can you 'pick up' the grammar of writing through reading?

I'm thinking the answer is 'yes.'

I was given almost no formal instruction in grammar at all as a child, and my years in Spanish class didn't make up for it. Yet when I finally began to learn formal grammar just two years ago, I discovered that nearly all of my writing follows the traditional prescriptive rules of written grammar, up to and including the prohibition against dangling participles.^*

I learned all of the rules by reading. (And writing, but mostly, I think, by reading.)

The question is: if it was easy for me to learn applied grammar by reading, and I think it was, why isn't easy for most students today?

Have to catch a train, so more later.

^* I didn't quite have the who-whom distinction, but close.

palisadesk remembers being taught how to read pronouns

On the subject of pronoun instruction in reading class, palisadesk writes:

I remember being explicitly taught about pronouns and antecedents -- 8th grade, I think. We had to memorize the rule, "a pronoun refers back to the nearest noun that agrees with it in gender, number and case" (or something like that). Then we had lots of assignments where we had to circle or underline the pronoun, go back and find the noun it referred to and circle that, and then draw an arrow arc connecting the two.

It seemed tedious at the time but it cleared up a lot of misconceptions, such as why wasn't a noun nearer the pronoun the antecedent, as in examples like, "Phil passed the ball to Anton. Later, he scored the only goal for the team." "He" has to be Phil, not Anton, b/c both are nominative. Of course if you wanted the goal scorer to be Anton you could connect the two sentences with "who" and delete " he."

Fascinating! I don't remember ever being taught how to understand pronouns in writing.

I think today a writing instructor would probably have to tell students that the "he" in the sentence "Later he scored the only goal..." is unclear. No one teaches the nominative rule today, no one learns it, and no one knows it, including me. I'm pretty sure composition textbooks caution against this kind of reference, and I myself wouldn't use it!

Now that I read palisadesk's comment, I wish I could.

Is this a case of writing conventions changing in reaction to changes in reading instruction?

Asians sleeping in the library

C. just sent me to the website.

major news from the Fed

Scott Sumner on the Bernanke press conference:

1. Bernanke emphasized that monetary stimulus is not like fiscal stimulus, it actually reduces the budget deficit. That’s right.

2. He said it was an 11 to 1 vote. The Fed is clearly behind him and hence the policy has credibility.

3. He kept talking jobs jobs jobs. And he emphasized that the Fed would do pretty much whatever it takes to get some progress on the employment front. Of course by itself that would be a bad policy. But when combined with the 2% inflation target (which he said had equal weight) it’s getting pretty close to NGDP targeting.

4. Speaking of NGDP targeting, Bernanke brought up the idea (without any prompting by reporters) and talked about Woodford’s plan for NGDP level targeting. He didn’t endorse it (how could he when the Fed only recently adopted a 2% inflation goal) but he certainly wasn’t critical of Woodford. I had the impression that if he wasn’t constrained by being head of the Fed right now, he’d be pretty sympathetic to Woodford’s proposal. And why do I have to call it “Woodford’s proposal?”

5. I’ve gotten a lot of criticism from people, even my friends in the blogosphere, for going too easy on Bernanke. Talking about how he’s well-intentioned, etc. I think this press conference shows that my comments were justified. A commenter named Mark C recently sent me a survey by Bloomberg that showed that the vast majority of economists did not think money was too tight, and only 1 out of 66 thought money was far too tight. Even though Bernanke is a Republican, he’s to the left of the mainstream of a profession that votes 70% Democratic. His call for doing whatever it takes to get more jobs was clearly sincere.

