Glencoe Parent and Student Study Guide

cross-posted at Irvington Parents Forum:

Hi all---

We had a meeting with the chair of the math department a couple of weeks back.

She told us that “if students need distributed practice parents can find worksheets online.”

Having spent many an hour finding worksheets online, not to mention a small fortune purchasing math textbooks and workbooks from Rainbow Resource Center, I had thought those days were behind me.

Wrong again! Last night I spent a couple of hours pulling worksheets from the web; I’ll be spending some time today scouting commercially available resources for teaching geometry.

So, to prevent other parents having to duplicate my efforts, I’m going to try to post my online sources, assuming I can locate the original URLs.

For today, I’m posting the single most useful resource I’ve found for reteaching math to your kids and providing the distributed practice they need to master the material:

Glencoe’s Parent and Student Study Guides

Glencoe has published every page of its 5 guides online in English and Spanish editions.

Description:

The Glencoe Parent and Student Study Guide is designed to help you support, monitor, and improve your child's math performance. These worksheets are written so that you do not have to be a mathematician to help your child.

Each book contains:

A 1-page worksheet for every lesson in the Student Edition. Completing a worksheet with your child will reinforce the concepts and skills your child is learning in math class. Upside-down answers are provided right on the page.

These worksheets are fantastic, built to help parents help their kids while also earning a living and running a household. Wonderful.

URLs:

• Glencoe Pre-Algebra

• Glencoe Algebra 1

• Glencoe Applications & Concepts Course 1

• Glencoe Applications & Concepts Course 2

• Glencoe Applications & Concepts Course 3:

Glencoe has all kinds of other useful materials available online, too

Glencoe’s math page

Enter your state, check “parent,” hit enter.

That takes you to Glencoe’s “Online Learning Centers” where you can click on all of Glencoe’s math texts and survey the offerings.

Catherine J.

evolution of dance

This guy spoke and performed at my niece's middle school in Chatham, IL.

Fantastic.

Way better than middle-aged ladies speaking about cyberbullying and middle-aged former teachers speaking about getting run over in bed.

Just my opinion.

Which I realize no one is asking.

++++++++

Apparently the cyberbullying lady was booed off the stage at the high school. Principal sent home a letter apologizing.

The run-over-in-bed guy told the kids teachers are underpaid. Every person in America owes his life to a teacher, he said. Something like that.

Ed said, "What about the guy who ran over him in bed? Didn't he have a teacher?"

online books

Courtesy of The Plummet of Onions:

Online Books

wow

Random John reloaded

Anne Dwyer just sent me to Random John reloaded, a biostatistician who writes a blog that does NOT require readers to sign up for a Google account in order to comment.

Speaking of which, Susan says she's having problems logging in.

Is anyone else having trouble?

Everyone else?

I'm starting to think I should have actually looked into Blogger versus every other option before setting up ktm-II.

Apparently snap decisions aren't such a hot idea on the web.

I may have to change my entire personality and character structure if I'm going to keep writing blogs.

NCLB - not

hmmm....

Mike Petrilli's off the boat for NCLB:

For almost five years now, I've considered myself a supporter of the No Child Left Behind Act. And not just the casual flag-waver variety. Much of that time I spent inside the Bush Administration, trying to make the law work, explaining its vision to hundreds of audiences, even wearing an NCLB pin on my lapel. I was a True Believer.

In a way, I still am. After all, in the 21^st Century, saying you "support" NCLB is shorthand for affirming a set of ideas, values, and hopes for the country as much as an expression about a particular statute....a set of powerful--and controversial--ideas that provide the subtext for all the big NCLB battles.

[snip]

Speaking personally, I've gradually and reluctantly come to the conclusion that NCLB as enacted is fundamentally flawed and probably beyond repair.

Now he tells me.

(Just kidding.)

His description of NCLB failings he did and did not anticipate is interesting:

Of course, I harbored doubts about certain specifics from the beginning. You didn't have to be a genius to see the "highly qualified teachers" mandate as a huge overreach and a probable failure, as it took a reasonable notion (teachers should know their stuff) and tried to enforce it through a rigid rule-based mechanism (second guessing principals who, for instance, hired engineers as math teachers). Nor was it hard to determine that asking all states to reach universal "proficiency" by 2014 but allowing them to define "proficiency" as they saw fit would create a race to the bottom.

Other flaws took me longer to appreciate. For example:

Surely schools would respond thoughtfully to the law's incentives to boost achievement in reading and math, and would understand that providing a broad, content-rich education would give them the best shot at boosting test scores, right? [ed: wrong. even I saw that one coming] Yet the anecdotes (and increasingly, evidence) keep rolling in of schools turning into test-prep factories and narrowing the curriculum. (See here, for example.)

Surely if those of us at the Department of Education pushed hard enough we could get districts to inform parents of their school choice options under the law, and ensure that kids trapped in failing schools have better places to go, right? Yet (as I conclude in this paper presented in December at the American Enterprise Institute), hard experience has shown that "stronger implementation" would only make a difference at the margin. It cannot solve the fundamental problem: in most of our big cities, there are too few good schools to go around. Uncle Sam can't snap his fingers and make it otherwise. Furthermore, while it's hard enough to force recalcitrant states and districts to do things they don't want to do, it's impossible to force them to do those things well. And when it comes to informing parents, creating new schools, or implementing almost any of NCLB's many pieces, it's not enough for states or districts to go through the motions. They have to want to make it succeed. If they don't, Washington is out of luck. It has no tools or levers to alter the situation. That's why I've called much of the law "un-implementable."

still flogging that Washington consensus!

I can't pretend any longer that the law is "working," or that a tweak and a tuck would make it "work." Yet I still like its zeitgeist. As Kati Haycock argued at the AEI confab, NCLB has "changed the conversation" in education. Results are now the coin of the realm; the "soft bigotry of low expectations" is taboo; closing the achievement gap is at the top of everyone's to-do list. All for the good.

Wrong again.

The Washington consensus, I've come to feel, reinforces race- and ethnicity-based views of IQ and achievement while at the same time depressing school accountability for individual student learning in all schools, rich, poor, and in between.

Not that there was a lot of accountability there to depress, but still.

To define white schools as good -- or at least good enough -- while defining black & Hispanic schools as catastrophically bad leads directly to the result Ed and I routinely experience here in Irvingtonland.

We go to meeting after meeting in which administrators look us straight in the eye, flash us a friendly smile, and say things like, "Student achievement correlates directly with number of books in the parent's home," or, "You can judge how good your school is by four criteria: the school, the students, the parents, and the community."

translation: We're off the hook, so party on!

There is no sense of urgency in the administration here. None. No sense that any of our kids might be at risk in any way if they're in 8th grade and can't figure a 10% tip while the most challenging book they've read this year is The Chocolate War (reading level 5.4). *

No one's worried.

No one's worried because our kids can't be at risk. By definition. The Washington consensus says so.

Thanks in part to NCLB, everyone "knows" that rich white schools are good, poor black and Hispanic schools are bad.

Everyone "knows" that "it's the parents that make the school."

And: everyone "knows" that Westchester parents hire tutors because we're a bunch of grasping, status-seeking jerks, not because our kids aren't learning inside our rich white schools.

The Washington consensus got it wrong, and apparently the people who brought us the Washington consensus plan to carry on getting it wrong.

Public schools are the problem.

Not public schools with disadvantaged students.

I can't do policy, but I've lived the Washington consensus inside an affluent white school district where "everyone is above average" and the "gene pool is good." (direct quotes)

It's time to stop focusing on the Achievement Gap between blacks and whites.

