Philip Keller on teachers and interactive lessons

Eureka
Eureka, part 2
Eureka, part 3
Eureka, part 4

From Philip Keller (whose The New Math SAT Game Plan: The Strategic Way to Score Higher we used and strongly recommend:

...and regarding MOOCs:

Count me in with the skeptics. Here's why:

Earlier this year, I developed an interactive simulation to use in my classroom. Then, I wrote a guided activity for my students to follow to use the simulation to learn a specific set of physics skills. Then, I played the "guide on the side" (suppress gagging noise) to observe and help as they worked through the activity.

No one complained that it was hard to understand. No one had technical difficulties working with the simulation. But what I saw was that no one drove themselves to engage with any sense of urgency. What I thought of as a finely crafted interactive study guide, they thought of as a "work sheet." Without me steadily circulating to maintain the pressure to keep on task, to actually read the words on the page, to follow the directions and to think about what was happening in front of them and to do the math -- well, it wouldn't have happened. And if I had sent it home as a flipped assignment, I don't think my students would have given the 20 - 30 minutes of relentless concentration required.

I don't want to sound all nuts-and-berries, but I think that teaching and learning requires personal interaction and a sense of accountability to a course and to the teacher. Only a tiny fraction of students will do all of what it takes to learn the material without that personal element.

Here's the pull:

What I thought of as a finely crafted interactive study guide, they thought of as a "work sheet."

Exactly right.

"Flipped" classrooms and MOOCs and interactive lessons students can work through at their own pace sound like a good thing (at least, MOOCs and interactive lessons sound like a good thing) …. but then, when you try them with your child or your students or yourself (at least in my case), nothing happens. Your child doesn't learn his math facts from the fun software program(s) you bought him, your students tune out, and you yourself watch exactly 1 lecture of each Great Courses series you purchase, if that.

I'm going to be sending Philip's account to all of the administrators & board members in my district. Several times.

From a second email:

And I am definitely a believer and practitioner of dorky professor humor.  

……………...

News flash: Phil's son just got into Princeton!!!!

Congratulations!

Flipping the Classroom: Hot, Hot, Hot
MOOCs grow the gap
The New York Times is surprised
In the world of MOOCs, 2+2 is never 4
World's funniest joke: humor depends on surprise
Dick Van Dyke on comedy
Philip Keller on the flipped classroom
If students could talk
Who wants flipped classrooms? (Salman Khan on liberating teachers)
True story
Are math & science lectures boring in a way humanities & social science lectures are not?

The New York Times is going to be surprised again

The New York Times is surprised 12/11/2013

In the Times today:

In past years, the College Board, which administers the program and the exams, has been justifiably criticized for requiring too much rote learning of a broad range of facts, and too little time for in-depth study, lab work or creative ventures. But now the board is beginning a drastic revision of its courses and exams, which will focus on the most important core concepts of a subject and leave more room for students and teachers to become more creative.

Even Gifted Students Can’t Keep Up
In Math and Science, the Best Fend for Themselves

Ostensibly, the New York Times editorial board believes AP courses are flawed and approves of the current effort to gut revise them.

Close reading of this passage, however, compels me to point out that the choice of the word "drastic" as the modifier for "revision" signals a certain ….. foreboding …. on the part of the Times.

Conclusion: the collective basal ganglia of the Times editorial board is crying out to be heard.

Dick Van Dyke on comedy

Auntie Ann left this link to Dick Van Dyke explaining comedy:

15:54 Dick Van Dyke:
A comedy writer writes those funny stories that people like Captain Harper steal, uh, sell.

9:45 Boy in class:
Can you write one now?

Dick Van Dyke:
Can I what?

Boy in class:
Can you write one now?

Dick Van Dyke:
Well, uh, see there’s so many different things a comedy writer – BACK TO CLASS, FACING BOARD, WALKING BACKWARD, FALLS OFF STEP IN FRONT OF CLASSROOM – does—

Children:
LAUGH

16:09 Dick Van Dyke:
You laughed there. You know why you laughed? Because that was unexpected. You didn’t expect me to do that. Did you see that? Unexpected means that something happens that you didn’t think would happen. It’s kind of like a surprise, really, and that makes you laugh. For instance, if Mrs. Gibbon had said, ‘Children we’re going to have some addition now, if she said, first of all [WRITING ON BLACKBOARD] 1 and 1 are 12.

Children:
LAUGH

Dick Van Dyke:
See, that surprised you. That was the unexpected so you laughed. Of course everybody knows that 1 and 1 are 11.

Children:
LAUGH

Dick Van Dyke:
DOUBLE TAKE – See? That’s what the unexpected does. It makes you laugh, because you don’t expect that. And it’s a surprise. Now, when I came in the door and sat down you didn’t laugh, did you, because there was nothing really funny. You expected me to do that. But what if I had come in this way. [WALKS TO DOOR] Just a minute, I’ll be right back.

Mrs. Gibbon:
Now watch carefully children. This will be very funny now.

LOUD BANGING ON DOOR, DICK VAN DYKE ENTERS, SLAMS DOOR ON HAND, AGONIZES, TRIPS OVER PLATFORM, FALLS ON FACE

Children:
LOUD LAUGHTER.

Dick Van Dyke:
Now you see. That was unexpected and you laughed. So that’s one way of making people laugh.

TRIPS ON PLATFORM AGAIN & FALLS DOWN AGAIN

LOUD LAUGHTER FROM CHILDREN

17:25 Dick Van Dyke:
See. Got you again. You can surprise people and make them laugh. Now. Another way to make people laugh is something familiar to them. If they see themselves, or they see something in other people that they recognize, they’ll laugh at that, too. Now. I’m going to do some movements for you. No words. Just gestures, and you’ll have to try and guess what it is I’m doing, alright? I’ll move this light table back – [STRUGGLES TO PUSH TEACHER’S DESK BACK TOWARD BOARD]

Children:
LOUD LAUGHTER

Dick Van Dyke:
[GIVES UP TRYING TO MOVE DESK, TURNS TO CLASS, FOLDS ARMS ON CLASS, LEANS AGAINST DESK] Well we’ll have to—oh! [DESK HAS MOVED BACK OF ITS OWN ACCORD]

Children:
LOUD LAUGHTER

Dick van Dyke:
Now I’m going to just do some movements and you’re going to tell me what I’m doing. Alright [PULLS UP PANTS AT KNEES, LEANS AGAINST DESK AGAIN, MIMES PUTTING ON ONE SHOE, THEN PUTTING ON THE OTHER & TYING IT]

Children:
Putting on your shoe!

