worse than you think

I've mentioned several times our family mottoes:

It's always worse than you think.

and

No common sense-y. (No common sense-y is less apropos now that Jimmy is living in a group home and Chris has graduated high school.)

Under the category of worse than you think: "I'm not writing, I'm drawing."

it's always worse than you think

One of my goals in life is to learn enough math so I can learn statistics, especially Bayesian statistics.

Since I don't know statistics, all I can do with this Andrew Gelman post is surmise that he's suggesting that our family motto (number 2)^* - it's always worse than you think - may be correct.

Robin Hanson asks the following question here:

How does the distribution of truth compare to the distribution of opinion? That is, consider some spectrum of possible answers, like the point difference in a game, or the sea level rise in the next century. On each such spectrum we could get a distribution of (point-estimate) opinions, and in the end a truth. So in each such case we could ask for truth's opinion-rank: what fraction of opinions were less than the truth? For example, if 30% of estimates were below the truth (and 70% above), the opinion-rank of truth was 30%.

If we look at lots of cases in some topic area, we should be able to collect a distribution for truth's opinion-rank, and so answer the interesting question: in this topic area, does the truth tend to be in the middle or the tails of the opinion distribution? That is, if truth usually has an opinion rank between 40% and 60%, then in a sense the middle conformist people are usually right. But if the opinion-rank of truth is usually below 10% or above 90%, then in a sense the extremists are usually right.

My response:

1. As Robin notes, this is ultimately an empirical question which could be answered by collecting a lot of data on forecasts/estimates and true values.

2. However, there is a simple theoretical argument that suggests that truth will be, generally, more extreme than point estimates, that the opinion-rank (as defined above) will have a distribution that is more concentrated at the extremes as compared to a uniform distribution.

I could be wrong.

I probably am.

[pause]

OK, I've just read the Overcoming Bias post to which Gelman is responding.

Where public education is concerned I have the answer.

The truth is always in the long tail.

Always.
_______________

^* family motto number 1 being no common sense-y

Always worse than you think, Congressional version

It's always worse than you think. CPSIA, that is. The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, passed overwhelmingly by Congress, is doing damage to vast swaths of childrens' fashion and toy industries as it mandates, among other things, outrageous new testing and tracking by manufacturers, retailers, and resellers to prove products are in line with overly stringent lower limits on lead levels, phthlates, and other chemicals.

The law is so poorly written that it's affecting non-childrens' products in all sorts of industries. Of course, it's mostly small businesses that can't afford to come into compliance. The educational products industry is filled with such small vendors. Here's a quote from one in an AP story:

But some small businesses, like American Educational Products in Fort Collins, Colo. — it sells classroom teaching aids like flash cards, animal models, globes and relief maps — say the testing and labeling costs are crippling to their operations even though their products are safe. They want the law amended to exempt products that present little or no risk to young children.

"The challenge as a small business is that I cannot do it all (the testing) immediately," said Michael Warring, president of AMEP. "I would have to spend a full year of revenue to test every product I sell."

Warring recently laid off four of his 70 employees. In his 15 years with AMEP, he has not had one safety recall or complaint about lead.

Even so, Warring says he is required to test samplings of all products he makes and sells for young children, which he said costs about $2,000 per product. The tracking labels will add another cost, he says, since they must be a permanent marking on each product.

Another industry hit hard is the scientific equipment industry. Here are some stories as they affect science classrooms.

From the Amend The CPSIA blog,

Heathrow designs and manufactures items for use by trained laboratory technicians. ... Heathrow directly employs 13 individuals in Vernon Hills, Illinois and 1 in Great Britain. Heathrow recently received a request from one of its U.S. customers to certify that its products meet the standards set forth in the CPSIA.

Why, you may ask, would a company that designs, and manufactures, products for use by trained laboratory technicians, in professional labs, be asked to certify that its products meet standards set forth in a law that deals with safety standards for children’s products? The answer is that..this particular customer of Heathrow sells the Heathrow product range into the middle school science classroom marketplace...Therefore, they think they need to have on file certification from their suppliers that these products meet the CPSIA standards...Our products are not designed for use by children... if products are not designed for use by children, they are not subject to the CPSIA. However, many companies are spooked by the fact that this law has mandatory $100,000 per occurrence fines and felony criminal sanctions. They do not want to go to jail for selling products that violate the CPSIA, nor can they afford to risk $100,000 per occurrence fines.

So, they will either get their certifications or drop the products. This means that our products will no longer be available for use by middle school science teachers (who apparently found a use for them in teaching biology, chemistry and other sciences)

This isn't the only manufacturer that won't be passing CPSIA test for its microscopes. The solder on microscope light bulbs fails the lead test too. So
no microscopes at all.

But that's okay, you probably wouldn't have had anything to look at anyway.
From here:

"First, Michael Warring of American Educational Products reports that a school opted to stop using AmEP's rocks to teach Earth Science and will instead rely on a POSTER... The continued ragging of consumer groups about "toxic toys" sullies the reputation of all good companies and their good products. In this case, rocks take on the "toxic" tag because they contain uncontrollable amounts of base elements found in nature.

It gets worse. Nearly all science kits could fall because of the lead in the insulation on the wires, as they did in the case of the Potato Clock.

From the above blog again:

"recently a manufacturer of the Potato Clock decided to test its version for compliance with the newfangled CPSIA. In their eager beaver-ness, they shot themselves in the foot, discovering (horrors) that the insulation on the product's potato wires contain trace amounts of lead over the arbitrary limits of CPSIA...

First, the company decided that since it now knew of the test failure, it had an immediate reporting obligation under CPSIA Section 15(b). In addition, they concluded they had an obligation to immediately stop sale, since continuing to sell would be another "knowing" violation - yes, kids, that's a felony with possible penalties of jail time and asset forfeiture (goodbye house and car!)...

The CPSC, apparently, upon receiving this (unwanted) 15(b) report concurred - yep, the wire insulation exceeds the standard, and yep, you have to stop sale. No recall was required by the CPSC BUT the company appears to have decided almost immediately that an informal recall was mandated. Why might they have decided such a thing? Well, perhaps they had a generalized fear of liability from dealers who might be sued for selling this "dangerous" device if it ever came to light that the product had impermissible lead in the wire insulation....

But the WORST part of this story, the most chilling, is the part about the wire insulation. The Potato Clock was recalled for having too much lead in the wire insulation. Why did it have lead in it at all? Wire insulation contains lead because it is recycled vinyl, probably recovered principally from scrap of other wire...

The real problem comes from the fact that the Potato Clock utilizes "ordinary" wire. Everyone and everything utilizes "ordinary" wire. No specially-coated wire is used in children's products and even if it were available, it would be too expensive for this kind of application. Potato Clocks should use "ordinary" wire. If ordinary wire will always fail the CPSIA standards because of its insulation, then everything using wire in schools can't be sold for use by children under 13 years of age. This means, among other things, no electricity education before the 7th grade in this country (and only for the 13 year olds in the room - the 12 year olds will have to leave the room until their birthday)."

On the bright side, at least it will end discovery learning.

worse than you think, part I've-lost-count

(Family motto: It's always worse than you think)

Excerpt from Afraid of Your Child's Math Textbook? You Should Be.:

At one time, a writer in this industry could write a book and receive roughly 6% royalties on sales. The salesperson who sold the product, however, earned (and still does) a commission upwards of 17% on the same product. This sort of pay structure never made sense to me; without the product, there’d be nothing to sell, after all. But this disparity serves to illustrate the thinking that has been entrenched industry-wide for decades—that sales and marketing is more valuable than product.

Now, the balance between the budgets for marketing and product development is growing farther and farther apart, and exponentially so. Today, royalties are a thing of the past for most writers and work-for-hire is the norm. Sales staffs still receive their high commissions, but with today’s outsourcing, writers and editors are consistently offered less than 20% of what they used to make. As a result, the number of qualified writers and editors is diminishing, and those being contracted by developers and publishers often don’t have the necessary skills or experience to produce a text worthy of the publisher’s marketing claims.