If we're going to focus on achievement gaps, and I'm beginning to think that's a non-starter, it's time to focus on the achievement gap between each individual child and himself.

Or between each individual child and his same-SES peer in Europe and Asia.


real information about schools? provided to parents?

Surely not.

....an important bullet waits to be bitten: collect and publish swift, reliable, and comparable data on the performance of the nation's schools via clear national standards, a rigorous national test, and a common approach to school ratings (e.g., a single definition of "adequate yearly progress"). Then everyone would have a consistent and fair way to distinguish good schools from bad. We would have consistently high expectations for all students and all schools, and would end the federal/state cat-and-mouse games being played over accountability. The federal government should also make school-level financial information transparent (a necessity to achieve the funding reforms mentioned above) and continue to pay for high-quality research and make its results transparent and accessible to all.

Given the fact that I'm going to have to file a FOIL request just to pry 6th grade gender subscores out of my own district, good luck implementing that one.

____________

* A friend's child recently defended the book to his mom, telling her that yes, it was too easy for the kids in his 8th grade class, but that was OK because "it's a classic."

3rd time's the charm

Hi Joe---

Now that this year's ELA tests are upon us, I thought it would be a good time to lodge my third request for student subgroup scores on the 2006 ELA. How did boys fare in comparison to girls in last year's 6th grade class?

Ed and I would like to know:

• how many 6th grade boys received scores of 4 on the 2006 ELA examination?
  
• how many 6th grade boys received scores of 3 on the 2006 ELA examination?
• how many 6th grade girls received scores of 4 on the 2006 ELA examination?
• how many 6th grade girls received scores of 3 on the 2006 ELA examination?

Thanks very much!

Catherine Johnson

kausfiles to the rescue

I hadn't read Kaus in awhile (I realize kausfiles isn't to everyone's taste around here), and had just checked in when I found this:

P.P.S.: As a non-eduwonk, I would think if the NCLB were working we'd see the results by now in positive test scores--and if it isn't working, we should abandon the perestroika-like attempt to whip the education bureaucracy into shape with testing and "sanctions"--and move on to the dissolution of that bureaucracy through a proliferation of charter schools. But Eduwonk says, via email, that it's too soon to tell whether the NCLB will improve test scores, since the " law was passed in January of '02, states only had the testing really implemented last year and this year ..."

As I've said on innumerable occasions, policy is beyond me.

Nevertheless, there's something about the idea of moving to the dissolution of the edu-bureaucracy through a proliferation of charter schools that instantly and without further ado wins my vote.


two questions

What is the timeline on NCLB results?

Do we know?

And does anyone know whether we are or are not seeing significant improvement in 4th grade reading (largely "decoding") scores?

Hirsch thinks so.

Hirsch's take is that NCLB's Reading First Initiative has improved the teaching of reading, but reading comprehension scores aren't budging because schools are drilling a formalistic, how-to approach to understanding what you read.

That's what kids here in Irvingtonland have been doing for the past week. They've been taking sample ELA tests. The 7th graders have all finished the one book they were assigned to read this year (The Outsiders, reading level 5.1),* and now they're taking practice reading tests.

Today they're taking the real one.

Which makes it an excellent time to lodge my third request for gender subscores on last year's ELA!


Hirsch on NCLB & Reading First

Gary Ratner [audience member]: Gary Ratner, Citizens for Effective Schools.... Professor Hirsch, you noted that No Child Left Behind and the Standards Movement, both fairly recent policy initiatives have produced I think what you call “meager results.”

[snip]

....what would the panel think of a federal policy that would come in as an amendment to the elementary and secondary education at No Child Left Behind [indiscernible] just coming up with a re- authorization in which the federal government would say, would go beyond just saying the goal is academic efficiency? Would go beyond just talking about saying there should be a challenging curriculum

[snip]

Frederick M. Hess [moderator]: [Audio glitch] arguably actually, NCLB does require that, of course, that states in submitting their compliance materials for No Child left Behind law are actually required to submit both assessments they use and standards that underlie them.

Gary Ratner [audience member]: But it is not being implemented. That is so far from the reality right now. There is no enforcement.

[snip]

Eric Donald Hirsch: ....the one place where No Child Left Behind has succeeded, it seems to me, is fourth grade reading scores; those have benefited from the No Child Left Behind Act.

[snip]

...what it illustrates is that you have to pay attention to the nitty-gritty, and not just do some structural thing if you want the law actually to have some effect; and that was the area where they actually paid attention to the nitty-gritty. They said, “This program is phonics oriented and it is okay. This program is not and we are not going to fund it.” They were actually paying attention to a specific elementary reading or decoding program. Those programs themselves have flaws but they do very well in getting you up to speed in decoding which is why fourth-grade reading scores, by the way, are primarily fluency and accuracy of decoding. Later scores involved comprehension. That basically is one of the subjects of the book.

Abigail Thernstrom: Maybe Lynne will not agree with me on this, but the Feds have a really hard time monitoring quality. And let me tell you a story very briefly, a Massachusetts story. Somebody I know raises, gets from the federal DOE a pile of money for the instruction of teachers in better math education. These teachers are teaching math; they do not know math. They need to have math workshops and so forth. Raises federal money; raises some local corporate money. The superintendent of the district -- it is four specific districts – the superintendent in this district got this money in his hands. His staff goes to work in using it, and at the end of the day, forget it.

The money is just going down the drain. It makes you want to cry what is happening with this money, because it is nothing good. And the Federal Department of Education will never understand that this money has not gone to anything useful.

If makes you want to cry or, alternatively, it makes you want to make other people cry.

Like this superintendent, for instance.

He could cry.

Crying would be a fine thing in his case.

_____________

* Lexile puts The Outsiders at 7th grade, but seeing as how Christopher read the book last year for fun, I feel I'm on solid ground going with 5.1. Then there's this from K-8 resources for Struggling Readers, "The Outsiders," by S.E. Hinton...is one of many books written by Hinton with high interest but lower reading level."

interview with Willingham

(Cross-posted at D-Ed Reckoning)

EdNews has a good interview with Daniel Willingham posted today on "reading comprehension:

6) What are your three main factors that you see as important in reading comprehension?

Decoding, fluency, and background knowledge. Obviously, if you can't decode, it's pretty much "game over." And if you don't have some degree of fluency, you're so occupied with decoding, that you can't pay attention to the meaning of the text. Finally, if you don't have some background knowledge to which you can relate the text, you may comprehend it, but your understanding will be pretty shallow—it will be closely tied to the text itself, and you won't be able to generalize the message of the text

There you go: decoding, fluency, and background knowledge. Three things that don't get systematicallt taught in your typical balanced literacy classroom.

Here's a question: "To what extent have educators and policy-makes recognized the importance of background knowledge to reading comprehension?" My answer would be "not enough!" I'm specifically concerned about the role of the National Reading Panel report. That Report is becoming crystallized in state and federal legislation as the final word on reading, and the report is great. . . but it's incomplete because it doesn't say anything about the role of background knowledge in reading comprehension. If we're concerned about having students who are good readers we have to recognize that reading is an interaction between the words on the page and the knowledge in the reader's head. Without background knowledge, you can't comprehend a text to a level we would call "understanding." We need to pay attention to developing background knowledge in students from the first day that they are in school, and encouraging parents to do so even before then. It's not a trivial matter to decide what that content should be and how to deliver it. But if we want all children to be excellent readers it has to be done.

Background knowledge: the untaught subject. Read the whole thing.

Bernie Rimland, rest in peace

While I was home visiting my mom, she gave me a clipping she'd saved for me -- saved and managed to transport with her to the hospital and from there to her nursing home.

The clipping was a news item saying that Bernie Rimland has died.

