Making tens for subtraction, PM standards ed.

As per post below, here are some small examples of how frequent and explicit the making ten strategies are in addition and subtraction in Primary Math, standards ed. This not not meant to be enough to explain these methods, just to show what an actual Teacher's Guide says.

This is a subtraction lesson, the hardest, where you can't just decrement the ones by the subtrahend.

No, it doesn't work this way

Peter Elbow on the composing process

I remember posting this before (or at least discussing it in Comments -- I think I recall gasstationwithoutpumps saying something about wives copy-editing their husbands' work) but I was just cleaning up some old drafts sitting in the queue and found this one, so here it is.

Again.

Still funny after all these years!

Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them

Fundraising flier from Wellesley.

Which pretty much rules out contributions from Wellesley grads who are: a) married to men and/or b) the mothers of boys.

Congratulations Steve H!

Steve had some fabulous news on Thursday!!!

(Has he posted?? In the comments somewhere??)

If he hasn't, I'm not telling!

No more fat versus small envelope surprises

T-minus seven hours and counting. It's like the owls in Harry Potter when the electronic acceptances (or rejections) come in. However, he already has an acceptance, a rejection, and a waitlist (polite rejection), and the acceptance comes with no aid. Thank you out-of-state universities! The scholarships they do give won't come until summer after you have committed. Had I known... So as of now, he isn't going to college next fall. Sooooo many students seem to be rejected or waitlisted so far this year. Students are having trouble getting into "likely" schools (unless they pay full price). Likely and reach school admittances seem to have little to do with academics at all levels, and some schools might reject you because they think they are a safety. If a school can reject you for whatever holistic reason they want, then students can't reliably know what "reach" means. What is the probability of being rejected at all of your schools? My son applied to 10, and I'm thinking that it wasn't enough.

Debbie at Ed Week!

I edited! (So I'm bemoaning a couple of too-long-for-onscreen-reading sentences...

Seeking the Top Score (Part I)
By Helen Yoshida on March 25, 2014 5:34 PM

From 1992 - David Klein and Jerry Rosen on fuzzy math and why we have it

The 1992 Mathematics Framework for California Public Schools governs, to a considerable extent, the mathematics curriculum in California's public schools. It is a model of mediocrity. The Framework recommends that calculators be issued to kindergartners and used in all K-12 grades; it strongly discourages placing students by ability or achievement; it advocates that teachers do more "facilitating" and less "teaching;" it discourages testing, and promotes portfolios, "authentic assessment," and "holistic scoring rubrics;" it de-emphasizes basic skills and promotes "cooperative work" over individual responsibility. In short, it is the bible of "fuzzy math."

[snip]

Why is this kind of mediocrity promoted by so many education professors and education experts? We suggest that it is simply good intentions gone awry, resulting in institutionalized "liberal racism." Liberal education experts fear that minority students can't learn real math because of "cultural differences." They recognize that it would be preposterous to lower standards only for those students while maintaining high standards for other groups. Thus, the education experts lower standards for everyone, with "authentic assessment" replacing hard-core, standardized tests, and so-called "higher order thinking" supplanting basic skills.

The clearest refutation of the racism disguised by the Framework comes from the work of Jaime Escalante, the teacher who was immortalized in the movie, "Stand and Deliver." Mr. Escalante proved beyond any doubt that minority students from poor neighborhoods can do as well in mathematics as any other group. His methods were traditional and "non fuzzy."

HOW EXPERTS DUMB DOWN MATH EDUCATION
Los Angeles Daily News
May 31, 1996
HOW EXPERTS DUMB DOWN MATH EDUCATION
by David Klein and Jerry Rosen

Ten years ago, I would have rejected this explanation out of hand.

But today, as a classroom instructor teaching "basic" composition, I wonder.

I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: college freshmen whose skills are far below where they need to be can be perfectly intelligent and 'smart' when you stick to spoken language.

They can be and they are.

In fact, it's not necessarily possible to tell which students have better skills and which poorer by listening to classroom discussion.

The Cambridge Pre-U courses are a case in point. I gather Cambridge Pre-U is being sold to districts (and to parents) as a rigorous replacement for AP courses that does not require grouping. All kids, at all levels of skill and ability, can take the same course and it's still advanced.

The reason that claim can be made is that the courses -- at least the one I witnessed -- primarily involve Googling (there is no assigned reading), creating group Powerpoints for presentation to the class, and class discussion. (The class I saw required one paper, written at the end of a year and a half of 'study.')

On the day I visited a Cambridge Pre-U class, one of the students strongly challenged a presentation four other students were giving. Every point the challenger made was dead-on.

Afterwards, the principal told us how wonderful the class is because you can't tell the AP kids apart from the non-AP kids.

Then he said proudly that the student who had done all the challenging was a kid who would never have been allowed to take a regular AP course in his school.

Naturally, that got my dander up. A talented student who hadn't been prepared by his school to take an AP course didn't seem like something a principal should be talking about with anything other than embarrassment and regret.

Today I feel a bit differently.

I certainly believe that the student I saw in action should have been prepared by his school to take one Advanced Placement course by graduation. He was headed for college, and that being the case, preparing him for AP was the school's job.

On the other hand, I now know that being smart and capable in speech does not mean being smart and capable in writing. Not even close.

I also know that writing really is thinking in any number of ways. Which means if you can't write....you're not the smartest person in the room.

So, back to Klein and Rosen. It now seems entirely plausible to me that, like me, a large contingent of education reformers has registered the fact that that underprivileged students fare better talking than writing (or doing math).

Education reformers don't have to have decided consciously to tackle the achievement gap by making math into a discussion subject in order to have done just that.

Allison on big data

12 months ago, you could raise funding for your startup overnight if you were doing "big data" for education (even though the data was quite paltry in size). The future hope of a Diamond-Age like mechanism to have kids worked in flipped classrooms at their ZPD ["zone of proximal development"] all without teachers needing to do anything to differentiate instruction was the holy grail.

6 months ago, the perfect storm of Anti-Common Core backlash, NSA domestic spying, and IRS abuse of 501c4 citizen groups meant Bog Data for Ed was in serious jeopardy.
I first realized this at a talk I was giving at a school that had chosen in May of 2013 to improve their math program: a goal of Singapore Primary Math in K-6, Shoseki in 7, Dolciani in 8, complete with real math training for all teachers and a FT BS math degreed teacher for 6-8. Oh, and state standrads-based standardized tests for the first time ever to measure student progress relative to their peers and state requirements.

The parents were on board in May. I gave the same talk in September, and the climate had changed.

Parents were so anti-data that they wanted no standardized test. Never mind that there was no way to measure student progress without a benchmark.

In order to make some basic determination about where these students were mathematically that first May, MSMI had devised a test based on state sample item. In September, I actually had a parent say to me "I know you took data on my child."

Another parent who stood by as I spoke to a family asking for how I could help their child get a bit of higher content in their math class said "I heard you ask that family for their child's name and grade."

The paranoia was rampant. The push to "opt out" was so great that we were in serious jeopardy of having any way of measuring if we'd done any good, let alone if kids had learn a year's math in a year's time.

Parents no longer trust their schools. This is perhaps the biggest legacy of the politicization of civic institutions. It is earned in many cases, but probably is worse in result than even lousy curricula. It will take a long long time to fix.

On the one hand, people habituate: the bad gets normal, as Temple always said. So this may blow over.

On the other, sans habituation almost at the level of mass amnesia, I don't see how this gets fixed.

I remember, very clearly, the moment a few years back when our district was suddenly required to weigh students, record their weights, and report the data to Albany.