Here’s how it works: Many publishers solicit developers, often on the Internet and from all over the world, looking for the best bid on a project. With competition this fierce, developers are forced to drastically lower their rates just to stay in business (and publishers exploit this fact). Let’s say a publisher hires a developer for a certain low-bid fee to produce seven supplemental math books for grades 3-8. The product specs call for each student book and teacher guide to have page counts of roughly 100 pages and 80 pages, respectively. The publisher wants these seven books ready for press in five weeks—over 1,400 pages. To put this in perspective, in the not too recent past at least six months would be allotted for a project of this size. But publishers customarily shrink their deadlines to get a jump on the competition, especially in today’s math market. Unreasonable turnaround times are part of the new normal, something that almost guarantees a lack of quality right out of the gate.

Of course, the developer could say no to this ridiculous timeline, but there are plenty of others who will say yes. So, the developer accepts the work and scrambles to put together a team of writers and editors who must have immediate availability, sheepishly offering them a take-it-or-leave-it rate, a mere pittance of what they could once demand. As is the case for the developer, for each writer or editor who declines, there are scores in the wings who will say yes just to survive. Those who do accept the inferior pay and grueling schedule often do so without the ability to review the product specs to know what they’re getting into. That’s because the specs are still being hashed out by the publisher and developer even as the project begins. And when product specs are “complete”, they are often vague, contradictory, and in need of extensive reworking since they were hastily put together by people juggling far too many projects already.

[snip]

Copyediting, the work I generally do now, is the final stage of editing before the product goes to press, where only a check for grammar, punctuation and things of this nature should be required. Content editing is a whole other expertise, one that is done after the writing where the content editor reviews the writer’s work for accuracy, sense, and structure, and makes sure the material adheres to the product specs. When I’m hired to copyedit, the profound errors I see in content are often staggering enough that grammar and punctuation seem immaterial. Sometimes the content in the student materials is so poor—steps omitted, unclear directions, concepts introduced when they’re not developed till later in the text, distorted interpretations of math terms and applications —that it boggles the mind it got past a content editor. With so many errors rampant at this stage of editing, rewriting is hastily done and it’s only inevitable that some errors will show up in the final printed product. And with a different copyeditor on each book, there are those who don’t even think about, or have the experience to recognize, the content issues so they go unaddressed. For a rate of four dollars a page, most copyeditors will do only what they were hired to do—look for errors in grammar and punctuation and move on. There's a mortgage due after all.

When I point out critical errors in content to a developer’s project manager, there’s generally a pause at the other end of the phone. I’m ruining their day, handing them a problem they don’t want, can’t possibly address given their resources and time. Some do their best; they’ll ask me to make corrections and bump up my rate a bit. Some will ask me to make notes so that they can fix the errors and do the rewrites themselves on their own time. Others will simply sigh, “The publisher knows it’s bad. Just do the best you can.” The publisher knows it’s bad. And yet, it doesn’t seem to matter. That’s because the sales and marketing team is already at work developing videos, brochures, webinars, catalog copy, and whatever else their bloated budgets will allow in order to sell what doesn’t actually exist—a quality product.

And speaking of the printed product, there’s one more step before we get there—production. These are the people who typeset the books and get them ready for press. India is a favored venue for some publishers because workers are available on three shifts and work fast, but mostly because the price is far cheaper than in the U.S. As editors, we often have to compensate for language barriers by color coding our instructions to the production staff or using simple language that is still frequently misunderstood, resulting in further unintended errors that often make it into the final product because there’s no time left in the schedule, no money left to pay someone, to do a final and thorough review in the manner it should be, and used to be, done.

[snip]

One must conclude that students and their education, if this is judged against product quality, is becoming an increasingly low priority. Not only don’t some publishers care, some have no problem expressing their lack of concern. Example: I received an email from a senior math executive of a well-established publisher responding to a concern I raised about the lack of correlations in a particular math series to the Common Core State Standards, correlations that were part of the product specs. The reason they were part of the product specs is because Common Core State Standards have been officially adopted by 43 states (ascd.org) and publishers are racing to make sure their products address them. This is how the senior executive answered my query: “It doesn’t matter if there aren’t enough correlations; our marketing materials say only that we ‘expose’ students to Common Core.”

Not only did this top-level “professional” have no problem stating this, she had no problem committing it to writing. Buyer beware: Read that marketing copy very carefully.

Afraid of Your Child's Math Textbook? You Should Be.
Annie Keeghan

writing prompt from Tex

Tex asked a great question:

Reading through your efforts, especially this week, to bring Christopher up to speed in order to perform well on his upcoming test, leads me to ask the question:
In hindsight (20/20), what would you have done differently over the last few years? I imagine this is not an easy question to answer because, from what I recall, you’ve “discovered” many things along the path to today. “It’s always worse than you think.”

I'd love to hear from everyone else on this one.

Ed and I talk about this because we're pretty sure that "accelerating" Christopher was a mistake.

I got going on all of this because of Wayne Wickelgren, who said that if you wanted your child to be on par with his peers in Europe and Asia you had to get him into the accelerated math track.

Which I then proceeded to do, aided and abetted by the folks at ktm-1.

Wickelgren was right, of course, but he wasn't looking at our situation here in Irvingtonland, where "Phase 4" math has traditionally been taught as a wash-out course.

On the bus the other day a friend of Christopher's said, "Ms. U. [legendary middle school math teacher, now retired] was a great teacher. She flunked people out of the course if they couldn't do the math. She got rid of them."

Ms. U. is the teacher who told a very large gathering of irate parents that she could take the top students in the district, put them in a room together, and still eke out a bell curve.

Ms. K was told, when she came to the district, to "hold down the number of As." I assume Ms. U. was the person who told her to do so, Ms. U. being chair of the department. Naturally parents were not apprised of this policy.

So....."accelerated" math in Irvington, which means algebra in 8th grade, isn't accelerated math.

It's a Darwinian reality show. In math. In 6th grade.

If we think constructivism is bad when it comes to relieving teachers of responsibility for student learning, a washout course has taken several giant steps down the road towards open sabotage of student learning.

e.g. you're a kid in this class, you're never shown how to do word problems in class, you're never assigned word problems on homework, you do your first word problems ever on the test and those word problems are multi-step!

When Ed and I ask ourselves what we would have done differently, item number one on the list is forget about "accelerated" math, take the Phase 3 course, and teach algebra to mastery on the side using the Saxon books.

At the same time.....on the principle of that which does not destroy me makes me strong I'm not completely persuaded that I would move Christopher to Phase 3 if I had it to do over again.

He's learned something about persistence and politics, and the district has taken heat it richly deserves. (Question: has any disadvantaged child taken Phase 4 math? Ever? I'm guessing the answer is 'no,' and I'm guessing that subject is going to be coming up.)

That question wouldn't be moving up the agenda if we hadn't had the radicalizing experience of Phase 4 math ourselves.

But that doesn't answer Tex's question.


trying again

If I were starting with a preschool child, knowing what I do now, I'd take my child to KUMON from the get-go if I could afford it.

If I couldn't afford it, I'd join edhelper.com, print out sequential worksheets and have my child do those.

I would teach a separate math curriculum at home from day one.

I think I'd probably choose Singapore Math for the early grades, then switch to Saxon as soon as my child got through the Primary Mathematics series.

I have two reasons.

• I continue to feel that the "teach two ways to do it"^* notion makes sense. Singapore and Saxon are quite different; Singapore feels foreign in its way; I like the "otherness" of the books. Remember deSaussure: meaning comes from difference.
  

• The Singapore books are much shorter than the Saxon books, and easier to get through on the side.
  

If I could possibly get my child through Mathematics 6 book I'd do that, too.

I'd give the ITBS each and every year to make sure I was seeing at least a year's progress and to diagnose areas of weakness.

