why you don't want your child to be popular

More from Why You Truly Never Leave High School:

In 2007, for instance, Steinberg and two colleagues surveyed hundreds of adolescents in two midwestern communities, asking them to decide which category they most identified with: Jocks, Populars, Brains, Normals, Druggie/Toughs, Outcasts, or None. They also asked a subsample of those kids to make the same assessment of their peers. Then they compared results.

Some were predictable. The kids who were identified as Druggies, Normals, or Jocks, for example, tended to see themselves in the same way. What was surprising was the self-assessment of the kids others thought were popular. Just 27 percent in one study and 37 in a similar, second study in the same paper saw themselves as campus celebrities. Yes, a few declared themselves Jocks, perhaps just as prestigious. But more were inclined to view themselves either as normal or none of the above.

Faris’s research on aggression in high-school students may help account for this gap between reputation and self-­perception. One of his findings is obvious: The more concerned kids are with popularity, the more aggressive they are. But another finding isn’t: Kids become more vulnerable to aggression as their popularity increases, unless they’re at the very top of the status heap. “It’s social combat,” he explains. “Think about it: There’s not much instrumental value to gossiping about a wallflower. There’s value to gossiping about your rivals.” The higher kids climb, in other words, the more precariously balanced they feel, unless they’re standing on the square head of the totem pole. It therefore stands to reason that many popular kids don’t see themselves as popular, or at least feel less powerful than they loom. Their perch is too fragile.

"sadistically unhealthy places to send adolescents"

Two people have told me about this article now: Why You Never Truly Leave High School

I love this line:

“Ironically, one of the reasons many of us have chosen to educate our own is precisely this very issue of socialization! Children spending time with individuals of all ages more closely resembles real life than does a same-age school setting.”

More:

Casey and two of her colleagues, Francis Lee and Siobhan Pattwell, were part of a team that co-published a startling paper last year showing that adolescents—both mice and humans—were far less capable of dialing back their fear response than children or adults.

[snip]

...if humans really do feel things most intensely during adolescence, and if, at this same developmental moment, they also happen to be working out an identity for the first time—“sometimes morbidly, often curiously, preoccupied with what they appear to be in the eyes of others as compared with what they feel they are,” as the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson wrote—then it seems safe to say this: Most American high schools are almost sadistically unhealthy places to send adolescents.

Until the Great Depression, the majority of American adolescents didn’t even graduate from high school. Once kids hit their teen years, they did a variety of things: farmed, helped run the home, earned a regular wage. Before the banning of child labor, they worked in factories and textile mills and mines. All were different roads to adulthood; many were undesirable, if not outright Dickensian. But these disparate paths did arguably have one virtue in common: They placed adolescent children alongside adults. They were not sequestered as they matured. Now teens live in a biosphere of their own. In their recent book Escaping the Endless Adolescence, psychologists Joseph and Claudia Worrell Allen note that teenagers today spend just 16 hours per week interacting with adults and 60 with their cohort. One century ago, it was almost exactly the reverse.

Something happens when children spend so much time apart from adult company. They start to generate a culture with independent values and priorities. James Coleman, a renowned mid-century sociologist, was among the first to analyze that culture in his seminal 1961 work, The Adolescent Society, and he wasn’t very impressed. “Our society has within its midst a set of small teen-age societies,” he wrote, “which focus teen-age interests and attitudes on things far removed from adult responsibilities.” Yes, his words were prudish, but many parents have had some version of these misgivings ever since, especially those who’ve consciously opted not to send their kids into the Roman amphi­theater. (From the website of the National Home Education Network: “Ironically, one of the reasons many of us have chosen to educate our own is precisely this very issue of socialization! Children spending time with individuals of all ages more closely resembles real life than does a same-age school setting.”)

In fact, one of the reasons that high schools may produce such peculiar value systems is precisely because the people there have little in common, except their ages. “These are people in a large box without any clear, predetermined way of sorting out status,” says Robert Faris, a sociologist at UC Davis who’s spent a lot of time studying high-school aggression. “There’s no natural connection between them.” Such a situation, in his view, is likely to reward aggression.

By Jennifer Senior
Published Jan 20, 2013
New York Magazine

Ed on Stephen Colbert

talking about Mali

I love the "back yard" line.

update: full episode here (Ed is the first guest after the monologue, which is hilarious.)

Ed on Stephen Colbert tomorrow night

Talking about Mali.

He'll be the straight man.

