 2005. The difference is staggering.

What jumps out at me are the many distinct grammatical subjects in the modern text compared to the older book:

Published in 2005:
The German States Remain Separate 
German kings after Frederick, including his grandson Frederick II, continued their attempts to revive Charlemagne’s empire and his alliance with the Church. This policy led to wars with Italian cities and to further clashes with the Pope. Conflicts were one reason why the feudal states of Germany did not unify during the Middle Ages. Another reason was that the system of German princes electing the king weakened royal authority. German rulers controlled fewer royal lands to use as a base of power than French and English kings of the same period, who, as you will learn in Chapter 14, were establishing strong central authority. 

Five main clauses, 5 different grammatical subjects.

Compare to:

Published in 1914:
In his lifelong attempt to maintain what he thought to be his rights as emperor he met, quite naturally, with the three old difficulties. He had constantly to be fighting his rivals and rebellious vassals in Germany; he had to face the opposition of the popes, who never forgot the claims that Gregory VII had made to control the emperor as well as other rulers. Lastly, in trying to keep hold of northern Italy, which he believed to belong to his empire, he spent a great deal of time with but slight results. (1914)

Four main clauses, 1 grammatical subject.

I'm wondering whether I can improve the 2005 paragraph just by tinkering with the subjects...

[pause]

OK, here's a rewrite:

Revision with "consistent grammatical subjects":
The German kings after Frederick, including his grandson Frederick II, continued Frederick's efforts to revive Charlemagne's empire and his alliance with the Church, but they did not succeed. Like Frederick, they incited fruitless wars with Italian cities and further clashes with the Pope, and the constant conflict undermined their ability to unify Germany's feudal states under one king. The kings were further weakened by the German political system, which allowed German princes to elect the king, and by their relative lack of royal lands compared to the large territories controlled by French and English kings of the same period, who, as you will learn in Chapter 14, were establishing strong central authority in their own countries. Frederick's successors succeeded neither in reviving the empire nor in unifying their country.

Six main clauses, only 2 different grammatical subjects, with 5 of the six subjects being the same ("German kings").

So I guess the lesson is: if you're going to engage in excessive summary, be sure to keep your sentence subjects consistent!

testing, testing

Grammar is sooooo slippery.

If anyone has advice on teaching the distinction between restrictive and nonrestrictive modifiers, I would love to hear.

Here's my latest stab at it. (Katharine told me about the "Pause Test.")

And here's the boyfriend who plays the piano, an example I learned from a graduate student and Fulbright scholar whose native language is Arabic.

She was the graduate assistant in an Applied Grammar course for English majors I was auditing, and she was gobsmacked by how little grammar American students know. One day she said (paraphrasing), "The reason to learn grammar is to appreciate your language. We study grammar because Arabic is a beautiful language."

We need a Writing Renaissance, not a "Writing Renaissance"

Here is is! (Cross-posted from Out in Left Field.)

According to an article in this past week's Edweek, K12 writing instruction is undergoing a renaissance:

Teachers are focusing on writing instruction like never before. More and more, they're asking students to write about what they read, helping them think through and craft their work, and using such exercises as tools not only to build better writers, but to help students understand what they're studying.

This renaissance, the article claims, includes a shift towards explicit instruction:

The shift is still nascent, but people in the field are taking notice. It marks a departure from recent practice, which often includes little or no explicit writing instruction and only a modest amount of writing, typically in the form of stories, short summaries, or personal reflections, rather than essays or research projects on topics being studied.

In fact there appears to be little or no increase in explicit instruction, but simply a shift in quantity and genres. For example, rather than taking inspiration from Dr. Seuss to write their own whimsical stories:

First graders in South Strafford, Vt., are reading Dr. Seuss' The Lorax, for fun, then for greater understanding, and then to hunt for evidence. They look for events in the plot that illustrate how the whimsical protagonist tries to protect the Earth and assemble examples into a simple paragraph to support the theme of the story.

In keeping with the new Common Core standards for English and Language Arts, the article notes, "these kinds of projects are unusual for the way they connect writing and reading." But the ultimate goal seems not to be to improve writing, but reading:

"Now we're seeing a lot more attention to the idea that writing about a text can improve reading about that text," said literacy expert Timothy Shanahan, the chairman of the department of curriculum and instruction at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The article cites a 2010 study:

a meta-analysis of 93 studies of writing interventions, which found that writing had consistently positive effects on students' reading skills and comprehension. Writing about what they read was particularly helpful to students' comprehension, but so were taking notes on what they read, answering questions about it, and simply writing more often.

In other words, despite the fact that ever since No Child Left Behind, as the article itself notes, concerns about reading comprehension have eclipsed concerns about writing, the ultimate goal of the "Writing Renaissance" continues to be reading.

Worse, this emphasis on writing for comprehension has become yet another excuse to water down math class:

A math teacher in Brighton, Mich., found that writing had a powerful effect on helping her 6th grade students understand algebra concepts. Julie Mallia and a colleague from the English department, Don Pawloski, teamed up in spring 2009 to have students write 10-page "how to" books for the next fall's 6th graders. Drawing both on math and on writing instruction, students had to explain concepts such as solving a problem with x.