I was furious. Chris had always struggled with his weight and was very sensitive about it (he lost 50 pounds last summer and has kept it off since!): it's not as if overweight children don't know they're overweight.

And it's not as if the grown-ups passing these regulations are universally thin themselves.

Needless to say, I protested, as I always do, and, needless to say, the administration and board blew me off, as the administration and board always do. High-school students would be weighed "with sensitivity," they said. And that was that. Everyone seemed to agree that weighing students and reporting the data to Albany was a bad idea, but admin & board follow regulations, good or bad. Except when they don't, of course.

The obstacle to habituation this time, as I see it: Americans believe that American schools are locally run.

Schools haven't been locally run in a very long time; superintendents speak in tongues, and bamboozled boards rubber stamp. The people vote, but the people don't get the schools they vote for.

Until now, though, parents busy with kids and jobs and volunteer work for the PTSA could lead their lives without knowing the schools aren't run by them, or that our overlords in Albany (or, even worse, Washington) don't give two figs for what we think, want, or hope.

With the constant, visible presence of Bill Gates and David Coleman and Arne Duncan and "Albany" and Washington D.C. in our lives, not-knowing has become a great deal more challenging.

Death by data, Part I've-lost-count

A compelling vision of the data-driven future of K-12 schooling? Or a chilling description of a brave new educational world in which even students' smallest actions are converted to digital data and used to build permanent "learner profiles"?

A new report from London- and New York City-based educational publishing powerhouse Pearson is likely to generate both reactions, depending on whom you ask.

Released this week, "Impacts of the Digital Ocean on Education" is intended as "an aspirational vision of what success might look like" in the rapidly changing world of "big" educational data and personalized learning.

Report authors Kristen DiCerbo and John Behrens of Pearson's Center for Digital Data, Analytics, and Adaptive Learning sketch out a vision in which end-of-year, summative tests of narrowly defined skills and content knowledge are replaced by a constant stream of digital data generated by "in vivo naturalistic tasks" that thoroughly blur the line between assessment and instruction.

Such data—generated from a variety of sources and activities, and focusing on students' social connections and interactions, rather than just their isolated individual experiences—would be constantly tracked and used to update profiles that follow each student across classrooms, grades, and schools, helping facilitate more customized learning experiences for each.

"The devices and digital environments with which we interact are designed to record and store experiences, thereby creating a slowly rising ocean of digital data," DiCerbo and Behrens write in the report. "We believe the ability to capture data from everyday formal and informal learning activity should fundamentally change how we think about education."

Just as big data and analytics have transformed finance, insurance, retail, and professional sports, the report says, they will change education. Until recently, the authors write, data collection and storage was expensive, limited, and isolated, and students' educational records were not portable, easy to share, or able to be quickly analyzed.

But the digital revolution has changed that reality, DiCerbo and Behrens contend. They argue that the abundance of increasingly fine-grained data available to educators "can help pinpoint the moments when learning occurs or a learner's approach to a problem changes" and then be used to help tailor suggestions or recommendations to help each student's learning continue.

'Ocean' of Digital Data to Reshape Education, Pearson Report Predicts
By Benjamin Herold on March 19, 2014 11:24 AM
A tidal wave of data could personalize learning

Jen on testing the "scaffolding"

The distinction being made here between the content standard and a strategy for showing that standard IS the crux of the problem for CC.

The tests could be made to test only for the concept, but are much more likely to be made in such a way that you have to know the specific strategy meant to "scaffold" you to the concept, rather than be secure in the concept itself.

It reminds me of a district level math supervisor when my oldest kids were in elementary. The district was using EDM (I know, I know, it was actually great for my kids and did what it was supposed to do, but I did realize as the years went on that it really didn't work for 50+% of their classmates).

The supervisor was explaining how they were trying to make sure that every teacher was really using the curriculum in exactly the way prescribed. It had clearly come to their attention that some teachers found the program lacking and were modifying it.

Their solution? They were making up district-wide unit tests for the lower grades that would ask the students specific questions about the games and activities that were to be included. That is, besides some questions that actually tested the concepts the kids were to be learning, they'd also have questions that tested whether they knew how the games were played, or what the rules were for playing them.

So, now the students were being tested on...nothing...so that the district could ding the teachers/school for it. And that, in a nutshell, is also the big problem for CC. Instead of asking questions that determine if they know and are fluent with their facts to 20, they are instead going to design questions that try to tease out HOW they were taught them and ding those who didn't use the specified "strategies."

If you don't live in New York

Our airwaves are saturated with unbelievably effective pro-charter ads (from Charters Work).

This one in particular is riveting; I watch it all the way through every time it comes on. It's like a little mini-narrative -- not so much on first viewing, but on repeats. You get to know the kids; you know the sequence you're going to see them in; and pretty soon you start to feel a build-up of dread each time you watch, knowing what's coming next, which is that the beautiful children will disappear one-by-one, and the little boy looking at you over the top of his spectacles will be the first to go.

It's like a terrifying work of dystopian sci fi, for pete's sake.

Or one of those horrifying news clips like the Challenger explosion that you watch every time it's shown, hoping the ending will be different this time.

Watch this ad ten times in ten days and you'll see what I mean.

Ze'ev Wurman on Bill Gates on Common Core

Bill Gates: OK. So what is the Common Core? It’s a very simple thing. It’s a written explanation of what knowledge kids should achieve at very various milestones in their educational career. So it’s writing down in sixth grade which math things should you know, in ninth grade which math things should you know, in twelfth grade which math things should you know.

Ze’ev Wurman: That, indeed, is what content standards are supposed to be.

BG: And you might be surprised to learn how poor those I’ll call those standards, but to be clear, it’s not curriculum. It’s not a textbook. It’s not a way of teaching. It’s just writing down should you know this part of algebra? Should you know trigonometric functions? Should you know be able to recognize a graph of this type?

ZW: Wrong. I wish Mr. Gates would actually read the standards rather than rely on what others tell him. Common Core standards are more than just content standards, they also dictate pedagogy and hence curriculum. Here are a couple of obvious examples.

“Grade 1 standard 1.OA.6: Add and subtract within 20, demonstrating fluency for addition and subtraction within 10. Use strategies such as counting on; making ten (e.g., 8 + 6 = 8 + 2 + 4 = 10 + 4 = 14); decomposing a number leading to a ten (e.g., 13 – 4 = 13 – 3 – 1 = 10 – 1 = 9); using the relationship between addition and subtraction (e.g., knowing that 8 + 4 = 12, one knows 12 – 8 = 4); and creating equivalent but easier or known sums (e.g., adding 6 + 7 by creating the known equivalent 6 + 6 + 1 = 12 + 1 = 13).”

This standard does not require only knowing addition and subtraction within 20, as a content standard should. It insists on knowing four specific ways to add and subtract. In other words, it dictates pedagogy and curriculum.

Bill Gates Needs an Education on Common Core

I haven't read the math standards start to finish, and I probably won't. (I'm working on the ELA standards, Appendix A in particular.)

Nevertheless, I think it's fair to observe that a "standard" instructing teachers to "use strategies such as counting on..." is more than just a content standard. Quite a bit more.

Unfortunately, in the context of American public schools, the word "strategies" means something quite different from what it does outside of public education.

Within public education strategies is a formal term for guide-on-the-sidery.

I remember being semi-gobsmacked, a decade ago, sitting in on a CSE meeting and hearing the word "strategies" repeatedly used to describe the district's approach to educating children with behavioral and/or learning difficulties. The student in question that day, a 5th grader with emotional and behavioral problems, was going to be given "strategies" he could use to stop acting the way he was acting and start acting the way the other kids were acting.

