letter to Andrew Rosenthal

re: Texas Republicans and "Knowledge-Based Education," I've sent this email to an address that I hope belongs to Andrew Rosenthal:

Hi -

I am a writer (Animals in Translation; Animals Make Us Human) and an instructor of freshman composition.

My class blog is here.

My husband, Ed Berenson, is Director of the Institute of French Studies at NYU (his new book is The Statue of Liberty: A Transatlantic Story).

Both of us strongly support “knowledge-based education,” and we are likely in the majority of parents, including liberal parents living in New York.

Although it’s not obvious from the platform’s wording, knowledge – not critical thinking per se – is the issue the Texas Republican Party has taken a position on. The phrase “critical thinking” means something quite different inside public education than out, and I’m hoping you’ll consider writing a follow-up to clarify.

Boiling it down, there are two fundamental issues in the ‘education wars,’ one involving values, the other involving empirical research on the brain.

In terms of values, a majority of parents (and taxpayers and liberal arts professors) want schools to transmit to students knowledge of the liberal arts disciplines.

The K-12 establishment disagrees. Education professors [tend to] believe knowledge is changing so quickly that material taught today will be obsolete tomorrow, so content doesn’t matter. Instead of teaching knowledge, schools should teach students to ‘think critically’ and to ‘learn how to learn.’

(If you're interested, I compare my own district's ‘content doesn’t matter’ 7th grade reading program to the Core Knowledge reading sequence here. My district spends $29K per pupil.)

In terms of research on the brain, the K-12 establishment believes that ‘knowing’ and ‘thinking’ are separate functions. In the age of the internet, they argue, there is no reason for students to 'memorize' and 'regurgitate' knowledge because you can find any information you need on Google.

That sounds logical, but cognitive science has shown that it’s wrong. In reality, it's not possible to think about content stored on Google. While you are thinking, content must be stored inside 'working memory,' and working memory for “external,” unlearned content is tiny -- while working memory for knowledge stored in long-term memory is much larger.

In short, “knowledge” stored in the brain is biologically different from “knowledge” stored outside the brain, and the difference matters to the quality of thought. Thinking depends on knowing.

Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham’s article for teachers is worth reading:
Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach?

In closing, I’ll mention that Ed headed the California History/Social Science Project in the ‘90s. CHSSP was a state-wide effort by the superintendent of schools to remove professional development from education schools and put it in the hands of disciplinary specialists – in other words, to make professional development “knowledge-based.”

I’m sure Ed would be happy to talk to you if you’re interested.
Hoping you’ll look into this further and consider writing a follow-up –

Catherine Johnson

Of course, I've omitted the question of direct instruction in values...

update: group learning, IQ, and performance

I added a chart to the post on group learning:

The blue bar represents the low performers, the red bar high performers. All have the same measured IQ (126), and at the beginning of the study all are performing well below the level their IQ would predict. The higher performers then recover, and their performance increases to a "126" level. The the low performers do not recover, and their performance remains suppressed.

instructivist weighs in

re: Texas Republican Party's purported opposition to 'critical thinking'

The indignation exhibited in the [NYT] comments is misplaced. In the bizarre Thoughtworld of educationists nothing is what it appears to be. Being indignant about a ban on "critical thinking" is like being indignant about a ban on "democracy" in The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea).

In the Thoughtworld of educationists there is endless prattle about "critical thinking" but this "critical thinking" is taking place in a vacuum. Educationists are notoriously hostile to knowledge. They want "critical thinking" to take place without anything to think about. These so-called higher-order thinking skills (HOTS) are the pretentious upper parts of Bloom's Taxonomy with the lower parts typically cut off.

comments needed

No Comment Necessary: Texas GOP’s 2012 Platform Opposes Teaching “Critical Thinking Skills”
By ANDREW ROSENTHAL

I say it's time for somebody out there to think critically about thinking critically.

AND SEE:
Critical Thinking Not Possible Without Content Knowledge

group work, IQ, and underperformance

re: group work lowers IQ

I've skimmed the article (free online).

Assuming the findings are confirmed in other studies (I suspect they will be), this is bad news.

