follow-up to Katharine on "Writing Revolution"

from Katharine's post on "The Writing Revolution":

- Many under-privileged children, even in high school, don’t know how to use basic conjunctions like for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so, and basic connectors like although and despite, and that the remedy includes teaching them the parts of speech.

[snip]

As for although and despite, while it’s possible that these specific words don’t figure much in the everyday speech of socio-economically underprivileged children, how likely is it, if you said something like “Although the hurricane won’t hit for a couple of days, you should start getting ready for it now” or “Despite the fact that we haven’t lost electricity yet, we might still lose it later,” they wouldn’t understand what you meant? Has anyone even bothered to test this?

As it happens, I've been thinking about "although" and "despite" for months now: I've been thinking about "although" and "despite" ever since reading William Robinson's 1995 article "Syntax and Grammatical Dependency in Adverb Clauses."

I'm very interested to hear how the passage below jibes with Katharine's knowledge of language development.

Robinson writes:

I want to focus on ... the assumption that our students need to write fewer simple sentences and more compound and complex ones ....

[Kellogg Hunt] (Grammatical Structures Written at Three Grade Levels) examined the grammatical features of the writing of students at grades 4, 8, and 12 and, for comparison, articles (not fiction) in Harper's and The Atlantic.  Among the schoolchildren, Hunt found that the 4th graders produced 37% more compound sentences than the 12th graders and the 12th graders 23% more dependent clauses than the 4th graders. So far, this would indicate that while increased compounding at the sentence level is not desirable, the increased use of dependent clauses is. However, the "superior adult" writers, as Hunt termed them, wrote only 5% more compound sentences than the 12th graders and only 6% more dependent clauses. In short, the high school seniors were using coordination and subordination at al most the same rate as professional writers of superior ability.

[snip]

Despite showing that 12th graders use dependent clauses at about the same rate as do superior writers, Hunt provides some interesting data in the details of the kinds of clauses they use. To introduce their adverb clauses, they rely overwhelmingly on three words, if, whenr and because. While both the 4th and 12th graders use because at about the same rate, the 4th graders use many more when clauses and the 12th graders many more if clauses (82). But dependent clauses of contrast and concession are virtually absent from the writing of both groups. Although and even though appeared 2 times in the writing of the 4th graders (when appeared 101 times and if 30 times) and 5 times in that of the 12th graders (where when appeared 53 times and if 73 times). The contrastive whereas appeared only twice among the 12th graders and not at all in the earlier grades, and while appeared 13 times in the writing of the 4th graders and 5 times in that of the 12th graders, an indication that it was probably being used to indicate time rather than concession or contrast.

As far as I can tell, people virtually never use the words "although" and "even though" in conversation. (See, e.g.: Serving chili and A sample stretch of talk.)

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, I'm thinking meteorologists and New Jersey governors don't use "although" and "even though" sentences, either.

(I cracked up reading Katharine's hurricane sentences -- "Although the hurricane won’t hit for a couple of days, you should start getting ready for it now." Believe it or not, I now possess an entire page of sentences transcribed from one of the weather people on TV the night of Hurricane Sandy. Great minds think alike.)

Back on topic: my experience of "basic writers" jibes with Kellogg's findings.

In my experience, "basic writers" don't use "concession words."

How well basic writers understand concession words inside academic prose, I don't know. I'm certain my students would understand Katharine's hurricane sentences.

The "although" sentences students write at New Dorp (2nd page - scroll down) sounded like a great idea to me the minute I read about them -- but, in line with Katharine's observations, possibly for different reasons from the school's.

I have the impression that New Dorp requires students to write "although" sentences in order to give them practice writing sentences with subordinate adverbial clauses.

In my experience, Basic Writers have very little difficulty (if any) writing subordinate adverbial clauses. My impression is that Basic Writers have very little experience learning how to punctuate adverbial clauses, either, but I could be wrong.

As far as I can tell, Basic Writers don't write "although" sentences because they aren't used to qualifying their statements or to conceding points. They aren't used to writing academic prose or thinking academic thoughts.

In fact, just before I read Peg Tyre's article I had arrived at the (tentative) conclusion that my students would profit from consciously and purposefully writing "although" sentences as thesis statements -- a subject for another post.

In the meantime, check out this beautiful two-sentence pair written by one of my students.