In another meeting, the same psychologist said a child with dyslexia would be given "strategies" she could use to read.

She wouldn't be taught to read; at least, that wasn't the focus.

Instead, she would be given strategies she could deploy, as needed (the child was to be the judge of that), to help herself read better than she was reading now.

Even then, before I'd delved into all these things, I knew it was all rubbish.

A 10-year old with emotional and behavior problems isn't going to use "strategies" to stop having outbursts, and a 10-year old with dyslexia isn't going to use "strategies" to read at grade level.

What century is it again?

"You just don't in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pre-text," Kerry told the CBS program "Face the Nation."
Kerry condemns Russia's 'incredible act of aggression' in Ukraine
BY WILL DUNHAM
WASHINGTON Sun Mar 2, 2014 10:40am EST

I read this out loud to Ed over breakfast the other day and we both burst out laughing.

We've spent a lot of time stewing over our district's obsession with 21st century skills. Ed's line: "The schools are teaching 21st century skills, so we have to teach the 19th-century ones."

Here's our new fantastically well-compensated superintendent telling the board how warmed-over, pre-crash Tony Wagner is "being used district-wide":



The super is a Common Core enthusiast, too.

Pop quiz: how many times do the words "21st-century skills" appear in Common Core?

Off-topic: the plane

This pilot, as I say, was a hero struggling with an impossible situation trying to get that plane to Langkawi. No doubt in my mind. That's the reason for the turn and direct route. A hijack would not have made that deliberate left turn with a direct heading for Langkawi. It would probably have weaved around a bit until the hijackers decided on where they were taking it.

Surprisingly none of the reporters, officials, other pilots interviewed have looked at this from the pilot's viewpoint. If something went wrong where would he go? Thanks to Google earth I spotted Langkawi in about 30 seconds, zoomed in and saw how long the runway was and I just instinctively knew this pilot knew this airport. He had probably flown there many times. I guess we will eventually find out when you help me spread this theory on the net and some reporters finally take a look on Google earth and put 2 and 2 together. Also a look at the age and number of cycles on those nose tires might give us a good clue too.

Fire in an aircraft demands one thing - you get the machine on the ground as soon as possible. There are two well remembered experiences in my memory. The AirCanada DC9 which landed I believe in Columbus Ohio in the eighties. That pilot delayed descent and bypassed several airports. He didn't instinctively know the closest airports. He got it on the ground eventually but lost 30 odd souls. In the 1998 crash of Swissair DC-10 off Nova Scotia was another example of heroic pilots. They were 15 minutes out of Halifax but the fire simply overcame them and they had to ditch in the ocean. Just ran out of time. That fire incidentally started when the aircraft was about an hour out of Kennedy. Guess what the transponders and communications were shut off as they pulled the busses.

Get on Google Earth and type in Pulau Langkawi and then look at it in relation to the radar track heading. 2+2=4 That for me is the simple explanation why it turned and headed in that direction.

Smart pilot. Just didn't have the time.

MH370 A different point of view. Pulau Langkawi 13,000 runway.

Getting creaky

This blogger interface is getting seriously creaky. It's ancient; no one's updated the code in a gazillion years, and glitches I can't fix crop up.

The latest: I no longer see the "Sign in" menu at the top right-hand side of the screen.

Does anyone have any opinions on the possibility of moving to Wordpress?

I've been using Wordpress for quite a while now, and I love it.

Among other things, on Wordpress I can attach pdfs files.

Crimson Wife and Anonymous on teachers instilling grit

Crimson Mom and Anonymous.

Think how much grit kids will develop once you flip all the classrooms.

Jean on Common Core in California and the history of us

I have a Common Core math question. My 8th grader daughter (a homeschooler) is taking algebra I this year. She was talking with her friend, who is in 7th grade and wanted to take algebra this year but was not allowed--for the first time they were only letting 8th graders take it. (This kid btw is older than her classmates, owing to a late birthday and having started school in another state with an earlier cutoff date.) So she wants to take it next year, but now they won't let her do that. From now on, algebra I will only be taught at the high school. This is said to be a CC thing.

We are in CA, and for years they've been pushing algebra in 8th grade. I am, of course, against kids taking it if they're unprepared, but I can't see why they won't let prepared students do it. Does anyone understand this?

At dinner tonight, we were joking that my husband should start an underground algebra class...

I wonder whether the history of 8th-grade algebra in my district is scattered across the two ktm blogs? It might be.

I first got into the afterschooling business when I discovered, at the end of the school year, that Chris had flunked a test on fractions in 4th grade. I found a crumpled test in his backpack. (I was working under an insane deadline -- actually, an insane missed-the-deadline-by-a-mile-and-now-everyone-wants-to-kill-me deadline, which is worse -- so I found out after the fact.

As it turned out, he hadn't just flunked a test. He had flunked a unit. And it wasn't just one unit, it was two, both involving fractions, as I recall. (I discovered the crumpled test from the other unit at least a year later, maybe longer -- short attention span theater.)

The school had told us nothing about any of this, and intended to do nothing about it, a fact I simply took for granted at the time. Why would our fantastically well-funded suburban school district concern itself with whether children actually learned the math teachers were teaching?

Not only had the school told us nothing, but on the one occasion I did acquire evidence, in real time, that Chris was collapsing in math his teacher told me, "Don't worry about his grade. He understands." That sounded wrong to me, but, on the other hand, what did I know? His teacher said he understood, so fair enough.

But now it was summer, and I was in possession of a test on fractions with a grade of -- was it 39?

38?

Pretty sure the exact numerical grade is findable via the About Kitchen Table Math link.

So I decided to teach my child fractions, not knowing that 4th-grade fractions are the math cliff; that's where all the kids plummet off the ledge to the rocky math shoals below. Ignorance being bliss, I sallied forth .... and I discovered right away that teaching fractions is not easy, especially when you had a mediocre education in math yourself. (I still remember feeling enthralled when I read H. Wu saying a fraction was a number! And I vividly recall Carolyn writing a post or comment quoting a boy who said a fraction was a division problem he didn't have to do.)

That was the genesis of kitchen table math: I needed help teaching Chris fractions. (Carolyn Johnston -- who co-founded the blog with me -- was in the same boat, except she happened to be a mathematician, so she did the rowing.)

Within a few days of discovering that I was not an elementary school math teacher, I had in my hands a copy of Wayne Wickelgren's Math Coach, and it was from Wickelgren that I learned that teaching algebra 1 in the 9th grade is not one of the 10 Commandments. After that my goal was to get Chris into the 8th-grade algebra class, which I did, but given how horrifically bad the teaching was in 7th and 8th grades, and how horrifically over-accelerated the curriculum was, that was probably the wrong way to go, in hindsight.

(On the old blog we used to call that class the Death March to Algebra, which should give you young 'uns some idea.)

Then again, the other kids who dropped out of the accelerated class fared poorly in the non-accelerated class, too. I was then in close contact with a mom who had been fighting the math wars for years; by the time her daughter was in 6th grade, she already had an appointment with the superintendent to discuss the situation.

Ed and I didn't make it to the superintendent's office till 8th grade.

(Have I mentioned our new superintendent isn't panning out, either?)

The other mom finally gave up the ghost. The daughter was desperate to get out of the accelerated class and her mom finally consented, and then promptly discovered that the kids who had moved down were struggling in the new class, too.

So the real hindsight question is: better to learn next to nothing in the accelerated class or the non-accelerated class?

I probably can't answer that, and having Chris take algebra in the 8th grade meant that he had me re-teaching nearly every concept, doing all of his homework sets every night myself (the publisher wouldn't sell me the Teacher Edition), and going over all of his homework and having him re-do problems he'd missed. I don't think I would have done that with Chris in 9th grade, especially not since he had by then enrolled in Hogwarts.