Stephen Colbert. On Comedy Central.

from 2008: Phil Holmes in Los Angeles

I have been meaning to get this story posted for years now. In fact, I've been meaning to track down Phil Holmes to ask whether he'd be willing to share his unpublished textbook with me.

Phil Holmes, one of the great English teachers of his generation, is standing before a class of high school seniors, trampling all over their self-esteem.

It is a Thursday in October, not long into the school year. Holmes gazes out at his class, his proper prep school face set off by white hair and rimless spectacles, and tells his students, all of them black kids from South Los Angeles, that the first grading period is ending "and most of you will be getting Fs."

The students stare, dead silent. For perhaps the first time today, he has their full attention.

"This is not a good start," Holmes continues, his tone stern but even. "But on the other hand, it's not unusual."

Class dismissed.

Holmes spent 35 years building his reputation at Harvard School for Boys and its successor, Harvard-Westlake, which attracted some of the best, the brightest and the richest students in Los Angeles. His teaching methods, his curriculum, his empathy, his intensity, his relentless demand for clear, well-ordered thought, changed kids' lives.

More than that, he shaped wave after wave of young teachers, many of them now working at some of the most influential educational institutions in America.

But when he and a colleague wrote a book describing their teaching method, publishers scoffed. Of course their method worked! Their classes were filled with bred-for-success overachievers! Who couldn't teach them?

So in 2002, at a time when most people his age were sliding toward retirement, Holmes accepted a teaching job at View Park Preparatory High School, at Slauson and Crenshaw boulevards.

[snip]

View Park Prep is no blackboard jungle. For many View Park parents, the choice was not between the charter and a traditional public school -- say, Crenshaw or Dorsey High -- but between the charter and a private school.

Still, the 15 miles that separate View Park from the rolling Coldwater Canyon campus of Harvard-Westlake might as well be 15,000.

More than 96% of the students at View Park are African American, and studies show that even middle-class black students tend to do worse in school, on average, than comparable students of other races. Moreover, roughly half of the students are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.

"At first, it was a shell shock," Holmes said, "because of three things. I wasn't prepared for the students to be so far behind in their reading development. . . . We were reading "The Odyssey," and within one or two days I knew we couldn't move through it like we did at Harvard-Westlake. Second, these students had no training in classroom discipline. At Harvard-Westlake, I could ask kids to start writing an essay in class, and I could go upstairs, get my mail and come back and they'd just be quietly working. If I walked out of class at View Park Prep, it would be total pandemonium.

[snip]

At the center of Holmes' teaching is a slender red-bound book titled "The Uses of Argument," first published in 1958 by British philosopher Stephen Toulmin, which sets out a steel-trap method for structuring an argument.

Creative writing, Holmes believes, is a frill for most high school students. How many, after all, will become poets or novelists? But virtually all will need to write some form of persuasive essay, in college and in their careers. That is Holmes' central focus.

By midyear, Holmes' students were showing progress.

"Can you state," Holmes asked his class one day in January, "what is the writing goal for the whole View Park Prep curriculum?"

Mister Searcy raised his hand.

"Writing a sustained case, free of mechanical errors, in a readable style," he said, repeating the mantra that Holmes has been chanting all year long.

By this time, everyone in Holmes' class knew the formula for a sustained case: Claim, clarification, evidence and warrant, cemented by "backtracking," a practice in which the writer re-reads and challenges his own work and answers any questions that arise.

The method works, as any number of View Park graduates can attest.

Skye Williams, now at Clark University in Atlanta, said Holmes' lessons "really helped us in college -- in history, biology, anything."

Teacher instills a love of words, but the lesson is about life
Los Angeles Times
By Mitchell Landsberg
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 21, 2008

Susan S tells me that her high school uses some version of Toulmin's method, but it's been extremely confusing to deal with. I have yet to read Toulmin myself, sad to say, though I've read several  explanations of Toulmin posted at various college sites over the past two years.

I'm thinking Richard Nordquist's explanation at about.com is probably the place to start if you're curious. George Hillocks' book on teaching argument writing has a section on Toulmin, and Joseph M. Williams' The Craft of Argument (there are 2: a long version and a short one) may be an adaptation of Toulmin's method (not sure).

I find it horrifying that Holmes could not find a publisher for his textbook.

This passage from the article is very nice:

That Thursday in October began with students filing into the 12th-grade English composition classroom that Holmes shares with a younger View Park colleague. He was dressed in a suit, green dress shirt and tie, black loafers, his hair neatly trimmed, his bearing attentive.