Thank God the Bernanke/Woodford policy has failed!
One down, two to go
I think Ben just did it
Is the Fed Really Causing the Sustained Drop in Interest Rates?
Federal Reserve Finally Working Expectations Channel with Open-Ended QE
Build That Apartment Building Now

The Great Recession: Market Failure or Monetary Disorder? by Robert Hetzel
Money Mischief: Episodes in Monetary History by Milton Friedman

Bernanke press conference

update:
Michael Woodford reacts
David Beckworth: Money Still Matters (Fed measure is wrong) - growth in Germany's M4 Divisia money supply compared to M4 Divisia growth in Eurozone & US

PRESS CONFERENCE: BEN BERNANKE DEFENDS UNLIMITED QE, AS MARKET GOES TOTALLY WILD by Joe Weisenthal and Matthew Boesler
Ben Bernanke Put On An Ingenious Performance Today — Here's What Just Happened by Joe Weisenthal

Rortybomb: Monetary Policy Explained with Animated gifs

PWN the SAT Math Guide Review

The main idea of the book is that "The SAT is not a math test." The implication is that the reader already does well in math and probably wants to get above 600 on the SAT (about 13 errors out of 54). Although students at all levels can learn from the book, it doesn't spend much time on the basics. This is a book for those who want to see what it is about their traditional math education that is not going to get the job done in time. In fact, the SAT specifically tries to get you to solve problems using your traditional (too slow) tools. This means that many of the problems are special cases. Instead of solving equations for x and y, you may have to solve for x+y. Instead of simplifying, you have to know how to manipulate equations into other forms. Instead of pulling out nPr and nCr, it may be easier to revert back to basic counting principles or listing all of the choices. The book does a good job of explaining these other non-traditional approaches, especially plug-in and backsolve.

"PWN the SAT" is not filled up with full practice tests. You are referred to the Blue Book for those, but it gives you a breakdown of each Blue Book question on each test. This is invaluable. You have to practice with real questions and timing, but you need to have a way to analyze what you did right and what you did wrong. The book does, however, give you many practice questions and four 20-question drills at the end. It took me less than a week, a few hours here and there, to do every question with follow-up analysis.

One interesting section is on how to "Be Nimble". I wish he would expand on that because I think you can codify the process better. The idea is that those who automatically dive into a traditional math approach may not have the quickness to come up with alternate approaches. However, I had cases where I immediately knew how to do the problem with a traditional approach (perhaps a little slowly), but spent too much time looking for the shortcut. "Nimble" (changing directions) takes time and that extra time has to be built up from other problems. It would be nice to see a section on how to be faster on the easier problems. These are things like immediately converting from one side to another for a 30-60-90 right triangle. It's easier to be nimble if you have extra time.

I highly recommend this book. Given that you are starting at a reasonable score level, you don't need anything more than this book and the official Blue Book. Beware of third-party tests. You can't "PWN the SAT" using proxy tests. You need to dive right in with the real thing.

Between

Pick a number between 1 and 10.

OK, 10.

Wrong.

Is there an official mathematical definition of "between" somewhere when it comes to integers versus reals? I just got caught on a SAT question when it asked for the number of integers between two points of a sequence. I included the end points. Of course, the choices included both with and without the ends. Also, I got caught on another problem when I selected the wrong choice even though I had the right answer. It's kind of a variation of mis-bubbling.

9th grade students and pronouns

from "The Grammars of Reading" by Eileen Simmons (English Journal Vol. 95, No. 5 May 2006):

One thing I know about my ninth grade students: They come to high school with an extensive background in formal English grammar. They have spent countless hours in elementary school and middle school singing songs and doing worksheets. I'm confident that they passed their grammar tests.

[snip]

My students were actively making meaning from their reading [of The Odyssey] by using rhetorical grammar;^* they were engaging with the text, making connections among words and phrases, and making powerful inferences....

But the progress students were making by charting action and character for difficult passages was not carrying over into their reader-response journals. In spite of my constant admonitions and frequent modeling to "use context--before and after your passage--to read for the answers to your questions," the students were still generating lists of questions without any indication that they were reading for the answers....

In desperation, I pulled out some passages for a directed-response exercise. I gave them a two-column sheet--text in the left column, with a blank right column--and asked them to write their responses in the right column. Once again I told them, "Don't just write questions. Read to find the answers to your questions. That means finding the passage in your book, reading into and out of the passage.^** When I read their responses, I was appalled. Their responses had only a tangential connection to the reading.

Curious, I went back through the stack of papers and a lightbulb went on.