I loved Bernie.

We were on different tracks, but it didn't matter. Though we saw eye to eye on behaviorism (both pro), he was a vitamin and supplements guy while I was pharmaceuticals and the NIH -- the guys in white coats as I think Bernie used to call them.

Bernie scorned the men in white coats!

I only had to get to know him a bit to see his brilliance; Bernie was probably the first Bayesian genius I ever met. After knowing him for a time I adopted a rule of thumb that anything Bernie believed in, no matter how much disdain it elicited from his foes in mainstream medicine, stood an excellent chance of being true in some fashion. He was way smart and, like a lot of parents of autistic people, marched to the beat of a different drummer.

Bernie once told me that when his son Mark was a baby, he would scream at the sight of his mother wearing anything but one particular housedress printed in one particular pattern. So Mrs. Rimland wore that same dress day-in and day-out.

Bernie also told me he cured his daughter of cancer using megavitamin therapy.^* I don't put it past him. If anyone could cure his child of cancer using megavitamins, it was Bernie.

Bernie was a kind and good man. His son Mark grew up to become an artist, and Bernie printed up his paintings on notecards and sold them to raise money for his Autism Research Institute. These days you get Mark's notecards as a gift when you make a donation.

Bernie never cured autism, though it's entirely possible he helped some autistic children emerge.

But he probably saved lives back in the day when Bruno Bettelheim was telling mothers they had made their children the way they were. I once talked to a woman who had her children in that era. She was so grief-stricken over the certain knowledge that she had caused her child's autism that for years she never drove a car with her children inside. She was chronically suicidal, and if one day the impulse to drive her car into a tree or a wall overwhelmed her she didn't want her children to die, too.

Dr Rimland, who was 78, "will go down in history as the person who ended the 'dark ages' of autism and spearheaded the fight to bring hope and help to autistic children," said Dr Stephen M. Edelson, his successor at the Autism Research Institute founded by Dr Rimland.

Dr Rimland began researching autism after his son, Mark, was diagnosed with the disorder. The result was the landmark book, "Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and Its Implications for a Neural Theory of Behaviour."

After marshalling extensive evidence and argument that showed the disorder had a biological basis, Dr Rimland wrote: "To add a heavy burden of shame and guilt to the distress of people whose hopes, social life, finances, well-being and feelings of worth have been all but destroyed seems heartless and inconsiderate in the extreme."

In recent years, Dr Rimland helped to introduce medical treatments for autism that some parents say have significantly improved, or even cured, their child's condition.

Mainstream medical groups such as the American Academy of Pediatrics reject such approaches and say there is no evidence they are effective.

Dr Rimland attributed the rise of autism diagnoses in the 1980s and 1990s to increasing use of vaccines - another idea embraced by some parents and a minority of researchers but rejected by public-health officials.

Dr Rimland was also one of the founders of the National Society for Autistic Children (NSAC), now known as the Autism Society of America (ASA).

He will be missed.


^{* I hope I remember the story right. Can't find it on Google, so take it with a grain of salt.}

thank you for your ongoing support and cooperation

Last week we all received a TRAILBLAZERS- & middle school math-related email from our superintendent thanking us for our ongoing support and cooperation.

That was a strange way of putting it, I thought. Ongoing support and cooperation where Math TRAILBLAZERS & the middle school math track are concerned have been noticeably absent here in Irvingtonland.

So I wrote an email. Because that's my job.

Today I find an even more egregious use of preemptive gratitude in this letter home to parents in Virginia:

Dear Families:

To honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s noble ideas and courageous acts, we worked together on a sensitizing experiment. They were all led to believe that one is inferior than the other. We initially divided the class into 2 groups –the blue and the green people. In the early part of the day, the green group was given preferential treatment. They were given privileges such as play centers, an extra special snack, and getting paid for performing a job. The switch occurred after an hour of receiving the special treatment.

At the end of our experiment, we talked about how they felt to be the preferred group and how it felt to be the group that was not favored. After which, we read a story on Martin Luther King Jr. (Martin’s Big Words) and talked about MLK’s vision and dream.

The purpose of this exercise is to educate and increase children’s sensitivity towards people and our differences. Furthermore, to treat others the way we want to be treated.

I encourage you to talk with your child about the events of the day as some of them ended up in tears for being treated "differently" based on the color of their shirt. I fervently wish that this exercise will impact your child’s life and that they learn to embrace their differences and celebrate their uniqueness.

Thank you for your cooperation and support in this endeavor.

etc.

I don't mean to be a killjoy here, but I'd say it's a safe bet this school is going to be receiving some distinctly uncooperative and unsupportive calls and emails in the days to come.

thank you for your ongoing support and cooperation
thank you for your cooperation and support in this endeavor
today's form letter from the school

double - oh - two

This may be a purchase. (Verizon Math, part 1)

what is .002 cents x 35,896?

Drop everything and go immediately to YouTube to listen to this protracted conversation between a customer who has been quoted a price of .002 cents per kilobyte usage and two different reps who can't tell the difference between .002 cents and .002 dollars.

Here's Instructivist's take. Credit to Katie, a commenter on his blog, for finding the link.

More fun with decimals: the guy's got a blog and a t-shirt!

I'm going to have to get that t-shirt before Verizon makes it go away.

My favorite line thus far: "[.002 cents] is very much less than .002 dollars."

Second favorite:

"How do you write 1 cent?"

".01."

"How do you write 1/2 cent?"

"Ahhh that would be .005 I think...I don't know, I'm not a mathematician!"

Third favorite:

"It's obviously a difference of opinion."

"It's not opinion!"

+++++++

I wonder whether it would have helped if the customer had dropped the approach he was taking, which was correct but wasn't working, and started focusing repetitively - make that perseveratively - on units.

Over and over again the two customer service reps do the calculation on their calculators (.002 cents x 35,896 kilobytes), come up with an answer of 71.792, and then change the unit from cents to dollars.

If he'd pointed out that they'd just switched the unit, would that have helped?

What I assume is happening in this exchange is that the reps are reading decimal figures in terms of the everyday decimal figures they're used to seeing.

When they have a figure like ".002" they attach the unit "cents" because .002 is more similar to the way we write cents than to the way we write dollars.

Then when they suddenly have a figure like 71.792 they switch to dollars, because 71.792 more closely resembles the way we write dollars than the way we write cents.

That's my guess.

Apparently this customer was originally quoted a rate of .002 cents per kilobyte, which in fact was incorrect; the correct rate was .002 dollars.

The original reps must have looked at something like .002/kilobyte and read it as .002 cents.

I say we start teaching the entire Western World unit multipliers today.

Verizon Math, the t-shirt

Japanese math textbooks

Instructivist links to a video of a presentation on constructivist math by David Klein and James Milgram hosted by Where's the Math.

I haven't seen it yet, but apparently Klein mentions a translated Japanese middle school curriculum he likes.