So, given the realities of an unreal situation, our decision to keep him in the accelerated track was either the right decision or 6 of one, half dozen of another. Plus, think of the grit!

(Which reminds me: I don't think I've told you Chris's story about unit multipliers. Unit multipliers were another revelation for me, writing the first kitchen table math. Will get to that later.)

So there I was, sitting at the kitchen table picnic table outside the kitchen, trying to teach fractions --  and then, 5 seconds later, trying to accelerate my 4th-grade son by a full year so he could take algebra in the 8th grade.

Without knowing a lot of math myself, and without hiring tutors.

The 5th-grade teachers were warm and on-board for the quest, and one of them told Ed and me that the middle school would not move Chris no matter how well-prepared he was. (She was right about that.) If we wanted him moved, she needed to move him up then.

So she did.

He wasn't ready. We needed the summer to work on math so he could move up come fall, a plan that made sense and had the potential, at least, to work beautifully. But, again, my extremely well-funded, nominally high-performing suburban school district does not concern itself with the fates of individual children. There will always be 10-year olds, and they will always score better on the state tests than underprivileged black and Hispanic children living in the city. So good enough.

Sometime during the move-up period I discovered how my district was handling acceleration.

My district was handling acceleration by having the 4th grade kids skip the entire 5th-grade textbook and, when they started 5th grade, go straight to the 6th-grade book, without telling the parents. All the parents knew was that suddenly their mathematically talented kids were struggling in math--for no obvious reason they could see--so they hired tutors. (I learned about the tutors from a math-teacher dad in town who told me the 5th-grade accelerated class was a disaster.)

Even without knowing a lot about math, I knew that skipping an entire year's worth of material was a terrible idea, so I went to talk to the interim principal about it.

He told me I was wrong. The 5th grade kids hadn't skipped an entire book, he said. Yes they did, I said. No they didn't, he said.

A couple of days later he called me in to his office and said, "You're right. They skipped an entire book."

Then he told me the class was a disaster, too. He didn't actually use the word "disaster." He used the nonverbals. His wife was a high-school math teacher, and he was obviously aghast.

Which brings me to the present.

I would like to know how my district is handling acceleration now that we have engageny math.

I would like to know, but I don't know. Finding out is going to take a lot of badgering of yon superintendent.

Fortunately, I'm good at that.

Funny how you never hear "badgering the superintendent for a straight answer" mentioned as a 21st century skill.

The joke's on you

So I've finally delved into the Common Core ELA standards, and....yikes. Always worse than you think.

Reading the standards in the wake of attending 3 district Common Core presentations (a fourth awaits on YouTube) is like a good news/bad news joke without the good news.

The bad news is Common Core.

The other bad news is my district has no idea what Common Core actually says, and they're doing it all wrong.

e.g.: nowhere in the Common Core will you find the words "21st century skills."

It's like that old Woody Allen joke, The food is terrible and the portions are too small.

MIA

Sorry to be MIA...I've been thinking this winter, which continues apace, has actually affected me metabolically.

I need SUN.

And more DEGREES.

LOTS MORE.

Birth of a meme

The new character education, coming soon to a district near you: grit.

Students need grit, and it's the school's job to foster grit.

Because grit is more important than knowledge.

Also: grit is best fostered by means of teachers telling students to do something they don't know how to do, then refusing to answer questions. In any other context, that would be rude, but never mind.

Our new superintendent, the one who was to bring accountability and every-child-every-dayness to our district, is a big fan of grit. Hosted a book club for parents on How Children Succeed the week after winter break.

He's a fan of Tony Wagner, too, while we're on the subject of expensive new superintendents with bad instincts. Vintage, pre-crash Tony Wagner, even better. (With increasing abundance, people want unique products and services!!!! So it's time to redefine rigor!!!)

Wrong again.

Here's Hirsch. And here's Peter Meyer.

At Education Week:

Unlearning Learned Helplessness

"I need help," several students said in their geometry class at Esperanza Academy in Philadelphia.

"I don't think so," teacher John Roman replied.

Roman had just given students a handout with several unmarked triangles on it, and asked them to determine which of the triangles were congruent. He also gave them patty paper (tracing paper), and said that it might help them complete the task. He did not, however, show or tell students what to do with it.

[snip]

[K]nee-jerk calls for help are indicative of a common reason students don't learn to their potential: learned helplessness. They encounter an unfamiliar task (or word, formula, etc.), and immediately shut down or seek help.

The good news is that because it's learned helplessness, it can also be unlearned. And because students have learned it from enabling educators like me (until I stopped spoon-feeding them), we're in the best position to help them unlearn it....Turns out, for example, that John Roman's students had sufficient prior knowledge of congruent triangles. They were also more than capable of figuring out how to use patty paper to perform the assigned task. What they lacked was a problem-solving mindset. They lacked qualities such as determination and resourcefulness.

Yet students will only acquire those qualities if we put them in situations that require those qualities. ...After commiserating for a couple of minutes, a few students picked up the patty paper and began tracing triangles. Soon all students did this, with no help from Roman besides subtle reminders to a few students that the patty paper might be helpful.

The value for students of experiences like this has more to do with confidence than content. The more they learn with little or no help from us, the more they believe in themselves and their abilities. Sure it's important for students to learn math and science and social studies. But the real lesson for kids when teachers do what John Roman did is that confusion is where learning begins, not where it ends.

And the lesson for us as educators is that students will only unlearn helplessness when we unlearn helpfulness.

Bad character comes from sages on stages.

Good character comes from guides on sides.

A likely story.

---

For the record, actual learned helplessness has nothing to do with the scenario described above.

The term comes from Martin Seligman's experiments with dogs in the 1960s, which entailed giving the dogs electric shocks and inducing a state of "learned" helplessness, learned in the sense that after being repeatedly shocked with no means of escape, the animals learned not to even try to save themselves, not even when the avenue of escape was directly in front of them. Instead, when the shocks came on again, they trembled and cried, and displayed all the signs of human depression. The experiments were cruel, though I don't think the experimenters knew they were cruel, going in.

I was taught the learned-helplessness experiments in college, and the image that formed in my mind of the cowering, crying dogs too distraught to exit the shock zone -- or even try to exit -- has stayed with me.

(On the other hand, having since experienced a very similar scenario on two separate occasions, I now see things a bit differently. But that is a story for another day.)

For a teacher to appropriate the term "learned helplessness" as a description of his own students is wrong in so many ways.

UPDATE 3/17/2014: See Crimson Mom's comment. (And don't miss the never-to-be-missed Anonymous.)

Any Comments on the New SAT?

For 2016, the SAT is reverting back to a 1600 based test, with the composition section optional.

The composition will be about 50 minutes rather than 25, and will focus on evidence rather than opinion.

I expect that most colleges will require this section.

"Changes in the annual test that millions of students take will also do away with some vocabulary words such as "prevaricator" and "sagacious" in favor of words more commonly used in school and on the job."

"Currently, students lose a quarter of a point for wrong answers, but no points for omitted responses. Moving forward, they will simply receive credit for correct answers."

Just this one change will squeeze the bell curve higher and reduce differentiation.

The new math test will have a portion where calculators are prohibited.

"It [math] will also focus on narrower topics — described in a College Board press release as "problem solving and data analysis; the heart of algebra; and passport to advanced math" — that Coleman suggested will most contribute to a student's college and career readiness."

"advanced math"? Remember that college and career readiness means passing a course in college algebra.