Children:
Tying!

Dick Van Dyke:
That’s right.

[WALKS CHARLIE-CHAPLAN STYLE]

Dick Van Dyke:
My shoes are on the wrong feet! That’s right.

[MIMES CHANGING SHOES TO DIFFERENT FOOT, THEN MIMES WALKING PIGEON-TOED]

Children shouting out what’s happened [unintelligible]

Dick Van Dyke:
That’s right. Now. I’m going to do another movement for you. This is called pantomime. It was invented by the Romans about 2000 years ago. Alright.

[MIMES THROWING A BASEBALL]

Children shouting what he’s doing

[MIMES CATHINKG A BASEBALL]

Dick Van Dyke: Oh! [MIMES HURT HAND]

PANTOMIMES TENNIS SERVE, CIRCUS LADDER, TIGHTROPE, BICYCLE ON TIGHTROPE, HEADLESS PERSON, YO YO (HITS HIMSELF IN NOSE)

Eureka
Eureka, part 2
Eureka, part 3
Eureka, part 4
Eureka, part 5

Flipping the Classroom: Hot, Hot, Hot
MOOCs grow the gap
The New York Times is surprised
In the world of MOOCs, 2+2 is never 4
World's funniest joke: humor depends on surprise
Dick Van Dyke on comedy
Philip Keller on the flipped classroom
If students could talk
Who wants flipped classrooms? (Salman Khan on liberating teachers)
True story
Are math & science lectures boring in a way humanities & social science lectures are not?

MOOCs and mikes

gasstationwithoutpumps wrote my next post---!

MOOCs should mike the audience.

Eureka
Eureka, part 2
Eureka, part 3
Eureka, part 4
Eureka, part 5

Flipping the Classroom: Hot, Hot, Hot
MOOCs grow the gap
The New York Times is surprised
In the world of MOOCs, 2+2 is never 4
World's funniest joke: humor depends on surprise
Dick Van Dyke on comedy
Philip Keller on the flipped classroom
If students could talk
Who wants flipped classrooms? (Salman Khan on liberating teachers)
True story
Are math & science lectures boring in a way humanities & social science lectures are not?

Eureka, part 4: Why MOOCs don't work and professors are jaunty

Eureka
Eureka, part 2
Eureka, part 3
Eureka, part 4
Eureka, part 5

Back to my eureka moment:

Sitcoms explain why MOOCs fail, and why flipped classrooms will fail.

To reprise: sitcoms work because they are funny, and funny works because it is surprising.

Surprise affects us via reward prediction error. When something better-than-expected happens, dopamine spikes, and your brain marks that event as a good thing: a thing to return to, a thing to pay attention to when you see it again.

In short, reward prediction error (via humor, in this case) commands attention.

Which brings me to the difference between a live lecture & a MOOC.

Live lectures are, not infrequently, almost bizarrely jokey. I say "bizarrely" because the jokes don't really fit the content. They're add ons, humor for the sake of humor.

Take a look at Jo Ann Freeman's lectures on the American Revolution. These are fabulous lectures, so fabulous I've managed to watch almost 3 of them, a record for me to date.^* I've never made it through more than 1 lecture from The Great Courses.

At times, Freeman is so jokey I feel impatient: Stop joking around about the Founders, will you?

But if I were sitting in the lecture hall listening to Freeman in person, everything would be different. Inside the lecture hall I would feel happy, interested, and best of all awake.

17:03 - 18:11: Here she is on her first semester teaching at Yale. I've seen this section several times now, and I still find it funny (even on tape, which I realize undermines my thesis….)



Here's Lecture 2 Being a British Colonist:



13:42 "I've already given you one arrogant British quote…"
16:53 "As promised, here is yet another arrogant British quote in my series of arrogant British quotes..."
17:36 Freeman laughs out loud at the observation that British observers never view the colonies as "polite."
17:47 Freeman on the British sending inferior goods to the colonies because the colonists wouldn't know
18:51 "I just can't resist adding [this] in, it makes me happy and it's John Adams!!!!

Another example of weird humor in college teaching: Thomas C. Foster's books.

How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines
How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form

Notice the subtitles.

"Lively and entertaining"

"Jaunty"

Then take a look at the reactions to Foster on Goodreads. More than a few readers see Foster as condescending. The reason readers see Foster as condescending, I think, is precisely that he is jaunty. He is jaunty about Shakespeare, he is jaunty about the Bible, he is jaunty about Ulysses, he is jaunty about Northrup Frye, he is jaunty about intertextuality for God's sake. Name a work of literature covered by Foster, and you will find a jocular and jaunty tone; open the book to a random page, there jocular and jaunty will be. The entire work is unrelievedly jaunty; Foster never lets up. Reading Foster, you become desperate for whatever is the opposite of comic relief.

Why would anyone, let alone a professor of English literature, write a book that leaves the reader desperate for whatever is the opposite of comic relief?

What Foster has done, I am certain of it, is transpose his classroom voice directly to the page.

It doesn't work.

But inside the classroom, his jocular and jaunty tone does work.

As a first pass at understanding how sitcoms and reward prediction error explain the failure of MOOCs and the impending failure of flips, I would say that MOOCs and flips are catastrophically handicapped by the simple fact that goofy humor works inside the classroom and doesn't work on tape.

Probably for the same reason The Big Bang Theory isn't funny without the laugh track.

Eureka, Part 5 t/k



Flipping the Classroom: Hot, Hot, Hot
MOOCs grow the gap
The New York Times is surprised
In the world of MOOCs, 2+2 is never 4
World's funniest joke: humor depends on surprise
Dick Van Dyke on comedy
Philip Keller on the flipped classroom
If students could talk

How to Read Literature Like an English Professor by Thomas C. Foster
How to Read Literature Like an English Professor by Thomas C. Foster - NOTES

^* It's a toss up which I'll finish first: The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Version or Jo Ann Freeman's 25 lectures on the American Revolution.

Flipping the Classroom: Hot, Hot, Hot
MOOCs grow the gap
The New York Times is surprised
In the world of MOOCs, 2+2 is never 4
World's funniest joke: humor depends on surprise
Dick Van Dyke on comedy
Philip Keller on the flipped classroom
If students could talk
Who wants flipped classrooms? (Salman Khan on liberating teachers)
True story
Are math & science lectures boring in a way humanities & social science lectures are not?

Speaking of jokes and "reward prediction error"

the world's funniest joke

I actually laughed out loud when I read this, and immediately afterwards thought: That joke's pretty dumb.

The fact is, though, that I didn't see the punchline coming, and I laughed.