"teaching grammar doesn't work"

Camped out in the faculty lounge post-Sandy, reading articles on "basic writing":

At a recent workshop for high school and community college teachers, an earnest young high school teacher explained forcefully to an experienced community college teacher that grammar was of no use in teaching writing. The high school teacher cited the now-famous Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer quotation. She said that knowing grammar had no effect on writing ability, insisting that "all the research" counterbalanced any intuitive and experiential evidence the older teacher might have to offer. The young teacher had, however, misquoted the passage; it says: "the teaching of formal [emphasis ours] grammar has a negligible or, because it usually displaces some instruction and practice in composi- tion, even a harmful effect on the improvement of writing" (37-38).

Taking the words teaching of formal grammar to mean knowing grammar is a serious mistake. What the research cited by Braddock et al., indicates is that instruction in traditional grammar over a limited period of time (a semester or less in the research studies being discussed) showed no positive effect on students' writing. In fact, several research studies and much language and composition theory argue for certain types of grammar instruction, when effective methods are used for clearly defined purposes. When writers learn grammar, as opposed to teachers merely "covering" it, the newly acquired knowledge contributes to writing ability.

In separate essays on grammar, both Kolin (139) and Neuleib (148) point out that the often-quoted passage in Braddock et al. was preceded by "Uncommon, however, is carefully conducted research which studies composition over an extended period of time" (37). Few people seem to pay attention to the qualification, however. Also, another 1963 study, one that Kolin reviews, has attracted much less notice than Research in Written Composition. Yet that other study, by Meckel, is more extensive and thorough in its conclusions and recommendations than is the Braddock work. Meckel's work shows that major questions still existed in 1963 about the teaching of grammar.

Meckel points to three crucial issues (981): First, none of the grammar studies up to 1963 extended beyond one semester-"a time span much too short to permit development of the degree of conceptualization necessary for transfer to take place." Second, none of the studies had to do with editing or revising, that is "with situations in which pupils are recasting the structure of a sentence or a paragraph." Finally, none of the studies makes comparisons between students who had demonstrated knowledge of grammar and those of equal intelligence who had none.
Teaching Grammar to Writers by Janice Neuleib and Irene Brosnahan

So basically:

• None of the studies checked to see whether students being taught formal grammar actually learned formal grammar.
• None of the studies included students deploying formal grammar in an effort to copy-edit sentences of their own.

And on this basis, schools have been refusing to teach grammar for a good thirty/forty years now.

"Teaching grammar doesn't work."

still no power

Still no power; house is down to 51 degrees. We were set to move to a studio apartment at NYU tomorrow but have just learned that 90% of the town has power so school opens Monday. Andrew is desperate to get back to school.

Paranoid at the moment because we've heard endless reports about how there will be "pockets" of people who don't get power back for days and weeks --- wondering whether we just drew the short straw -----

Our power situation, btw, is galling because our power survived the storm.

Then Con Ed sent a team out to turn it off the next day.

We were on pins and needles the whole storm, as the lights flickered off and then back on again, and we were fantastically relieved to have made it through with power intact....

Pretty sure writing a post or two about grammar will make me feel better.

What matters most in "The Writing Revolution"

Peg Tyre’s recent article in the Atlantic, "The Writing Revolution,” provoked controversy among educators, many of whom find direct instruction in writing, particularly at the level of sentences, to be unnatural, ineffective, joy stifling, and creativity-crushing (despite compelling evidence to the contrary).

The article should instead have provoked controversy among linguists.

It implies, among other things, that:

-Many under-privileged children, even in high school, don’t know how to use basic conjunctions like for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so, and basic connectors like although and despite, and that the remedy includes teaching them the parts of speech.

-Such students also don’t understand that “the key information in a sentence doesn’t always come at the beginning of that sentence.”

The problem is that, except for severely language impaired children (and non-native speakers), these basic facts about the English language are among the things that children do pick up incidentally, without formal instruction, and master well before high school. (Mastering the written aspects of language, including the conventions that are specific to writing, is a different story).

Does anyone seriously think that typically developing native high school students, however socio-economically underprivileged, don’t know how to use and and or?

As for although and despite, while it’s possible that these specific words don’t figure much in the everyday speech of socio-economically underprivileged children, how likely is it, if you said something like “Although the hurricane won’t hit for a couple of days, you should start getting ready for it now” or “Despite the fact that we haven’t lost electricity yet, we might still lose it later,” they wouldn’t understand what you meant? Has anyone even bothered to test this?

The notion that the students in question don’t know these crucial function words comes partly from observations about their written language: “the students’ sentences were short and disjointed” and deficient in function words; partly from their performance on a “quick quiz” that required them to use these function words; and partly from their performance on a task that combined reading comprehension and writing: reading a passage from Of Mice and Men and then writing a sentence based on the passage that began “Although George...”