What goals the article does mention that pertain specifically to writing are about quantity and argumentation rather than technique. Students should be writing more, and they should be writing pieces that shift from:

"opinion untethered to evidence" and "decontextualized" writing—writing not based on the reading of a text—in favor of writing that requires students to read, comprehend, and respond to text, grounding their interpretations in evidence found there.

As for writing strategies, we find nothing here about corrections and revisions. Instead of rewriting, there's rereading:

They read a text again and again, first to make sense of it and note their questions, as the teacher works the room to help,... A second round of annotating focuses on looking for elements of the genre and how it works. They read again to spot structural decisions the writer made to create meaning, she said. The students then use what they learned in their own writing.

There's something to be said for "spotting structural decisions" and trying to emulate these. Indeed, the one instance of direct writing instruction the article cite pertains to organization:

When Ms. Leddy teaches The Lorax, she walks through the text repeatedly with students, discussing it from a different angle each time. When they're through, students learn to write short "hand paragraphs," with the thumb as the topic sentence—the Lorax cares for the Earth—followed by three examples of how he does that and a "pinky sentence" restating the interpretation.

But none of this addresses a much more fundamental problem that affects all types of writing--no matter whether it's fiction, nonfiction, personal writing, summaries, or more involved, reading-connected writing assignments. This problem, which has become the talk of professors at campuses all around the country, is the problem that growing numbers of students have with the basic building blocks of all writing: phrases and sentences.

In none of the many Edweek articles on English and Language Arts do we find any mention of the steep decline in students' ability to write well-formed sentences. But this is arguably the greatest problem with today's writing, which, even at the college and graduate levels, is riddled with comma splices, dangling modifiers, subject-verb agreement problems, and the kind of garbling that results from a dearth of direct instruction and feedback from teachers and a failure by students to review and revise. Here are just a few examples from my growing collection:

1. Comma between subject and verb: Children who experience the world in a more rigid and narrow manner, will have difficulty with social inferences.

2. Comma splice: Generalization is a tough skill for ASD students to learn, teachers are sometimes baffled that they act a certain way in one subject and completely different in other.

3. Failed subject verb agreement: Two of the defining characteristics of autism includes impairments in social interactions and communication.

4. Failed preposition agreement: There are three types of aphasia to which a child can be diagnosed.

5. Dangling modifiers: In thinking about students transitioning from high school to college, the issues of accepting the disability and self-advocacy are crucial.

6. Wordiness: By providing direct instruction, this assists the students with improving their ability to give examples.

7. Awkwardness (and wordiness): Because of these results, it suggests that “object and subject relative sentences” need different amounts of working memory to be understood by the reader.

8. Displaced modifier: I first inquired about this young man’s high school experience, who I will call RC.

9. Incoherence (and wordiness): Due to the fact that these children with autism are unable to proper engage in social situations eliminates the knowledge base that they would normally acquire.

None of the above-described elements of the so-called "Writing Renaissance" will solve these problems. For this, we need direct, sentence-focused writing instruction. Yet, for all the empirical support there is for this kind of instruction, the tide shifted away from it long ago, and it will take a true Writing Renaissance to bring it back.

The Daily, RIP

The Daily is gone.

I start every day with The Daily, which I read-slash-skim from beginning to end before doing anything else. I am a devoted fan.

Now I'm bereft.

Here's the LA Times on Why the Daily Failed.

"The untimely death of the Daily illustrates the perils of the app economy," etc.

The app economy! Right. A subset of the economy economy (scroll down for the L-chart).

A friend of mine was saying, the other day, that a recession can be a good time to start a business. I've heard that myself, and maybe it's true. But we're not in a recession. We're in an L-shaped depression (or an L-shaped recovery, take your pick.) Coming up on the 5-year anniversary of the crisis.

[pause]

Googling "L-shaped recovery" I came across good news: Jan Hatzius predicts we'll have above-3% growth after 2013. That's still not a V, but it's better than the 2 to 2 1/2% growth we've been having. Maybe a lot better, I'm thinking.

Hatzius seems to have been right about everything else so far (not that I would know, necessarily), so: good to hear.

Too late for The Daily, though.

thumb paragraphs and other

When Katharine has time, she'll repost to ktm, but go read now!

It's time for me to re-read Robert Connors Erasure of the Sentence. (Katharine's post on Connors.)

"from literacy to electracy"

Stumbled upon "from literacy to electracy" in my travels. Haven't had time to get a sense of the site, but I did click on enough links to find this observation from Claude Lévi-Strauss:

My hypothesis, if correct, would oblige us to recognize the fact that the primary function of written communication is to facilitate slavery.

I wonder whether C's "Writing the Essay" instructor would like that.

I'm thinking Yes.