Humor depends on surprise.

Eureka
Eureka, part 2
Eureka, part 3
Eureka, part 4
Eureka, part 5

Flipping the Classroom: Hot, Hot, Hot
MOOCs grow the gap
The New York Times is surprised
In the world of MOOCs, 2+2 is never 4
World's funniest joke: humor depends on surprise
Dick Van Dyke on comedy
Philip Keller on the flipped classroom
If students could talk
Who wants flipped classrooms? (Salman Khan on liberating teachers)
True story
Are math & science lectures boring in a way humanities & social science lectures are not?

Eureka, part 3: MOOCs and flips and dopamine

Eureka
Eureka, part 2
Eureka, part 3
Eureka, part 4
Eureka, part 5

So, MOOCs. Why don't they work (setting aside, for the moment, Anne D's experience)?

I had just gotten to the point where sitcoms gave me the answer I was looking for when I had to take a train to the city.

So, to reprise:

Ed brought up movies.

When you go to the movies, he said, the screen is huge, the sound is deafening, all the lights are turned off, you can't talk to your friends, and you have to stow your cell phone. Plus a movie lasts only a couple of hours, then you never have to see it again unless there's a sequel that you really want to see, and you don't have to see that for at least a year.

And even at the movies, even with all the ploys and devices filmmakers and theater designers have developed to hold your attention, if the plot sags, your mind wanders.

MOOCs don't have any of those things, so good luck. The wonder of it all is not that the drop-out rate for MOOCs is catastrophic, but that anyone thought they were a good idea in the first place.

Ed continued.

TV, he said, had had to follow in the footsteps of movies. TVs are bigger, the sound is louder, the experience more immersive….

That's not really true, I said. It's definitely not true of sitcoms. Sitcoms are the exact same hokey, flat-lit, 3-camera affair they always were, with the laugh track telling you when to laugh, and they work. They always have.

That's when it hit me.

"Reward prediction error"

In graduate school (I have a Ph.D. in film studies) I was intensely interested in comedy; I wrote my dissertation on 1950s comedies. 1950s comedies are fabulous, but what I really wanted to know was: what is humor?

What makes things funny?

I've wondered about that for my entire adult life, and have probably, finally, found at least a partial answer, which has to do with -- hold your breath -- the basal ganglia. (For passersby, I have been slaving over a basal ganglia writing project for years now.)

Research on the basal ganglia is very new, so take what I'm about to describe as provisional.

The basal ganglia seem to be all about reward prediction error.

"Reward prediction error" means that learning happens when you predict a reward and you are wrong.

Here's how it works. (Or may work).

Dopamine spikes or drops in response to "prediction" errors, that is to mistakes we make predicting rewards.

• If you expect something good to happen & it doesn't, dopamine drops. That feels bad.
• If you expect something bad to happen and it doesn't, dopamine spikes. That feels good.
• If you're not expecting anything good to happen one way or another, and all of a sudden, out of the blue, something good does happen, that feels great. Because dopamine.

(I've learned just this week that "because" has become a preposition.)

So, if you're expecting a check to come in the mail and the check comes in the mail, no dopamine spike. You open the check, you're mildly happy (if that), you deposit the check. Life goes on.

If you're not expecting a check to come in the mail and a check in the exact same amount as the expected check-in-the-mail arrives without warning, that feels great because dopamine.

A surprise check in the mail feels great because dopamine fires in response to good surprises (or to "better-than-expected" rewards.)


Reinforcement learning

Reward prediction error is the basis of reinforcement learning.

It's unfortunate that "reinforcement learning" is called "reinforcement learning," because "reinforcement," to me, sounds as if learning takes place when the same thing happens again.

Instead, reinforcement learning takes place when something new happens, something you didn't expect.

("Something new" includes something old but better -- or worse -- than you expected. I know the whole thing gets incredibly confusing right around this point, but just remember the surprise check in the mail: how different it feels from the fully anticipated check in the mail. The surprise check in the mail produces reinforcement learning; the expected check in the mail does not.)

For the record, I don't know how learning via distributed practice, via repetition, relates to reinforcement learning, so that question will have to remain a mystery for the time being.

Reinforcement learning in the sense of the incidental learning we do naturally throughout the day (what should I do again? what should I not do again?) depends on mistakes. "Reinforcement learning" happens when we are wrong, when we are wrong in a very specific way: reinforcement learning happens when we are wrong about the goodness or badness of what comes next.

Drug addiction is probably a phenomenon of reward prediction error, btw.

Normally we habituate to good things. We get used to them; we no longer feel ecstatic when they occur. But addictive drugs always spike dopamine -- that is their effect inside the brain -- and that is what makes them addictive.

Cocaine spikes dopamine every time you use it, so  your brain is always getting a 'REMEMBER THIS AND DO IT AGAIN' message, and your interest in taking cocaine always increases. Addiction is a form of learning, a form of overlearning, more exactly.

At least, that is the way I understand the reward prediction error theory of drug addition, as a "disease of learning and memory."

(Interesting 2012 research here…dopamine and GABA…)


Surprise is good

The long and the short of it: surprise is good.

Good surprise is good.

Bad surprise is bad.

All surprise, however, appears to be informational. Our brains react strongly, and we learn.

Which brings me to sitcoms.

Why are funny things funny?

Funny things are funny, at least in part, because humor -- humor that works -- is surprising. If it's not surprising, it's not funny.

And that means humor tells your brain you've made a reward prediction error. The punchline of a good joke or gag is unexpected, so dopamine spikes up. Dopamine spikes feel good, so we come back for more.

A good sitcom doesn't need an immersive setting or loud music or arresting imagery to hold our attention.

A good sitcom sets the reward prediction errors coming one on the heels of another, and that is plenty.

Eureka, Part 4 t/k

Flipping the Classroom: Hot, Hot, Hot
MOOCs grow the gap
The New York Times is surprised
In the world of MOOCs, 2+2 is never 4
World's funniest joke: humor depends on surprise
Dick Van Dyke on comedy
Philip Keller on the flipped classroom
If students could talk
Who wants flipped classrooms? (Salman Khan on liberating teachers)
True story
Are math & science lectures boring in a way humanities & social science lectures are not?