In this last task:

Many were stumped. More than a few wrote the following: “Although George and Lenny were friends.”

As a linguist who specializes in grammar, reading comprehension, and the mechanics of writing, I’d like to suggest an alternative explanation for what Tyre and others are observing here: these students are showing a combination of difficulties with reading comprehension, difficulties with writing conventions, and difficulties sustaining attention.

These high school students know perfectly well what for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so, although and despite mean, and how to use them. And, as the article observes, “the students who couldn’t write well seemed capable, at the very least, of decoding simple sentences.”

However, the article provides no evidence about their reading comprehension—and how many of them, for example, comprehend at the level of Of Mice and Men. While they surely understand the basic function words of their native language, perhaps they don’t understand all of nouns and adjectives used by Steinbeck. Perhaps (especially if they encounter words they don’t know) they aren’t able to sustain attention across some of his longer, more complex sentences. And while they surely could use the word “although” correctly in oral speech, perhaps they haven’t been instructed in the basics of punctuation and sentence fragments vs. complete sentences. All this could result in a fragment like Although George and Lenny were friends. when what the teacher was looking for instead was Although George worked very hard, he could not attain the American Dream.

And all this is consistent with the efficacy of the remediation program adopted by the school that the article profiles:

The Hochman Program, as it is sometimes called, would not be un­familiar to nuns who taught in Catholic schools circa 1950. Children … are explicitly taught how to turn ideas into simple sentences, and how to construct complex sentences from simple ones by supplying the answer to three prompts—but, because, and so. They are instructed on how to use appositive clauses to vary the way their sentences begin. Later on, they are taught how to recognize sentence fragments, how to pull the main idea from a paragraph, and how to form a main idea on their own.

Prompting children to use certain function words, and also appositives, prompts them to practice writing longer, more complex sentences. Helping students comprehend paragraphs improves their ability to write responses to reading passages.

By fall 2009, nearly every instructional hour except for math class was dedicated to teaching essay writing along with a particular subject. So in chemistry class in the winter of 2010, Monica DiBella’s lesson on the properties of hydrogen and oxygen was followed by a worksheet that required her to describe the elements with subordinating clauses—for instance, she had to begin one sentence with the word although.

Although ... “hydrogen is explosive and oxygen supports combustion,” Monica wrote, “a compound of them puts out fires.”

Unless ... “hydrogen and oxygen form a compound, they are explosive and dangerous.”  

If …  

This was a hard one. Finally, she figured out a way to finish the sentence. If … “hydrogen and oxygen form a compound, they lose their original properties of being explosive and supporting combustion.”

Notice that what’s hard about this task isn’t the meaning of the function words and how to use them, but understanding the chemistry of hydrogen and oxygen well enough to know their relevant causal and contrastive properties. The issue is both reading comprehension and subject-specific mastery. But the task is still a good one, because what the although, unless, and if prompts do is to prompt Monica to review the lesson with the specific goal of finding the causal and contrastive relationships it discusses.

As her understanding of the parts of speech grew, Monica’s reading comprehension improved dramatically. “Before, I could read, sure. But it was like a sea of words,” she says. “The more writing instruction I got, the more I understood which words were important.”

When you’re prompted to look in a text for the kinds of relationships expressed by although and if, you know that you should specifically be looking for words like although and if. This kind of focus may help students overcome difficulties sustaining attention, such that complex texts become something more meaningful than a “sea of words.”

The Hochman method is a great antidote to the current fads in writing instruction, but not for most of the reasons suggested in Tyre’s article.

(Cross-posted at Out In Left Field).

the ocean in the air

We have power.

We also have trees. This morning I've relearned the lesson of Darwin: we've been through three 'Treemageddons' in the past 2 years, and the trees that were standing at the beginning of this storm are the trees that survived those onslaughts. They're still here.

Imagine what the scene would be like if none of those storms had happened.

Listening to TV... subways, buses, trains. All down. C was unhappy with us for summoning him home in the run-up to the storm, but when he learned last night that all the dorms had lost power -- and that most of the other Westchester students seemed to have gone home, too -- he was mollified. The Long Island kids, a much larger contingent, may have stayed put.

Still waiting to hear what's to become of his midterm tomorrow. I would really like NOT to be driving to the Village to deliver my child for a post-hurricane midterm that can't be rescheduled by even a day.