Laura Z on "Advanced"

Laura Z reacts to "Advanced" ("Me being the person I am..."):

Oh my... Me, being the person that I am, find this essay an argument for and against a LOT of things. Not the least of which is to continue to homeschool my daughter! LOL

Seriously? This was considered "advanced?" It's horrible! I expect better from my 8th grade daughter with Asperger's.

I'm laughing!

Here are the two charts from the NAEP report:





I was talking to Katharine about this a little while ago. She said the prompt is so uninspiring she didn't know how much she could have done with it, either.

Good point.

Even so, the "Advanced" essay lacks both topic sentences (another way of saying 'lacks analysis') and evidence (evidence as opposed to detail)...

Without being able to support my own argument (sigh), I'm taking it on faith that an Advanced student in his or her final year of high school should be able to come up with topic sentences and evidence no matter how lousy the prompt. If he or she is making an argument, and this student is making an argument, then he or she should be able to produce supporting arguments and evidence.

I'm pretty sure.

Here's the prompt, by the way:

Text:

Write an essay for a college admissions committee about one kind of information or communications technology you use. Describe what it is and explain why the technology is important to you. Develop your essay with details so the admissions committee can understand the value of technology. You may use information from the presentation in the essay.

Pretty dreary.

I would love to see that 'presentation.'

Average scores in eighth- and twelfth-grade NAEP writing, by race/ethnicity: 2011 

Characteristic	Grade 8	Grade 12
White	158	159
Black	132	130
Hispanic	136	134
Asian	165	158
Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander	141	144
American Indian/Alaska Native	145	145
Two or more races	155	158
NOTE: Black includes African American, and Hispanic includes Latino. Race categories exclude Hispanic origin. SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 2011 Writing Assessment.

Average scores in eighth- and twelfth-grade NAEP writing, by gender: 2011 

Characteristic	Grade 8	Grade 12
Male	140	143
Female	160	157
SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 2011 Writing Assessment.

Average scores in eighth- and twelfth-grade NAEP writing, by school location: 2011 

Characteristic	Grade 8	Grade 12
City	144	146
Suburb	155	154
Town	148	149
Rural	150	149
SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 2011 Writing Assessment.

advanced writing in the 12th grade as assessed by NAEP

According to NAEP, in 2011 only 3% of high school seniors were able to write an essay as good as the one below, which is considered "Advanced."

% scoring "Advanced":
4% of white students
5% of Asian students
0% of black students
1% of Hispanic students.

5% of students whose parents had college degrees scored in the Advanced range.

5% scoring Advanced would be fine if "Advanced" meant Advanced. But it doesn't. "Advanced" on NAEP means 3% of high school seniors are able to write a coherent statement on the subject of:

• Story or personal narrative about real/imagined difficult choice
• Essay about technology important to student
• Letter persuading council to build/not build convenience store

All 3 of these prompts call for opinion and the marshaling of evidence strictly (or nearly so) from the student's personal experience, and that is not at all what college writing is about. Nor is it the kind of writing one does in business or the professions.

From The Nation’s Report Card: Writing 2011:

Sample Task: Writing to explain
When writing to explain, the task of the writer is to bring together relevant information and to present this information with focus and clarity so that the topic becomes understandable to a reader. The sequence of ideas, and how ideas are arranged, must cohere and contribute to the communicative purpose.

One of the writing tasks from the twelfth-grade assessment asked students to write about a type of technology that they use in their lives and why they value that technology. The Value of Technology task began with a short video about young people’s use of technology. This video included animation and statistics about technology use. The written part of the task then specified an audience for students to address in explaining the value of a particular technology. Responses were rated using a scoring guide ranging from “Little or no skill” to “Effective.”

The sample student response shown below was rated as “Effective” in responding to the task about the value of technology. After an opening paragraph that defines video games and introduces the ideas to be developed throughout, the writer constructs the explanation primarily through use of personal experience. This approach skillfully communicates the value of video games through the use of detailed descriptions of specific games and what the writer has learned from them. Ideas are fully developed, and the rich use of explanatory details establishes a distinct voice speaking intelligently from experience. This response demonstrates skills associated with performance at the Advanced level. Twelfth-grade students at this level are able to craft responses that strategically accomplish the communicative purpose.

Student response - Grade 12 - Advanced
Videogames are a primary source of entertainment for people of all ages. Videogames are discs or cartridges that hold data; once a disc or cartridege is inserted into a gaming console, the data is read and displayed on the screen along with prompts that allow the game to be played. Games have many genres ranging from fighting to educational and can be used for than just mere entertainment. I personally have been experiencing what videogames have to offer for over five years now. Gaming is not just something that people do for fun, people can play videogames for many reasons. Videogames are an important factor in many peoples lives including mine and are a valuable type of technology.