Set-up

• Subjects had the same IQ: 126.
• They were put in small groups of 5 and introduced to each other.
• They took an IQ test with no feedback as to how they did.
• Then they took a second computer-administered IQ test.
• After each question, they were told whether they got the answer right or wrong.
• At the same time, they were also given their rank inside the group (rank determined by each person's # of correct answers).
• They were also given their rank vis a vis 1 particular member of the group, chosen "pseudorandomly."
• 2 people had brain scans during the test-with-feedback condition.

Results

• Everyone did worse in the beginning. Across the board. Everyone. Everyone did worse than his/her measured ability.
• As the test went on, some people recovered. Their performance went back up to the level predicted by their IQ scores. 
• The others never improved. They started low, and they stayed low. 
• Females were more likely to start low and stay low than males. 
• For high performers, brain scans showed activity in the amygdala (likely fear), decreasing over time. (That is, they were likely feeling less fear, perhaps growing more confident.)
• For high performers, activity in the lateral PFC increases over time. Activity in lateral PFC is associated with IQ tasks, with working memory tasks, and with increased task difficulty. 

So. All told, membership in a small group produced a net decrease in number of correct answers compared to what you would predict for the same 5 people working alone.

Everyone's performance dropped at the outset.

Some people recovered, others didn't.

The people who recovered simply went back up to where they had been going in, before experimenters assigned them to a small group.

Questions

• How small is small? Would group of 20 students in whole class instruction show the same pattern? 25 students? 30? 
• If so ... yikes.
• In the wake of this study, mixed-ability groups strike me as an even worse idea than I've thought in the past. Lower ability children in a mixed-ability group are going to be getting constant negative feedback about their status vis a vis the higher ability children. On the other hand, the study did not include a condition that manipulated feedback in this manner. That would be interesting.
• Assuming this study picked up on a personality difference (which we don't know, of course), what would happen if you grouped the 'nervous' kids together, putting the 'confident' kids in their own group? Would two groups still separate out in this way?
• Would same-sex groups change the results?
• What does this tell us about grades and grading? 

The blue bar represents the low performers, the red bar high performers. All have the same measured IQ (126), and at the beginning of the study all are performing well below the level their IQ would predict. The higher performers then recover, and their performance increases to a "126" level. The the low performers do not recover, and their performance remains suppressed.

Implicit signals in small group settings and their impact on the expression of cognitive capacity and associated brain responses

group learning: the sine qua non

I was just telling Ed about the study on group projects & IQ, and he said that already, in the 1990s, when he headed the California History Social Science Project (under the umbrella of the California Subject Matter Project), group learning was drilled into him as the absolute best way to teach.

Ed also tells me that Phil Daro (B.A. in English), was head of the original math project, and Bill Honig got rid of him: kicked him upstairs & hired a real math professor from San Diego State to take charge. Ed doesn't remember his name now.

The point of the Subject Matter Project was to take professional development away from ed schools and consultants and put it in the hands of content specialists.

Phil Daro wasn't a content specialist.

He still isn't a content specialist but he's chairing the Mathematics College and Career Readiness Standards Work Group for the new Common Core standards.

AND SEE:
Calculators? Don't Answer

group learning lowers IQ

Chris came into the bedroom this morning to announce that group projects make you dumber. He read it on cracked.com. (Only dimly aware of the existence of cracked.com. Now I'm a fan.)

Sure enough.

AND SEE:
Implicit signals in small group settings and their impact on the expression of cognitive capacity and associated brain responses
Attending meetings lowers IQ: research
Neuroscientists Find That Status within Groups Can Affect IQ
Group Settings Can Diminish Expressions of Intelligence, Especially Among Women, Study Finds
Warning: Meetings May be Bad for Your IQ

just-in-time learning

Barry's new article. In my comment, I left a passage on memory consolidation from John Medina's Brain Rules:

It takes years to consolidate a memory. Not minutes, hours, or days but years. What you learn in first grade is not completely formed until your sophomore year in high school.

The Precision Teaching Book

My copy arrived today!

The Precision Teaching Book by Richard Kubina and Kirsten K. L. Yurich.

From Chapter 0:

Creating a sound educational program, like the Direct Instruction reading program, takes determined effort in the planning, creation, implementation, and subsequent review and revision of the curriculum. In other words, engineering a learning environment expressed by a well balanced, potent curriculum occurs through a reasoned and rational process. Effective learning environments establish desired behavior and require no less than a systematic analysis of human behavior.