Instructivist thinks Klein is referring to these books:

[14] Mathematics 2: Japanese Grade 11 - Kunihiko Kodaira, Editor - AMS, 1997, 262 pp., Softcover, ISBN-10: 0-8218-0582-7, ISBN-13: 978-0-8218-0582-4, List: US$32, All AMS Members: US$26, MAWRLD/9

[15] Basic Analysis: Japanese Grade 11 - Kunihiko Kodaira, Editor - AMS, 1996, 184 pp., Softcover, ISBN-10: 0-8218-0580-0, ISBN-13: 978-0-8218-0580-0, List: US$26, All AMS Members: US$21, MAWRLD/11

[16] Algebra and Geometry: Japanese Grade 11 - Kunihiko Kodaira, Editor - AMS, 1996, 174 pp., Softcover, ISBN-10: 0-8218-0581-9, ISBN-13: 978-0-8218-0581-7, List: US$26, All AMS Members: US$21, MAWRLD/10

[17] Mathematics 1: Japanese Grade 10 - Kunihiko Kodaira, Editor - AMS, 1996, 247 pp., Softcover, ISBN-10: 0-8218-0583-5, ISBN-13: 978-0-8218-0583-1, List: US$32, All AMS Members: US$26, MAWRLD/8

I have in my own files this list, which may be the same as Instructivist's books:

Resource Materials available from the UCSMP Director's Office

• Soviet Studies in Mathematics Education, vols. 7-8
• Japanese Grade 7 Mathematics
• Japanese Grade 8 Mathematics
• Japanese Grade 9 Mathematics
• Russian Grade 1 Mathematics
• Russian Grade 2 Mathematics
• Russian Grade 3 Mathematics
• Developments in School Mathematics Education around the World, vols. 1-3

About UCSMP's Translation Series

Translations of Japanese Elementary textbooks are sold here: Global Resources. (Klein didn't mention these, I gather. I have no idea whether he's seen them.)

You can look at sample pages here

Myrtle (hi, Myrtle!) found this link: Japan: A Different Model of Mathematics Education (pdf file)

I still can't do these middle school entrance problems. At least, not the first one. Not in two minutes.

sigh

UPDATE: Yes, I can.

In fact, I may even be able to do this problem in 2 minutes.

Saxon Math to the rescue.

First Lego League

Well, it was a long day at the tournament (our team had to be there at 7am and we left after 5pm), and I have very mixed feelings. This "NanoQuest" tournament was for kids not yet in high school.

I'm happy for our (4th and 5th grade) kids because they won three awards. I would also give them the most excited (surprised?) award of all 49 teams. They had a lot of fun and realized that hard work pays off. (I don't know if they would feel quite the same if they didn't win anything.) We came in 18th out of 49 teams in the robot part of the competition.

First Lego League is getting to be Big Time. They mentioned that our governor wants to provide funds for all middle schools in the state to be able to have teams. For those who don't know about it yet, they hold the tournament once a year. It consists of two parts, centered around a new theme each year. This year it was nanotechnology. (Classic top-down, hands-on learning)

One part involves programming a robot constructed out of Lego pieces. There is the main computer and a number of input and output ports to control motors and sensors. Each year the teams get a new 4 X 8 foot map with lego missions that have to be done. The team tries to do as many missions as possible in 2 1/2 minutes. One of the missions was to push a truck up onto a platform, back up, and then trigger a release mechanism to raise the truck. Another mission was to deliver a "dirt trap" across the board and then push a device that would release the dirt into the trap. The team gets points for each mission they accomplish. They get three (two and a half minute) attempts to get their robot to make the most points. Forty-nine teams with up to 10 kids per team, coaches, parents, three attempts spaced at intervals of an hour and a half. Lots of people, lots of noise, and a DJ who sounded like Sylvester Stallone. I expected to hear the theme from Rocky. For those who have seen him the Spy Kids movie, I expected to hear him yell "Game Over".

The other part of the tournament was the project on nanotechnology. The kids had to research the subject, come up with a topic, and put together a presentation. Creative is the word, even though the goal is an invention. There are no right or wrong answers. Our team put together a skit for a nanotool to reduce nanofriction. It was seriously cute. It won first prize.

The team that won the overall competition, and gets to go to Atlanta for the national tournament, was part of a year-round robotics club. They got most all of the points possible.


Why do I have mixed feelings? You can probably guess. I'll put it this way. How many of these kids go to schools where they are teaching math that will virtually guarantee they will never have the skills to get into a college of engineering? How can excitement and love of engineering, robots, and teamwork overcome bad math curricula? Our public school sent three teams of 8th graders to the tournament, but only provides CMP + algebra lite for 8th grade math. On purpose.

As a coach, it was my job to lead the kids and not tell them what to do. I got to facilitate discovery learning myself. It doesn't work. They want kids to experience the real world issues of a big project with specific deadlines. However, most projects in the real world have team members who aren't starting with absolutely no knowledge. What's a facilitator to do? Teach. It's a fine line. You have to teach them the skills they need and then prod them in the right direction. Fundamental learning and project deadlines don't mix. Top down, real world projects are not the way to teach low level skills.

Rather than taking the time to really learn what the robot can or can't do, everyone jumped right in and started doing things. It took the longest time to figure out that the robot was not a reliable piece of equipment. Even at the tournament, the common complaint was repeatability. Coaches and parents said that kids would get really excited when the robot accomplished a mission, only to be equally deflated when they ran it again and it completely failed. I was the coach for the robotics part of the competition. We couldn't get our robot to move in a straight line. We finally realized that it wasn't exactly weight symmetrical and one tire was a tiny bit flatter than the other tire. (If one tire traveled pi*d in one rotation, and the other tire rotated pi*(d-epsilon) in one rotation, then the robot won't go straight.) Then, there was the problem of turning a specific angle. It just couldn't be done reliably. Our robot sometimes decided to start spinning around in circles when told to turn 60 degrees. Although it is the job of engineers to deal with and overcome equipment issues, having the skills to discover (troubleshoot) these problems do not exist in kids.

It is EXTREMELY frustrating for kids to discover things when they do not have the knowledge and skills to do so. Trial and error discovery learning is no fun and very inefficient. That's why coaches teach. They may not tell the kids what to do, but they directly TEACH a whole lot of KNOWLWDGE and SKILLS.

Now, for next year, the kids will have less to DISCOVER, but will do a whole lot better.

sidebar!

I am now utterly confused on the sidebar-left sidebar-right issue (and I'm too chicken to find out what Jakob Nielsen has to say).

UPDATE: No I'm not.

Seems as if Jakob Nielsen has nothing to say about the left-right conundrum where sidebars are concerned.

If you guys feel like voting in the comments section, please do.

amateurs making decisions

Be sure to take a look at Allen's response to Rory's post about parents choosing their kids' schools.

Allen's post reminded me that my own family has recently made back-to-back decisions based in limited knowledge and information.

Ed and I made a bad choice of physician a few years back.

But my two sisters & my brother and I, thanks to laws mandating transparency & an office of ombudsman for long-term care, could probably make a good choice of nursing home today.

I've now had experiences with 3 state-paid ombudsmen or advocates: one for students, one for parents of developmentally disabled kids, and one for patients in long-term care.

Two were terrifically helpful.

One was not especially helpful as an advocate, but gave us a great deal of information concerning law and school practice we wouldn't have known without her.

If I had to bet, I'd say that once school choice comes to pass (at the moment I'm thinking school choice will come to pass) we'll also create better means of making real information about individual schools available to parents.

Easily available.

++++++++

Unless ideology gums up the works, that is.

Ed school ideology is all-pervasive and to some degree all-persuasive; it's not going away any time soon. Who's to say the Advocates & Ombudsmen & state-funded informational websites that will come along won't be constructivist, too?

If experience is a guide, they will be.

Hirsch is good on this point. Hirsch traces ed school philosophy to the Romantics and argues that ed schools wouldn't be able to impose their vision on nearly every public and private school in the country if the American people didn't already believe the same things constructivists believe.

Here's Hirsch:

Our nation was born in the Enlightenment but bred in the Romantic period....