Just before the bell, one of his students poked her head in, hoping to get excused from class. "We're taking a makeup test in AP history today," she said. "Do you mind?"

"Yes, I do mind," Holmes said. "We're doing something very important in here."

Holmes had nothing unusual planned. He considers every lesson, every minute of class time, to be important, and, at age 66, he often stays up past midnight preparing for the next day's lessons. There are 26 students enrolled in this class, which was designed to give them the skills they would need to write college papers. All were dressed in some variation on View Park's uniform: khaki pants, a maroon sports shirt.

Holmes asked them to take out a homework assignment -- a critique -- that was due.

The assignment called for the class to analyze a student's college application essay. In the course of the next 90 minutes, Holmes led the class in dismantling not just the essay, but one student's critique of it, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, word by word.

There's a hanging detail, he said at one point -- why is it a problem?

"It's too vague," a boy answered.

"What's vague about it?" Holmes demanded.

The boy couldn't answer at first, but Holmes was relentless, forcing him to think. In the end, they hammered out an answer.

At another point, a single word -- resourceful -- launched Holmes into a discussion of Odysseus, and how his resourcefulness ("He found a way to blind the giant") could be a source of inspiration for the students.

The entire class was like this, Holmes leading a discussion in which no point, no word was insignificant. He could be brutal, dismissing one student's argument as "mindless." And he could be generous, if guarded, with praise.

Outside after class, Khadijah McCaskill said the students don't mind the tough talk, or the tough grades. This is her second class with him.

"His toughness helps the class concentrate and makes it easier to learn," she said.

"He's a phenomenal teacher," she added. "He's phenomenal because everything he does connects together. And even if you don't know it then and there, it will . . . be connected to a larger thing later on."

Authoritative teacher ("his toughness helps the class concentrate"), coherent curriculum (everything he does connects together).

That's the magic.

why college costs so much

They're paying the adjuncts too much.

sources:
Moving Beyond Grade 12
By Lynn Olson
Published: January 4, 2007
Education Week


Health Law Pinches Colleges
By MARK PETERS and DOUGLAS BELKIN
Wall Street Journal
Updated January 18, 2013, 7:53 p.m. ET

the people's poems

Thinking about cells and bells, I realized that instructivist types actually do have 3 rhymes to our name:

• learn and earn
• college knowledge
• sage on the stage 

I like sages on stages, so I'm claiming that one for us.

news to me

from Education Week:

We hear it all the time. "Students should take ownership of their school."

7 Ways to Increase Student Ownership
By Jennifer Barnett
January 8, 2013

That reminds me.

Back when C. was in middle school, all the students were required to pick up trash strewn around outside by one small group of students. The assistant principal told parents the reason for the policy was that when some students are required to pick up other students' trash, they "take ownership of the school."

When I shared the rationale with C, he said, "But if it's our school, then it's our trash, too, and we don't have to pick it up if we don't want to."

In the edu-world words never mean what you think they mean.

I believe it was Glen who pointed that out.

I can answer that

Trying to catch up on old copies of Ed Week....and I find....

Good news!

Harvard Education School has partnered with Survey Monkey to create a PARENT SURVEY.

All about parent involvement in the schools!

Very exciting.

Reading right along .... I have a suggested revision for Item 10 under Parent Engagement:

I answered a couple of others as is...

AND SEE:
do not press send
Harvard, SurveyMonkey Offer Tool to Weigh Parent Engagement By Michele Molnar January 15, 2013

Cells and bells, the video

I've just watched the "open spaces" video a couple of times. I don't see a single adult in any of the images. No classrooms, either. Just "think tanks" and "breakout rooms" and "wide hallways" and the like.

From the video:

LIBRARIES evolve into vibrant extensions of classroom space.
THINK-TANKS or breakout rooms support individual or group work space.
OPEN COMMON AREAS allow students to meet and gather informally.

And this:

When it comes to building proposals, as opposed to curriculum and teaching methods, citizens actually have a vote.

Mine is No.

Cells and bells

That's a new one on me.

Cells and bells.

Meaning: old-timey school buildings with old-timey teacher-dominated classrooms (sage on the stage) and old-timey bells:

A building alone does not create a school culture. But research shows that school buildings can affect students' morale and academic performance. Now, school officials are moving away from the "cells and bells" design marked by long, locker-lined hallways of windowless classrooms, and toward more open, flexible buildings aimed at creating a sense of community and collaboration.