I would probably also formally adopt the CA state standards for use here at home (I may do that still).

And....I think that's it!

I'd love to hear from everyone else.


Mathematics 6 press release
Wayne Bishop on Mathematics 6
Russian Math thread at ktm 1


^* Just two ways. Not multiple ways.

calling all math brains

Any suggestions you may have about afterschooling geometry would be more than welcome.

More than welcome, because.....Irvington has purchased and is now implementing a new geometry text!

From Glencoe!

That's Glencoe as in Page-Splatter Glencoe. Glencoe Geometry, New York Edition ISBN: 0-07-873320-0.

yippee

So....moving right along.....we see, linked to a real-world problem on geometric properties of class ring design....a box!

More about school rings

Many companies that sell school rings also offer schools and individuals the option to design their own ring.

Excellent!

And, on page 90, a Key Concept:

Five essential parts of a good proof:

State the theorem or conjecture to be proven

List the given information.

If possible, draw a diagram to illustrate the given information.

State what is to be proved.

Develop a system of deductive reasoning.

One year from now, this will be my life.

That's one year from now assuming I manage to figure out some way to teach enough pre-algebra so my kid can maintain a B average in his "accelerated" math class this year.


speaking of which

I've already left this anecdote in a Comment, but this one belongs front and center. Here it is:

I was talking to a math-brain friend here in town.

Probably some of you recall that until a couple of years ago, for reasons now lost in mists of time, Irvington had 4 math tracks.

Phase 1 was the slowest; Phase 4 was the fastest. Kids were placed in a Phase at the beginning of 3rd grade in 3rd grade; that is to say, at the end of 2nd grade kids went into the track in which they would be expected to remain for the rest of their school career. Which meant that at the age of 8 my own child, placed in Phase 3, had been placed out of calculus in senior year without the school seeing fit to mention this fact to his parents.

Naturally I had always assumed that Phase 1 was SPED. I mean....I knew what was going on in Phase 3; it wasn't advanced work. I knew what the kids were doing in Phase 4, which was the same thing the kids in Phase 3 were doing along with some Math Olympiad problems the parents solved over the weekends. Then there was Phase 2, a whole other level also more or less doing the same material only slower..... which didn't seem to leave much room for a Phase 1 for regular-ed kids. A normal class divides into thirds: fast, medium, slow. Statistically speaking, the fourth track had to be outliers, which meant it had to be kids with real learning disabilities.

Talking to my friend, I said something about the teacher who taught the SPED kids in Phase 1.

She said, "Phase 1 isn't special ed."

"Yes, it is," I said. "It's Phase 1." I may not know much about statistics, but I have absorbed the concept of a normal distribution.

"No," she said. "Phase 1 is just kids who aren't any good at math. Or math isn't their thing." Then she told me one of the Phase 1 kids at the high school had just scored a 94 on Regents (algebra 1 & geometry)

Talk about it's always worse than you think.

We've got an entire lowest-possible-level class for kids with no discernible learning disabilities, no classification, no nothing --- an entire class of kids who, apparently, are simply assumed to be "no good at math" or "math isn't their thing."

"How the hell did that happen?" I said.

She didn't know.

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

This really is worse than I thought.

I've always thought the Irvington bell curve needs to be picked up in toto and simply moved down the field.

The fast kids take geometry in 8th grade; the "big middle" takes algebra; etc.

Turns out we don't even have a bell curve.

Is there a name for a distribution that has a huge bump at the bottom? I'm sure there is.

Rafe Esquith at Mindless Math Mutterings

it's always worse than you think

A teacher pal in the Midwest tells me that the single worst thing about her district (where she's happy & has taught for many years) is the chronic implementing of new programs without aforethought.

Every five years the district implements new stuff. Without fail. (Last summer they bought Lucy Calkins, but then didn't use the curriculum; they also piloted TERC, but decided against it - whew.)

Administrators come in, implement stuff, and move on to better jobs where they implement more stuff.

It's the same everywhere, it seems. If I remember correctly, and I think I do, the material sent out to parents last year, introducing our new middle school principal, said he'd implemented character education in his school in Albany.

And that was it, pretty much.

He implemented character education in an urban school attended by disadvantaged kids. So, apparently on the strength of that accomplishment, he was hired to implement stuff here.^*

Of course, what do I know? If you listen to the New York Times, character education is what disadvantaged kids need.

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

The fact that the star teachers in our schools -- and most schools are going to have a star or two -- have to sit around listening to professional developers instead of creating and providing the professional development themselves and being paid to do it really cheeses me off, and always has.

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


churning the curriculum

Paul Hill, an education researcher at the University of Washington, sees parallels between education practices and medicine as practiced in the Colonial period. "There was not a lot of science behind medicine then," says Hill. "It was swept by fads." Each patient's suffering was thought of as unique, a special case. There was no broad research that demanded standardized responses to standard ills. Each patient was in need of individualized care. Ever hear one of your child's teachers use that word? We provide individualized instruction. Each class is unique. "Physicians used to say the same thing," says Hill. "There was a natural tendency to think of everything as much too unique to want to generalize your practice."

But while medicine has moved into an era of standardized practice driven by medical research, education remains in the era of leeches and bleeding. Where was the research that demanded teachers drop phonics, teach in "open" classrooms or try "new" math? Where, for example, was the research that led so many elementary school teachers to tinker with "heterogeneous grouping," where children of mixed abilities were put into groups with the hope that the faster learners would tow along the slower learners? Like so many educational fads, it sounded like a good idea, but it rarely worked in crowded classrooms lacking the talented aides who could pull it off.

At Harvard, former teacher Tom Loveless teaches a subject on this very topic: "Controversies in Education Reform." The syllabus, which consists entirely of required readings on school failures, resembles an indictment of a Mafia chief. Loveless has a personal feel for the problem that dates back to his nine years of teaching in Sacramento public schools. "This is an industry with tremendous turnover at school sites," says Loveless. "Half the principals change schools every six or seven years and superintendents even more frequently. I went through three or four principals, all of them saying: "I have some new ideas and we're going to change things." In come the big changes, out goes the principal within a few years, in come more big changes. "Nobody would stay in one place long enough to be responsible for outcome," says Loveless. "By the time everyone figures out what they're doing doesn't work the principal is gone and you're off to a new approach."

source: Neglected Evidence

The beauty of this system is that taxpayers get to pay for all this stuff. If you're a taxpayer and a parent, you get to pay for the tutors and the time-off-work to (try to) fix the problems, too.


^* Middle school model in our case. Our middle school is apparently destined to become exemplary no matter what the parents think.

Doug Sundseth on writers editing themselves

Catherine: "In other words, it takes two decades for writers to be able to edit their own prose well." (see: Kellogg, R.T. (2008). Training writing skills: A cognitive developmental perspective [pdf file] Journal of writing research, 1(1), 1-26)

Had you said something like, "edit their own prose and get anything useful out of the process", I might agree. I don't think that most writers ever get to the point where they can "edit their own prose well." The best that you can expect is that if you give your work a week or two before you look at it with an eye to editing you can sometimes see poor writing of various sorts.

Oh, you might be able to do a good job of basic copyediting. But I think that significant writing is too closely tied to each writer's idiosyncratic thinking process for the writer to notice flaws of logic, organization, and flow as often as you really need to. And absent those things, I don't think you can say that the writer can edit his own work "well."

Frankly, finding even a professional editor that can do a good job of structural editing of the work of others is a non-trivial task. Even good editors are often lured down the alleyways of comma placement, spelling, and a random selection editorial peeves of dubious validity.

IME, a good reader who is willing to say, "I don't follow this part", is as useful as (sometimes more useful than) most editors. If you can tell me where you're having a problem, I can often see all or part of the problem and rewrite to correct it. If you can articulate why you don't understand the part, you're invaluable.

But good readers are hard to find, too.