Woodrow Wilson on fathers, sons, and universities

I am interested in [this organization - the YMCA] for various reasons. First of all, because it is an association of young men. I have had a good deal to do with young men in my time, and I have formed an impression of them which I believe to be contrary to the general impression. They are generally thought to be arch radicals. As a matter of fact, they are the most conservative people I have ever dealt with. Go to a college community and try to change the least custom of that little world and find how the conservatives will rush at you. Moreover, young men are embarrassed by having inherited their father’s opinions. I have often said that the use of a university is to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible. I do not say that with the least disrespect for the fathers; but every man who is old enough to have a son in college is old enough to have become very seriously immersed in some particular business and is almost certain to have caught the point of view of that particular business. And it is very useful to his son to be taken out of that narrow circle, conducted to some high place where he may see the general map of the world and of the interests of mankind, and there shown how big the world is and how much of it his father may happen to have forgotten. It would be worth while for men, middle-aged and old, to detach them selves more frequently from the things that command their daily attention and to think of the sweeping tides of humanity.

Woodrow Wilson on the Christian Men’s Association

Needless to say, I personally do not agree that a sentiment such as "the use of a university is to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible" can be advanced without "the least disrespect for the fathers" even once, let alone often.

Well, at least Woodrow Wilson thought character education happened via instruction in the disciplines, not vendor-produced character-ed "curricula" and the like.

I suppose that's something.

Eureka, part 2: why MOOCs don't work and flipped classrooms never will work

Eureka, part 1

So as I was saying, Ed and I were having lunch in the American Diner, somewhere in the vicinity of Nyack (if I am not mistaken) and we were talking about MOOCs, and I had a eureka moment re: why MOOCs don't work, and why flipped classrooms won't work, either.

The whole MOOC/flipped classroom extravaganza of lo these past 2 years------

Wait.

Has it been 2 years?

Should we date the commencement of MOOC fever to Bill Gates' anointment of Salman Khan as the new new thing?

[pause]

Two seconds on Google brings us to Bill Gates on the “golden era” of learning, thanks to massive open online courses and easy access to information, so I say Yes, blame Bill Gates. Because if it wasn't Bill Gates who launched us on the MOOCs-&-flips merry-go-round, it could have been. Pretty much wherever you see a really bad idea re: public education taking hold, you will find Bill Gates.

So I blame Bill.

Anyway, Ed and I got on the subject of MOOCs, and while I no longer recall our point of departure, we pretty quickly arrived at the simple fact that MOOCs (and flips) are fantastically boring.

The fantastic boringness of MOOCs is no secret, & pretty much everyone concedes the point (though for different reasons) but the question is: Why?

Why are MOOCs fantastically boring?

More to the point, why are MOOCs fantastically boring to me, a person who is perfectly happy, and not remotely bored, listening to a live lecture delivered inside a lecture hall?

I can prove it, too. Morningside's Summer School Institute, which I attended the summer before last, used a heavy-duty lecture format; we students sat for hours of lecture, hours on end. Lecture and Powerpoints.

It was great!

By the end of the two weeks I was exhausted and my brain was fried, but I wasn't bored (just the opposite), and, more importantly, I was still in the class. Everyone was. Which would not have been the case if we'd been taking the class via MOOC.

(For the record, the first week of the Summer School Institute is largely lecture; the second week is divided between lecture and student teaching in Morningside Academy.)

My point being: I have a very high tolerance for lecture; I have no problem showing up for, learning from, and enjoying live lectures delivered in bricks-and-mortar venues. Where MOOCs are concerned, I should be a natural.

So why can't I make it through more than 2 or 3 (usually 2) taped lectures of a MOOC?

Ed brought up movies.

When you go to the movies, he said, the screen is huge, the sound is deafening, all the lights are turned off, you can't talk to your friends, and you aren't allowed to turn your cell phone on. Plus a movie lasts only a couple of hours, then you never have to see it again unless there's a sequel that you really want to see, and you don't have to see that for at least a year.

And even at the movies, even with all the ploys and devices filmmakers and theater designers have developed to hold your attention, if the plot sags, your mind wanders.

MOOCs don't have any of those things, so good luck. The wonder of it all is not that the drop-out rate for MOOCs is catastrophic, but that anyone thought they were a good idea in the first place.

Ed continued.

TV, he said, had had to follow in the footsteps of movies. TVs are bigger, the sound is louder, the experience more immersive….

That's not really true, I said. It's definitely not true of sit coms. Sit coms are the exact same hokey, flat-lit, 3-camera affair they always were, with the laugh track telling you when to laugh, and they work. They always have.

That's when it hit me.

Part 3 t/k

Eureka
Eureka, part 2
Eureka, part 3
Eureka, part 4
Eureka, part 5

Flipping the Classroom: Hot, Hot, Hot
MOOCs grow the gap
The New York Times is surprised
In the world of MOOCs, 2+2 is never 4
World's funniest joke: humor depends on surprise
Dick Van Dyke on comedy
Philip Keller on the flipped classroom
If students could talk
Who wants flipped classrooms? (Salman Khan on liberating teachers)
True story
Are math & science lectures boring in a way humanities & social science lectures are not?

Little Drummer Boy

I spent the first 5 seconds of this video thinking This is ridiculous, and, about 5 seconds after that, This is fabulous!

Little Drummer Boy Pentatonix

You have to watch the video, and the singers' faces.

Eureka

This afternoon, while Ed and I were having lunch in the American Diner over in …. Nyack?

Hmm.

I have no idea what town the American Diner is in.

Retake.

This afternoon, while Ed and I were having lunch in the American Diner, it came to me.

Why MOOCs don't work, and why flipped classrooms aren't going to work, either.

I've got it.

Optimal arousal levels.

That's the problem.

As usual, the world of athletics is way ahead of the world of everything else.

More anon.

Eureka
Eureka, part 2
Eureka, part 3
Eureka, part 4
Eureka, part 5

Flipping the Classroom: Hot, Hot, Hot
MOOCs grow the gap
The New York Times is surprised
In the world of MOOCs, 2+2 is never 4
World's funniest joke: humor depends on surprise
Dick Van Dyke on comedy
Philip Keller on the flipped classroom
If students could talk
Who wants flipped classrooms? (Salman Khan on liberating teachers)
True story
Are math & science lectures boring in a way humanities & social science lectures are not?