Later on, I'll try to post the video I took last night. The air sounded like the ocean. There was a soft, continuous roar that would periodically build to a loud, crashing din like the waves coming in --- and all this without a branch or a leaf so much as trembling. Perfect stillness on the ground, a roar in the air.

I must have been hearing the wind currents, right?

The wind currents or the gods.

how many pronouns?

re: the number of "function words" English has

Lights flickering here, so I'm getting this up. HBR: Why are function words so important?

James Pennebaker: In English there are about 500 function words, and about 150 are really common. Content words—nouns, verbs, adjectives, and most adverbs—convey the guts of communication. They’re how we express ideas. Function words help shape and shortcut language. People require social skills to use and understand function words, and they’re processed in the brain di fferently. They are the key to understanding relationships between speakers, objects, and other people. When we analyze people’s use of function words, we can get a sense of their emotional state and personality, and their age and social class.

[snip]

Function words sound like two-by-fours: They’re important but not meaningful in creating the overall architecture.
You might even think of function words as the nails. It seems natural to pay them little regard. If you type a sentence into Google, its algorithms disregard function words, because it’s interested in content. But these words convey important subtleties—“a ring” versus “that ring.” In foreign languages, function words often convey people’s status relative to one another.

If you listened to a job interview, what would the use of function words tell you?
It’s almost impossible to hear the differences naturally, which is why we use transcripts and computer analysis. Take a person who’s depressed. “I” might make up 6.5% of his words, versus 4% for a nondepressed person. That’s a huge difference statistically, but our ears can’t pick it up. But hypothetically, if I were to listen to an interview, I might consider how the candidate talks about their coworkers at their last job. Do they refer to them as “we” or “they”? That gives you a sense of their relationship to the group. And if you want someone who’s really decisive in a position, a person who says “It’s hot” rather than “I think it’s hot” may be a better fit.

Your Use of Pronouns Reveals Your Personality | Harvard Business Review | December 2011 | p 32-33

3rd time's the charm - remembering Treemageddon again and again

Treemageddon through the years

OK, message received. As soon as this one's over, we're buying a generator.

Also a week's stash of caffeine candy.

Hudson Independent Facebook page

This is the restaurant down the hill from us, the one we always go to. No rain yet, no real wind, and the Hudson is overflowing its banks. Already.

We're a good 35-40 miles from the mouth of the Hudson.

Storm still coming.

Meanwhile, back on topic, here's some math!

If the wind is 75 mph at ground level, it's 95-100 mph at the 30th floor, 125 mph at the 60th.

a teaching assistant at a "top university on the East Coast of the USA" grades a paper

Huddleston and Pullum (scroll down)

When I say "no accountability," this is one of the things I'm talking about: a teaching assistant who does not know what the passive voice actually is given the power to grade student writing.

the passive voice files

Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum on the passive voice:

In truth, the passive is very often exactly the right way to frame a clause in a particular context, and all competent authors use passives frequently. The people who recommend against it use it themselves, even while talking about how you should not use it. For example, in the act of explaining that you should "Use the active voice" because it is "more direct and vigorous than the passive", William Strunk and E. B. White assert that "Many a tame sentence . . . can be made lively and emphatic by substituting a transitive in the active voice" (see section 14 of their book The Elements of Style). Their sentence defies their warning; it contains an instance of the passive voice itself (can be made lively and emphatic).

The Secret Life of Pronouns and a pop quiz (part 1)

We've been talking, off and on, about students having trouble understanding anaphora.

Come to find out, pronouns, along with conjunctions, prepositions, and auxiliary verbs -- the so-called "function words," or "style words," as James Pennebaker calls them in The Secret Life of Pronouns -- are processed in a different part of the brain from "content words."

Function words are quite different from content words. For one thing, function words, according to Pennebaker, are almost impossible to perceive in speech. Which I assume means they are invisible in written texts as well.

Moreover, function words are extremely difficult to learn after the age of 12. Learning the content words of a foreign language is doable; learning the function words, not really.

And, last but not least, function words are highly 'social.' The meaning of a function word depends upon social context, and damage to the part of the brain that handles function words results in damage to social skills, too. Damage to the part of the brain that handles content words leaves social skills intact.

What might these findings mean for students who have difficulty understanding anaphora in written texts?

I don't know the answer to that, but I think it may mean, in part, that novice readers in college don't experience written text as written speech in the way fluent readers do.* The act of reading academic prose isn't for them a social exchange between a writer who is speaking and a reader who is listening  (a point that may be related to the argument Gerald Graff has been making for lo these many years).