Pronouns. They weren't connecting the pronouns to their antecedents.

Back in the classroom, I announced my discovery and asked students to list personal pronouns I didn't want case, person, or number--just a list of pronouns In all four ninth-grade classes, the room became deathly still. Students looked at me with terrified eyes. Grammar 4 was rearing its ugly head.

"Think about the grammar songs you learned in middle school," I said.

Reading Ms. Simmons' article, I am making my own powerful inference, which is that apparently, inside K-12 English classes, "reader response" means "generating" a list of questions because the teacher told you to.

In this case, generating a list of questions about a work of literature -- The Odyssey -- you can't begin to fathom.

Here's the way things worked back on my home planet:

• Teacher assigns reading
• Students do reading 
• Teacher asks comprehension questions
• Students answer comprehension questions
• Teacher checks answers & makes sure students understand the reading
• Students ask questions about things in the reading they don't understand
• Teacher answers questions about things in the reading students don't understand 
• Serious discussion and analysis begin when the preceding activities have been successfully completed

I don't remember how home-planet teachers handled pronouns and antecedents. Wish I did. I'm guessing teachers didn't handle pronouns and antecedents at all. Instead, teachers gave students reading passages geared to their reading level, and students just gradually and naturally picked up the connection between pronouns and antecedents as they went along. (Did teachers explicitly teach pronouns and antecedents to students who didn't pick the connection up naturally? I'm guessing most did not, but again I don't know.)

The students in Ms. Simmons' class clearly are not prepared to read The Odyssey. I'm not prepared to read The Odyssey, and I am a person who scores 800 on SAT reading. I read The Odyssey along with Chris, the summer before he entered his Jesuit high school. I loved the book, but I didn't have an easy time of it.

^* By "rhetorical grammar," the author means picking out the 'action verbs' in a passage (mostly, but not always, the action verbs in the independent clauses) and figuring out who (mostly who, not what) performed the action. 

^** Do students know what this means?

Andy!

woo hoo!

5+2: the canonical sentences

source: John Seely's Grammar for Teachers, a short, succinct, clear, and useful distillation of Quirk and Greenbaum.

Teaching English composition, I now start with these three 'canonical' sentence patterns:

SV
SVO
SVC

For the SVC and SVO patterns, I use Phyllis Davenport's ur-sentences:

SVC: Something (or somebody) is something.
SVO: Something (or somebody) did something.

For my 'core' SV examples I like:

Rex barked
Jesus wept.^*

From the first three, I move on to:

SVOO
SVOC

And from there to:

SVA
SVOA

Spelled out, using John Seely's examples:

SV: Subject+Verb
Elephants exist.

SVO: Subject+Verb+Object
Elephants like grass.

SVOO: Subject+Verb+Indirect Object+Direct Object
Elephants give children rides.

SVC: Subject+Verb+Complement
Elephants are animals.

SVOC: Subject+Verb+Object+Complement
Elephants make children happy.

SVA: Subject+Verb+Adverbial
Elephants live here.

SVOA: Subject+Verb+Object+Adverbial
The elephant thrust him away.

In these sentence patterns, all "sentence slots" -- S, V, O, C, A -- must be filled. If a slot is not filled, the sentence becomes "grammatically incomplete."

I've written "5+2" because the final two patterns - SVA and SVOA - are, in Seely's words, "much less common": "They only occur with a very small number of verbs, but they are important."

Seely's book is fantastically helpful. I've been using the iPad version, but I may order a hard copy, too.