MOOCs grow the gap

This study contributes to a growing body of research on academic achievement of students in online courses. In a recent meta-analysis of studies comparing online to inperson courses (2009), the U.S. Department of Education found that there was no significant difference between student achievement in online and traditional courses, although a small increase was noted for hybrid courses that combined the two methods. However, when these studies were further analyzed by at-risk student population demographics lower achievement was found in online courses (Jaggars & Bailey, 2010). This finding has been recently expanded by Xu and Jaggars (2013) in a study that investigated how different types of students—including groups that share characteristics found, particularly, among students from AOLE’s partner high school—perform in online learning courses. Using course grade and course completion as dependent variables, Xu and Jaggars found that while all students did less well in online courses, some student groups were more negatively affected from taking courses in this mode. These students were males, younger students, students with lower levels academic skills, and African American students. [emphasis added] The study also found that the negative impact of online learning was exacerbated when groups of students comprised of those who adapt least well to online learning study together. It should be noted that the study, based on research conducted across Washington State on 500,000 online and face-to-face course enrollments (and 41,000 students), did not distinguish between different types of online learning environments, faculty preparation, or support services available to students. The Xu and Jaggars study confirms prior findings in previous smaller studies, which also found that students from at-risk demographic groups and introductory courses had lower performance in online courses compared to other students, thereby exacerbating the well-documented achievement gap in higher education (Kaupp, 2012; Xiu & Smith, 2011, Terenzini & Pascarella, 1998).
PRELIMINARY SUMMARY
SJSU+ AUGMENTED ONLINE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT
PILOT PROJECT
September 2013
Prepared for Principal Investigator: Elaine D. Collins, Ph.D

Eureka
Eureka, part 2
Eureka, part 3
Eureka, part 4
Eureka, part 5

Flipping the Classroom: Hot, Hot, Hot
MOOCs grow the gap
The New York Times is surprised
In the world of MOOCs, 2+2 is never 4
World's funniest joke: humor depends on surprise
Dick Van Dyke on comedy
Philip Keller on the flipped classroom
If students could talk
Who wants flipped classrooms? (Salman Khan on liberating teachers)
True story
Are math & science lectures boring in a way humanities & social science lectures are not?

In the world of MOOCs, 2 + 2 is never 4

The statistical model found that measures of student effort trump all other variables tested for their relationships to student success, including demographic descriptions of the students, course subject matter and student use of support services. The clearest predictor of passing a course is the number of problem sets a student submitted. The relationship between completion of problem sets and success is not linear; rather the positive effect increases dramatically after a certain baseline of effort has been made. Video Time, another measure of effort, was also found to have a strong positive relationship with passing, particularly for Stat 95 students. The report graphs these and other relationships between variables examined by the logistic-regression models and pass/fail.

While the regression analysis did not find a positive relationship between use of online support and positive outcomes, this should not be interpreted to mean that online support cannot increase student engagement and success. As students, Udacity service providers and faculty members explained, several factors complicated students’ ability to fully use the support services, including their limited online experience, their lack of awareness that these services were available and the difficulties they experienced interacting with some aspects of the online platform. It is thus the advice of the research team that additional investigations be conducted into the role that online and other support can play in the delivery of AOLE courses once the initial technical and other complications have been addressed.

Conclusion: The low pass rates in all courses should be considered in light of the fact that the project specifically targeted at-risk populations, including students who had failed Math 6L before Spring 2013 and groups demonstrated by other research to be less likely to succeed in an online environment. Previous studies (see Section 1) have found that these students do less well in online than in face-to-face courses. Further, student groups in at least one major study (Jaggars and Xu, 2013) who were found to experience the greatest negative effect from taking courses online share many of the characteristics found among the AOLE partner high school students in particular, a group with very low pass rates in Spring 2013.

Overall, much was learned during and from the first iteration of AOLE and improvements are already in progress in the second AOLE iteration. Perhaps most importantly, the faculty members who taught these courses, although they had to contend with major difficulties along the way, believe that the content that has been developed has tremendous potential to advance students’ critical thinking and problem solving abilities. One faculty member summed it up this way: "Udacity has brought to the table ways to make the courses more inquiry-based and added real life context."
PRELIMINARY SUMMARY SJSU+ AUGMENTED ONLINE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT PILOT PROJECT September 2013

Let's reprise.

• The clearest predictor of success in the course was the number of problem sets students completed. In other words, practice. 
• The online mentors, aka teachers-slash-tutors, didn't help. But they might have helped if students had a) had lots of internet experience (practice) & thus could figure out how to get to the mentors; b) known the online mentors existed; and c) been able to get the MOOC site to work.
• "Previous research" had found that weak students do better in face-to-face courses, so….SJSU opted to run a MOOC and fill it with weak students.
• "Most importantly," the teachers who taught the MOOCs think the "content" has "tremendous potential to advance students’ critical thinking and problem solving abilities."

Practice is what matters, so the instructors are focused on inquiry; weak students do badly in online courses, so the MOOC people put weak students in online courses; educational technology never works.

A person who lives in the world where two plus two equals four would be doing something else.

Eureka
Eureka, part 2
Eureka, part 3
Eureka, part 4
Eureka, part 5

Flipping the Classroom: Hot, Hot, Hot
MOOCs grow the gap
The New York Times is surprised
In the world of MOOCs, 2+2 is never 4
World's funniest joke: humor depends on surprise
Dick Van Dyke on comedy
Philip Keller on the flipped classroom
If students could talk
Who wants flipped classrooms? (Salman Khan on liberating teachers)
True story
Are math & science lectures boring in a way humanities & social science lectures are not?

The New York Times is surprised

Two years after a Stanford professor drew 160,000 students from around the globe to a free online course on artificial intelligence, starting what was widely viewed as a revolution in higher education, early results for such large-scale courses are disappointing, forcing a rethinking of how college instruction can best use the Internet.
After Setbacks, Online Courses Are Rethought by Tamar Lewin December 10, 2013

Who could have predicted the coming of a MOOC rethink? Apart from every single person reading, writing, & commenting on this blog, who?

I ask you.

And perhaps the most publicized MOOC experiment, at San Jose State University, has turned into a flop. It was a partnership announced with great fanfare at a January news conference featuring Gov. Jerry Brown of California, a strong backer of online education. San Jose State and Udacity, a Silicon Valley company co-founded by a Stanford artificial-intelligence professor, Sebastian Thrun, would work together to offer three low-cost online introductory courses for college credit.

Mr. Thrun, who had been unhappy with the low completion rates in free MOOCs, hoped to increase them by hiring online mentors to help students stick with the classes. And the university, in the heart of Silicon Valley, hoped to show its leadership in online learning, and to reach more students.

But the pilot classes, of about 100 people each, failed. Despite access to the Udacity mentors, the online students last spring — including many from a charter high school in Oakland — did worse than those who took the classes on campus. In the algebra class, fewer than a quarter of the students — and only 12 percent of the high school students — earned a passing grade.

Meanwhile I'm pretty sure I heard our curriculum director say, at the last board meeting, that our classrooms have been flipped.

One of the board members said, "What's that?"