The word natural has been a term of honor in our country ever since our forebears elevated "nature" and "natural" to a status that had earlier been occupied by divine law. Following the Colonial period, during the heady days of the early 1800s, the most influential thinkers in New England were no longer writers like Jonathan Edwards, who had exhorted us to follow the commandments of God's law, but writers like Emerson and Thoreau, who admonished us to develop ourselves according to nature. That was a hugely important shift in our mental orientation. Vernon Parrington titled the second volume of his masive intellectual history of the United States The Romantic Revolution in America, 1800-1860, and his use of the term revolution accurately estimates the fundamental change that took place in the American attitude to nature and to education.

The fundamental idea of romanticism is that there isn't any boundary between the natural and the divine. Jonathan Edwards emphatically did not see nature and the natural as being either reliable or divine. In his famous 1741 sermon called "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," he cautions us against the sinful "natural man" and contrasts an imperfect "nature" with divine "grace," which is a special supern atural dispensation that sinful "natural man" must seek if he is to be saved. In the nineteenth century, by contrast, American Romantics like Emerson, Whitman, and even our great educational reformer Horace Mann thought that if you followed nature, in life and in education, you really were following the divine. There were no natural sinners. Sin was a product of civilization.

Observation: it is impossible to grow up on a farm and think nature is your friend.

We used to sweat through every summer Waiting For Rain; inevitably, when rain was late coming, my dad's temper would ignite.

I remember one day hearing explosions towards the front of the house. Minutes later my sister came sobbing and hiccuping into our bedroom.

"I'm never going to marry a man who depends on the weather!" she gasped out a couple of words at a time, in between those involuntary air-gulps that seize up the lungs of a child who's been crying really hard.

I'm an Enlightenment baby.

today's quotation

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

Flannery O'Connor

new blog format

Ok... got it up. This thread is for any suggestions.

I think that the title bar should be a little bit smaller.

Are the fonts ok?

There is a recent comments and recent posts widget that can be added to the side, is it needed?

What order for the sidebar categories?

Colors?

Catherine has final say on all suggestions.

Going to work for an hour.

Hope you guys like it.

Rory

cruelty + no imagination = NYC principal

I found this story so ridiculous on the face of it I couldn't think of anything to say about it. How on earth does a principal tell a special education student (or any student) that he doesn't "have the brains" to accomplish something?" But my friend Schoolgal, who's actually endured experienced spelling bees, had this to say:

Why was it only one class participated in the bee? Usually the whole 5th grade does it in class and then we send 2 winners to compete in the grade contest (usually held in the auditorium).

Principals usually select a teacher to be in charge. The teacher then informs the grade to hold a spelling bee in class. Then their 2 top spellers compete in a grade competition usually held in the auditorium. In this case, this was not done at first. Only one teacher (the special ed teacher) did it, and that's when the principal realized she did not follow the procedure and held a grade contest.

By telling the first child he was not good enough I think she scared off the first and second place winners who backed out of the regional competition. I believe the child in question came in 3rd. (given that there were probably only 4 classes competing).

This principal was more about her image than anything else. The next level was the region, and many children would be eliminated on the first round, not just her school.

If this principal had any savvy, she would have gotten a coach for this kid and made a big fuss over the fact that this child is special ed--a missed opportunity to be proud of the achievement!

Instead she berated the kid and now denies the conversation took place.

I was very impressed with these comments. As cruel as I thought the principal had been, she turns out to have been blessed with a complete lack of foresight as well. No wonder she moved up so high in a system where people needed to ask permission before dialing 911.

HTML guides

Lynn asked for simple guides to html code.

Here's my list:

<a href= "http://www.w3schools.com" >Visit W3Schools.com!

HTML special characters

HTML codes - Characters and symbols

Table of character entity references in HTML 4

Character entity references defined in HTML 4

24 Character entity references in HTML 4

The Most Popular Character Entities

Mathematical, Greek, and Symbolic characters for HTML

Theme Viewer

Theme Viewer?

Hey!

Maybe I should set up an Irvington Schools blog with a pink stripy theme!

Just to keep 'em guessing.

can't search comments

I have just this moment discovered that we cannot search Comments.

drat

Of course, it will be just my luck that Ken or Rory or someone will know of a handy-dandy widget that would instantly correct the situation.

I am planning to discover the meaning of "widget" ASAP.

Speaking of which (speaking of "ASAP," I mean) the Weekend Journal has an article on a husband-and-wife team who track internet acronyms. ($)

You can see their work at Acronym Finder.

Maybe now I can find out what or whom the homeschoolers are talking about when they bring up their "DHs" and "DDs."

[pause]

Forget it.

They've got 12 pages for DD alone.

online speed of reading test

Of course, it's an ONLINE speed-of-reading test, so since people read 25% slower on computers^* you should probably add 25% to your score.

(hey! maybe I should go ask a U.S. middle schooler to do that for me!)

+++++++

hmm....

rightwingprof's recent revelation that he is a severe non-fan of Jakob Nielsen has aroused my curiosity.

After stumbling across & reading this post, however, I'm still wondering.

Nevertheless, I for one do not want rightwingprof putting any time into explaining the deficiencies of Jakob Nielsen's many and varied usability manifestoes until he finishes up with Ricky, part 2.

________________

^* according to Jakob Nielsen who is on probationary status around here, it seems

practice tests for Accuplacer

Accuplacer is the standardized test no one ever hears about; it's the test everyone entering a community college takes.

My sister thinks entering students may actually be required by law to take the Accuplacer. Her 8th grade daughter signed up for two courses at their community college this fall, and she had to take the test even though she's still in middle school and was enrolling in Spanish I and Voice.

My sister may be right about a legal requirement, at least for some states if not all.

In any case, zillions of people take the Accuplacer, but you never hear a word about it.

Nor does there appear to be a roaring test-prep industry for Accuplacer tests, even though your results on the test determine absolutely whether you do or do not get to enroll in college.

If you flunk, you can't enroll.

You can enroll in the school's pre-college courses, but pre-college courses aren't college. They're high school that you're paying for.^*

Apparently the idea that anyone can enroll in community colleges is one of the misconceptions high school students and their parents share.

Not true.

The rule is: anyone who passes the Accuplacer can enroll in community college. (The College Puzzle puts it this way: "Students usually must take placement tests at community colleges in order to qualify for college-level work.")


what's on the Accuplacer?

Tonight I was trying to get Christian signed up for his next course at Westchester Community College. (He's still fiddling with financial aid, so it will be just one course this winter). Last summer Christian passed the Accuplacer reading test, failed the math. He's supposed to be working his way through Saxon Homeschool Math 5/4, and until a couple of months ago was working his way through Saxon Homeschool Math 5/4, but lately he's stalled.

Everyone's stalled except me, and although I haven't stalled I've slowed.


math woe

I'm going to have to crack the whip if there's any chance of averting a Math Catastrophe around here.

Tonight Christopher melted down because he couldn't figure out how to do a problem Christian made up: "If 5 babies are born every 10 seconds, how many are born in 1 minute?"

Something like that.

This came up because yesterday Christopher had no idea how to do a real-world problem concerning babies: If 1 baby is born every 12 seconds, how many are born every minute?

1 baby per 12 seconds is apparently the actual rate of babies being born in the U.S. according to Ed.

(Just in case you're looking for a cool description of how to estimate how many babies are born per minute in the U.S., it's here. At least, I think it's cool. I leave it to our resident math brains to decide.)

Christopher had no idea how to solve this problem. "12 x 60?" he said.

Ed says the accelerated math curriculum is so incurably procedural that the kids approach word problems the way they'd approach a dartboard; they pick a procedure, fling it across the room, and hope it hits the target not the wall.

Christian didn't know how to do the baby problem, either, at first.

"12 x 60?" he said.

Before I could start banging my head against the wall he decided he could answer the question skip-counting by 12s up to 60.

That was a relief.