You mean...writing an effective curriculum isn't something you can pay teachers a stipend to do for 3 days over the summer?

Even when you hire a Trailblazers consultant from Bedford?

We've had years of strife over Trailblazers here in my district, culminating in the middle school teachers complaining that kids were coming into 6th grade not knowing what they needed to know. In response, the answer was ... not to adopt Singapore Math.

The answer was to "hybridize" Trailblazers during a 3-day curriculum development stint one summer. After hybridization, Trailblazers would no longer be our curriculum; our curriculum would be Irvington Math. Problem solved.

Rejiggering Trailblazers has been an ongoing project. A year or two before we hired the lady from Bedford, I went to a board meeting at which the then-assistant superintendent for curriculum (we've had several), confronting that year's uprising, said impatiently, "People say Trailblazers is our curriculum." She rolled her eyes. "It isn't. We write our own curriculum."

That's been the answer forever: there's no problem with Trailblazers because Trailblazers isn't the curriculum.

In a couple of weeks, I'm off to the precision teaching workshop at Morningside Academy in Seattle...

how to be hap-hap-happy like me

Being very happy does not seem to be a malfunction (Alloy and Abramson, 1979).
source: Very Happy People by Ed Diener and Martin Seligman

Good to know!

("How to be hap-hap-happy like me" is the title of a hilarious book by Merrill Markoe.)

The deathless meme of learning styles

to Michael Weiss's question re: the death of learning styles, palisadesk has this to say:

No, it's far from done. The critique in Psychology Today may mean that some people are wising up, but the meme is deeply entrenched (along with a lot of other mystical ideas about teaching and learning) in K-8 certainly, and perhaps far beyond.

We continue to have workshops and mandatory PD on how to teach to different "learning styles" (fits in well with "differentiation," you see). And since most of the curriculum people seem unaware of research in psychology or cognitive science, even though the whole idea of learning styles and "aptitude-treatment interaction" has been debunked for decades, articles in jounals are not going to affect prevailing opinion.

My district, and others that I know of, requires teachers to identify students' "learning styles" when developing lesson plans, unit plans, intervention plans, or referring student for assessment. Of course there is no real data to support this stereotyping of students -- typically, a student is labeled a "kinesthetic learner" because s/he is out of seat a lot, or likes to play with Lego. "Interpersonal learners" are so identified because they enjoy chatting with their friends, but not on the basis that this socializing actually improves their learning outcomes (in fact the opposite is more usually the case).

I notice that our psychologists, most of whom have Ph.D.'s and know their stuff, are very careful to avoid falling into the "learning styles trap, and will pointedly say that they do not measure this because it is not scientific and has no reliably quantifiable metric. However, their lack of enthusiasm fails to slow down the train. Our IEP forms have a section for "learning style." Needless to say there is no data-based information to enter there.

The absence of evidence is nothing new. Steven Stahl wrote a good article on the topic for American Educator almost 15 years ago, and it made no difference.

The meme has a life of its own, like a virus, and will be hard to dislodge.

Hegemony in action.

math in Bedford

Bedford Math

They're going to teach roman numerals even though roman numerals aren't included in Common Core.

Also, they're choosing between Singapore Math (Math in Focus) and Terc.

oy

AND SEE:
Irvington & Bedford

richest school districts in America

at Huffington Post

super

The superintendent who fought back

The "Learning Styles" Myth

"...the more carefully designed and controlled the study, the less the data supported the hypothesis that matching learning styles to type of instruction mattered."

Source: What type of learner are you? (And why it doesn't matter)

Can we finally stick a fork in this myth? I think it's done.

Pat

A sample of 222 undergraduates was screened for high happiness using multiple confirming assessment filters. We compared the upper 10% of consistently very happy people with average and very unhappy people. The very happy people were highly social, and had stronger romantic and other social relationships than less happy groups. They were more extraverted, more agreeable, and less neurotic, and scored lower on several psychopathology scales of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. Compared with the less happy groups, the happiest respondents did not exercise significantly more, participate in religious activities significantly more, or experience more objectively defined good events. No variable was sufficient for happiness, but good social relations were necessary. Members of the happiest group experienced positive, but not ecstatic, feelings most of the time, and they reported occasional negative moods. This suggests that very happy people do have a functioning emotion system that can react appropriately to life events.
VERY HAPPY PEOPLE
Ed Diener and Martin E.P.  Seligman
Very Happy People (pdf file)

This is a good description of my mom. I always called her a golden retriever because she was naturally cheerful.