Eureka
Eureka, part 2
Eureka, part 3
Eureka, part 4
Eureka, part 5

Flipping the Classroom: Hot, Hot, Hot
MOOCs grow the gap
The New York Times is surprised
In the world of MOOCs, 2+2 is never 4
World's funniest joke: humor depends on surprise
Dick Van Dyke on comedy
Philip Keller on the flipped classroom
If students could talk

Done!

Semester over.

Whew.

Mission creep

Sharon Necaise, a public school educator at West Feliciana High School, in St. Francisville, La., told FoxNews.com her experience with Common Core has been positive.

"This is the thing, [Common Core] brings a critical thinking and cognitive awareness component that will ensure our students and children are not robots," Nercaise said.

Teachers complain Common Core-linked lessons little more than scripts to read
By Perry ChiaramontePublished December 05, 2013 FoxNews.com

AP Test $$$

Having written a check for $445 this morning to cover the cost of the 5 AP tests my son will take in May, I figure I'm allowed to gripe a little bit. I came close to telling him not to bother taking the tests. They will have NO influence on whether he gets into one college or another. However, his school won't give him the weighted value for the course unless he can get at least a '3' on each test. Never mind that all of his grades are A's. Does anyone know of students who do not bother to take the tests? I think the cost is too high and parents should not have to pay for them 6 months ahead of time. I feel like I'm at the car dealership for service. I just write the check.

Math scores & loss aversion

Enhancing the Efficacy of Teacher Incentives
Loss-aversion incentives increased math test scores between 0.2 and 0.4 standard deviations
In recent years, a number of U.S. states and school districts have implemented teacher financial-incentive plans, also known as merit pay, with the goal of increasing student achievement. Some past studies have shown that such reform attempts, which pay teachers bonuses after their students hit certain goals, have had limited effects on student achievement.

In Enhancing the Efficacy of Teacher Incentives Through Loss Aversion: A Field Experiment (NBER Working Paper No. 18237), co-authors Ronald Fryer, Jr., Steven Levitt, John List, and Sally Sadoff find that using an alternative "loss aversion" incentive -- with teachers being paid bonuses in advance and asked to give money back if students don't achieve specific results -- significantly improves student achievement. Their results also suggest that loss-aversion incentives might be used in the corporate world in the pursuit of profits.

Although earlier studies have confirmed a correlation between teacher quality and student achievement, the challenge to date has been identifying quality teachers and providing proper incentives for all teachers to successfully strive for improved and lasting student achievement. At least ten states and numerous school districts in the United States have adopted programs that reward teachers with extra pay after students achieve certain goals on tests or report cards, but these "traditional" incentive programs generally have not had large effects on long-term student performance.

Fryer and his co-authors conduct a field experiment of teacher incentives using the concept of loss aversion -- that is, by framing incentives as losses rather than gains. They worked with schools in Chicago Heights, Illinois, which is located thirty miles south of Chicago and has nine K-8 schools with a total of about 3,200 students, during the 2010-11 school year. Chicago Heights' schools are made up of primarily low-income minority students who struggle with low achievement rates.'

In cooperation with school administrators and the teachers' union, the authors randomly selected 150 volunteer teachers and divided them into two main categories. The "gain" group was subject to traditional merit-pay incentives distributed after student achievement levels were determined and met; the "loss" group was subject to loss-aversion incentives that gave bonuses in advance, with the stipulation that money would be returned by teachers if students didn't hit stipulated test goals at the end of the school year. With a pool of $632,960 to distribute in incentive payments, the authors further subdivided the "gain" and "loss" groups in order to measure individual-based and team-based teacher incentives.

Using benchmarks from prior student test scores and final end-of-school-year ThinkLink Predictive Assessment test results, the authors find that loss-aversion incentives increased math test scores between 0.2 and 0.4 standard deviations, or the equivalent of increasing teacher quality by more than one standard deviation. The traditional "gain" incentives yielded "smaller and statistically insignificant results." Similar patterns were found in reading test scores -- and in both individual-based and team-based teacher incentive approaches. The authors did not identify any other factors, such as student absenteeism or outright cheating in test scores, which could explain the differences in achievement results.
--Jay Fitzgerald

Anonymous weighs in

Here's a weird thought to ponder: across the land, future teachers are being taught that direct instruction is bad, that they should be the guide on the side, that the discover method is the best way to educate...but exactly HOW are they being taught this? Does a guide on the side help them to discover the enduring understanding that this is the best way to teach? I bet not. I bet they are being directly instructed not to directly instruct. Hmm...

The reason this came to mind is that I was remembering a curriculum writing workshop in which I was instructed (and it felt direct to me) that if a question has a single correct answer then it is not an essential question.

What has happened is that the understanding-by-design crowd has claimed the term "essential question" as their own special buzzword. I guess the common core crowd is using it too.

Tom Loveless on the algebra 2 problem

From Algebra II and The Declining Significance of Coursetaking:

...taking and successfully completing an Algebra II course, which once certified high school students’ mastery of advanced topics in algebra and solid preparation for college-level mathematics, no longer means what it once did. The credentialing integrity of Algebra II has weakened.

The declining significance of successfully completing Algebra II highlights a dilemma. Pushing students to take more advanced coursework has been a mainstay of American school reform for several decades. That prescription has worked in boosting enrollments. In 1986, less than half of all 17 year-olds (44%) had completed Algebra II, and for Black and Hispanic students, the rate was less than a third. Completing Algebra II is now commonplace. In 2012, about three-fourths of students completed Algebra II, and the race/ethnicity gaps associated with taking the course have narrowed significantly. (All NAEP data below are from the NAEP data explorer.)

Getting more students to take higher level math courses may be a hollow victory. It has not coincided with students learning more math.

Worse than you think, non-Common Core edition

After a 3-year hiatus, I have returned to my district's school board meetings. I am, once again, a regular.

It's been somewhat fun.

It's also been interesting in that I discovered, on my first night 'back,' that I had missed the board. Missed as in missed members of the board as people for whom I feel a great deal of affection. I was happy to see them again, after so long away.

Crazy!

I've spent years attempting to reform my district, and being frustrated by the administration and by whoever was currently serving on the board who wasn't someone I helped elect.

And Chris's middle school years were harrowing.

But Chris's middle school years are well behind us now, and come to find out, my essential emotion today, where board members are concerned, is: affection. I am fond of our school our school board members, collectively and individually.

I seem to feel the same way about our administrators. (That's really weird.)

Ed says I have become the loyal opposition.

Anyway, it's somewhat fun to be back.