^* John 11:35

people talking

A sample stretch of talk

...speakers are sitting at the dinner table talking about a car accident that happened to the father of one of the speakers

< speaker 1 >  I’ll just take that off. Take that off.
< speaker 2 >  All looks great.
< speaker 3 >  [laughs]
< speaker 2 >  Mm.
< speaker 3 >  Mm.
< speaker 2 >  I think your dad was amazed wasn’t he at the damage.
< speaker 4 >  Mm.
< speaker 2 >  It’s not so much the parts. It’s the labour charges for
< speaker 4 >  Oh that. For a car.
< speaker 2 >  Have you got hold of it?
< speaker 1 >  Yeah.
< speaker 2 >  It was a bit erm.
< speaker 1 >  Mm.
< speaker 3 >  Mm.
< speaker 2 >  A bit.
< speaker 3 >  That’s right.
< speaker 2 >  I mean they said they’d have to take his car in for two days. And he says All it is is s straightening a panel. And they’re like, Oh no. It’s all new panel. You can’t do this.
< speaker 3 >  Any erm problem.
< speaker 2 >  As soon as they hear insurance claim. Oh. Let’s get it right.
< speaker 3 >  Yeah. Yeah. Anything to do with
< speaker 1 >  Wow.
< speaker 3 >  coach work is er
< speaker 1 >  Right.
< speaker 3 >  fatal isn’t it.
< speaker 1 >  Now.
Teaching about talk – what do pupils need to know about spoken language and the important ways in which talk differs from writing?
in: Spoken English and the question of grammar: the role of the functional model

I've been digging into some of the literature on talking vs writing.

re: the conversation above, I am struck by the fact that everyone knows what everyone else is talking about.

How?^*

Student writers have to achieve the same effect with readers they can't see, a tall order. Professional writers have to produce a steady stream of sensible-seeming thoughts and images inside the minds of readers they can't see, don't know, and will never meet.

How does that happen?

The answer is: via cohesion devices.

But how do cohesion devices work? Are the cohesion devices used in writing direct analogues to the cohesion devices used in speaking? (And what are the cohesion devices in speaking, anyway? I'm not sure, exactly.)

What are the best devices; when do you use which ones; and how do you teach them to students?

I'd like to know.

I'm reading Vande Kopple next. Then Halliday and Hasan, Kolln, and Dillon.

^* ESP?

tornado watch

Not quite the drama of Hurricane Irene, but still.

summer re-boot

After declaring Summer over, I'm declaring it back on again. Chris is home for the weekend, and Ed has scored some reasonably-priced tickets to the Open final.

So summer's end happens Monday.

We're lolling on sofas in the family room, watching World's Worst Tenants.

Bliss!

pop quiz

So....two hours into my first Blackboard sojourn, I am stymied.

I cheered up when I finally located a document titled Help for Instructors, which I have now downloaded.

QUESTION: How many pages does the Blackboard manual contain?

No peeking.

I wonder how long the Smartboard manual is.

Being Tough on Tough

Though I haven't read it, I honestly don't get what the big deal is about Paul Tough's new book, How Children Succeed. From what I gather from various reviews and interviews, Tough's Big Idea is that persistence and curiosity matter more than IQ does for success. But was there ever a time or place when this statement wasn't obvious? Of course IQ means little if you don't apply yourself; of course intelligence leads nowhere interesting if you lack curiosity. Does anyone--especially in this Emotional Intelligence-obsessed world of ours--really think that the successful people out there--even the genuises--achieved what they did primarily because of their IQ scores? Didn't Malcolm Gladwell already write a book back in 2008 on the findings that what makes an expert is 10,0000 hours of practice? What is it about Tough's book that's garnering so much attention?

A slightly different take on Tough's Big Idea is voiced by Joe Nocera in today's New York Times:

Tough argues that simply teaching math and reading--the so-called cognitive skills--isn't nearly enough, especially for children who have grown up enduring the stresses of poverty. In fact, it might not even be the most important thing.

Notice how quickly Nocera slips from the obvious--that teaching teach math and reading isn't nearly enough--to the ridiculous. To say that learning to read and do math might not be the most important elements of success is like saying that adequate food and shelter might not be the most important elements of staying alive (after all one must also breathe oxygen). When it come to essential elements, it's pointless to quibble over what's most important.

In interviews Tough is careful to admit that, while schools need to do more to encourage persistence and curiosity, there are no clear studies on how to do this. Refreshing though this caveat is, it, too, raises the question of what this book has to offer that's new and plausible, or at least useful.