Do students hear the 'voice' of an academic text? It's possible many do not. I can read Spanish and French fairy well, but I've never heard a voice in either language -- is it the same for English-speaking students who've read very little academic prose?

Do they know that academic text has a voice?

I wonder.

In any event, it seems clear to me that understanding pronouns in speech does not lead automatically to understanding the same pronouns in prose. And this problem cannot be solved by teaching vocabulary (although for reasons I'll get to later I think vocabulary instruction would help). Function words take their meaning from context.

I'm wondering whether the difficulty students have understanding anaphora inside academic prose works like this, at least in some cases:

1. Students don't experience the reading of academic prose as a social exchange. 
2. So students don't automatically interpret the anaphora used in academic text in terms of other words in the text, but instead assume that the meaning must be lodged outside the text somewhere. 

This may be a stretch. Still, reading Pennebaker in the wake of attending Morningside's Summer School Institute, I am coming to think that function words are an important piece of the reading comprehension puzzle.

Students who have no problem understanding function words in a face-to-face exchange do have problems understanding the same words in text.

Pop quiz:

How many function words exist in the English language?
How many of the words we use each day are function words?

The Psychological Function of Function Words by Cindy Chung and James Pennebaker
^* Written prose isn't written speech; spoken language and (most) written language are radically different. But a good reader experiences written prose as a form of speech. A good reader hears a 'voice' in prose.

Parents Day

sigh

Colleges are even less accountable than K-12.

If that's possible.

a math revolution too

Barry's in the Atlantic!

why do students have to sit on the floor

I'm watching the Jo Boaler video, which I see was funded by the Educational Advancement Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to imposing its ideology on other people's children (1) the development and implementation of inquiry-based learning at all educational levels in the United States, particularly in the fields of mathematics and science, and (2) the preservation and dissemination of the inquiry-based learning methodology of Dr. R.L. Moore (1882-1974).

Immediately, it struck me: students sitting on the floor. Again. I see this constantly in informational videos about inquiry-based classrooms.

Why?

Has no one in our history managed the feat of inquiring while seated at a desk?

re: the "harrassment and persecution" accusations Boaler has posted on a Stanford University website.

I have been married to a university professor for my entire adult life, and I've never seen anything like this. Stanford should direct Boaler to host her complaints on a personal website, and Milgram and Bishop should consult attorneys.

The Bishop/Clopton/Milgram critique of Boaler's research is entirely professional in content and in tone. The following is an excerpt:

Dr. Boaler kept the names of the schools private and asked that everyone trust that she had faithfully recorded the outcomes of her study. We were able to determine the identities of these schools. Then we studied the considerable amount of data in the California data base relating to these schools, as well as data requested through the Freedom of Information act or the California Public Records Act. This data includes things like school rankings, demographic data, SAT I outcomes, AP outcomes and even student level outcomes. Further, the results of the students from each of these schools on the entry level CSU4 math skills test are available. The totality of this data does not support her conclusions.

Indeed, there is only one year in the last five where any of these various measures for any cohort of students gives any advantage to the Railside students - the CST5 Algebra I exams for the ninth grade students in 2003 - and this is the only test data from that California database which is reproduced in Prof. Boaler’s report even though these data cannot represent the cohort that is the focus of the report.

We also found evidence that Dr. Boaler obtained her results by focusing on essentially different populations of students at the three schools. At Railside, her population appeared to consist primarily of the upper two quartiles, while at the other two schools the treatment group was almost entirely contained in the two middle quartiles.

A Close Examination of Jo Boaler’s Railside Report
Wayne Bishop
Dept. of Mathematics Cal. State University, LA
Paul Clopton VAMC
San Diego
R. James Milgram
Dept. of Mathematics Stanford University

Jo Boaler should provide her data to other researchers.

parents v. schools, Victorian edition

Have stumbled upon a brief history of discipline in British schools. Apparently parents have long been held in low regard by the public servants hired to teach their children:

In the early part of 1890 a teachers’ newspaper, The Schoolmistress, complained that its urban readers were under the constant threat of violence. It noted that the ‘rough language and violence heaped on teachers in some of the low and rough neighbourhoods of London and other large towns can hardly be imagined by those who have not witnessed it’. The image that the paper put forward was of a school system in a state of siege, with teachers fearing that they could be attacked at any time by the parents of their pupils. Though the lurid descriptions that appeared in The Schoolmistress were undoubtedly exaggerated for dramatic effect, they reflected a very real problem that afflicted schools at the time, which was a severe and ongoing hostility between parents and teachers.