On outlining: In many ways, the formal outlining taught in the 70s was worse than useless. Until I managed to get past the cumbersome process involved in the sort I was taught, I actively avoided outlining at all, to the great detriment to my writing.

Now, I always outline any writing longer than a page or two, but I haven't used a formal outline since the last time it was required in high school. I make notes, draw lines, and rewrite the parts I can no longer read for all the scribbling. At the end, I have a plan that is functionally an outline, but it bears little resemblance to the roman numeral, capital letter, lower-case roman numeral (etc.) outline taught in some writing classes.

This is why Writers Workshop makes no sense. Editing is a separate process from writing; in the real world (the 21st century world!) the professional writer has a professional editor.

I'm now convinced that the goal of writing instruction should be to teach students to write the best first draft they possibly can -- because the first draft is pretty much going to be their last draft even if you force them to "revise."

The fact is: they're not going to revise.

They're not going to revise because they're nowhere near being able to read their own words the way a stranger reads them.

More later.


Ronald Kellogg
The Psychology of Writing

national standards: 1992 edition

History on Trial tells the story.

Ed was tangentially involved in the creation of the 1992 national history standards, which are now used by New York state and receive a grade of "A" from the Fordham Foundation. The entire undertaking was a political fiasco, and having taken a look at Chester Finn's recent description of the standards I have no reason to think things would be different today.

Here is Finn, writing in Troublemaker:

...the quest for standards was instead weakened by the credulous expectation that self-interested experts, mostly free from the discipline of consumers, parents, practicing teachers, and policymakers--and sometimes free from leading university scholars in their own fields--could successfully distill from their own cherished subjects the essential skills and knowledge that kids should learn in school, and could do so while (a) avoiding political correctness, (b) sparing schools from the savage internecine disputes within the field, and (c) producing a manageable document of essential curricular guidance rather than a kitchen-sink tome with the heft of the Los Angeles phone directory.

The dismaying results ranged from incoherent blather (English) to left-leaning political correctness (history) to immense, encyclopedic treatments (geography) that placed the authors' discipline at the center of the intellectual universe and made everything else revolve around it. The U.S. Senate voted 99-1 to condemn the history standards, and an early draft of the English standards was so vapid that Clinton's Education Department cut off further funding.

Troublemaker by Chester E. Finn
p 173

It's always worse than you think.^*

Chester Finn is one of the few policy types who has championed liberal education. Yet here we see him dismissing major historians as "self-interested experts" who require the "discipline" of consumers, parents, practicing teachers, and policymakers to produce an acceptable set of history standards.

David Klein got the same treatment.

Worse yet, Finn's glancing mention of the 99-1 vote is obnoxious. The Senate did not vote 99-1 to "condemn" the standards. The Senate voted 99-1 on a bill concerning unfunded mandates to which an amendment condemning the standards had been attached.

Here's Gary Nash:

To well-informed observers in the Senate gallery, it was obvious the action had been hasty and purely procedural. The Senate had held no hearings on the history standards; the Subcommittee on Education, Arts, and Humanities had taken no action; and not one of the teachers and scholars who had produced the guidelines had been consulted. It was also apparent that most of the senators voted on the resolution without having opened a copy of the documents at issue. Patty Murray, Gorton's Senate colleague from Washington, admitted that she voted for the resolution without ever having seen the standarsd "in order to move the debate back to the unfunded mandates bill that was on the floor at the time."

[snip]

Less than two weeks after the Senate passed the resolution, it voted to strip its Unfunded Mandates Bill of all extraneous provisions, including the resolution disapproving the history standards. Later the House took up the bill but neer introduced the history standards issue at all. Nevertheless, a chill wind blew through the NCHS office in Los Angeles. The world's most powerful deliberative body had intervened in support of the most fervent critics of the standards to tell the nation's teachers and academic historians that its guidelines for schools had been written irresponsibly and malevolently.

p. 235-236

There you have it: how politics work. The Senate voted 99-1, then took it back, but the damage was done and that's the point.

99-1!

Those were some bad standards!

Nearly 20 years later Chester Finn, champion of quality, can roll out this astonishing number as proof that you don't want historians in charge of history, geographers in charge of geography, or mathematicians in charge of math.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the Foundation he leads bestows a grade of 'A' upon these self-same standards and no one's the wiser.

The fact is: parents and college professors cut no ice with anyone, including most of the folks advocating on our behalf.

So I'm not going to be signing on for national standards.

I'm giving Gary the last word:

The standards have been used extensively across the country, and for eight years I have not received a single criticism of the revised volume.
Lynne Cheney's Attack on the History Standards, 10 Years Later

Case in point.

David Klein on IB and AP
Chester Finn on curricular gold
Gary Nash: Reflections on the National History Standards
Lynne Cheney's Attack on the History Standards, 10 years Later
History on Trial Chapter One
History on Trial (Harvard Education Letter)
Whose History? by Linda Symcox

the standards:
National Standards for History Basic Edition
National Center for History in the Schools UCLA
ISBN 09633218-4-6
National Standards for United States History Grades 5-12 Expanded Edition
National Center for History in the Schools UCLA
ISBN: 09633218-1-1
National Standards for World History Grades 5-12 Expanded Edition
National Center for History in the Schools UCLA
ISBN: 0-9633218-2-X

^* family motto

email from the guidance counselor

back story: email to the guidance counselor

This came Friday:

Mrs. Johnson,
I spoke to Ms. T and Christopher received a XX on the CTBS test. I hope you have a nice weekend.
G.

I don't know what to make of this. Initially I thought someone had seen the light; someone had said to Christopher's guidance counselor — the guy who's supposed to be guiding our son — or, perhaps, to the principal, "We don't need another fight with these parents."

Then I heard from the school attorney I mentioned (who will be writing posts for ktm-2 one of these days):

The penalty for violating the crap out of a parent's FERPA right is that the Feds "threaten" to withhold Federal funds. We know of no instance in which this has ever been done. There is no private right of action to sue under FERPA. However, it is a PITA to deal with OCR, so schools usually roll over and quick rather than have that time suck occur.

So now I'm thinking the school actually did intend to withhold Christopher's CTBS score until acceptance and rejection letters had gone out for Earth Science no matter how much it fanned the flames.

Worse yet, school authorities thought acceptable professional behavior for a guidance counselor means telling a parent to send a followup request one week later instead of recording the first request on whatever calendar program taxpayers have purchased for his use.

Step behind the yellow line.

Come back next week.
Highest taxes in the country & I'm sending my kid to middle school at the DMV.

Anyway, I cited FERPA in the spirit of "see you and raise you"; I wasn't thinking tactically. My attitude was: If you can't send me my kid's science score today, then you can give me every last scrap of paper in his school file 45 days from now.

This wasn't a threat; I wasn't planning to "win." Parents never win. We ask for stuff; district says no to stuff. It's the Prime Directive.

All of a sudden, voila. Score arrives.

So.... I guess we haven't seen an outbreak of common sense. I must have just happened to stumble onto a threat that works.

It's always worse than you think.

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

On the other hand.... a threat that works.

Good to know.

I'm looking forward to Thinking Out Loud's posts.



news from nowhere part 14
news from nowhere part 16
news from nowhere part 17
news from nowhere part 20

Worse than you think - Common Core edition

(Family motto)

So. My district.

No longer has Math Trailblazers.

Does have timed worksheets.

With the predictable results.

Lost the battles--all of the battles--won the war. That was my conclusion.

Wrong!

My district does have good math scores, comparatively speaking, and I continue to think our math scores are 'real,' not a product of random variation. But we'll see.

The appearance of timed worksheets and better math scores coincided with our losing all the battles; that part is true, too.

It's the last part that doesn't track, the lost all the battles, won the war part. Normally when people lose all the battles they lose the war, too, and that's what happened here. We lost all the battles, and we lost the war--and we got better math scores in the bargain because somewhere in there, after ten or twelve years of parent uprisings, we got timed worksheets.