There is one disturbing answer to that last question. To the careless reader who approaches the book from the perspective of the dominant educational paradigm, it offers yet another reason to water down academics in favor of "the whole child." The connections between grit and academic rigor, and between curiosity and well-taught academic subjects, should be as obvious as the inherent importance of grit is. Indeed, I'm guessing these connections are obvious to most people. But they clearly aren't obvious to many of those wielding the greatest power over whether or not our children succeed.

desperately seeking anaphora

At Morningside Academy I learned that many students have difficulty understanding anaphora, which I am (presently) defining as any expression in a text that:

• refers back to something earlier in the text (the antecedent)
• often possesses a meaning that can't be found out by looking the word or words up in a dictionary

e.g.:

But shortly afterwards both Androcles and the Lion were captured, and the slave was sentenced to be thrown to the Lion, after the latter had been kept without food for several days.
source: Tales of Wonder From Many Lands: A Reader for Composition by Howard Canaan and Joel N. Feimer

"Latter" refers to the Lion, and a dictionary can't tell you that.

Yesterday, in class, I found that most of my students were thrown by this passage. I assume the same has been true of students in all of my previous classes, but I never picked up on it. (aaarggh)

This sentence was a problem, too:

Some holidays are greatly overrated, Valentine's Day is one of them.
source: Hunter College Reading/Writing Center Grammar and Mechnics

Nearly all of the class thought this sentence was correctly punctuated, and not because they had no idea what a complete sentence (or clause) is. (I was pleasantly surprised on the 'what is a complete sentence?' front.)

My students easily pegged "Some holidays are greatly overrated" as a complete sentence, but they vehemently denied that "Valentine's Day is one of them" could be complete because it doesn't make sense on its own. I do mean vehement. I had the same reaction from the rising 8th grader I worked with last week.

From the get-go, two falls ago, when I returned to the classroom, I've been trying to teach my students how to write cohesive prose. Writing cohesive prose means connecting sentences to one another, and connecting sentences to one another means using anaphora.

But now I'm going to be paying close attention to anaphora in reading comprehension, too.

Meanwhile, turns out Erica M. has been dealing with this issue forever:

Catherine, that is EXACTLY the kind of sentence my students have trouble with. That's why I do so many "is it a sentence or not?" drills with my students. They can't tell. Even kids at $40,000/year Manhattan private schools (especially kids at $40,000/year Manhattan private schools!) just can't figure it out. They can't separate grammar from context. That's why they write endless comma splices. I have one student right now, a very bright rising senior at a notoriously progressive Manhattan private school, whom I recently spent an entire session just doing "is it a sentence or not?/punctuate the comma splices" with, and the next practice SAT she took, she still got loads of them wrong! I'm going to keep having to write her drills. I bet that in her entire education, no one has ever made her do this. What disturbs me, though, is that her teachers have apparently looked past the problem for years.

and see:
All good writing consists of good sentences properly joined.

Can you spell 'hegemony'?

from the Times:

Catholic schools have been bleeding enrollment and money for years, and many have been forced to close. But some, like St. Stephen of Hungary, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, have found a way to thrive — attracting a more affluent clientele by offering services and classes more commonly found in expensive private schools.

Selling points include small class sizes and extracurricular activities beginning in the youngest grades. And by often charging far less, these schools have been able to stabilize themselves and even grow.

“Our competition or our standard isn’t another good Catholic school,” said the Rev. Angelo Gambatese, the pastor at St. Stephen of Hungary church, which shares a building with the school. “It’s the best independent schools in Manhattan, and we intend to achieve the same level of performance that they do, academically, developmentally.”

[snip]

While 70 percent of the students are Catholic, a figure that has not changed, it has a more Franciscan focus on kindness and respect rather than papal edicts, which makes it more palatable to families not traditionally in the Catholic school market.

“I don’t feel like it’s holy rollers over there,” said Richard Sher, a parent of two at the school who is half Jewish, half Protestant.

Mass is every other week; the homily is more of a discussion than a lesson. When Father Gambatese talked in May to the youngest students at Mass about Adam, he wondered why Adam asked God for more humans. “He wanted people to talk to and play with,” Sabrina Vidal, 8, said. “Yes!” Father Gambatese said. “Don’t you get tired of hugging a lion?”