The underlying issue in these conflicts was school discipline. By 1890 many parents were objecting to what they saw as the cruel and arbitrary use of corporal punishment then endemic within the school system. Children were not only caned but also subjected to many other forms of physical punishment, from being struck across the knuckles with slates, to receiving blows to the head with metal classroom pointers. In one case the disciplinary regime of a particular school involved a teacher stalking round the classroom, threatening children with a large knife. Parents generally thought that such forms of behaviour were inappropriate and that their children should be protected from such treatment.

Any sense of outrage felt by parents was reinforced by the fact that most of the punishment that occurred in schools was unlawful.

[snip]

The common perception of Victorian schools is that they were primitive and brutal institutions in which children were subjected to violent discipline. Though there is a certain amount of truth in this, it fails to acknowledge the general unpopularity of corporal punishment among parents as well as pupils. Even in the 19th century this type of punishment was seen as an archaic and outmoded disciplinary tool. The negative image was supported by popular literature, such as Charles Dickens’ novel Nicholas Nickleby (1838) and by real-life events, including the infamous Eastbourne Manslaughter of 1860 in which a school boy was beaten to death by his teacher. By this date opposition to corporal punishment was at its height and it was generally believed that the demise of the practice was fast approaching.

Yet the use of corporal punishment persisted. Teachers felt it had value as a disciplinary tool, believing that it was a quick and simple means by which order could be imposed on a class. Meanwhile many politicians and judges educated at public schools saw corporal punishment as a normal and natural part of childhood and had little sympathy with the objections of parents. Collectively their efforts helped to preserve its use as an educational tool and to institutionalise it as a standard disciplinary measure within schools. From the early 1890s onwards a number of administrative and legal measures were brought into effect that protected the rights of those teachers who wished to strike children. Classroom teachers were permitted to use corporal punishment and the rights of head teachers to inflict punishment were extended considerably. By the time of the First World War the parental protests against disciplinary excesses had been suppressed and corporal punishment was established as a normal and expected form of discipline. The practice was only banned in British state schools in 1987.

Spare the Rod
By Jacob Milddleton History Today | Volume: 62 Issue: 11 2012

So...it took 150 years, give or take, for parents to drive corporal punishment out of the schools.

Successive generations of U.S. parents have been agitating for phonics and a knowledge-based education in the liberal arts for -- is it 110 years now?

Give it another 40, and maybe we'll see some action.

Notice for parents new to KTM

I thought a post might be good for parents new to KTM and this problem.

Kitchen Table Math exists because many K-8 schools don't ensure mastery of basic skills. Parents have to do the work at home. And, as one can see by other posts, it's not just a problem in math. Everyday Math, a common math curriculum, spirals through the same material each year in the hope that students at all levels will master the skills when they are ready. They assume that this works by definition. They tell teachers to keep moving and to "trust the spiral". It doesn't work.

One night long ago, I told my son to stop fooling around and do his EM math homework (from a workbook, not a textbook). Ten minutes later, I saw him doing other things and told him to do his math. He said it was already done. I looked at the workbook and saw only 4 easy problems. When I asked the teacher about this, she said that they will get a chance for more practice when they spiral back to the same material. They talk about how spiraling builds on previous knowledge and skills, but I saw only repeated partial learning. One parent complained that three of her kids were covering the exact same material and they were in three different grades. Either they knew the material already and were bored, or they were still confused.

Parents learn the hard way that it doesn't work. Many schools know that it doesn't work too because they send home blanket notes to parents asking them to work on "math facts". They must know that that some parents can't or won't. Unfortunately, this problem doesn't just stop at basic arithmetic. It continues with things like fractions, percentages, and solving equations. Parents are left reteaching their kids at home or with tutors. Some parents don't see this problem until 7th grade when their bright child gets placed into the "slow" math track. It's unlikely that the student will recover after that point. It could be an ability issue, but too many students respond well to curricula like Singapore Math (as with my son) at home or with tutors. KTM is loaded with examples of how parents had to help their kids.

When my son was in fifth grade, his teacher found bright students who still didn't know the times table. Some were still adding 7+8 on their fingers. She had to stop trusting the spiral to get students back up to speed. This caused her to skip 35% of the material that year, but the focus on mastery did work. However, she did not try to get the lower grade teachers to improve mastery of the basics.