""No longer will the SAT only have disconnected problems or tricky situations students won't likely see again," he said"

How else will they create a bell curve at the top end using a limited range of material?

What do colleges think of these changes? Did the College Board ask them?

"It is time to admit that the SAT and ACT have become disconnected from the work of our high schools," he said.

This is interesting. They don't want to be seen as just following the ACT and they are trashing their competitor at the same time.

"Mr. Coleman believes changing the focus of the exam also will change instruction, from rote learning of SAT vocabulary from flashcards to deeper learning. He said the new SAT "will measure the best of what students are working on in class -- the work that most prepares them for college and career success.""

Which is it? Will the new SAT reflect what's going on in class, or will it be used to drive what should be going on in class?

"...that such standardized tests can create "unproductive anxiety" for students and lead to expensive private test prep and coaching that "reinforces privilege rather than merit."

Coleman can't have it both ways. The point of the test is to show how students compare on a nationally normed test. The score will be used by colleges to separate them. That's the whole point of their product. There will ALWAYS be test prep that favors students with involved parents or those willing to spend the money. The only way to eliminate the benefit of test prep is to truncate the bell curve at the top end. Many more students will then get perfect scores. How many colleges will want the scores from a test that shows how many students can tie their shoes?

I like it that they want to eliminate those questions used only for creating the bell curve at the top end, but wonder what they are going to replace it with. Will there be more content, say from their SAT II tests? Will they add AP-level questions? Or, will the new SAT drive the trend towards less academic differentiation and more fuzzy holistic college admissions? Even the SAT II tests and the AP tests can't differentiate students at the upper end of the curve.

Debbie at RJ Julia tomorrow morning

From Debbie:

I'll be speaking/q & a'ing tomorrow (March 1 at 11 a.m.) at RJ Julia in Madison, CT. Come say hello if you are in the area.

Donna Jackson's new(ish) book

The Last Best Cure: My Quest to Awaken the Healing Parts of My Brain and Get Back My Body, My Joy, and My Life

Donna and I have been out of touch way too long!

Blast from the past

The Tri-State Consortium tries and fails to Trailblazerize my district

Really existing Common Core

Part 1: Help Desk, Common Core edition

Our high school principal explains the centrality of modeling to high school math:

55:23 This is a very important slide and one that you’ll hear me talk about a number of times.

Because modeling, we really look at modeling as the way to really permeate through all of the different levels of mathematics at the high school level. And we really look at it from a standpoint of pedagogy. When we talk about modeling, what we’re really talking about is the conceptual side of mathematics. Recently, and there’s been a shift to a very computational format for teaching mathematics, especially at the high school level. And that’s where we would start to break things down and scaffold them into very fine points. But what we have found is mathematics teachers over the last 10, 15, 20 years, when this pattern was happening, was that students were starting to learn their broader understandings of mathematics. 56:19 There was a big need to pull back and get back to the point of teaching to deeper understanding and to the conceptualization of math, not just about being able to compute the correct answer. So modeling we really look at as the link to be able to do that. It’s the opportunity to create real-life problem-solving situations where students need to understand the conceptualization of what’s going on in the math as well as how it relates to the real world.

Geometry, obviously, is when we start talking about shapes and sizes and the relative position of objects, and statistics and probability gives us the opportunity to start looking at mathematics and creating analysis and really looking into the chances of opportunity and things occurring.

57:07 So again, as I mentioned, modeling becomes a real important focal point for us. And the phrase that we’ve been talking about is it becomes this umbrella for us. It’s the umbrella that brings the whole mathematics curriculum at the high school level together, and a way for us to keep progressing through and thinking about how it matches up. So when we think about constantly naming and reinforcing the work that the students are doing we want to constantly bring them back as well to these broader-scale concepts. 57:39 So this slide and the next slide starts to talk about that even within those conceptual designs that I mentioned before, even within algebra, there’s an aspect of modeling that’s critical and important for them to understand in the algebra as well as the other mathematical concepts within.

Similarly you have functions here, and again, there are pieces of it that we pull out and we understand how do we create real-life conceptualization and contextualization for our students so that when they’re working through this, they understand again not just the specific calculation of an equation or formula but what it really relates to.

Similarly we do the same things in geometry and we do the same things in statistics and probability. Again, for me, this is about teaching to big ideas and perspective. We’ve been talking at the school about deep understanding and I said that would be one of those shifts that we keep coming back to, and I think that that’s really one of the most important messages that we can deliver about the mathematics instruction and how the Common Core starts to create a shift for us.

Irvington UFSD School Board Meeting - February 11th, 2014

This strikes me as fundamentally wrong, but if you guys tell me it's sound, I'll have to revise my view.

My understanding of math, of what math is, is that …. mathematics is not essentially, or even first and foremost, a system for representing empirical reality. The fact that math so powerfully -- and so eternally -- does capture many aspects of empirical reality is, in my view, either a) beside the point, or b) creepy.

Math, as I think of math, has a mathiness that cannot be reduced to modeling; math is a thing unto itself and should be taught as a thing unto itself -- or, at least, students should be made aware of the fact that to a mathematician math is not just a code-writing tool.

(Again, setting aside the possibility that math is just a code-writing tool.)

"Constructionism"

Constructionism is a philosophy of education in which children learn by doing and making in a public, guided, collaborative process including feedback from peers, not just from teachers. They explore and discover instead of being force fed information, or subjected to a regime of social control as in the Prussian system adopted in the US and elsewhere, sometimes called Instructionism. Constructionist guidance has to be informed by a knowledge of what there is to explore and discover, including our ignorance, and of a variety of approaches that can be used for children at different developmental levels with various degrees of preparation.

More on this topic can be found by exploring Google using keywords such as "constructionism", "education", "philosophy". See for instance openworldlearning, Seymour Papert's website, http://www.papert.org , and the wikipedia article on constructionist learning. Constructionism is implemented on the OLPC XO in the form of collaborative discovery.

"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." - Attributed to Confucius.

Constructionism is built on the foundation of Constructivism, the theory of childhood learning created by Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, and many others.

One Laptop Per Child

No fun.

Help Desk, Common Core edition

Two weeks ago, when our high school administrators gave a presentation devoted exclusively to Common Core "shifts" ("shifts," not "curriculum areas") the principal told us that henceforth math will be taught as modeling first and foremost. All math, it seems, in all math courses.

That strikes me as a terrible idea. Dreary, too.

Math for math's sake, math as a liberal art, math as a thing of beauty...math in my district is apparently a vocational art, not a liberal one. Kids are going to be explaining their answers a lot, too. (The explanation we saw opened with the words "We used the rules we have learned about discriminants.")

If you have thoughts, let me know.

Helicopter parent thread at the Atlantic

The possibly-inevitable helicopter parent thread has erupted at the Atlantic, so if any of you has the time or inclination to leave a comment, I hope you will.

I've just left this one:

I'm Catherine, a 'character' in the book (for the record, I tutored my own son for SAT math & took the test myself, once.)

Reading this passage I see that a fairly important section of the chapter has been omitted, and that is Debbie's attitude toward her son's grades.

The problem wasn't the Bs.

The problem was that her son was sliding by. He was underachieving, as his math teacher says.

Actually, I have a copy of the manuscript - here's the section that appears in the book but not in the excerpt:

"For me–and this was where I parted ways with the school–the issue wasn’t grades. I would have been proud of Ethan’s B’s if the math teacher had bounced in and said, “Ethan’s a hard worker.” But that’s not what he said, and it wasn’t what I was seeing. Ethan was taking the easy path, and the school was in his camp. The administrators thought Ethan, a happy-go-lucky, disorganized middle school boy with ADHD, should determine his own academic goals."