I have been playing videogames from a very young age. Mario was the first game I was ever introduced to and it was not through playing; through sheer coincidence my mother realized that the theme music to Mario put me to sleep as a baby. Once I was old enough to hold a controller I began playing the game. Ever since that moment I have been playing videogames. Games are multi-purposed; to some it is merely a form of entertainment, but to others it could be their job. Some people argue that games are a waste of time and that they are not product. I beg to differ; games are important to me because not only do they give me something to do to pass time but they are also educational. A prime example of this is a game I was introduced to by my cousins, Runescape. When I was about thirteen I had went to see my cousins up state and I saw them playing this browser game called Runescape (a browser game is a game that can be played within an internet browser without the need to download or upload information from a disc or cartridge). Me being the person I am, I was curious as to what it was so I began to ask questions. By the end of the day I learned two things about that game, two things that to some gamers, were their favorite word. It was a MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role playing game) that was free; in essence it was a free gamethat I didn’t have to download and I could do basically whatever I wanted that was allowed in the game. Within the game you could do any of the various skills offered, quests, and even fight against other players from around the world with you’re avatar. Once I got home, I of course signed up and began to play. Throughout the few years I played that game I realized it was set in Medieval times and I learned many things about that age. I learned the process it takes to turn ore into metal, what smelting is, how leather is crafted into clothing, how clay is used, and some of the politics of Medieval civilizations throughout the quests of the game. Although I would spend hours on this game and it seemed like I was doing nothing, I infact was actually learning.

Another game my cousins introduced to me was Age of Mythology. The game was a PC game(which means it had to be bought and it contained disc which had to upload the game onto you’re computer or device and then the game could be played) and I had played it at my cousins and eventually went on to buy it. If mythology was a subject in school, this game could be the teacher. This game focuses around Greek, Egyptian and Norse mythology. You follow the antagonists (which you name) through all three civilizations chasing an evil minotaur that is attempting to end the world. You begin in a fictional Greek city and eventually move throughout the world. This game teaches any of it’s players not only how armies from all three civilazations worked but those civilazations major Gods, minor Gods, demigods and mythological creatures. Stories based on mythology or fact are also told and experienced throughout the game; such as the Trojan Horse and Ragnorak. I have never picked up a book based on mythology or ancient Gods but because of this game I have an extensive knowledge of the mythology of those three cultures. Games are important in society; they give people a hobby and peace of mind. They can also be used for educational purposes. Toddlers no longer read books to learn how to read, write, and spell, they are given toys and games to play. Games hold a high position in society and can be beneficial to those who use them if they wish to use them in that way.

This student, who is certainly a competent "personal" writer, has advanced a thesis: video games are valuable for more than entertainment.

In support of his thesis (I'm assuming the writer is male), he tells us that he learned "the process it takes to turn ore into metal, what smelting is, how leather is crafted into clothing, how clay is used, and some of the politics of Medieval civilizations" from a video game. This knowledge he acquired over a number of years and many hours of play.

In the next paragraph he tells us that although he has "never picked up a book based on mythology or ancient Gods" he nonetheless possesses "an extensive knowledge of the mythology of [Greek, Egyptian, and Norse] cultures" thanks to another video game. He provides no further detail as to what this knowledge consists of, or how long it took him to acquire it.

Essentially, the evidence this writer offers in support of his thesis boils down to: I remember stuff I saw in my video games.

The essay concludes with the assertion that "toddlers no longer read books to learn how to read, write, and spell." The writer offers no evidence to support this claim and seems not to know the meaning of the word "toddler." Toddlers have never read books, now or in the past, because toddlers are too young to read. They can't play video games, either, for that matter.

For my money, this essay is pretty much the exact opposite of what an Advanced high school senior should be able to produce in timed writing.

Very worrisome.

Blackboard Math

Allan Folz left a Comment pointing us to his new website: Blackboard Math. Have just this moment headed over there -----

Practice arithmetic just like Abe Lincoln. Updated for the 21st century. Coming in one week.

I love it!

"How to learn things automatically"

More on the Matrix-type memory downloads

Video here

As I understand it, in Shibata & c.'s experiment subjects learned 'X' not by seeing 'X' or being told about 'X' but instead by generating the brain activation pattern of a person who knows 'X' and who learned 'X' in the customary way.

To generate the brain activation pattern of a person who knows 'X', subjects reacted to 'neurofeedback': a green circle indicating how close the subject's activation pattern was to the pattern produced by people who know 'X.' Subjects were able to change their brain firing by changing the green circle, and once their brains were firing the way brains fire when brains know 'X,' the subjects knew 'X,' too.

Without ever having seen or been told about 'X.'

Wow.

For the record, I have experienced neurofeedback myself, and I can tell you that it works. Back in college, as the T.A. for a Learning and Memory course, I was once hooked up to electrodes and directed to produce alpha waves with my eyes open instead of closed (which is when we normally produce alpha waves). I was the demonstration project.

Obviously I had no idea how to produce an alpha wave on purpose, but after just a few minutes of neural feedback in the form of a tone that sounded every time my brain randomly produced an alpha wave, I was able to produce alpha waves intentionally.

I was able to turn the tone on and keep it on.

(Producing alpha waves with my eyes open, by the way, was not a particularly pleasant sensation. Producing alpha waves with my eyes closed was relaxing; producing alpha waves with my eyes open made me feel sleepy and semi-blind. Very strange.)

Ever since that day I've wondered why biofeedback, which is what it was called back then, never took off.