This is not difficult material if mastery of basic skills is ensured starting in the earliest grades. However, the "trust the spiral" attitude pumps problems along until many gaps have built up and teachers can't possibly diagnose and address each one. That’s why Everyday Math includes things called "Math Boxes" to try to get students to fix themselves. This makes math seem much more complicated than it really is. Schools talk about critical thinking and problem solving, but they don't define them exactly and many students can't show them on state tests designed to match these teaching ideas. Those vague skills don't make up for a lack of mastery of the basics. The best students are the ones with the best mastery of skills.

Unfortunately, the new Common Core Standards won't force K-6 schools to fix the problems of mastery. The use of the word "fluent" in the standard is sparse and the word is undefined. The new tests, like PARCC, are unlikely to put much pressure on schools to achieve a level of mastery that will keep all career doors open in K-8. Kids will still be pumped along, and the onus for keeping kids on track will still rest with parents. My advice to parents is to not trust the spiral. You have to ensure that your kids master the material the first time starting in the earliest grades. You have to ask the school when and how they track in math. You have to ensure that learning gets done to meet this tracking decision. You have to realize that "proficient" is not nearly good enough. Even "exceeding expectations" might not be good enough. Schools will talk about how wonderful it is that they get so many kids over a low cutoff proficiency level, but this is not very meaningful for individual students. Many parents quickly figure out that their standards have to be much higher that the state standards. Schools care about statistics, but parents care about individuals. What’s good for schools is not necessarily what’s good for your child.

from the Chairs Survey at the University of New Hampshire

from the report:

3) Disciplinary Disconnect. When asked what the most positive aspect of the UWR [University Writing Requirement] was, one [department] chair from CEPS wrote,

None. Students need technical writing for success and not exploratory writing.

Despite the ambiguity of the term "exploratory writing," one could infer that it points to process-based writing-to-learn procedures such as freewriting, journaling, and drafting. Such techniques tend to delay exactness and preciseness in language, two of the pinnacles of what the respondent above refers to as "technical writing."

Some may disagree with the goals of writing-to-learn and process-writing methodology. However, this comment may point to a wider issue: the disparity between what individual disciplines value as "good writing" and the values espoused by a writing program with roots in composition pedagogy. It is this disparity—what we will refer to as a disciplinary disconnect—that seems prevalent in respondents' perceptions of writing in general and in perceptions of the UWR.

In fact, as some chairs suggested, the genres and forms of writing required in different disciplines—and the way such writing should be taught—vary greatly:

Scientific writing is quite different from composition classes.

[The needs for writing instruction] depend on the specialization of the department.

Spring 2005 Chairs Survey Report
University Writing Program University of New Hampshire

"students working collaboratively to understand Freire"

Welcome to Resources for Teachers links to video posted at the California Acceleration Project, in which "developmental reading" students are discussing "The 'Banking' Concept of Education" by Paulo Freire.



INSTRUCTOR: So how does that relate to oppression?

STUDENT: 'Cuz you know it's down when it's the oppression time.

INSTRUCTOR: It sets you back.

STUDENT: Now you can't get no jobs or nothing. You got a depression, know what I'm saying, Recession.

[snip]

INSTRUCTOR: "It inhibits creative power." You know that word inhibit? Make a guess at what inhibit [unintelligible].

VARIOUS STUDENTS: Advance? Occupy? Allows?

INSTRUCTOR: That's a good guess.

STUDENTS [unintelligible]

INSTRUCTOR: From context. You look at the rest of that sentence and the whole article and what we've learned so far. Make a guess at what inhibits means.

STUDENT: [unintelligible]

INSTRUCTOR: Do you think that banking education ALLOWS creative power? Does that work?

STUDENT: Hell no. It RESTRAINS it.

INSTRUCTOR: Exactly! Exactly.

(Successful student exchanges high five with neighbor.)

INSTRUCTOR: Nice reading from context. Right on.

handwriting and grades and the wisdom of the crowd

Even legible handwriting that's messy can have its own ramifications, says Steve Graham, professor of education at Vanderbilt University. He cites several studies indicating that good handwriting can take a generic classroom test score from the 50th percentile to the 84th percentile, while bad penmanship could tank it to the 16th. "There is a reader effect that is insidious," Dr. Graham says. "People judge the quality of your ideas based on your handwriting."
How Handwriting Boosts the Brain by Gwendolyn Bounds | WSJ | October 5, 2010

I absolutely believe that. And I doubt teachers can turn this bias off. Cognitive biases can't be turned off at will.

Grades and grading are a mess. Probably for writing especially.