Anyway, tonight I got worried about what exactly is on the Accuplacer math test. Christian has to take a math course to get his Teaching Assistant Certificate, which is his immediate goal, and he has to pass the Accuplacer test to take the course.

Christian wants to buy the textbook to see what he needs to know. That's a good idea, but since we couldn't do that tonight and couldn't even look at it on Amazon because we didn't know the title I decided to see if there was an Accuplacer test prep book I could take a look at.

Apparently there's not.

I find this bizarre. People's lives are hanging on the results of the Accuplacer, and no one's ever heard of it or written a test prep manual telling you what's on it or how close you are to being able to pass it.

The good news is that I found what looks like a terrific website for Accuplacer test prep. You can take a free online self-assessment test on 31 different scales including Algebra II. I thought I saw somewhere that Accuplacer also tests college-level math, but I don't see it now.

I took the Algebra 1 test & missed one of 20. Careless error.

May try algebra 2 tomorrow.

College Placement and the College Puzzle of placement tests

____________

^* high school you're paying for again

How to change the system

Now that I've got your attention, the answer is: I don't know.

Last year Ed talked to Kent Barwick ($), who is past president of the Municipal Art Society, the major organization working on creating a livable city.

Ed says Mr. Barwick set him straight on all kinds of things.

For one, Ed had always thought public works projects were easier to get off the ground in France because the French government is so powerful.

Wrong.

Barwick told him that the Public Authorities in New York state are far more powerful than any government. The Authorities have few political or democratic checks on their actions.

Apparently they do what they want to do, and they don't have to answer a lot of questions while they do it.


Caro on Moses

Barwick also told Ed that the book to read if you want to understand local politics - any local politics, large or small - is Robert Caro's 1344-page biography of Robert Moses.

Ed did read it, and the book was a revelation.

In a nutshell, in local politics the various "actors" - banks, governments, unions, political machines, and so on - typically have a converging interest in extracting more money from taxpayers to use as they see fit and to manage their relationships with one another.

In the case of Robert Moses, there were 5 Actors: Moses, the banks, the labor unions, construction companies, and the Democratic machine.

Moses wanted to build parks, highways, and bridges; banks wanted deposits of funds to pay for parks, highways, and bridges; construction companies and unions wanted contracts to build parks, highways, and bridges; the Democratic machine wanted jobs on Moses' parks, highways, and bridge projects to dispense to members of the Party. (Moses was himself a Republican.)

Taxpayers weren't asked whether they wanted or needed all of these things; in some cases the projects Moses undertook were not only unwanted by voters but were actively opposed.

These entities—Moses, the banks, the unions, the construction companies, and the Democratic machine—weren’t the same entity; they had the potential for conflict. What prevented conflict—what kept operations smooth and conflict-free—was money.

Taxpayer money.

The people who were footing the bill were the one entity that did not have a voice.


how does this work in public schools?

Probably like this.

In my own town there are three Actors:

• administration
• school board
• teacher's union
  

These three entities share an interest in raising taxes, in part because money minimizes conflict. The administration can buy the things it wants to buy (TRAILBLAZERS textbooks, assistant superintendents for curriculum and technology); the school board can buy things it wants to buy (million-dollar weight rooms); the teacher's union seems to have been so well taken care of that most parents here are unaware of the fact that we have a union.

Many of these purchases are items parents don't want; in some cases, e.g. TRAILBLAZERS, these purchases are actively opposed by parents.

The expenditures we do want - another Earth Sciences teacher so everyone in the 8th grade can take Earth Sciences instead of the 48 children allowed to do so now, say - may or may not happen, depending on whether the District happens to want these things, too.


what does this mean?

I don't know!

I've come to believe, however, that it's essential to get your analysis as right as you can make it, which is why I now reject the "Washington consensus." (That's a story for another day.)

Once you see that entities we take to be competing or conflicting (school board "versus" union) have converging interests, things make more sense.

It makes sense that, in the recent athletic fields bond vote here, the union would vote for further public indebtedness, would publicize its vote, and would telephone the "parent leading the committee to defeat the bond"^* to pressure her.

Public indebtedness threatens a district's ability to meet pension obligations and to raise taxes for salaries & classroom supplies, so in theory the union ought to have mixed feelings about a new bond proposal.

That it did not can be explained by the union's converging interest in collaborating with the board and the administration to carry on increasing taxes for all projects and obligations large and small.


what can citizens do about converging interests?

Thoughts anyone?

Apparently there is a Straphanger's Union in the city that has actually managed to make subway riders into an Actor to which attention must be paid.

I can see where a Parents' Union might work.....

What I can't see is how a Parents' Union might be created.

That's about as far as I've gotten.


* there was no committee
robertmoses

why school choice isn't the end all

Minding the (Achievement) Gap:

"One of the series that created the most ripples was 'Inside Choice Schools,' a seven-part report in 2005, fifteen years after Milwaukee launched the voucher program, detailing students' experiences at voucher-supported schools. Borsuk and fellow reporters visited all but 9 of the 115 voucher-supported schools at the time -- all that would allow them in -- and described what they saw. The schools ranged from excellent, he recalls, to 'startlingly bad,' such as one Christian school in a dimly lit church basement without classroom walls or any clear curriculum. Through interviews, the reporters found that Milwaukee parents generally want a school with a cozy feel and value this intimacy over teacher credentials. Borsuk wrote (with colleague Sarah Carr), 'Parental choice by itself does not assure quality. Some parents pick bad schools -- and keep their children in them long after it is clear the schools are failing.'" (emphasis mine)

Unlike many school reform advocates, I am not totally convinced by "vouchers" as a solution to our education problem. While I agree that competition on a wide scale level does have an overall positive effect on the quality of products that people buy, on smaller scale, when it comes to individual services or goods people can make some surprisingly poor choices.

Unfortunately, because education deals with people's children, parents are often to emotionally attached, to close to the situation, to make rational decisions. Just as people make poor choices to get themselves deep in debt to buy flashy cars or the "right" clothes, people don't make decisions about their children's education based on quantitative measures.

Part of the problem may be that there is no good easy to find, widely published information on how well any school or school district performs. Instead parents rely on subjective feelings to judge schools. Do they like the teachers? Is the playground well kept? Do they use lots of cool edubabble?

Witness the success of good charter school systems like KIPP or Achievement First. You would think that parents would be rioting to get their kids in the schools or demanding that their public schools adopt the same policies. Yes there are waiting lists, but there is nowhere near the urgency that you would expect.

Imagine if a new cell phone provider came out and was able to offer better call quality, state of the art phones, double the minutes, at half the cost of your current one. People would be dropping their current service in droves and scrambling to get on the new plan.

When I first moved to Sumter, South Carolina the general consensus was (and still is) that Sumter High School was way better than rural Crestwood High School. Sumter High School had all the town money, it has the good football team, great buildings, and most importantly it was 55% white vs 43% white at Crestwood.



But... if you are savvy enough to look find the the school report cards, you find something different. I compiled this table based on Sumter HS and Crestwood HS 2006 school report cards.

As you can see, on almost every category, Crestwood HS kicks Sumter HS's ass. In the two categories that Sumter HS has the edge, it's only by the slimmest of margins.

You would think that parents who attend kids attend school at Sumter HS, especially black parents, would be raising hell, but no! 80% of parents who attend Sumter HS are happy with the learning environment, whereas at Crestwood HS only 44% are.

It's numbers like these that depress me. A rural, mostly minority school can provide a better education than the city's mostly white school, and yet the perception is exactly the opposite.

This doesn't mean that school choice is a bad thing. There are some parents who are smart enough to make educated decisions. Eventually market forces will have a positive affect. Even if the parents don't see the differences, the school administrators will learn from each other.