The boy whose parents were told they should be happy with Cs (in high school) is a friend of my family; I contributed his story to the book. That boy also has ADHD and his case was one of very significant underachievement.

With both boys, the school's approach to an underachieving student with ADHD and a 504 plan was to push back against the parents instead of providing the "accommodations" the boys needed to function as well as their peers (and which the school is obligated to provide).

And in both cases, too, the boys ended up transferring to Catholic schools where they did much better without any SPED 'services' at all. (Neither family is Catholic.)

Judging by some of the emails Debbie's been receiving, parents of kids with ADHD seem pretty often to be the target of 'helicopter parent' judgments made by school administrators.

I'm love to know how many parents have this experience.

Debbie has now had several emails from parents with the same story: an underachieving child with ADHD, a school administrator conveying the message that a) parents shouldn't "push" and b) they're the only parents who are pushing.

I'm now wondering how many people with kids on 504 plans are explicitly told, by school personnel, that "letting" their child "fail" is a good motivator for children with ADHD.

Debbie Stier is in The New Yorker & on The Today Show tomorrow!

Big Score: When Mom Takes the SAT by Elizabeth Kolbert 

What a day!

Google speaks...

...through Tom Friedman, no less:

The least important attribute they look for is “expertise.” Said Bock: “If you take somebody who has high cognitive ability, is innately curious, willing to learn and has emergent leadership skills, and you hire them as an H.R. person or finance person, and they have no content knowledge, and you compare them with someone who’s been doing just one thing and is a world expert, the expert will go: ‘I’ve seen this 100 times before; here’s what you do.’ ” Most of the time the nonexpert will come up with the same answer, added Bock, “because most of the time it’s not that hard.” Sure, once in a while they will mess it up, he said, but once in a while they’ll also come up with an answer that is totally new. And there is huge value in that.

How to Get a Job at Google
FEB. 22, 2014 | NY Times

I am praying our superintendent doesn't see this.

UPDATE: Daniel Willingham on the actual research. Thank heavens we have him.

Uncommon Students in the Common Core

I have a piece on how special ed students are faring under the new Common Core Standards on the online Atlantic:

The stubbornness of thought

I've just come across the best explanation of the "Don't think of elephants" effect I've ever read:

Byrne is also right to emphasize the stubbornness of thought. Once you think something, it is very difficult to eradicate that idea from your mind. The late, brilliant social psychologist Dan Wegner described this as the great irony of mental control: in order to insure that you aren’t thinking about an unwanted idea, you have to continually turn your mind to that very idea. How do you know that you aren’t thinking of a white bear driving a red Ferrari unless you think about whether you’re thinking it?

FEBRUARY 19, 2014
THE POWERLESSNESS OF POSITIVE THINKING
POSTED BY ADAM ALTER

The known unknown

So last week I submitted the following list of questions prior to the high school administration's Common Core presentation:

On math:

• Jason Zimba, “lead architect” of CC math standards, says that CC math will not prepare students for STEM careers or for admission to selective colleges (see attached). How are we dealing with that?
• Has the high school coordinated with grades K-8 to discuss whether teachers in those grades are using CC’s slower math sequence – and if so, with how many students?

On ELA:

• Whither the flipped classroom? Common Core requires more reading, more challenging reading, and broader reading: how does “more reading” square with students spending up to two hours a night watching Powerpoints?
• Are students reading any texts written prior to the 20th century?
• Are students reading any of the exemplar texts recommended by Common Core guidelines?
• How much time in English class is devoted to nonfiction?
• What types of nonfiction are students reading in English class?
• Has The Lucifer Effect been retired?
• Will next summer’s reading lists be consistent with Common Core’s emphasis upon serious works of literary fiction and nonfiction?
• Has any thought been given to creating a coherent, sequential, historically-organized curriculum in literary studies that would allow students to perceive the influence of earlier works on later ones (a critical component in understanding and appreciating fiction)?
• Has any thought been given to providing a serious survey course in British literature?
• Has any thought been given to teaching the Bible as literature (again: critically important to understanding the allusions in fiction)?
• What does “close reading” look like at Irvington High School? (Since we last spoke, I’ve read the CC exemplars of close reading. The middle school’s work example, although it does show a student using evidence from the text to support a point, isn’t a close reading as CC defines the term.)

Superintendent response:

Catherine,

The presentation that has been planned for tonight is consistent with those that were delivered for the elementary and middle school levels and highlights the shifts associated with CCLS. Tonight’s presentation will not address specific concerns or topics within any one curriculum area.

Kris

Kristopher Harrison, Ed.D.
Superintendent of Schools

That's not the right answer.

Question from Jen

What do you all think of My Math from McGraw Hill?

My Math is aligned to the CCSS and provides Differentiated Instruction through My Learning Station and Real-World Problem-Solving Readers. I will submit the request for a live webinar with a specialist as soon as I hear back from you.

Sounds ominous, but I haven't gone to look through yet.

I have looked through Jumpmath and would love to use it -- however, they don't have US versions of Grades 1-3 yet, only 4-7 (and our area is K-4). I could deal with explaining to kids about color vs. colour and meter vs. meter, but I'm not sure other teachers (or some parents) would be as, um, easy-going?!

Anyway, any knowledge that people have of My Math -- or of US schools using Jumpmath materials would be great.

And I do promise to do my own homework as well, but it will be the weekend before I have time to do a good job of looking through the curriculum. Unless there's so little of it there that we won't be able to tell about it anyway!

Thank you for any help the blog readers can give! --

Conjunction junction, après le déluge

I was searching for a transcript of Conjunction Junction when I came across the following exegesis of conjunctions, also entitled "Conjunction Junction" & inside a Prezi presentation, no less:

…if a conjunction is the 'Hitch,' the matchmaker, then the clauses are the two strapping young lovers (the two parts being joined).

• Independent clauses can stand alone as sentences. In our Hitch analogy, they are the sassy, strong independent sugar mamas and sugar daddies.
• Subordinate clauses are the gold diggers. They cannot stand alone as sentences. They begin with subordinate conjunctions, and are NEEDY.
• They are like parasites. They depend on independent clauses for survival.

I've just read this passage out loud to Ed who says, "Obviously you should never use subordinate clauses."

Yet more evidence that something happened in 1985. ^*

Something bad.


^* Wikipedia tells us that the first run of Schoolhouse Rock began in 1973 and ended in 1985.

Onward and upward

In The Economist:

Estonia’s government has commissioned Mr Wolfram’s consultancy in Oxfordshire to modernise maths courses for secondary-school pupils. Starting this month, it will pilot lessons built around open-ended problems which have no single solution. One example: “What’s the best algorithm for picking a romantic date?” (Possible answer: go on more dates with a lower quality threshold to maximise the chance of success.) Another: “Am I drunk?”, which leads into quantitative analysis involving body masses, rates of alcohol absorption and other variables.

Time for a Ceasefire | Feb 1st 2014 | SHANGHAI AND TEL AVIV

John Mighton's article on JUMP Math in AMS Notices

John Mighton, the Canadian mathematician (and playwright) who created JUMP Math, has an article worth reading in the current issue of AMS Notices. 

He provides probably the only description I've seen that really gives meaning to the word "balanced approach":

"H. Wu has warned against drawing false dichotomies in math education (for instance, between concepts and deep understanding versus procedures and algorithms). One dichotomy is particularly damaging to students: the false opposition between “explicit” or “direct instruction” versus “discovery” or “student-centered” instruction. Current research in cognitive science suggests that effective lessons should combine elements of both approaches. In 2011 A. Alfieri et al. conducted a meta-analysis of 164 studies of discovery-based learning and concluded that “unassisted discovery does not benefit learners,” whereas discovery combined with “feedback, worked examples, scaffolding and elicited explanations do[es].”