St. Stephen offers the kind of extras found at far more expensive schools, like French for 3-year-olds, violin for fourth and fifth graders, and iPads for sixth to eighth graders. But some parents, Catholic and non-Catholic, said they were also drawn to the discipline and values-based approach at St. Stephen, elements that have fallen out of fashion at most nonreligious schools.

“We were looking for structure, and that’s what we got,” said Deirdre O’Connell, a parent who works in banking.

In Katherine Peck, the entrepreneurial 33-year-old at the heart of St. Stephen’s revitalization, the parents also got a principal schooled in progressive teaching. Classrooms are no longer teacher-focused, with students at desks, but student-centered, with children at tables. Students have publishing parties every month to showcase their writing, textbooks have been de-emphasized in favor of hands-on learning and every classroom has an interactive projection system.

Mrs. Peck, who is Catholic and attended Teachers College of Columbia University, said Catholic schools gave her more flexibility than the public schools where she had taught. (She also taught at the Epiphany School before coming to St. Stephen.) “Everything I was doing at Teachers College, I could do in the classroom,” she said, compared with the public school where she said everyone had to teach from the same page.

To Survive, a Catholic School Retools for a Wealthier MarketBy JENNY ANDERSON | New York Times | Published: August 19, 2012

I need to start a Catholic school. A real one. A real Catholic school, only with precision teaching.

Of course, I'm not Catholic. So I wouldn't be anyone's first choice to start a Catholic school. Also, the Catholic Church isn't starting new schools, not here in Westchester County anyway. The church is closing them.

Yesterday I taught my first class (freshman composition) in Victory Hall, a building that up until two or three years ago housed a Catholic girls high school. I love teaching in Victory Hall, and I was happy to be assigned a room there again. The place has an aura.

Jimmy's group home, originally built to serve as a convent, has an aura, too.

But when I arrived at Victory Hall, I discovered that I wasn't teaching in the building itself; I was teaching in one of the ancient modulars out back. I didn't even know the modulars were there, and now I'm teaching in one.

Catholic schools used to have so many students they had to buy trailers to expand the plant.

Now they're all going or gone.

Ed has often asked how much longer Chris's Jesuit high school can hold out. It's housed on the same campus with a major education school, and major education schools have no truck with the Jesuit tradition.

and see:
cultural hegemony

good writing

All good writing consists of good sentences properly joined.

- Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg in Higher Lessons in English. A work on English grammar and composition, in which the science of the Language is made tributary to the art of expression. Revised edition, 1896.

I've been talking to Katharine Beals about writing instruction, grammar, and the sentence. (Here's Katharine's post on the erasure of the sentence).

At least since the 1980s (the 1980s again!) writing instruction has been about process, not sentences: process, voice, and the production of personal narratives and opinion pieces. Pick up nearly any college composition textbook and you will find in its pages a slew of sample student essays all written in the first person, with discussion of the sentence pushed to the back of the book. There you will find "sentence fragments" and "run ons" and "misplaced modifiers" bundled together in a chunk of pages devoted to grammar and punctuation. The sentence, in today's writing class, is mostly a source of error.

Of course, "process writing" seemed wrong to me from the get-go. I myself never, ever 'free-write,' and since I actually am a writer, I feel I'm on solid ground drawing the conclusion that 'free-writing' is a waste of instructional time.

But I became more convinced that the process approach is misguided after working with Kerrigan's X-1-2-3 method, which gives novice writers a method of building an essay on a stack of sentences with identical subjects and identical sentence structure (Subject-Verb-Object or Subject-Verb-Complement). e.g.:

X Power corrupts.
1 It corrupts the weak.
2 It corrupts the strong.
3 It corrupts all the relations between the two.

By the time I returned to the classroom to teach freshman writing, I had begun to feel that the sentence is key. Not just because sentences -- not words -- are the raw material of writing, but because the sentence is the essay in some sense. The essay makes an argument, and a sentence is an argument.