My mom once said to me, in the middle of a conversation about the number of kids in our family who have significant problems (and after I had pointed out that optimism was her natural state): "It's true. I always think things are going to get better."

She paused, and thought for a moment.

Then said, "I don't know why," and we both laughed.

That was my mom. Someone needs to bottle the brain chemicals she had.

Hegemony

Hegemony, believe it or not, is a word I encountered frequently in graduate school.

Then, after finishing my Ph.D., I never heard it again, not that I recall.

Lately, though, I've found myself using the word hegemony not infrequently (God help me), using it in sentences like: "The public schools have hegemony." Or, worse: "Education schools have hegemony."

The institution of public education is so immense, so vast, so moneyed, and so intensively peopled that other corners of the culture, institutions and organizations that, by rights, ought to be entirely separate from public education, are not. Other institutions are taking their cues from public education whether they know it or not, and often they don't know it. So we see Everyday Math and Lucy Calkins in Catholic schools, and in charter schools, too.

Worst example for me personally: early on in C's sophomore year at his Jesuit high school, I think. I attended the annual Back to School Mother's Dinner, where the principal, during his remarks, told us that the school had instituted some kind of interdisciplinary required course for entering freshman because "teaching subjects in isolation is wrong."

Teaching subjects in isolation is wrong?!

This from the principal of a Jesuit school?

That's hegemony. The ideas of the ruling class hijack your mind.

Now it appears that the president of the University of Virginia has been pushed out of her job because she is not sufficiently committed to: technology, a core obsession of public schools and the public school establishment.

The Rector and Vice Rector who fired UVa's president seem to have sent each other op eds by David Brooks (writing about education), by John E. Chubb And Terry M. Moe (writing about education), and even by Atul Gawande (who appears to be to policy professionals what Malcolm Gladwell is to business professionals).

David Brooks, for God's sake! These people are reading op eds by David Brooks, and sending each other op eds by David Brooks, and then firing university presidents on the basis of op eds by David Brooks....who is possibly the last pundit on earth I would want anyone listening to on the subject of education.

Although David Brooks attended an elite university himself, although Brooks sends his own children to a Jewish day school, he seems to have no awareness that the values embodied in a major research university (and no doubt in a Jewish day school as well) are directly at odds with the values embodied by Teachers College.

That's hegemony. I haven't set foot inside a public school since the 1970s when I was a lad, but I think what Teachers College thinks.

See, e.g.:
David Brooks has a really bad idea, part 1
David Brooks has a really bad idea, part 2

As for Moe and Chubb, they are knowledgeable people, but they've pinned their hopes for school choice on the "liberating" power of education technology. I sympathize, but Good luck with that.

Moe and Chubb, in my view, have not paid sufficient attention to what history tells us about just how liberating technology in public education has been to date. At least, in this exchange between Moe & Chubb and Larry Cuban, Cuban gets the better of the argument:

LC: In tracking such technological innovations as film, radio, television, videocassettes, and desktop computers over the past half century, I found a common cycle. First, the promoters’ exhilaration splashes over decisionmakers as they purchase and deploy equipment in schools and classrooms. Then academics conduct studies to determine the effectiveness of the innovation as compared to standard practice; they survey teachers and occasionally visit classrooms to see student and teacher use of the innovation. Academics often find that the technological innovation is just as good as—seldom superior to—conventional instruction in conveying information and teaching skills. They also find that classroom use is less than expected. Formal adoption of high-tech innovations does not mean teachers have total access to devices or use them on a daily basis. Such studies often unleash stinging rebukes of administrators and teachers for spending scarce dollars on expensive machinery that fails to display superiority over existing techniques of instruction and, even worse, is only occasionally used.

Few earnest champions of classroom technology understand the multiple and complicated roles teachers perform, address the realities of classrooms within age-graded schools, respect teacher expertise, or consider the practical questions teachers ask about any technological innovation that a school board and superintendent decide to adopt, buy, and deploy.