The somewhat comes from the content of board meetings, which is never what I want. Or, rather, it's (sometimes) in the vicinity of what I want, but it's not what I actually want.

Plus, there are surprises.

Last Tuesday night's surprise was the revelation that the district does not have an early reading curriculum.

At all.

I had been assuming we had a bad one. Last I checked we have something like 18% of kids going into 'Tier 2' intervention, and I'm pretty sure that number would be 10% with a good reading curriculum. (I hope palisadesk is around to weigh in.)

So I had just naturally been assuming that we have a really bad early reading curriculum the same way we had a really bad math curriculum in K-5 and a really bad reading curriculum in the middle school.

But no.

We don't have any early reading curriculum at all.

The funny (ha-ha) thing about this is that back when Ed and I first moved to town we became dimly aware of what seemed to be chronic conflicts at the board level re: not enough textbooks to go around. Various classes didn't have enough textbooks, and somehow enough textbooks were never bought or budgeted for or who knows what, and teachers were getting in trouble for spilling the beans to parents about the not-enough-textbooks situation, until finally the then-board president took matters in his own hands and decreed that enough textbooks be ordered at once and distributed to students. That's the story I heard, at any rate.

So it's path dependency.

We have always been a district with a not-enough-textbooks problem, and we are evolving into a district with no textbooks at all.

I'm sure regular attendance at board meetings will reverse that trend.

Resources for the ACT test?

My daughter is a junior and in the middle of the test taking year. I went back through all the posts and gathered the resources on the SAT. Does anyone have a similar set of resources for the ACT test?

Wrecking rigorous math in high school, non Common Core edition

Lots of folks are up in arms about the "lowered" standards in high school, courtesy of Common Core. Meanwhile STEM preparation is degrading here, no CC necessary.

Let's recap:
In 2007, MN adopted "better, more rigorous!" standards that they claimed were the tops in the nation, matching MA and CA. In these, all 8th graders were required to take Algebra through the algebra of the line. This would now be called "algebra 1", and algebra 1 was no longer a credit bearing course in high school. Also in these changes, all high schoolers were required to take algebra 2 before graduation. The standards defining algebra 2 covered only those subjects expected to be
learned to mastery. These standards did not include trigonometry nor logarithms nor other kinds of mathematics.

In 2011, the standards were rolled in. The state did not change the teacher credentialing requirements for 8th grade math teachers.

The new Algebra 1 class looked like old Algebra 1 to parents. Except it's only 1/2 of the algebra they knew. And Algebra 2 is about 1/2 of the algebra 2 they knew. But there's no way to be half a year ahead, though, for most schools, and therefore, for kids. So the new alg 1 is the only alg 1, and the only alg 2 is the rest of the old alg 1 and 1/2 of old alg 2.
Content including trig, logs, complicated factoring, circular functions, all of this is now in pre calc.
Limits, sequences and series, graphing of high order functions, de Moivre's theorem, etc. is now in most APcalc classes.

Now, schools cheat this by offering a year  for AP calc AB, they claim, and a year for AP calc BC.

But this is a sham. A 5 of the AB test is mathematically no less than a 4 on the the BC,  because the BC test simply does not offer that much more material than a competent calculus course would already have offered. While it does offer new topics, it most definitely does not offer multivariate calc, which is the 2nd term of calc in any semester-based engineering or STEM calculus sequence, and the third term at any quarter based university calc sequence.

So...to recap: we in MN, without CC, teach algebra earlier now, and as a result, kids leave no better off where they did before in terms of knowledge, but a year behind the titles of the courses they are taking.  They and their parents are misled about what they know and what they have been taught when.

For the majority, they basically take pre calc, same as always. But for the honors kids who used to get a real AP course that really was the equivalent of the first semester of calculus, they are screwed. They no longer get that, or they only do by taking finding some school supposedly giving them alg 2 in 8th grade--who is qualified for that???? and then, they still only get as far as 1 term of college calc. Likely they waste a year instead of learning something for real.

This means without 2 years of supposed hs calc, they are not ready for calc based physics in college.

This can't be blamed on Common Core. This can't be blamed on ed schools, either.

This is the Cargo Cult of education (a phrase I coined here UPDATE! below) and the Cargo Cult of politics. We walk around, mimicking what real people once did, pretending that coconut headphones and a guy waving sheets as if they are semaphores on the tarmac will bring back the cargo planes.

The legislature pretended that decreeing students do something earlier was the same as doing it well.
The legislature pretended decreeing everyone take algebra 2 would make them capable of it.
The Dept of Ed pretended to concur and changed the content of the standard.
The publishers pretended to concur and changed the content of the books.
The schools pretended to concur and changed the content of the courses.
The teachers pretended to concur and gave everyone high grades.
The parents and students ...well? some pretend their schools are still great. Some are duped until college. And even then, most just want someone else to pay for the student loans they had to take for remediation, not yet angry about the remediation.
 But the kids who used to be ready for an engineering degree program are no longer ready, and are losing ground compared to their foreign counterparts.

Until people admit reality we will keep playing these games.

From the MN dept of ed Math 2007 standards FAQ
"Some algebra II material is introductory in nature and lays the foundation for future courses. Students are not expected to master such material. For example, logarithms are usually introduced in algebra II, but mastery of the fundamentals of logarithms is not expected until precalculus or college algebra. For this reason, logarithms are not mentioned in the 9-11th grade standards and benchmarks."

UPDATE: E. D. Hirsch first used the phrase Cargo Cult here  http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/7262 to refer to the state of educational research. My use of it was independent of this, and somewhat different.

Help desk, Common Core edition

Cruising Common Core materials (there seem to be lots on Prezi), I find this (slide title: "Two Types of Essential Questions: Overarching and Topical"):

Isn't there one right answer to "how many ways can we achieve the sum of 23"?

Isn't the answer: "There are an infinite number of ways to achieve the sum of 23"?

Another thing: would this question be asked, in this way, in combinatorics? (In the time I've spent trying to learn combinatorics, I haven't encountered a question with more than one right answer. Nor did I encounter a question with an answer of infinity.)

(And how is this question "topical"?)

I am watching in amazement as Common Core rolls across the land.

It's as if every constructivist in the country has suddenly been handed a lifetime prescription for anabolic steroids.

All those years of No Child Left Behind and Adequate Yearly Progress must have created a massive pent-up desire in the breasts of America's educators to conduct mini-lessons and ask math questions with no right answer.