The battle to get rid of Math Trailblazers culminated in the district getting rid of Math Trailblazers...and replacing it with nothing.

We have no curriculum, in my view (I'm not going to be taking this one back), and we have no textbooks. Little kids are coming home from school in tears, not knowing how to do their math homework.

When parents complain, they are told "COMMON CORE" and sent to EngageNY. Some children have gaps because of COMMON CORE, parents are told. The younger kids will be in better shape than the older kids because they started COMMON CORE from the get-go & didn't have to suddenly shift over to COMMON CORE when the state commanded schools to shift over to COMMON CORE. COMMON CORE, COMMON CORE: COMMON CORE is the problem, and COMMON CORE is the explanation of the problem, too.

So I am told.

Meanwhile our new curriculum director (another battle lost) is engaged in a multi-year effort to "map" the curriculum.

When she is done, the curriculum will be modular; we will be able to swap out old units and swap in new units whenever the state passes a new curricular mandate. No word as to whether ease of unit-swapping will solve the problem of gaps.

So yesterday I asked for a copy of the district's scope and sequence, K-12.

Not sure why I didn't do that years ago. It's funny how there are always some lines you feel you can't cross. I'm reasonably certain the district doesn't have a scope and sequence--a friend of ours was told so directly when he asked for one maybe 15 years ago--and for some reason I've felt I shouldn't put people on the spot by asking for something I'm pretty sure they don't have.

I do remember, I think, asking for copies of a math syllabus back when C. was in middle school -- I think Debbie S. may have done the same. I'll check. I think we were both told we couldn't have copies of the syllabus, but the details are hazy now....Actually, as I think about it, the then-Assistant Superintendent finally sent me a syllabus, which I discovered was for the old class with the old textbook. The district had adopted new textbooks that year, and as far as I could tell no one had written down a syllabus based on the book teachers were actually using.

I'm going to have to go through my old emails one of these days...

In any event, where the possibly apocryphal Irvington scope and sequence is concerned, now's the time. Presumably the high school classes have syllabuses (syllabi) and it's time for the community to see what K-8 has.

UPDATE: We don't have a scope and sequence and never did. Confirmed in BOE meeting of 10/22/2013.

Beyond that, I don't want to hear that young children are coming home crying over math and COMMON CORE did it.

The problem isn't COMMON CORE.

Children crying about math in Irvington long pre-dates COMMON CORE.

Heck, parents crying about math in Irvington long pre-dates COMMON CORE.

Crying and blogging.

---

I have to check in with Allison, who is I think on top of the NY situation vis a vis COMMON CORE math.

I love knowing someone in Minnesota who can explain my own state education department's  math situation to me.

UPDATE 10/26/2013: We have replaced Math Trailblazers with "math modules" from engagny, which somebody downloads from the internet. The engageny curriculum has yet to be completed, so...let's say we have replaced Math Trailblazers with part of a curriculum. A brand-new, never been taught, never been learned from math curriculum you have to download from the internet.

The tragedy of histogeomegraph continues

In the news today: another botched attempt at interdisciplinarity in our public schools:

ALBANY — High school is full of hypotheticals, like “How does one solve for x?” and “What happens if I skip class?” But this week, students at Albany High School were given an alarming thought puzzle: How do I convince my teacher that I think Jews are evil?

[snip]

“Your essay must be five paragraphs long, with an introduction, three body paragraphs containing your strongest arguments, and a conclusion,” the assignment read. “You do not have a choice in your position: you must argue that Jews are evil, and use solid rationale from government propaganda to convince me of your loyalty to the Third Reich!”

[snip]

Dr. Vanden Wyngaard, who met with Jewish leaders in Albany and made a public apology on Friday, said the assignment was apparently an attempt to link the English class with a history lesson on the Holocaust. The assignment itself seems to back up that theory, telling students to use “what you’ve learned in history class.” It also suggests using “any experiences you have.”

It echoed another recent, controversial assignment in Manhattan, where an elementary school class was given math problems featuring the whipping and killing of slaves, according to The Associated Press. That assignment was an effort to combine math and social studies lessons.

Students Told to Take Viewpoint of the Nazis
By JESSE McKINLEY
Published: April 12, 2013

I always thought the problem with teaching all subjects as one was that the results would be superficial and pointless. Like histogeomegraph.

It's always worse than you think.

Ken on Madison's reading scores

Ken's series of posts on the Times article are going to be invaluable to parents attempting to persuade their districts to use SBRR reading programs (scientifically based reading research).

His latest is short and sweet, which makes it especially useful.

The Times article on Madison's success with balanced literacy has the story wrong.


in a nutshell:

• The TIMES article concerns a group of Madison schools eligible for two million dollars in Reading First funding on condition that they chose an SBRR reading curriculum (SBRR curricula systematically teach phonemic awareness and phonics).^*
  

• Reading First is part of NCLB, and is the only part deemed by the Department of Education to have worked (see Sol Stern's aricle in City Journal as well).
  

• The Madison schools under discussion chose to forego the two million dollars in federal funding for which they were eligible because they wished to carry on using a balanced literacy program. (Best source on balanced literacy versus SBRR programs is Louisa Moats' Whole-Language High Jinx.)
  

• According to figures provided by Madison to the TIMES, balanced literacy has been successful in raising reading scores.

• That turns out to be false. Yes, scores are up on Wisconsin's test. Scores on NAEP, however, are flat. Now it appears that the schools in question are in fact underperforming Madison's other schools.
  

• My understanding of Moats' paper is that all children are equally at risk for reading difficulty: "[Reading scientists] have established that most students will learn to read adequately (though not necessarily well) regardless of the instructional methods they’re subjected to in school. But they’ve also found that fully 40 percent of children are less fortunate. For them, explicit instruction (including phonics) is necessary if they are to ever become capable readers. These findings are true across race, socioeconomic status, and family background."
  

The reading wars are still with us, and the stakes are high.


where did whole language come from?

This is another entry under the always worse than you think heading:

In 1837, Horace Mann, a lawyer and Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, proposed to the Boston School Masters the adoption of a "new method" of reading that began with the memorization of whole words rather than just learning the letter sounds and blending them into words. His "new method" was based on the work of Thomas A. Gallaudet, who had developed a way to teach deaf children to read. Since deaf children had no ability to "sound out" letters, syllables, or words, the constant repetition of "sight" words from a controlled vocabulary seemed to be the most efficient way to teach them to read.

Adapting the work of Gallaudet, Horace Mann and his wife Mary developed a reading program that applied the same principles to students who had no hearing impairment. His method was tried for about six years in the Boston schools, and then soundly rejected by the Boston School Masters in 1844. Samuel Stillwell Greene, then principal of the Phillips Grammar School in Boston, expressed the views of the Boston School Masters, and the following excerpt from his essay is as relevant today as it was in 1844:

"Education is a great concern; it has often been tampered with by vain theorists; it has suffered much from the stupid folly and the delusive wisdom of its treacherous friends; and we hardly know which have injured it most. Our conviction is, that it has much more to hope from the collected wisdom and common prudence of the community, than from the suggestions of the individual. Locke injured it by his theories, and so did Rousseau, and so did Milton. All their plans were too splendid to be true. It is to be advanced by conceptions, neither soaring above the clouds, nor groveling on the earth, -- but by those plain, gradual, productive, common-sense improvements, which use may encourage and experience suggest. We are in favor of advancement, provided it be towards usefulness. . . . We love the secretary, but we hate his theories. They stand in the way of substantial education. It is impossible for a sound mind not to hate them."

The establishment of the normal school to train teachers at the same time Horace Mann was promoting the "new method" was not coincidental because these institutions became the vehicle by which to continue promoting the "new method." With the help of John Dewey at the University of Chicago, Arthur Gates at Columbia Teachers College, and the growing network of normal schools springing up around the country, direct, intensive, systematic phonics was debunked in favor of the whole word "look and say" way of teaching reading, with no research to support it.