Speaking of writing and grades, I had a thought the other day. It's not possible, under the current system, for teachers to grade papers according to an objective standard. An A paper for one teacher is a B paper for another teacher is a C paper for a third.

In theory, a testing company can achieve 'rater reliability' by dint of extensive training sessions, although Todd Farley's account of his experience in the industry makes me wonder.

But is training-up individual graders to apply the same standards as their colleagues (even if it's possible) the best approach?

Maybe not.

Any teacher can (or should be able to) correct a paper's grammar, punctuation, and spelling. I assume teachers are going to agree on grammar, punctuation, and spelling far more often more than they disagree.

Beyond that, however, I'm not sure you actually want a uniform response across teachers. "Writing" as a profession or a business obligation means writing for an audience of more than one reader, and the individuals who make up that audience don't necessarily agree amongst themselves that you've said what you've said or that you've said it well. Writers learn from these disagreements.

Maybe students would also benefit from a 'diversity' of reader reaction?

If I had my druthers, I would scrap the letter-grading of writing altogether, apart from scoring punctuation, grammar, and spelling, simply on grounds that the letter-grading of student writing is simply too inconsistent to be credible.

I would experiment with some kind of Intrade or Wisdom of the Crowd approach. Farm papers out to a bunch of readers who read quickly and check off a thumbs-up or thumbs-down option. Something simple. Then give everyone the results for everyone.

Students would receive a kind of polling or survey result instead of a grade: a rough sense of how well their papers worked for an audience compared to papers written by their peers.

Of course, students would need to be able to read the work of their peers to see what kind of paper produced what kind of global response.

Or -- here's a thought -- perhaps schools could create an extensive set of exemplar student papers that have been 'voted on' by a large number of instructors. As a teacher of freshman writing I would kill to have such a resource myself.

I don't know whether a system along these lines would offer useful or 'actionable' information to students.

But I think it might.

Mark Helprin on writing by hand

In the Wall Street Journal's Word Craft series:

This brings up Levenger, which sells "tools for writers." The fewer tools the better, and they need not be costly or complicated. Whether you use a pencil, a pen, an old typewriter or something electrical is largely irrelevant to the result, although there is magic in writing by hand. It's not just that it has been that way for 5,000 years or more, and has engraved upon our expectations of literature the effects associated with the pen—the pauses; considerations; sometimes the racing; the scratching out; the transportation of words and phrases with arrows, lines and circles; the closeness of the eyes to the page; the very touching of the page—but that the pen, not being a machine (it does not meet the scientific definition of a machine), is a surrender to a different power than those of mere speed and efficiency.

In short, a pen (somehow) helps you think and feel. And although once you find a pen you like you'll probably stick with it the way an addict sticks with heroin, it can be anything from a Mont Blanc to a Bic. The same for paper. There are beautiful, smooth, heavy papers, but great works have been written on ration cards, legal pads and the kind of cheap paper they sell in developing countries—grayish white, almost furry, with flecks of brown and black that probably came from lizards and bats that jumped into the paper makers' vats.
Skip the Paris Cafés And Get a Good Pen by Mark Helprin

I can't help but feel there's something to this, although I don't write by hand myself. Still, I started out writing by hand, and that may be what matters. Temple told me that older architects who'd learned to draw by hand before switching to CAD continued to make good drawings. It was the younger architects, she said, who sent her blueprints with two-foot wide passageways for cattle and the like. They had never learned to draw, and their CAD drawings were severely flawed.

I don't generally give a lot of credence to intuition, but in this case my intuition coincides with a century-old belief in the value of good handwriting (at least a century). Seeing as how our predecessors seem to have known more than a few things we've forgotten, the fact that they valued fluent and beautiful handwriting strikes me as one more reason not to simply assume that "keyboarding" is to writing what washing machines are to doing your laundry in the creek.

But of course I could be completely wrong. Maybe one of these days I'll get around to reading The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture.

In the meantime, I'm going to see what Lifehacker and the Wall Street have to say about it:

• Why You Learn More Effectively By Writing Than Typing by Melanie Pinola 22 JANUARY, 2011 8:00 AM
• A Defence of Writing Longhand
• How Handwriting Boosts the Brain By GWENDOLYN BOUNDS October 5, 2010 WSJ

A few years ago, I used Betty Dubay's Write Now to try to improve C's handwriting as well as my own. My printing improved quite a bit.



image from WSJ

help desk - 2nd grade mode question

A ktm reader sends this question from her daughter's 2nd grade math book.