Articles & excerpts:

How to learn things automatically

From the study:

With an online-feedback method that uses decoded functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signals, we induced activity patterns only in early visual cortex corresponding to an orientation without stimulus presentation or participants’ awareness of what was to be learned.

[snip]

[W]e developed a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) onlinefeedback method, by which activation patterns corresponding to the pattern evoked by the presentation of a real and specific target orientation stimulus were repeatedly induced without the participants’ knowledge of what is being learned and without external stimulus presentation [see supporting online materials (SOM) and methods]. The mere induction of the activation patterns resulted in significant behavioral performance improvement on the target stimulus orientation, but not on other orientations.

[snip]

Although previous fMRI online feedback training is a promising technique for influencing human behaviors (10–13), as in lesion or TMS studies, it could at best reveal influences of the entire extent of an area/region on learning/memory, which is a certain limitation for neuroscientific research (20). In contrast, the present decoded fMRI neurofeedback method induces highly selective activity patterns within a brain region, thus allowing the investigator to influence specific functions. It can “incept” a person to acquire new learning, skills, or memory, or possibly to restore skills or knowledge that has been damaged through accident, disease, or aging, without a person’s awareness of what is learned or memorized.
Perceptual Learning Incepted by Decoded fMRI Neurofeedback Without Stimulus Presentation by Kazuhisa Shibata,* Takeo Watanabe,*† Yuka Sasaki,‡ Mitsuo Kawato

Related:

In this study, we have shown that it is possible to directly condition neural activity using reward feedback derived from fMRI. Subjects were able to discriminate between two cues and respond to each by activating the appropriate region of their left sensorimotor cortex, while suppressing activity in a second region.
Direct Instrumental Conditioning of Neural Activity Using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging-Derived Reward Feedback
Signe Bray,1 Shinsuke Shimojo,1,2 and John P. O’Doherty1,3

Walter Ong predicts Powerpoint in 1970

I've been thinking about talking versus writing, and about how thinking-in-writing is different from thinking-in-speech, and I'd forgotten that I'd pulled this article by Walter Ong a couple of years ago.

Ong's argument is that although thinking-in-speech is different from thinking-in-writing, the invention of the alphabet changes the nature of thinking. People develop new ways of thinking, which depend upon writing, and they transfer their new habits back to the medium of oral speech.

Then thinking changes again with the invention of print.

And again, with the invention of electronic communication.

(Ed told me something interesting re: the invention of print. There is a school of thought that nations don't come into being until the invention of print. Without print  -- print per se, not just writing -- you can't have countries.)

Ong's argument makes sense to me, but I'm wondering whether it can be true of students who've essentially never read serious expository prose.

What happens if all you do in 13 years of formal education is sort through packets and Google things?

I don't know the answer to that, and this passage from Ong doesn't address the question, but I'm posting it because I think it's cool.

The effects of [the invention of] print on narrative have never been worked out, but they were massive. Early narrative can be beautifully organized, but so far as I know, nowhere in the world before print was there any lengthy narrative with the tight sequential plotting (build-up, climax, denouement) which has matured everywhere since print, perhaps most typically in the detective story, although such tight plotting has been known outside narrative, in drama, for some two thousand years. There is no narration in drama, but actors. With print, but not without it, James Joyce could produce Finnegans Wake. It is humanly impossible to produce two handwritten copies of Finnegans Wake which are exactly the same. In this large book, as you know, thousands of words have their own idiosyncratic spellings. Every single letter has to be supervised individually. This means, of course, that the final composition of the work--as of most works in print today--is done in the printer's proofs. (Balzac used to strike out whole galleys and rewrite everything on the other side of the proof sheets--an extreme example which, in my friendship for publishers and printers, I do not recommend any of you follow.) But once you know the sort of things that can be put into print, the feeling for such things influences your writing, even such things as your personal. correspondence. You can tell that Alexander Pope's letters were written by a man who knew the printed book and that Cicero's were not. Cicero's sound far more oratorical, for one thing, and the audience is felt in a different way....

And so in the present and the future, when we live with the electronic media. These have not wiped out anything, but simply complicated everything endlessly. We still talk face-to-face and write and print. The electronic media have massively reinforced print.

[snip]

And so the future is already here. We have entered into a world of communication which we are only beginning to understand. Aristotle said that in his day the Greeks had no word for "literature." (If they had no word for it, don't ask me how he said that.) Today we have no word for this new thing. I would suggest that it might be called a "presentation."

The End of the Age of Literacy by Walter J Ong, S.J.
St. Louis University
Revision of April 10, 1972
Original draft completed November 1960 (taped for Opinion Institute, Omaha, Nebraska, developed out of article done for St. Louis Post-Dispatch and published April 4, 1959)

get the party started

My sister called earlier today to say the revolution has begun:

Horizon Charter Schools will not reopen a school it closed a month ago in Rocklin because it lacks community support, school officials announced this week.

The school had included an accelerated learning academy for third- through eighth-grade students and a science, math and engineering academy for high school students.