So there you have it.

Whole language has its origins in reading instruction for the deaf.

Of course!

The deaf!

Let's teach hearing children the same way we teach deaf children.

Why not?


is Susan J around?

Susan has done a great deal of volunteer work with education of the blind, and I'm thinking she'll know the answer to this question.

I have a memory that deafness is an enormous obstacle to education....I'm thinking that deaf children suffer deficits in reading comprehension and understanding of abstract material--but I don't know this, and I don't want to be saying it on a blog if I'm wrong. (I'm going to strike this post, as a matter of fact as soon as I find out I am wrong.)

Susan, if you're around, do you know something about this?

Does anyone?

Obviously I'm thinking that it is the height of folly to adopt a method of reading instruction for typical children that teachers of the deaf have had to use by necessity.

I would think that in any case, but if it's true that reading comprehension suffers as a result of deafness, that makes the history even worse.

Another question for Susan: I also think I've read that blindness is not a terrible handicap for reading comprehension.

Is that correct?

Or have I got that wrong?



from Susan J

Many deaf children fail to acquire language at a young age. (Let's restrict this to deaf children who don't have any vision problems.) This is because even the tiniest babies need to experience language and -- if they are deaf -- sign language is the only option. Unfortunately, deaf children with hearing parents may not be sufficiently exposed to sign language either because the parents don't learn it or they mistakenly believe that if they don't use sign language, the child will learn to lip read better.

American Sign Language (ASL) is its own language; it isn't English. So my guess is that learning to read English is for a child who knows ASL rather like learning a foreign language.

However if the child has missed the window for his or her brain to acquire any language, they may have lifelong deficits.

As for blind children who don't have any other disabilities, they don't seem to have any unusual reading comprehension problems. Obviously the mechanics of reading braille with your fingers is different from visual reading and it helps if the student's braille teacher is well-trained.

I'm thinking that Oliver Sacks' book (Seeing Voices) may discuss this.

fyi, one of the most riveting books I've ever read about language and disability is Susan Schaller's A Man without Words.


As to Horace Mann, I think it's safe to say that, at a minimum, a form of reading instruction based in the techniques of teachers working with deaf children is stupid folly and delusive wisdom, both.

Ken on Madison's reading scores
cued speech and literacy
forcing hearing children to learn as deaf children must
how to make a point

_________________


^* I believe that wealthy schools aren't eligible for Reading First funding, but take that with a grain of salt.

Everyday Math's smoking gun

I want to bring this up front.

LynnG said... Steve, it is always worse than you think.

Here's what EM's Teacher's Reference Manual (Grades 4 - 6) has to say about fraction division.

"Indeed, few adults ever need to divide fractions once they leave school.
Therefore, the main goal of division of fractions in Everyday Math is not to
give students practical skills . . ."

This is an exact quote?

This is an incredibly damning statement to make. I've heard this argument before from regular people, but never so blatently from a math program. I would consider this to be a smoking gun statement. There is no other interpretation.


The simple question is how on earth can they decide on this in K-6! This philosophy guarantees that kids will never need to divide fractions as adults.


Dividing rational expressions like

1/(x-5) divided by y^3/(X+5)

is a required and common skill, even for any high school college math track.


Invert and multiply. What's the big deal? Just think about all of the complicated tasks in life that most kids master. This doesn't rank very high, but oh no! Math is different. It's complicated! It's scary! You have to "understand" it.

It's not about understanding. It's about LOW EXPECTATIONS!

When I talk to other parents about our public schools, they might not know about the problems in math, but they sure know about low expectations.

Everyday Math is based on low expectations. According to Andy Isaacs, it's not for the "elite", and now we know what that means. It means that if you want your child to get into a college math track in high school, you need lots of outside help.

Another rude awakening

Last year, my first-born was in enrolled in our local public school in second grade, and although he spent 6 or 7 hours there each day, he came home with tons of homework and a good deal more learning remaining. I started to think, “Why am I sending my kids to school, when the school sends them back to me to educate?” A friend later complained to me that when they gave her son a book report, it meant at least 5 hours of her own time working on it with him. Another parent told me how great the tutoring was at the chain store down the street from her. All this got me to thinking: if I’m ultimately in charge of my kids’ education, why do I feel so powerless? . . .

I assumed that the government knows best what, and how, to teach my kids. It’s an assumption I was raised with, one I never challenged, until now. Well, you know what they say about you when you assume…

“It’s always worse than you think?” Well, that’s what we often say around here.

Another parent gobsmacked by our public schools

Back to School: Part One

doctors on electronic medical records

As a veteran of the public school system, I've never seen electronic medical records as the great white hope where medical costs are concerned. "Technology" is expensive.

Sure enough:

The conversion to electronic health records has failed so far to produce the hoped-for savings in health care costs and has had mixed results, at best, in improving efficiency and patient care, according to a new analysis by the influential RAND Corporation.

Optimistic predictions by RAND in 2005 helped drive explosive growth in the electronic records industry and encouraged the federal government to give billions of dollars in financial incentives to hospitals and doctors that put the systems in place.

[snip]

RAND’s 2005 report was paid for by a group of companies, including General Electric and Cerner Corporation, that have profited by developing and selling electronic records systems to hospitals and physician practices. Cerner’s revenue has nearly tripled since the report was released, to a projected $3 billion in 2013, from $1 billion in 2005.

The report predicted that widespread use of electronic records could save the United States health care system at least $81 billion a year, a figure RAND now says was overstated. The study was widely praised within the technology industry and helped persuade Congress and the Obama administration to authorize billions of dollars in federal stimulus money in 2009 to help hospitals and doctors pay for the installation of electronic records systems.

[snip]

But evidence of significant savings is scant, and there is increasing concern that electronic records have actually added to costs by making it easier to bill more for some services.

In Second Look, Few Savings From Digital Health Records
By REED ABELSON and JULIE CRESWELL
Published: January 10, 2013

Mickey Kaus has posted emails from physicians describing their experiences with EMRs that are fascinating. This one especially:

I once reviewed a hospital record from a large national medical center that I can’t name, but [you've] heard of. The patient had a major operation. The operative note was incredibly good. Page after page it recorded in exquisite detail exactly where the surgeon cut, exactly what he retracted, exactly what he saw, exactly what detailed care he took to avoid injury to this organ and that one. I was impressed. I remember thinking, “Wow. No wonder this place has a national reputation.” This was the best documented operation I had ever seen.

In spite of this operation, the patient got worse. Four days later she went back for a repeat of the same operation. And the second operative note was the exactly the same as the first. Identical. Page after page, word for word, exactly the same. Leave aside the impossibility of having two multi-hour operations go exactly the same way, it is not possible to dictate or write two multi-page op notes that are word for word identical. The op notes were frauds. They were templates, worked out with the hospital risk management department to describe what should happen, and entered in the EMR with one click of a mouse. What actually happened? No one can tell.
More on Obama’s Great Health Leap Forward

Talk about 'always worse than you think.' Yikes.

We experienced a comic version of the prefab clinical observation several years ago when we took Andrew and Jimmy to the hospital for extensive speech testing, resulting in extensive reports. When we read Andrew's, we discovered that the report characterized him as 'deaf.'

Andrew is not deaf.

The rest of the report seemed to be about Andrew, not some other kid, so we assumed somebody must have hit the 'deaf' macro by mistake. That was mildly annoying, but it didn't occur to us to ask ourselves whether anything in the report was specific to Andrew.

Then there was the time C's middle school math teacher selected "Finds math difficult" from the Comment Bank....which reminds me of the then-assistant principal telling parents that teachers were no longer allowed to hand-write comments on report cards because you never knew what they'd say. (They might say something inappropriate, like "Finds math difficult.")

Meanwhile here's the latest news from the coming Disruption that is the MOOC: Crash Sinks Course on Online Teaching.