"An effective lesson can be student-centered but still led by the teacher. Research in cognitive science suggests that, while it is important to teach to the strengths of the brain (by allowing students to explore and discover concepts on their own), it is also important to take account of the weaknesses of the brain. Our brains are easily overwhelmed by too much new information, we have limited working memories, we need practice to consolidate skills and concepts, and we learn bigger concepts by first mastering smaller component concepts and skills."

So when a school administrator tells you "We use a balanced approach", the chances are fairly good that they are not doing what Mighton is writing about above.

Allison on kids and textbooks

More bad news on the Powerpoint curriculum

My district, my district

They've been keeping me busy.

They've been keeping Allison busy, too.

• Allison on flipped classrooms
• Allison on her AP history class in high school 
• Allison on every actual instance of flipping she's seen

We are seriously on the on the wrong track around here.

Tyranny of the tidy

It is fortunate for contemporary prophets that most of their predictions are as swiftly forgotten as made, for paper, while it may be used in a metaphorical sense by the electronics industry, has also remained stubbornly literal. The more digital information sped around the world, the more people wanted to print it out. From 1992 to 2002, world consumption of paper and board products grew from 250m tonnes to 325m.

Insecurity, said the visionaries: children clutching on to familiar objects as the world accelerates past them. As the value of tech stocks rose, bosses became increasingly determined to prove that they “got it”. One way of demonstrating that they were truly wired was to espouse the paperless vision.

A few of them tried to impose the vision on their employees. The most dramatic of these experiments took place at the offices of Chiat/Day, an American advertising agency. In 1993, Jay Chiat, the boss, had a revelation while on the ski slopes, and realised that his employees' minds were trapped by the boxes they were working in. Free their bodies from the box and you would free their minds. They were, accordingly, installed in offices without desks or filing cabinets. There were sofas to sit on and a few special rooms for meetings. There was nowhere to keep any paper; indeed, nobody was supposed to keep paper.

Chiat/Day's employees behaved like any group of refugees torn from familiar surroundings. They tried to rebuild their world. One woman bought a child's red wagon, put her paper files in it and trailed it around the corridors after her. Most people recreated their desks in the boots of their cars, where they stored their files and notebooks, dashing in and out of the building to the parking lot during meetings. Groups of workers took permanent control of meeting rooms and a shanty-town of desks grew up. The company was eventually bought by a traditionalist rival and normal life resumed.

The public sector got the bug too, though rather later. Panting along behind the curve, the British government committed £200m (then $290m) in 2001 to developing a paperless school. Baroness Ashton of Upholland, launching the scheme, waved a paper and pencil around, predicting their eventual demise .


The revenge of the trees

In most quarters, however, the fate of the tech stocks has taken the shine off those futuristic visions. The world is kinder to the past, these days, and to tools that have proved their value over millennia. A sign of the times is the publication of an excellent book* by Richard Harper and Abigail Sellen which details the many virtues of paper and the many workplaces in which it remains surprisingly important.

Air-traffic control, for example, does not, at first glance, seem a likely candidate. The business of monitoring incoming aircraft and predicting their future course, which depends on measurement and mathematics, sounds as though it should be entirely electronic. Yet paper remains an essential part of the air-traffic control system in Britain.

Each air-traffic controller works in a team of about five staff. Information about each incoming plane in that controller's sector is printed out on a piece of paper—a flight progress strip, about eight inches long and an inch deep. As the plane moves across the controller's sector, the strip is annotated—with, for instance, speed or altitude changes. On the basis of those annotations, different team members can do their job—working out, for instance, the implications of those changes for the next sector. In a busy sector, one team may have 50 strips on display.

Many attempts have been made to get rid of the flight progress strips. The only way of doing away with them, it turns out, is to give air-traffic controllers smaller areas to cover. For larger areas—which means a more complex job—the paper strips are essential. “They are a jolly efficient means of annotating information,” says Richard Wright of Britain's National Air Traffic Services. “The controllers can read them at a glance. If we replace them it will have to be with something better. They will be with us for some time yet.”

Paper's importance to the air-traffic controllers illustrates some of the reasons why it survives. It can be annotated more easily than text on a screen can; those marks can be seen more easily by several people than can digits on a screen; and it can be moved around, thus conveying more information.

[snip]

Has anyone written a definitive account of the book as intrinsically paper-based?

The growing distinction between 'meaningful' and 'worthless" college degrees

As American college completion rates continue to climb, George Will foresees a time when society will sharply distinguish "between those with meaningful college degrees and those with worthless ones".

Today, the dominant distinction defining socioeconomic class is between those with and without college degrees. Graduates earn 70 percent more than those with only high school diplomas. In 1980, the difference was just 30 percent.

Soon the crucial distinction will be between those with meaningful college degrees and those with worthless ones. Many colleges are becoming less demanding as they become more expensive: They rake in money — much of it from government-subsidized tuition grants — by taking in many marginally qualified students who are motivated only to acquire a credential and who learn little.

Today's "college students are learning less than they used to".

Lindsey reported that in 1961, full-time college students reported studying 25 hours a week on average; by 2003, average studying time had fallen to 13 hours. Half of today’s students take no courses requiring more than 20 pages of writing in a semester. Given the role of practice in developing expertise, “the conclusion that college students are learning less than they used to seems unavoidable.” Small wonder those with college degrees occupying jobs that do not require a high school diploma include 1.4 million retail salespeople and cashiers, half a million waiters, bartenders and janitors, and many more.

Most college graduates are underemployed

Related:

• A college degree has become the new high school diploma (Cost of College)
• College graduates are no longer ‘special’ (Cost of College)

(Previously posted at Cost of College)

Doing versus explaining and the process method

Fabulous comments on the Should math students explain their answer in words post. I'll try to get as many as I can pulled up front…

In the thread, Allison points out the irony that good teachers are the people who actually know consciously the nonconscious steps experts use to do what they do, and yet teachers are the one category of human being expected to stand aside while students figure things on their own out by deploying strategies and asking three before me.

Which brings me to my own experience teaching college composition.

I know I've said this a number of times but it bears repeating, I think: when I returned to teaching three years ago, I was chronically stymied by the fact that while I knew how to write myself, I had no idea how to explain what I did to my students.

In fact, it was worse than that. The problem wasn't just that I had no idea how to explain what I did when I wrote. The real problem was that I had no idea what that was. What was I doing when I wrote that was different from what they were doing?

All I really knew about what I did was that I wrote by ear. And so I would tell my students, frequently, that writing by ear was an option, and that the way to develop an ear for college writing was to do all their assigned college reading (and hope for the best).

Beyond that, I was stumped.

I didn't particularly want to tell freshman writers just how obsessive the process of writing entirely by ear actually was.

Writing by ear, for me, meant I would write something that sounded bad; I would hear that it sounded bad (that seemed to be the critical element, hearing badness); and I would then spend endless hours writing and rewriting and rewriting again (and again and again), trying to make what I'd written a) stop sounding bad and, only then, once that was achieved, b) start sounding good.

I did this for hours on end.

Until things sounded right.

So what does writing-by-ear translate to inside a composition class?

I'll tell you what it translates to: it translates to the process method, which I think is a lousy way to teach writing.

The Process Method, by the way, seems to have originated in the Bay Area Writing Project, now called the National Writing Project. Ed was somehow connected with the Bay Area Writing Project & has spoken disapprovingly of it for lo these many years. I'll have to get him to brief me again…

In the process method, students write something bad, then have their peers tell them it's bad, then revise the bad thing they've written to make it …. better.