On Tuesday, Horizon officials confirmed they are closing their entire accelerated learning program, which also includes kindergarten through second-grade classes housed at a site in Lincoln. The program will end Dec. 21.

"It became clear that the program, in its current form, is largely unwelcome to the community upon whose support the program itself depends," Horizon said in a prepared statement.

[snip]

The announcement came after a month of acrimony between school officials and parents that started when the closure of the Rocklin school site was announced.
Parents were upset about the change, which came with less than a week's notice.

[snip]

The Rocklin school – which had 390 students – was shuttered after Placer County officials said only 75 students were allowed under current permitting rules to be in the facility being leased in an industrial park. School officials also cited traffic safety problems for the closure.

[snip]

In October, Horizon CEO Craig Heimbichner asked parents to be patient while school leaders sought a new site and to remain with the charter in a home-school program.

Since then, more than a third of the program's 200 students have left the program, according to parents. Many of those still with Horizon are meeting at homes, libraries or public meeting rooms in an attempt to keep classes together or to accommodate parents unable to home-school their children.

Keiko Chang said her son's class of 20 third-graders met at a library a few times, but had to split into two groups to hold classes at family homes. Her son's group moved from house to house on whatever days or times worked for the homeowners.

The group recently found a permanent home to use from 8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. each school day. Each family pays $3 a day to cover insurance, Chang said.

But the children may not be nomads for long; teachers are attempting to open a private school, while parents are working with another charter school organization to start a program in the Roseville area, according to parents.

The program is expected to use the same Core Knowledge and project-based instruction that Horizon had used in its accelerated academy, said parent Laura Daggett.
She said her first-grade daughter has made huge gains in the program. "You can't imagine the difference between August and now," Daggett said.

The only school that teaches with the Core Knowledge program is Rocklin Academy, which has a lengthy waiting list, she said.

Horizon has put administrator Dennis Craft in charge of helping families transition their students to their home school option or to help them find another school, Clark said.

Horizon Charter Schools won't reopen in Rocklin
By Diana Lambert
dlambert@sacbee.com
Published: Sunday, Dec. 2, 2012 - 12:00 am | Page 2B

two years is two years

more from Barry's article on the Common Core:

This approach not only complicates the simplest of math problems; it also leads to delays. Under the Common Core Standards, students will not learn traditional methods of adding and subtracting double and triple digit numbers until fourth grade. (Currently, most schools teach these skills two years earlier.) The standard method for two and three digit multiplication is delayed until fifth grade; the standard method for long division until sixth. In the meantime, the students learn alternative strategies that are far less efficient, but that presumably help them "understand" the conceptual underpinnings.

Once again, knowledge stored in memory is entirely different from knowledge stored on Google.

Biological memory is a biological process that requires a period of time during which new memories are consolidated:

Memory consolidation refers to the idea that neural processes transpiring after the initial registration of information contribute to the permanent storage of memory.
Memory consolidation, retrograde amnesia and the hippocampal complex
Lynn Nadel* and Morris Moscovitcht Cognitive Neuroscience

I don't know how much time the brain requires to consolidate memories, but I recall John Medina suggesting that the figure may be as long as 10 years. (That would jibe nicely with the 10-year rule for development of expertise, wouldn't it?)

The "consolidation lag" between first learning a new skill and really knowing that skill explains why "just-in-time" learning is so crazy. There is no such thing as just-in-time learning. The brain doesn't work that way. No matter how smart you are, if you are 17 and you don't know how to do long division, you can't just have your professor show you how and then start doing it. Knowledge has to be consolidated before you can use it well, and consolidation takes time.

Here is James Milgram on his experience teaching Stanford students who had not been taught long division:

What happens when you take long division out of the curriculum? Unfortunately, from personal and recent experience at Stanford, I can tell you exactly what happens. What I'm referring to here is the experience of my students in a differential equations class in the fall of 1998. The students in that course were the last students at Stanford taught using the Harvard calculus. And I had a very difficult time teaching them the usual content of the differential equations course because they could not handle basic polynomial manipulations. Consequently, it was impossible for us to get to the depth needed in both the subjects of Laplace transforms and eigenvalue methods required and expected by the engineering school.

But what made things worse was that the students knew full well what had happened to them and why, and in a sense they were desperate. They were off schedule in 4th and 3rd years, taking differential equations because they were having severe difficulties in their engineering courses. It was a disaster. Moreover, it was very difficult for them to fill in the gaps in their knowledge. It seems to take a considerable amount of time for the requisite skills to develop. [emphasis added]
Transcript of R. James Milgram
1999 Conference on Standards-Based K-12 Education

There is no just-in-time learning, and you can't catch-up.

For the sake of argument, say it takes two years to consolidate the skill of adding and subtracting double-digit numbers. (I'm guessing it takes more than two, but I don't know.) If a child learns to add and subtract double-digit numbers in second grade, he or she will be proficient in fourth grade.

Delay teaching the algorithms until fourth grade and now you have a cohort of students who won't be proficient in addition and subtraction until 6th grade.