The six-week course, called "Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application," was created by Fatimah Wirth, a Georgia Tech instructional designer. The emphasis of the course, which began on Jan. 28, was to teach students how to create online learning materials and manage an online class.

Students were asked to sign up for groups using Google Docs, but a spokesman for Google Inc. said the program allows only 50 people to edit a document simultaneously. When the crush of students tried to sign up, the system crashed, said Debbie Morrison, who was in the class.

Ms. Wirth emailed an apology, but when things didn't improve she, in conjunction with Georgia Tech and Coursera, pulled the plug on the course.

Kaus's other post on EMRs: Obama's Great Health Leap Forward

The Ups and Downs of Electronic Medical Records
Medicare Is Faulted on Shift to Electronic Records
A Shortcut to Wasted Time
Abuse of Electronic Records
Uneasy About Online Medical Records

John Fleming - 2007 Baccalaureate address - Princeton University

Ed just sent me this.


a ktm-2 moment:

The word "baccalaureate" of course refers to the bachelor's degree you will receive on front campus two days hence. This will be a sacramental action, a sacrament being the "outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace." The degree is an inward and spiritual grace conveyed by President Tilghman by the authority granted to her by the trustees. Its outward and visible sign, the diploma, you will pick up on Cannon Green. Don't forget to get yours. Even though it's only outward and visible, it did cost well over a hundred grand. Baccalaureate is a Latin word invented in the Middle Ages by translating the Old French bachelier. A bachelier was an apprentice knight, a warrior of such modest means that he fought beneath the banner of a superior knight. The etymology of bachelier is obscure, but we think it might derive from sub plus chevalier. This would mean "someone beneath a horseman." Being beneath a horseman, though perhaps preferable to being beneath a horse, still strikes me as a less than exalted status. Other associations of the bachelier are suggested by Chaucer's description of his squire, son of the knight, of whom he writes:

With hym ther was his sone a yong SQUIER
A lovyere and a lusty bacheler ...
So hoote he lovede that by nyghtertale,
He sleep namore than dooth a nyghtyngale.

As readers of "Romeo and Juliet" will remember, the nightingale is a dirty bird. And you have Chaucer's word for it that bachelors, of whatever gender, are hot.

Within a hundred years of its first appearance in English, its semantic field had expanded to include its academic meaning and its more common and current sociological one — a man as yet unmarried but ripe for the marital state. This suggests, doubtless, that the closest social analogies to medieval warfare must have been undergraduate life and matrimony. But the implication of a preliminary stage, a transition beyond adolescence but not too far beyond it, remains. Hence the perfect fit of Baccalaureate and Commencement itself. In every Commencement address I have ever heard — or given, for that matter — it has been pointed out that the word "commencement" clearly denotes a beginning, not an ending.

Of course there is an ending, and I must warn you about it. Beginning on Tuesday at noon, you are no longer the younger generation — and it's all downhill after that. The plenary valorization of the youthful, the contemporary, the innovative, the preference for 12-year-old violinists and 19-year-old metaphysicians, and the appetite for all the daily Apple updates, these are necessary features of American dynamism; at your age I embraced it completely, but I find I have grown in wisdom wonderfully in the last five decades, and I think you will do so soon. I now realize that at the very least the quintessence of the here-and-now must be tempered with the wisdom of the ancients, meaning something written, thought or said sometime before the day before yesterday.

diversity

From this elevated pulpit my view of the class of 2007 is one of extraordinary uniformity — hardly surprising, given the fact that you are all wearing the same uniform, the uniform of a bachelor of arts and sciences. Yet I know for a fact that the black robes are covering a near riot of individuality. You are an allegorical tableau of the philosophical problem of the one and the many, and the social and spiritual challenge of the individual and society — subjects which you have undoubtedly touched upon in your careers here. Neither as a nation nor as a university have we got this one fully worked out yet. It still says on the penny "E pluribus unum" with the emphasis clearly on the unity. For the last 20 years in the academy we have been extolling the "pluribus" part.

The magic word here is "diversity." "Diversity" aspires to the status of a terminal good and therefore a terminal goal. What does it mean, and what does it not mean? Actually academic "diversity" has a quite delimited range having to do with obvious racial, ethnic, sexual and religious distinctions: Some folks are black, some white; some straight, some gay; some are Hispanic, some Asian-Americans, some Methodists, some Muslims. "Diversity" does not mean that at Princeton we have many students of below average intelligence, or many who are illiterate, or quite a few who are dying of AIDS. I will not go on with a list of the underprivileged but very real categories of world diversity, but I will ask you to think, as Princeton graduates, how you are and how you are not like everybody else in the world.

From the 18th century we have inherited in 18th-century language, the doctrine that "all men are created equal," and "that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights," then enumerated as including "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Incidentally, the feel-good phrase "the pursuit of happiness" was a last-minute substitution for "the possession of property," and it was a mistake. The pursuit of happiness is the stuff of dreamers. The possession of property is the stuff of lawyers.

The stealth appearance of the Deity in our Declaration of Independence has proved something of a political embarrassment, abused by some on the so-called religious right as a charter of theocracy and by others on the so-called secular left as, apparently, a typographical error. As a Christian believer, I am less bothered than some of my colleagues by Jefferson's mixing of genres. Our founders were wise legislators, and one mark of wisdom in a legislator is a healthy appreciation of what law cannot do, no less than of what it can do. Legislation could not make of the whole world a family of brothers and sisters. The recognition of the universal fatherhood of God one day might. Hence the messianic requirement to "respect the dignity of every human being" belongs where it is in the baptismal covenant, but not in the New Jersey statutes. Where do Princetonians stand with regard to the universal equality of all humankind?

I see from U.S. News and World Report that Princeton is an "elite" university. The specter of elitism has haunted all my years here. Who wants to be an elitist? Many of my faculty colleagues are appalled by elitism. They combat it valiantly by wearing blue jeans to work, by sharing first-name terms with their students, and by maintaining rigorous neutrality concerning the competing moral and aesthetic claims of "Paradise Lost" and "Spiderman III."

[snip]

Not long ago I was on an appointments committee reading the recommendations of job candidates. Concerning a certain candidate one letter said that this person's work was "always exciting and often brilliant." The adverb "often" spelled his doom. What? Only often brilliant? Princeton professors are brilliant 24/7. Reee-jected! These are the professors who moan about the evils of "elitism."

the project method

And you people, you Class of Destiny, you are if anything even worse [more elite] — meaning in this instance, naturally, even better. What it took to get into this institution is exceeded only by what it took you to get out. My career at Princeton was not paralyzed by self-doubt. I modestly considered myself capable of handling not merely my job, but any job in the place. But to one height I knew I could never ascend. I could never, ever have gained admission to the freshman class — yours, or any other Princeton class. I simply don't have what it takes. I had never done any of those things that you wrote about in the autobiographical statement of your admissions packet. I never backpacked through the Carpathians. I never made a papier-mâché model of the New York subway system. Not even with an unrusted nail did I perform an emergency tracheotomy on an asthmatic camel in the Gobi desert, thus saving myself and my companions from certain death. I did not in fact ghostwrite the enabling legislation for the most sweeping program of environmental remediation ever undertaken by the Ohio State legislature. My big "extracurricular" was the 4-H Club.

on gratitude

One mark of the mature elite sensibility is the capacity to experience gratitude and the power to express it generously ˜ in action as well as in word. So I hope even amid so much exuberant emotion you are grateful for this place and, above all to those in many generations whose support, encouragement and not infrequently sacrifice allowed you to be here.

on money and banking

So, Class of Destiny, we must be on our separate ways. As you go, be sure to take with you not merely your diploma but your whole education. I shall hope to see you around. That is a platitude, but then this is a Baccalaureate address. Besides, it's a platitude plus. One of the particular pleasures of long service as a Princeton professor is that just about half the time I am in or on my way to a really interesting place, I am likely to have a chance meeting with an old Princeton student. ....Once, in O'Hare Airport, a man in a business suit practically jumped over the security barrier to accost me. "Professor, uh, Professor!" he screamed. "You changed my life, Professor uh!" he continued, as the crowd formed. "You taught me 'Money and Banking!'" Well, I try to take the larger view. You cannot expect that a fellow who takes a course called "Money and Banking" when he is 19 years old will be particularly sharp when he is 49. Perhaps the firing of the synapses was slightly out of time, but the heart was in the right place. He knew that I was from Princeton, and that someone there had taught him something.

full text here


bonus: Fleming on procrastination

I learned the following things, among others. There are quite a few Princeton students who, six weeks into a course, do not know their preceptor's name. (I take comfort from the fact that only a comparatively small number do not know the name of the course lecturer either, and even those could usually give me a physical description leading to a positive ID.) I learned that it is quite possible for a Princeton undergraduate to take a course, indeed to write a passable paper for a course, without being able to tell an interested bystander (i.e., me) the number of the course, the title of the course or, most amazingly, the general subject matter of the course. Nor was it always possible for the interested bystander to deduce from the title of the paper to be submitted the course — or, sometimes, the department — for which the paper might have been written.