Such new designs tie together a shift to a more technology-driven, collaborative, student-centered approach to education with an effort to improve students' safety, engagement, and community.

[snip]

Increasingly, the spaces themselves are designed to foster student connection. Traditional cafeterias in some schools have been replaced with more café-like areas where students might work and eat at the same time. Windows are opened to improve daytime lighting and indoor-air quality. Hallways are broadened and lockers removed to reduce clutter and chaos.

Many newer buildings also are "more learning-focused, less teacher-focused," says Craig Mason, an architect with the DLR Group, based in Overland Park, Kan. Some school buildings include breakout spaces for students to meet in small groups, or have windows specifically so a group can work outside while still being supervised.

Schools' Design Can Play Role in Safety, Student Engagement
By Jaclyn Zubrzycki
Published in Print: January 10, 2013, as Building Toward a Positive Climate

I'm asking myself: what would Gordon say?

School buildings are being intentionally designed to foster peer orientation? To minimize teacher influence?

OK, fine. One more reason to vote down bond propositions.

Meanwhile, how come the ed establishment has a lock on slogans that rhyme?

• guide on the side
• sage on the stage
• chalk and talk
• drill and kill
• cells and bells

I need a rhyme.

Citizens Weigh-IN on Common Core

Parents, teachers rally against Common Core standards in Indiana schools Lawmakers, teachers and parents rallied Wednesday at the Statehouse for a bill that would withdraw Indiana from Common Core State Standards , a national set of academic standards adopted in dozens of states. People who oppose the Common Core initiative argue decisions about educating children need to be made locally and not in Washington.

copy that

The associate director of the learning center at my college told me a fascinating story this week.

Her son was hired by a major copy editing company (I had no idea copy editing companies existed). When he took the job, he was required to copy, by hand, several well-written and well-edited articles: each one three times!

She said she'd never heard of such a thing and neither had her son, but then a friend told her that's the way the Jesuits taught writing when he was in school.

Is that true?

Did the Jesuits have students copy good works by hand?

The UK regains some sense in math

I've heard it remarked that what happens in Europe is just a preview of what's coming to our shores here in the US.  If that's true, then this makes me smile:

Pupils aged 11 will be given extra marks for employing traditional methods of calculation in end-of-year Sats tests, it emerged.

Children who get the wrong answer but attempt sums using long and short multiplication or adding and subtracting in columns will be rewarded with additional points.

Ministers insisted the changes – being introduced from 2016 – were intended to stop pupils using “clumsy, confusing and time-consuming” methods of working out.

This includes so-called “chunking” and “gridding” where pupils are encouraged to break problems down into numerous component stages before an answer is reached.

 *snip*

Elizabeth Truss, the Education Minister, will outline the plans in a speech to the North of England Education Conference in Sheffield on Thursday.
Speaking before the address, she said: “Chunking and gridding are tortured techniques but they have become the norm in recent years. Children just end up repeatedly adding or subtracting numbers, and batches of numbers.
“They may give the right answer but they are not quick, efficient methods, nor are they methods children can build on, and apply to more complicated problems.

Everything old truly is new again.

Dartmouth strikes a blow against A.P.

So glad we didn't have C. apply to Dartmouth (my alma mater):

“The psychology department got more and more suspicious about how good an indicator a 5 on the A.P. psych exam was for academic success,” said Hakan Tell, a classics professor who heads Dartmouth’s Committee on Instruction, so the department decided to give a condensed version of the Psych 1 final to incoming students instead of giving them credits.

Of more than 100 students who had scored a 5 on the A.P. exam, 90 percent failed the Dartmouth test. The other 10 percent were given Dartmouth credit.

[snip]

The College Board, which administers the A.P. program, said it found the Dartmouth results hard to credit.

“It’s very difficult to believe that 90 percent of students with a 5 on their A.P. would flunk a test on an introductory course,” said Trevor Packer, the College Board official in charge of the A.P. program. “We have research, including Dartmouth students who got a 5 on their psychology A.P., showing that they did better than students without that A.P.”

Mr. Packer said he believed Dartmouth had an obligation to share details of the experiment.

Dartmouth Stops Credits for Excelling on A.P. Test
By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: January 17, 2013

Suburban schools in my neck of the woods are itching to dump AP courses, and Dartmouth's move will be cited far and wide and often. Thanks!