That's the way it works. Two years is two years.

and see:
Eide Neurolearning explains elaborative rehearsal 


by heart

Speaking of knowing things by heart, when did that expression disappear from common usage?

We know it by heart. A lovely metaphor.

These days any and all discussion of remembered knowledge involves obligatory reference(s) to "spitting," "vomiting," and/or "regurgitating."

I swear, if I have to read one more person saying that "spitting back knowledge" isn't "thinking critically," I will do some copious regurgitating of my own.

download this

I just checked out one of the articles Barry quotes and found this:

Paula Tommins asked, “How are we training the teachers and supporting the teachers because they’re going from downloading to coaching.” By “downloading” she meant imparting knowledge, she later said.
Parents question a new method for teaching math
Published: Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Just the other day I was thinking about the download scenes in The Matrix.

Neo would be in mortal danger so he would dial up the home computer and ask the guy they left back on the ship to download How to Fly a Getaway Helicopter into Neo's skull, and in under 5 seconds -- voilà. He could fly.

I was thinking those scenes are evidence that everyone's folk theory of learning encompasses the fact that knowledge stored on Google is not the same thing as knowledge stored inside your brain. I mean, the Warchowski siblings could have written the scenes differently, right? (If they'd gone to Teachers College, maybe they would have.) They could have had Keanu Reeves Google "How to Fly a Getaway Helicopter" and then have Google read him the directions really, really fast.

They didn't do that or anything like that because everyone understands that when it's a matter of life and death you have to know the instructions by heart.

p.s.: 'Downloading' new skills into our brains like characters on The Matrix set to become a reality, say scientists

p.p.s.: how to learn things automatically

more fun with middle school

An Amazon book review:

The reason I gave this book two stars, is because we use this book in our class all of the time. Most of the stories and poems in here are hard to understand and complicated.

I know that you are supposed to use your mind, and there is no right or wrong answer, but you can not use your mind if you dont know what is going on. I keep getting zero's on my daybook assignments, because all I can put in the margins or the pages to write what you think, is that I can't write anything because it was hard to understand, so I get zero's for not understanding, and that to me isnt fair! So, I think that if to this book you tell your opinion, I think that if your opinion is that you didnt understand it, than that should still be counted as "no right or wrong answer".

Amazon review of Daybook of Critical Reading And Writing (Grade 6)

The fabulous thing here is that this student is attempting a fairly sophisticated argument. It's an argument of the jailhouse lawyer type, of course, but still. He or she is onto something. S/he just needs better writing skills to pull it off.

Unfortunately, better writing skills aren't in the offing, I predict. Daily zeros on daybook assignments are a proven time-waster even the Writing the Essay people don't go in for.

p.s: Someone needs to tell this student about the Postmodernism Generator.

p.p.s.: I was going to title this post "Why we fight" but I thought that would be over the top.

explain yourself - Barry on the Common Core

Barry writes:

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article for TheAtlantic.com describing some of the problems with how math is currently being taught. Specifically, some math programs strive to teach students to think like "little mathematicians" before giving them the analytic tools they need to actually solve problems.

Some of us had hoped the situation would improve this school year, as 45 states and the District Columbia adopted the new Common Core Standards. But here are two discouraging emails I received recently. The first was from a parent:

They implemented Common Core this year in our school system in Tennessee. I have a third grader who loved math and got A's in math until this year, where he struggles to get a C. He struggles with "explaining" how he got his answer after using "mental math." In fact, I had no idea how to explain it! It's math 2+2=4. I can't explain it, it just is.

The second email came from a teacher in another state:

I am teaching the traditional algorithm this year to my third graders, but was told next year with Common Core I will not be allowed to. They should use mental math, and other strategies, to add. Crazy! I am so outraged that I have decided my child is NOT going to public schools until Common Core falls flat.

This may sound wildly off topic, but the struggle a third grader has "explaining" why two plus two equals four strikes me as being of a piece with the struggle basic writers have trouble writing a conclusion, especially a conclusion in a 5-paragraph essay, a highly compressed form that leaves you no room to "ask a rhetorical question" or "suggest future lines of inquiry" or "close with a quotation that captures your view" and the like.

With the 5-paragraph essay, when you get to paragraph 5 you've said everything you were going to say (if you're lucky), but the teacher wants you to say something more.

But what?

One thing I always liked about William J. Kerrigan's X-1-2-3 approach is the fact that he didn't bother with introductions and conclusions. The introduction was 1 sentence - Sentence X - and the conclusion was 1 sentence, too. Kerrigan called the final sentence the "rounding off" sentence, as I recall. Really, that's all anyone should do in a very short paper; otherwise your introduction & conclusion - 2 paragraphs out of 5 - take up 40% of the essay.

I've had to abandon Kerrigan's one-sentence policy, though, since I'm pretty sure other instructors don't look kindly upon one-sentence introductions and conclusions, not that I've asked.

So my students, like the 3rd grader trying to explain 2+2, solve the problem they've been set and then struggle to say something else about the something they've just said.