I cannot without hypocrisy impugn the undergraduate propensity for procrastination possibly revealed by this experience. I myself have long taken it as a rule of life that one should not postpone until tomorrow what one can postpone to the next day. Several students stayed on to chat after delivering their papers, and one opined that it was impossible to enjoy the full measure of anxiety offered by the writing experience if you handed the thing in more than five minutes before the final deadline.

Fleming wrote columns for the Daily Princetonian for years, though they're a bit hard to find. Some are here.

Drear

I've finally tuned in to Common Core a bit, mostly because I've been chatting with a Common Core person here in my town, who directed me to NYC's Tasks, Units & Student Work.

So today I took a quick look at NYC's sample ELA Tasks and Units and saw only one sample Task, across all 14 grades (Pre-K through Grade 12), that had anything whatsoever to do with fiction: Grade 9 Literacy in English Language Arts: Who Is to Blame for Romeo and Juliet’s Death.

It's always worse than you think!

Number one, Romeo and Juliet is too hard for 9th grade students to read, especially 9th grade students who've just spent 9 years reading "informational text" and writing "calls to action."

But, number two, even if 9th-grade students could read Romeo and Juliet, there is no earthly reason for anyone to undertake a "Task" that involves answering the question "Who Is to Blame for Romeo and Juliet's Death?"

Real English professors don't assign Tasks requiring students to figure out "Who Is To Blame for Romeo and Juliet's Death?" (Real English professors, in my experience, don't assign Tasks at all. They assign papers.)

Real English professors don't assign Tasks requiring students to figure out "Who Is To Blame for Romeo and Juliet's Death?" because Romeo and Juliet is a play, not a feature story in the New York Times. Romeo and Juliet are fictional characters; they don't actually exist.

Who is responsible for Romeo and Juliet's Death?

You got me.

William Shakespeare, maybe?

If this is Common Core, public school is about to turn into 13 years of SAT reading.

Thirteen years of SAT reading is nobody's idea of a good time. Let us pray that our policy elites do not manage to lengthen the school year before Common Core passes from the stage.

What actual English professors think students in English classes should write about:
Norton: Writing About Literature
Norton: Identifying Topics
English paper thesis statements 

The complete list of sample ELA tasks and units.

"I don't have the courage"

A couple of months ago Ed and I were in the 4-5 school where we saw an announcement of a presentation on multiple intelligence or individual learning styles or some such.

Multiple intelligences almost certainly do not exist, but our 4-5 school appears to be hiring P.D. types to tell everyone they do.

So here's a thread about Dan Willingham's on teacher.net teacher who's just read Dan Willingham's Do Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic Learners Need Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic Instruction?

Harbinger
Here is a link to a very interesting article from The
American Educator regarding modalities and what cognitive
science really tells us.

It "addresses why the idea of tailoring instruction to a
student's best modality is so enduring‚ despite substantial
evidence that it is wrong."


LL
Fantastic article. I agree and support it fully. Thanks
for sharing research-based findings that TRULY are based in
scientific research.


thanks for it!
What a great article - I don't have the courage to give it out in my
school but the sense that it makes is beautiful....

Is this the world teachers work in?

Would it actually take courage to hand out an article appearing in American Educator?


it's always worse than you think

I hadn't read the next post in the thread when I asked those questions.

Here it is:

LL
I think you're missing an important point! NO ONE is saying
that kids don't need to move during the day. That's common
sense and should be done. The problem comes in when people make
grandeose claims and state fraudulent (or non-existant) research
extrapolating benefits of movement to creating expensive
programs requiring specific movements, hiring trainers to teach
them, and implying that these can fix learning disorders.

That is the problem. Movement is great! Marketing the "sale"
of movement to get rich off of those who don't understand
research and only believe hype and testimonials is unconcionable.

process, yes. have it your way, no.

To my latest, Myrtle Hocklemeier said:

Since the mathies in my life have always said that math is "justification, justification, justification" rather than simply the answer, I always thought that THAT sounded remarkably like fuzzy math.

But there is a difference and maybe in some future post you can expand on that.

Yes, there are several differences. But first, let me tackle an issue that grates on me. There are a number of concepts/methodologies/terms that have been hijacked by the educrats, and as a result, reasonable people react negatively to them. Portfolios. Rubrics. And yes, process.

Here's the first difference: The educrats say process is more important than the solution. I do not. The second difference is that educrats are speaking of what I call Burger King math (Have it your way!), where any old way students can think up to arrive at a solution is equally great. I, on the other hand, am speaking of a process that has been taught since Aristotle -- or has been until recently -- a process that is designed to teach us to think clearly, linearly, sequentially, and logically.

I understand Ricky's frustration with formalism. I was the same way. I lost points on math assignments because I was good at math, and I skipped steps (when I was in school, you lost points for that). So let's say I was supposed to solve (3x - 1) / 4 = 5. Here's what I was supposed to turn in:

(3x - 1) / 4 = 5
3x - 1 = 5 * 4
3x - 1 = 20
3x = 20 + 1
3x = 21
x = 21 / 3
x = 7

Instead, I would do something like this:

(3x - 1) / 4 = 5
3x = 21
x = 7

It's the right answer, of course, but I didn't get full credit, and I shouldn't have (though at the time, I thought I should have). This was in the space race/New Math era, so the focus was not only on the correct solution, but getting us to understand what we were doing. But as a student, the only justification I could think of for this anal retentive insistence on showing every tiny step was to make sure you hadn't copied your answer from somebody else.

Being on the other side of the desk changed my perspective.

Cheating control is a small part of it, yes. Another part of it is learning to follow instructions (something I have come to appreciate as one of the most important lessons we should learn in education -- because so few of my students can follow simple directions). But mostly, it is about learning to think.

If one of my students hands in an assignment with just the correct answer and no work, he gets no credit (for the first two reasons above). If one of my students hands in an assignment with the correct process (work), but the wrong answer, he gets partial credit -- because by showing the work, he has shown that he has learned something, even if the answer is incorrect (no, not lots of partial credit, but partial credit nonetheless), and because learning the process is a big part of our educational mission.

Note that I'm not saying process is everything, or that the correct solution isn't important. Note that I'm not saying estimation, but solution. And note that I'm saying the process, and not just process.

There is a right way to approach a problem -- sometimes more than one right way, particularly as you get more advanced -- and then there are wrong ways to approach a problem, ways that might in some instances get you the right solution, but will in many other instances lead you to the wrong solution -- or worse, an "estimation" instead of a solution. The other problem with wrong ways to solve a problem is that they do not discipline the mind in that admittedly boring, sequential, logical thought process that has applications to ever aspect of our lives, and not just mathematics.

That's my biggest objection to Burger King math -- and I have many.

I realize this is a conservative point of view, but there is a reason something has been done since Aristotle, and tossing something out merely because it is traditional is madness.