I have always been an optimist, and I am convinced if school reform advocates continue to yell loud enough that eventually our country can at least come closer to having the education system that it deserves.

I'm so confused!

Baltimore Sun: SAT scores well in predicting college success

The much-maligned but ever-influential SAT -- under fire nationally amid concerns over its fairness -- received positive marks yesterday in a report that gauged the test's power to predict long-term college success in Maryland.

Designed to forecast a student's ability to perform college-level work, the SAT is also an accurate predictor of retention and graduation rates at all of the state's four-year colleges and universities, according to an analysis of recent student data prepared for the Maryland Higher Education Commission.

'The higher the SAT scores of students, the greater the likelihood that they not only returned for a second year of study but eventually earned a baccalaureate as well,' the report said.

wfrv.com: UW Chancellor Defends Affirmative Action

(AP) MADISON High school grades and test scores aren't good predictors of a student's performance in college, which forces admission officials to look at other factors, University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor John Wiley told a legislative committee reviewing affirmative action in the state Thursday.

Wiley's appearance before the Special Committee on Affirmative Action comes as UW-System regents consider a new admissions policy that would give greater weight to nonacademic factors such as race. UW-Madison admissions officials already perform this so-called holistic review.

Wiley cited data that he said showed that someone who gets a 4.0 grade point average in high school could earn anything from failing to honors marks in college. He added that ACT and SAT scores mean nothing in predicting first-year grades.

(Cross posted at parentalcation)

formatting and sidebar

Catherine asked me to look into adding a sidebar. I tweaked a format and came up with this.

Its pretty close to this, but not exact. Any inputs?

Update: Spanned header across page, so not sidebar title is even with date of top post.

suggestions for undergrads

If any of you have kids (or know kids) who are getting ready to go to college, you may find this helpful.

out of the woodwork

Some anonymous knucklehead, claiming to be an NCTM insider, just left a comment to this post on D-Ed Reckoning discussing the new NCTM focal points. Either he or she screwed up the terminology and/or players or I am very confused:

Re: the phrase "quick recall"--as someone involved in reviewing the CFPs, I should let you in on the fact the the phrase was a compromise to those traditionalists who couldn't deal with the phrase "automaticity of facts" or "automatic recall" or even "fast recall"--etc. [Ed: Huh?] "Quick recall" is the phrase used by those who support what appear to be the ideas expressed in your blog.... You cannot believe how many versions of this phrase were discussed and debated before NCTM made this compromise with those who are part of the Mathematically Correct camp....

I guess I would be critical too if I opposed the efforts of Skip Fennell and NCTM. I would be kicking myself for not coming up with and publishing the Focal Points myself.

For those who criticize the CFPs, and only comment on statements printed in various biased articles (some of which are taken out of context), I encourage you to read the 41 page document. [Ed: which I linked to and did, in fact, read] It's a free download. Most of the reporters, radio-show hosts, and journalists that I've spoken to in my state have not actually read the entire document, but focused more on the reform-traditional controversies that have been part of the Math Wars over "how to teach mathematics"--and not "what to teach."

I encourage you to spend some real time with the document (http://www.nctm.org/focalpoints), then develop a real opinion....

teaching problem solving to second graders, part 2

(Part 1 is here.)

Now the students are ready to start solving simple comparison problems with variables.

First the students are taught how to translate a phrase like "T is less than H" or "R is more than W" onto a number family.

The lesson might be taught like this:

Sometimes we refer to a number without telling which number it is. We can call that number J or B or any other letter. Here is a sentence that tells about two numbers: J is less than M.

We don't know which numbers J and M are, but we can put those numbers in a number family. J is less than M. So J is the small number. M is the bug number.

The big number goes at the end of the arrow. The small number goes close to the big number. Here's how you write it.


Then an example using "more," like "R is more than W," is taught.

After the students are firm on this skill, they are ready to tackle a translation like "J is 18 more/larger than K."

This must be a difficult skill because in CMC they scaffold the instruction by circling the number which tells how much more. Like this:


Eventually the scaffolding is faded.

To translate the problem, the students are instructed to ignore the circled number. This makes the problem identical to one they know how to translate -- "J is larger than K." They know that this can be translated into:


Then they are taught to place the circled number, 18, into the only available spot in the number family. Like this:


Once the students are firm on this skill, they can be given a problem that they know how to solve like "F is 12 more than 56." Now they should be able to translate this to a number family and solve for F.

Then the problem can be made more difficult by specifying two variables and the value of one of the variables, such as "R is 250 more than P. R is 881. What number is P?"

Finally, the students are ready to start solving real word problems like "Fran was 14 years older than Ann. Ann was 13 years old. How many years old was Fran?"

Here's how they are taught how to solve these kinds of problems:


This is a good stopping point. This represents a month worth of instructional time for the lessons and the practice. That's for lower performers, higher performers can probably learn this in about a week. Bear in mind that the students are learning and practicing about 10 other strands of material while all this is going on.

The value of this problem solving technique (like Singapore Math's bar graphs) is twofold. First, it reduces solving math problems to a systematic process; this will clarify the student's thought process. Second, the use of the written number families frees up the novice student's working memory which is taxed heavily in solving word problems. Given enough practice, these skills will become automatic for the student and lodged in long term memory. When this occurs, the burden on the student's working memory is becomes much less and the need for the number family prompt is diminished.

Teaser for next lesson: The students learn how to solve word problems like "Jerry weighed 72 pounds. Terry weighed 94 pounds. How much heavier is Terry than Jerry?" To solve problems like this, the students are taught the concept of moving forward and backward along the number family line.

pluses and minuses equal division

I came across this article on the math wars in the Oregonian. As usual, it's false dichotomy-ariffic and is chock full of he-said-she-said nonsense; however, this blurb caught my eye:

Some parents want to do away with reform math. Others want both reform and traditional math offered, so parents and students can choose the one that works for them.

This is what I don't understand. Any school with enough students to support two classes can offer both kinds of math classes. This would conveniently put an end to all the tensions and offer parents a real choice. Parents could choose to have their kids taught in a "drill and kill" or in a "rainbows and lollipops" class. It's not like this would cost any extra money or effort on the part of schools.

math night coming right up, part 2

I wonder how many parents know that Math Nights are part of the package?

Parents

Be pro-active with parents. Don’t wait until complaints hit. People have done a lot of things to involve parents, from math nights to big math carnivals, where the kids teach the activities to the parents. There are letters in the program that go home to parents. In one district, the coordinator ran a six-week course for parents and taught them mathematics, essentially. It depends on what will work with your audience. Teachers need to communicate with parents, making sure that the parents see the math facts practice and that the arithmetic they value is visible.

I'm positive most parents don't know the backpack letters are pre-fab.

math night coming right up

math night coming right up

About a month ago two parents posted an online petition addressed to our Superintendent requesting a district meeting to discuss math curriculum and pedagogy in Irvington schools.

The superintendent did not respond.

It seems that math in Irvington is on her mind, however.

Dear K-5 Parents,

As you know, the mathematics Trailblazers program was adopted by the Board of Education in 2004 and is in its final phase of implementation this year in Grade 5. The District has provided strong support to teachers to ensure excellent initial training and ongoing professional development, and the results to date, are very positive. [ed.: time to take a listening tour of Irvington!] As with any new initiative, however, it is imperative that we continue to monitor children’s progress and to provide ongoing opportunities to keep parents informed as well as to continually evaluate the program’s effectiveness.