GRE scores by intended field of study for college seniors

Source: Educating School Leaders, p 32

Steve H on the mailing list

Have just read this comment by Steve H:

My son also has a college brochure stack two feet tall. He also made the comment that if you put your hand over the name of the college, you could not tell which one it is. (That would make a good YouTube video. Name This College.) I also liked the survey where they asked students why they got into a top college and the general response was: "I have no clue whatsoever." For others, however, it seemed like the extra oblong interest and special talent made the difference. It has to be special or at some particularly high level.

Unfortunately, the segment talks only about the most egregious application mistakes and stupid parents. I would like to be a fly on the wall when admissions people make the final decision. After they process race, gender, sports, and alumni parents, (grades are given), there will still be many to choose from - maybe one in five. what are the deciding factors? It might depend on whether you catch the eye of one of the strong or powerful admissions people. It might be your essay that does it, but it might also be your special talent.

Steve is in his year of viewing dangerously....college viewbooks are a world unto themselves.

My favorites were the ones from Grinnell, which were so striking, and so indecipherable in terms of who the intended audience was supposed to be and what message we were supposed to be taking away, that I kept scans.

What is the story Grinnell is telling prospective parents with these images?

After the mean girls reject your son, he'll gel his hair and take up violin?

And this is worth $50k a year?

By the way, if I were the parents of the three girls, I would have been furious. They are sisters whose parents -- both university professors in Kabul -- immigrated from Afghanistan. They're beautiful girls, and Grinnell had no business a) taking a photo like that and b) using it to promote the college.

Of course, maybe the parents weren't consulted. Which makes it even worse.

Younger

As the nation's schools undergo a wave of teacher retirements, some 25% of teachers have only five or fewer years in the classroom, "a precipitous decline" in experience since the late 1980s, when the typical teacher had 15 years' experience, according to a study by the National Commission on Teaching & America's Future, a Washington, D.C. nonprofit advocating teacher quality.

That may explain why some 43% of parents report being "extremely worried" about their kids' elementary-school teacher assignments, according to a poll last month of 306 parents by CafeMom, a social-networking and community website.

Dread of August: The Kids' Teacher Assignments | By SUE SHELLENBARGER | Aug. 6, 2013

This generation of teachers has been trained in pure constructivism.

According to Robert Slavin, direct instruction hard been all but dropped from teacher training by 1991.

An Interesting Common Core Exchange

Common Core and Curriculum Controversies

Something really struck me as strange during Fordham's panel discussion last week. At 54min 50sec in the video, there's a very basic, yet revealing, question posed by this young lady.

 Question: Garrett Fryer American Youth Policy Forum Was there ever a discussion, when you all were designing it, to implement it on a kindergarten level and letting it grow with the students as they aged on through each grade, as oppossed to implementing it with the entire school system nation wide? 

Answer: Jason Zimba This is something that states have each approached differently. Some states have done something more like that, some states have done something less like that. I seem to remember at one point I saw a MA plan where the grade level wasn’t the key parameter, but they had a Venn diagram, you know, what we do now the Common Core doesn’t do, what the Common Core does that we don’t, and then what sort of overlap, where we want to do it better. And they decided to take those three... in year one, we’re gonna focus on the overlap and do it better. In year two, we’ll drop things… and then in year three, we’ll add… I got the details of that wrong, but… my only point is that different states all approached it differently, and we may find out that some states were much wiser than others in this way. Singapore has a long standing, high functioning system in which they not only revise their syllabus ever so often, but they do it actually on the basis of how kids do, so think about that, a performance-based loop, a feedback loop. Which is something we are taking halting steps toward, but can only imagine. And so roughly every six years or so, they’ll put out tweaks to the thing. This year I noticed that they’ve rolled out a new thing in kindergarten. 

Lisa wonders... How in the world can one "image" OR take "halting steps toward" creating a "high functioning system" based on a "performance-based feedback loop" when we are STARTING with a top-down DESIGN by the name of Common Core?

The chairs

From the "High School" section of Illustrativemathematics.org:

Mathematically proficient students start by explaining to themselves the meaning of a problem and looking for entry points to its solution. They analyze givens, constraints, relationships, and goals. They make conjectures about the form and meaning of the solution and plan a solution pathway rather than simply jumping into a solution attempt. They consider analogous problems, and try special cases and simpler forms of the original problem in order to gain insight into its solution. They monitor and evaluate their progress and change course if necessary.

This video shows an excerpt of a conversation between two students comparing approaches to solving a problem and trying to understand why they got different answers and where one of them made an error.

PROBLEM:

Three halls contained 9,876 chairs altogether. One-fifth of the chairs were transferred from the first hall to the second hall. Then, one-third of the chairs were transferred from the second hall to the third hall and the number of chairs in the third hall doubled. In the end, the number of chairs in the three halls became the same. How many chairs were in the second hall at first.

I haven't watched the video, but I hope one of the approaches the two students consider involves asking the teacher what the problem means by "the chairs."

By happenstance, my students and I read the first half of G.K. Chesterton's essay on fairy tales in class today. When I say "read," I mean that my students and I read each sentence individually and out loud and then stopped so I could explain what the sentence meant and why after first asking the person who had just read to take a crack at it.

Chesterton's opening lines:

Some solemn and superficial people (for nearly all very superficial people are solemn) have declared that the fairy-tales are immoral; they base this upon some accidental circumstances or regrettable incidents in the war between giants and boys, some cases in which the latter indulged in unsympathetic deceptions or even in practical jokes. The objection, however, is not only false, but very much the reverse of the facts.

I asked my students what the words "the objection" meant. When nobody knew, I pointed out that the words "the objection" function as an anaphora: the definite determinative (the) tells you that you already know which (or what) objection because you've seen it before, in the text. It's the objection, not "an objection."

So, if you've already seen "the objection," and you've only read one other sentence, what is the objection? It's got to be inside that one other sentence.

At that point, my student who was educated outside the United States in his early elementary years (and who speaks very lightly accented English) figured it out.

..................

My answer to the Illustrated Math problem, which I arrived at on my own and without a lot of conjecturing and solution-pathway-planning and special-case mongering and the like is: 4,938.

..................

The Common Core era is going to be an unhappy one for mathematically gifted children.

I predict.

Help desk - Illustrative Mathematics

Illustrative Mathematics 

Thoughts?

Trailblazers kids in a Common Core world...

At the Irvington Parents Forum blog.

I'm waiting for the many apologies due to come rolling in from all the central administrators & board members who insisted on sticking with Trailblazers for lo these many years.

My favorite was the board member who said, during the candidates' forum, "We're not changing the math curriculum because of 20 people on a blog."

He meant list serve.

Daniel Wilingham on Paul Tough

He likes the book -- I may have to read!