Dartmouth needs to release the data. AP courses are developed by disciplinary specialists; in the past Ed's been approached to work on AP history. In terms of content the AP course is a college course.

I agree that high school teachers are in no way the equivalent of college professors with Ph.D.s in the field, but that is not the issue at hand. The issue at hand is Dartmouth's claim that entering students who have scored 5s on the AP Psychology exam fail an introductory Dartmouth psychology department exam. I don't believe it. I know the kind of kid who gets accepted to Dartmouth -- I personally know several students attending Dartmouth now -- and they're not failing introductory-level course exams. If they are, there's something wrong with the exam.

Here's a student essay, from the AP Psychology Examination, that scored 10 of 10. (Scoring commentary here)

Here's the College Board's explanation of scoring for the writing portion.

Psychology Course Description

fractions, again

Wonderful post on Diane Ravitch's blog, written by a high school math teacher. The whole thing is great, but I especially love this passage:

I teach high school math. I took a break to work in the private sector from 2002 to 2009. Since my return, I have been stunned by my students’ lack of basic skills. How can I teach algebra 2 students about rational expressions when they can’t even deal with fractions with numbers?

Please don’t tell me this is a result of the rote learning that goes on in grade- and middle-school math classes, because I’m pretty sure that’s not what is happening at all. If that were true, I would have a room full of students who could divide fractions.

in the stockings this year

from Urban Dictionary

I reckon I'll pass

Susan S has conducted an inquiry into the "Writing the Essay" course C. suffered through this semester, and found this question posted to Yahoo Answers:

Essay 2
Write an essay of your own in which you reckon with the original, chosen essay and its ideas. Do this reckoning in the context of other sources (written and experiential). Do this reckoning not only for its own sake but also for the sake of developing an idea of your own. Your writing task is at least two-fold: to deepen our understanding of that original source while letting us see you reckon with it across the entire essay; and to develop your own idea along with this reckoning, an idea that emerges through your analytical reckoning. You must cite the original, chosen essay and at least three other written texts in your essay. You can also use your own experiences to help develop your idea.

[The student asks]: RECKON??? do you know how many definitions there are of reckon... can someone explain what i am supposed to do.

For Christmas I ordered three Writing the Essay mugs from Urban Dictionary, one for Ed, one for me, and one for C.

Unfortunately, the one I ordered for me has a definition of "Trailer Fraud" on the side, so now that's another whole multi-step errand to add to the list.

learning to read by learning to spell in Aruba

from the Official Tourism site of Aruba:

Language

Dutch and the local language of Papiamento are the official languages of Aruba, but most Arubans speak a minimum of four languages including English and Spanish.

In the cab back to the airport we interviewed the driver re: multilingualism in Aruba.

He told us that Aruban children speak Papiamento at home and in Kindergarten.

Then, in 1st grade (I'm pretty sure it was 1st grade, not 2nd -- but I wish to heck I'd taken notes) students move to immersion classes taught in Dutch.

The teacher speaks in Dutch (and does she write her words on the board?? I don't remember).

The children have a slate of her words at their desk, with a piece of tracing paper on top. They trace over the words as she speaks them.

They learn to hear Dutch at the same time they learn to spell Dutch.

That's the way things were done in America lo these many years ago. Both Frederick Douglass and Huckleberry Finn describe learning to read English by learning to spell English.

Aruban children commence studying English and Spanish in 5th grade. Some years back, they moved on to learn Italian, German, Portuguese, and French in high school, but that is no longer the case today.

Laura Z on parents as guides on the side

re: Gordon Neufeld's Hold Onto Your Kids, Laura in AZ said...

This is a wonderful book! One of the best I've ever read, period!

Oh, yes, when you don't go with the flow with your child. I too tried with my daughter - from Pre-school through 4th grade. Not knowing she had Asperger's - though she is very high functioning. The schools tried to make her social, tried to make my "square-peg" fit into the "round-hole" of the whole social set-up. When it didn't work, it was my fault. (This was before her diagnosis).

Then when we started homeschooling, everything became so much easier for my daughter, because she had so much less stress! But the accusations came that I was sheltering her (Er... yeah, that's kinda my job), she wasn't getting "socialized" (We were keeping it at healthier levels and not overwhelming her), etc.

It all came down to the arguments given in the book - modern society really believes that especially as children get older they should raise themselves and each other. Parents are only to be "friends" or perhaps "Guides on the Side." We have lost our place of authority. How many parents even ask little 2 or 3 year-olds what they want to wear? Or what they want to eat?