As part of our commitment, there will be a Math Information night for K-5 parents on January 22, 2007 at 7:00 PM in the Dows Lane Library hosted by staff from Dows Lane and Main Street Schools. Teachers will present information about the Trailblazers program, and parents will be able to ask questions to which they will receive responses that evening or soon after the session. [ed: how about parents provide information while teachers listen?] As the date draws near, a separate flyer will be sent home by building principals requesting confirmation of your attendance.

In addition, since students in the current elementary program are not tracked and those in the current Middle School program are in leveled classes, the staff recognizes that the transition to 6th grade is a valid concern [ed.: as opposed to an invalid concern] on the part of parents and one that will soon be addressed. Therefore, parents of current fifth graders will have an opportunity to attend a meeting in February 2007 to discuss this topic. Once again, information will be sent home later this month.

I hope that you will make every effort to attend these important parent meetings.

As always, we value the input of parents and look forward to these opportunities to hear from you and to be able to respond and work collaboratively with you as we move forward.

Thank you for your ongoing support and cooperation and best wishes to you and your families for a healthy and Happy New Year.

Sincerely,
Superintendent of Schools

+++++++

note:

Asking questions and receiving answers is not the same thing as "working collaboratively" and "moving forward."

In case you were wondering.

+++++++

email to the Board:

I am disheartened by this communication from our superintendent.

The wording suggests that the administration draws a distinction between valid and invalid parent concerns.

Valid concerns will be addressed; invalid concerns will not.

You may be aware that our superintendent has refused to acknowledge an online petition signed by 34 parents requesting a district meeting to discuss math curriculum and pedagogy.

This is our problem.

The administration stages “Information” meetings to address issues it wishes to address; it dismisses out of hand direct requests for meetings from parents whose issues it wishes to ignore.

And yet all of us are expected to provide “ongoing support and cooperation” to the administration come what may.

Support and cooperation cannot be assumed or commanded. Support and cooperation are precious forms of good will that can only be earned by listening to and acting upon parent goals for our children’s education, not by “explaining” district practices.

Our district’s mission statement opens with the words, “The mission of the Irvington School District is to create a challenging and supportive learning environment in which each student attains his or her highest potential for academic achievement.”

If this mission is to mean anything, parents must share with the administration a clear understanding of what each student’s highest potential actually is.

When it comes to math, a first answer can be found in the international standard for achievement, which is algebra mastered by the end of 8th grade for at least 80% of students.

At the KIPP Academy in the Bronx 80% of graduating 8th graders, all of them disadvantaged black and Hispanic children who enter the school two years below grade level, pass the Regents Math A examination.

Here in Irvington only 35% of our students are prepared to take Regents Math A before entering the 9th grade; few or none of these students are black and/or Hispanic. I can think of no way to increase these numbers using the spiral curriculum we currently inflict upon accelerated middle school students, their parents, and their tutors. If we wish Irvington students to be on par with their same-age peers in Europe, Asia, and the Bronx we will have to adopt:

• a curriculum such as Saxon Math that is built upon the principles of cognitive science

• a pedagogy that stresses formative assessment, distributed practice, and above all district responsibility for individual student learning
  

Many parents are aware that their children are not learning what they could and should be learning in Irvington schools. It is essential for the administration to solicit, respect, and act upon parent concerns where curriculum and pedagogy are involved.

Thanks much --

Catherine Johnson

thank you for your ongoing support and cooperation
thank you for your cooperation and support in this endeavor
today's form letter from the school

da bomb

Well my blatent sucking up to Carolyn Catherine worked and I was invited to join KTM2.

Of course I will try and only post my highest quality posts (relative for me) over here. To start...
Comparing Fractions with Cross Multiplication (originally posted at parentalcation)

Today my 6th grader asked for with her math homework, specifically how to "cross multiply fractions with whole numbers". I wasn't quite sure what she was talking about, so I took a look at her homework. I saw that she had 10 problems to compare fractions with different denominators, some with whole numbers. I started to explain how to find a common denominator, etc... but she got really upset with me.

"Thats not how my teacher showed us", she said. "My teacher told us to cross multiply."

I still had no idea what she was talking about, so I went to check with my girlfriend, Shannon, to see if she knew what our daughter was talking about. But Shannon was as confused as I was.

Both of us being confused, we did a quick google and came across this explanation of the process from mathleague.com.

Comparing Fractions
1. To compare fractions with the same denominator, look at their numerators. The larger fraction is the one with the larger numerator.
2. To compare fractions with different denominators, take the cross product. The first cross-product is the product of the first numerator and the second denominator. The second cross-product is the product of the second numerator and the first denominator. Compare the cross products using the following rules:
a. If the cross-products are equal, the fractions are equivalent.
b. If the first cross product is larger, the first fraction is larger.
c. If the second cross product is larger, the second fraction is larger.

Example:
Compare the fractions 3/7 and 1/2.The first cross-product is the product of the first numerator and the second denominator: 3 × 2 = 6.
The second cross-product is the product of the second numerator and the first denominator: 7 × 1 = 7.
Since the second cross-product is larger, the second fraction is larger.

Example:
Compare the fractions 13/20 and 3/5.
The first cross-product is the product of the first numerator and the second denominator: 5 × 13 = 65.
The second cross-product is the product of the second numerator and the first denominator: 20 × 3 = 60.
Since the first cross-product is larger, the first fraction is larger.

Well, we figured it out and were able to help her finish her homework... her way, but we are rather conflicted about it.

Though the system works, we aren't quite sure what the purpose of it is. It almost seemed to us to be cheating. Though the system works, neither one of us could give a mathematical explanation of why. Finding a common denominator is relatively easy to explain, and is also an essential skill when it comes to adding unlike fractions. Is this new math, really really old math, or something in between?


rory @ parentalcation

p.s. does anyone else want a sidebar for the blog?

Carolyn on Everyday Math

I just noticed this comment from Carolyn on rightwingprof's Ricky post:

Ben learned the range, maximum, minimum, mode, and median every year from 1st grade through 4th grade. In the 5th year they learned to divide and so they taught them to calculate the mean. This is still going on in middle school -- but in the curriculum they are using, they do seem to give it less emphasis.

You brought back my Everyday Math experiences with Ben in grade school -- every day he'd come home with something in homework that they hadn't been taught. I remember the day he came home with division problems, when he hadn't been taught long division. It turned out they were intended to do the divisions with calculators -- that left them more time for learning higher-level skills like calculating the max, min, median, etc..

It's a nightmare.

We're almost halfway through Year 2 in Irvington's "Phase 4" accelerated math class & the kids are dropping like flies. (Not quite, but close enough. Kids who managed last year's class pretty well are seeing their grades drop; more tutors are being hired.)

Even Ed is now talking about hiring our Own Private Math Teacher.

Which won't do much good, seeing as how even Our Own Private Math Teacher will have to practice reactive teaching to get Christopher through the tests in one piece.

tags

Any thoughts on "tag" categories?

They're listed at the bottom of the page.)

issues, I've got issues

Hi everyone -

I just got back from Evanston (no time to see friends - non-stop, whirlwind, get Mom set up in nursing home action!) - we have 30 members!

That's fantastic!

Question: Susan and Lynn both report having trouble with their Google accounts -

Here's Susan: My Google thingy doesn't remember my password. When I do a new one with the same user name and password I'm fine, but the minute I go away and come back I have trouble.

And here's Lynn: Despite having created a google account, Blogger won't recognize me as a member of KTM, the sequel and allow me to post. Do you know what is wrong?

Is anyone else having problems? (I just had a problem signing in; I had to use the Blogger Dashboard to do so. I'm not sure anyone else can access the Dashboard, though.)

Let me know.

Then someone else can figure them out!