The sentence is an essay in miniature.

and see:
Cost of College on William J. Kerrigan's X-1-2-3 method

today's factoid

All but five states no longer require the teaching of cursive handwriting in public elementary schools.
With Pen in Hand, He Battles On
By GENA FEITH | September 3, 2012, 4:38 p.m. ET

Another executive decision from central administration.

Oh well. It's not as if handwriting matters, or anything.

what paradox?

ABSTRACT

Chinese classrooms present an intriguing paradox to the claim of self-determination theory that autonomy facilitates learning. Chinese teachers appear to be controlling, but Chinese students do not have poor academic performance in international comparisons. The present study addressed this paradox by examining the cultural differences in students' interpretation of teacher controlling behaviors. Affective meanings of teacher controlling behaviors were solicited from 158 Chinese 5th graders and 115 American 5th graders. It was found that the same controlling behaviors of teachers had different affective meanings for different cultural groups (Chinese vs. American) and for groups with different levels of social-emotional relatedness with teachers (high vs. low). Chinese children perceived the behaviors as less controlling than American children and, in turn, reported that they were more motivated in their teachers' class than American children. Regardless of culture, children with high social-emotional relatedness with teachers perceived the behaviors as less controlling than children with low social-emotional relatedness with teachers. It was also found that internalization mediated the relation between social-emotional relatedness and children's learning motivation in both cultures. The findings revealed cultural differences as well as similarities in the psychological process of internalization.
The Chinese Classroom Paradox: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Teacher Controlling Behaviors
Zhou, Ning 1; Lam, Shui-Fong 1; Chan, Kam Chi 2
Journal of Educational Psychology
Publish Ahead of Print, 19 March 2012

High discipline/high joy.

The secret of success.

The Jesuits figured it out 400 years ago.

US public schools forgot it back in the 1960s, I think. The 60s, or maybe not 'til 1985.

update 9/11/2012:
Doug Lemov on warm/strict
all Teach Like a Champion posts

Why rich suburban school districts are the wrong choice for 90% of the kids attending them

ABSTRACT

Being schooled with other high-achieving peers has a detrimental influence on students' self-perceptions: School-average and class-average achievement have a negative effect on academic self-concept and career aspirations-the big-fish-little-pond effect. Individual achievement, on the other hand, predicts academic self-concept and career aspirations positively. Research from Western and developed countries implies that the negative contextual effect on career aspirations is mediated by academic self-concept. Using data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2006 (a total of 398,750 15-year-old students from 57 countries), we test the generalizability of this mediation model in science using a general multilevel structural equation modeling framework. Individual achievement was positively related to academic self-concept (52 countries) and career aspirations (42 countries). The positive effect on career aspirations was mediated by self-concept in 54 countries. The negative effects of school-average achievement on self-concept (50 countries) and career aspirations (31 countries) also generalized well. After controlling for self-concept at both the individual and the school level, there were significant indirect contextual effects in 34 countries-evidence for mediation of the contextual effect of school-average achievement on career intentions by academic self-concept.
Big Fish in Little Ponds Aspire More: Mediation and Cross-Cultural Generalizability of School-Average Ability Effects on Self-Concept and Career Aspirations in Science
Nagengast, Benjamin 1 2; Marsh, Herbert W. 2 3 4 | Journal of Educational Psychology |
Publish Ahead of Print, 9 April 2012

Absolutely true.

Absolutely true.

I have seen the damage in my own child and in the children of other parents here and in neighboring towns where I tutor.

To this day, C. sees himself as stupid in math. Stupid. Not: OK in math, really good in verbal. Stupid. Can't do math.

When you're a little fish in a big pond AND YOU ARE A CHILD, WITH A CHILD'S BRAIN, AND A CHILD'S BLACK-WHITE WAY OF PUTTING TWO AND TWO TOGETHER, that's what you think.

Maybe I'll strike those all-caps later, when I read this again.

But maybe I won't.

AND SEE:
nominally high-performing schools
grade deflation and winner-take-all "star schools"