Writing the Essay at Urban Dictionary

I think someone's going to be getting a Writing the Essay mug for Christmas.

AND SEE:
the boss compositionists

the natural

I read a fabulous passage the other night re: process writing, purportedly drawn from Peter Elbow's work. Can't track down the original to confirm, but it's too droll to pass up posting here:

Start off writing as naturally and comfortably as possible. Don’t think about grammar or about any minor matters of phrasing or spelling. Think only about what you want to say....

Next . . . get your text to say exactly what you want it to say—but still without worrying about minor matters of phrasing, grammar, or spelling....

Now turn your attention to phrasing, spelling, and grammar. . . . [R]ead it aloud to yourself ...and read your piece aloud to one or two listeners. . . . Give your final, typed version to another person to copy-edit.

Tryg Thoreson on Peter Elbow

My favorite part is paragraph 2, where you get your text to say exactly what you want it to say without worrying about spelling, grammar, or "phrasing."

I mean, jeez. If we're dispensing with phrasing, why not go all the way and dispense with writing altogether?

Writing is hard.

Talking is easier.

Also, where are all the volunteer copy editors? Do they copy edit blog posts?

Thoreson's article is a lot of fun.

another gap that doesn't close

A new study of elementary and middle school students has found that those who are the youngest in their grades score worse on standardized tests than their older classmates and are more likely to be prescribed stimulants for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

The findings suggest that in a given grade, students born at the end of the calendar year may be at a distinct disadvantage. Those perceived as having academic or behavioral problems may in fact be lagging simply as a result of being forced to compete with classmates almost a full year older than them. For a child as young as 5, a span of one year can account for 20 percent of the child’s age, potentially making him or her appear significantly less mature than older classmates.

The new study found that the lower the grade, the greater the disparity. For children in the fourth grade, the researchers found that those in the youngest third of their class had an 80 to 90 percent increased risk of scoring in the lowest decile on standardized tests. They were also 50 percent more likely than the oldest third of their classmates to be prescribed stimulants for A.D.H.D. The differences diminished somewhat over time, the researchers found, but continued at least through the seventh grade.

It gets worse.

The findings dovetail with research carried out by two economists, Kelly Bedard and Elizabeth Dhuey. In looking at fourth graders around the world, the two found that the oldest children scored up to 12 percentile points higher than the youngest children. Their work, which was described in the best-selling 2008 book “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell, has shown a similar pattern among college students.

“At four-year colleges in the United States,” Mr. Gladwell wrote, “students belonging to the relatively youngest group in their class are underrepresented by about 11.6 percent. That initial difference in maturity doesn’t go away with time. It persists. And for thousands of students, that initial disadvantage is the difference between going to college — and having a real shot at the middle class — and not.”
Younger Students More Likely to Get A.D.H.D. Drugs
By ANAHAD O'CONNOR
NOVEMBER 20, 2012, 11:25 AM

Sheesh.

C. was one of the youngest kids in his class, and at some point it dawned on me that his friends were also the youngest kids in his class -- and that the older kids seemed to be having more fun. Probably getting better grades, too.

But when I pointed out the connection, nobody believed me. The reigning view was that age of birth affected sports, but not academics, and not friendship. Academics and friendship were somehow completely and totally unrelated to biology, I guess.

Obviously I shouldn't have stopped reading Malcolm Gladwell when I did. If I'd read The Outliers, I could have at least won an argument or two.

cleft sentences

I was talking to Katharine today about teaching writing. I've been focusing on sentence combining, specifically on teaching students to write the kinds of embedded and heavily "noun-modified" sentences you see in academic writing.

Katharine said she thinks students need to learn not just how to 'combine' and 'embed' but also how to manipulate word order via cleft sentences, "anticipatory its," passive voice and the like.

So tonight I've been tracking cleft sentence handouts....

This one looks good.

English teachers need to study linguistics. I'm playing catch-up, and I hadn't made a conscious distinction, inside my own mind, between "embedding" versus "word order" as different ways of persuading sentences to do what you want them to do.

If you haven't made a distinction consciously, you can't use it to decide what to teach.

that was quick

Finally emerging from Hurricane Sandy discombobulation to discover that Poof: the semester is gone. I have just four classes left to teach (the rest being committed to in-class papers & the exit exam).

Whoosh.

So where were we?

While I'm figuring that out, here are my current off-topic preoccupations, in case anyone has info and/or reading recommendations:

How do power grids work? (Allison posted some links on decrepit infrastructure, I think.)

What is a hurricane? What is a Nor'easter? What is a midlatitude trough? (And do other places have hurricanes followed immediately by 6 inches of snow?)

How long can you store gasoline?

Generator or inverter, or generator and inverter?

Does my fireplace produce a net loss in heat? (Do all fireplaces produce a net loss in heat? Does it matter?)

What I Saved from the Flood 

What is an IP address, anyway, and how does the FBI find out what your is if they really want to know? Also, what is metadata?

the power

Since our power came back on (8 days without), Ed and I are both loving our light switches!

I've been walking around the house turning lights on just because I can.