Then, if they happen to be in a class taught by Peter Elbow, they find a volunteer copy editor to fix all the things that still need fixing.

OK, time to cook vegetables.

Will finish up later.

And here's to you, Mrs. Malaprop

I love student malapropisms.

I love student logic misfires just as much.

From Ignorance is Blitz: Mangled Moments of History From Actual College Students Paperback by Anders Henriksson:

Judyism was the first monolithic religion. It had one big God named 'Yahoo'.

Noah's ark came to it's end near Mt. Arafat.

These pre-Socratics lived long before Plato and were not decisively influenced by his work.

Eventually Christian started the new religion with sayings like, 'The mice shall inherit the earth'. Later Christians fortunately abandoned this idea.

Romans persacuted Christians by lionizing them in public stadiums.

Without the discovery of the flying buttock it would have been an impossible job to build the Gothic cathedral.

(Regarding the Black Plague): "Death rates exceeded 100% in some towns."

This was a time of stunned growth. The plague also helped the emergence of English as the national language of England, France, and Italy.

Renaissance merchants were beautiful and almost lifelike. They enriched themselves by planting wool and selling it for clothing. They increased these profets by paying interest to people who borrowed money from them. This produced even more grits for the mills of change.

Hitler, who had become depressed for some reason, crawled under Berlin. Here he had his wife Evita put to sleep, and then shot himself in the bonker.

Stalin, Rosevelt, Churchill, and Truman were known as the 'big three'.

And this:

It is now the age of now. This concept grinds our critical, seething minds to a halt.

You can say that again.

Should math students explain their answers in words?

Complex information, such as that required for motor skills, can be learned implicitly, without awareness.

[snip]

Imagine you are riding a bicycle, and you start falling to the right. How would you avoid the impending crash? Many cyclists say they would compensate by leaning towards the left, but that action would precipitate the fall. When responding to the same situation while actually riding a bicycle, these same cyclists would turn their handlebars in the direction of the fall. The example (from Ref. 1) highlights the distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge*. Implicit learning refers to the ability to learn complex information (e.g. skills such as bicycle riding) in the absence of explicit awareness. Anecdotes such as the bicycle example offer subjectively compelling demonstrations for the existence of implicit forms of knowledge that are distinct from (and possibly in conflict with) explicit knowledge, but the existence of such learning without awareness has been difficult to prove scientifically.

Implicit learning revealed by the method of opposition
Tim Curran
TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.5 No.12 December 2001

It's an article of faith, inside schools of education, that procedural learning is dumb.

Having spent a great deal of time immersed in the literature on the basal ganglia, which handle  procedural learning, I'm pretty sure that assumption is wrong. Possibly very wrong.

The emerging research on the intelligence of nonconscious learning and the cognitive unconscious hasn't surprised me at all, mainly because, years ago, I read Arthur Reber's Implicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge: An Essay on the Cognitive Unconscious. Reber's book was so world-altering that I have kept it on my desk ever since.

As I recall (it's time to re-read), Reber opens his book with the question of expertise: how to transmit expert knowledge from one generation to the next.

In other words, he opens with the question of education.

e.g.: We have, today, people who know how to perform open-heart surgery. We will need, tomorrow, people who also know how to perform open-heart surgery. Since the people who know how to perform open-heart surgery today will grow old and die, we need to transfer their knowledge to the next generation.

How?

People's first thought (again, I haven't read Reber's book in years, so take my summary with a grain of salt)…. People's first thought was that experts should simply tell novices how they do what they do.

Simple!

But that didn't work out.

The reason it didn't work out: experts don't know how they do what they do.

That fundamental insight into the nature of expertise has never left me.

Experts don't know how they do what they do.

The fact that experts don't know how they do what they do has made me highly skeptical of "explain your answer" questions as the sine qua non of math achievement and comprehension. As far as I can tell, adults who are really good at what they do have an enormous amount of nonconscious knowledge and comprehension, so shouldn't that also be the case with children who are good at math?

I don't think the second proposition necessarily follows from the first. Perhaps math students should be able to explain, in words, why they did what they did in order to arrive at a correct answer. However, anecdotally I do see "math kids" who "just get it" -- and, anecdotally, those kids always look like the good-at-math kids to me.

In any event, I was tickled to discover that people who know how to ride a bicycle not only don't know how they do what they do but in many cases consciously believe they do exactly the opposite of what they actually do.

"Sluggish attentional shifting" in dyslexia

Have just come across this paper in my travels today:

Apart from their reading difficulties, dyslexic subjects often suffer from a variety of subtle sensory and motor deficits.Whether these deficits have a causal relationship to the reading disorder, form additional risk factors, or are totally independent of the reading problem, is under vivid debate. In this article, we review the evidence and suggest that ‘sluggish attentional shifting’ (SAS) can account for the impaired processing of rapid stimulus sequences in dyslexia. Within this novel framework attention-related prolongation of input chunks is decisive for many small deficits found in dyslexic subjects.

Impaired processing of rapid stimulus sequences in dyslexia
Riitta Hari and Hanna Renvall
TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.5 No.12 December 2001

For years now I've been hoping to find time to dig into the literature on dyslexia.

One of these days.

Hari & Renvall open with an arresting observation by Scott Adams:

‘It might seem impossible for you to convey that time doesn’t always march in one direction, bringing with it a perfectly ordered sequence of causes and effects, but it is not hard for me to imagine it, because I’m dyslexic. When I hear a phone number spoken quickly, I hear all the numbers but don’t have any impression in what order they were spoken. It’s as if they came in all at once.’
Scott Adams in The Dilbert Future (2000), Boxtree, p. 233.

The authors remark that:

This description from the famous cartoonist fits nicely with findings on dyslexic adults who seem to have a prolonged ‘cognitive window’ (or ‘time or input chunk’1) within which the temporal order of successive items is easily confused 2–4.

Debbie's book - Today Show - Spreecast !

Debbie's pub date is coming up, and things are getting exciting. She's had incredible response to the book; the blurbs are incredible. So I'm expecting good things.

The biggest news so far is that Debbie and Ethan will be on the Today Show on February 25.

And, on February 12 Debbie will be doing a "Spreecast." (Actually, it's the 2 of us; I'm the interviewer/sidekick).

You can sign up here, and I hope lots of you will---!

Neil Postman's 1990 prediction

School teachers, for example, will, in the long run, probably be made obsolete by television, as blacksmiths were made obsolete by the automobile, as balladeers were made obsolete by the printing press.

Informing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman1990 | speech excerpted by Memoria Press

The technologies that were going to make teachers obsolete thus far:

• movies
• film strips
• TV
• CDs
• desktops/laptops/iPads 
• internet
• educational software

The technology that's going to make teachers obsolete will have to be much more radical than any of these things, I think.

Some kind of knowledge implant, a la The Matrix….

Sunday reading - horselaugh edition

I'm a huge fan of bad sci fi (Ed, too).

I'm also a fan of funny writing about bad sci fi, which goes with the territory. Any day that brings an Anthony Lane review of a movie starring Tom Cruise is a good one.

Yesterday, via the magic of Google, I discovered Ricki Lewis's post on SyFy Channel's Helix. She is hilarious.

Her piece was so funny I insisted on reading practically the whole thing out loud to Ed while he was trying to read something else.

I was laughing and guffawing throughout, which I'm sure added to the entertainment value.

SyFy’s Helix: Tired Plot, Bad Science, Fun
By Ricki Lewis, PhD
Posted: January 16, 2014