Public school "technology" is not new.

Online learning is not new.

We've had distance learning for years now -- where's the revolution?

Where's the disruption?

Where's the new revenue stream?

Answer: nowhere. There's no revolution, there's no disruption, and there's certainly no revenue stream. Instead we have Todd Oppenheimer publishing The Computer Delusion in 1997, and Clifford Stoll following up with High Tech Heretic in 2000. It's 2012 now, and they're still right.

Trouble is, nobody knows it, and the flipped classroom is hot! hot! hot! Our pundits expect major research universities to get with the program, and (one) reason our pundits expect major research universities to get with the program is that education schools have hegemony. Pundits receive their thoughts and views from Teachers College.

The only good news I can see in all this is that we still have university presidents who are capable of observing reality and framing a proper argument:

Dr. Sullivan said that online education was no panacea — and indeed, was “surprisingly expensive, has limited revenue potential and unless carefully managed can undermine the quality of instruction.”

Of course, we may not have these people around much longer.

Daniel Willigham on the UVa firing.

update 6/26/2012: Brooks grew up in an academic family. Father was an English professor, mother a traveling history instructor. Today he's recruiting teachers for public schools whose idea of history is this.

help desk: J.C. progress report & question

from California, JC writes:

UNDER THE HEADING OF THEY DO WHAT THEY DO

N will be entering the 9th grade this fall and will hopefully be enrolling in the local public high school (or maybe not). Currently in the 8th grade, N is taking his final today in Honors High School Geometry. N attained this level of competency by working year round on math ever since the 1st grade. He has not had to skip a year of instruction as the local public students have.

The local district, in its infinite wisdom, will not accept N’s transcripts showing straight A’s and Standardized test scores in the 99th percentile for mathematics as proof of his ability. In their defense, N does not have state administered test scores on the CST Algebra 1 or Geometry tests – those tests aren’t made available to home schools that operate independent of a school district. The local high school is requiring N to take a 50 question, calculation heavy, 2 hour, Geometry course challenge exam. The test will cover material from a classroom he’s never attended and a textbook he has never used. The test won’t be a neutral exam such as the standardized exams.

According to “district policy” my son must pass the challenge exam with a 90% grade or better in order to continue on in the honors track. We were not to be supplied with the answers to the study guide that was provided. We were also informed that the study guide was missing ¾ of the materials that could be included on the exam. I wouldn’t be able to correct the study guide questions, as N has passed me by mathematically speaking. Thankfully Barry G came to my rescue and worked the problem sets, and provided fantastic comments and notations which helped me to provide my son with a proper review where he was weak.

The district, county and state all refused to let N take the CST tests this spring because he wasn’t enrolled with the public schools. In May I gave N the CST retired questions for Geometry (posted on the CDE website) and he only missed 2 out of 64 questions. We also gave him the on line Algebra 1 test, and uncovered an area of weakness, which was remedied with one evening’s chalk and talk thanks to purple math - he then only missed 3 questions on the whole Algebra 1 exam.

Needless to say, I’m a bit worked up because our high school won’t accept N’s test scores and grades as proof of his abilities. It seems terribly unfair when you consider that the district students only need a B- grade on their report cards to advance to the next honors level class.

If you investigate further - our high school’s CST scores for the 9th grade single honors Geometry class indicate 75% of those honor students fail to score in the advanced category. That’s not a stellar record -- especially knowing how low the proficiency bar is set by the California Department of Education. N is trying to gain entry to the 9th grade Honors Algebra 2 course. The Algebra 2 double honors track has better CST scores with only 22% of the honors students failing to score at the advanced level. The improved performance of the upper track is likely a product of after schooling.

The administration is slamming the gate shut on students who transfer in from schools other than the local district. UPDATE: It isn’t “all” out of district transfer students who must take this exam as I had previously been informed. No, it’s just the students who come from “non traditional” high schools that must pass a challenge exam. So apparently, private home school students must out perform the majority of the local high school honors math students in order to gain admission to the honors math track. Perhaps, hypothetically speaking, it’s just the home school children of veteran math warriors who are expected to perform at this level.

This all seems so horribly unfair. N is an excellent student and has worked incredibly hard, and the standardized tests all place him at the very top. I wouldn’t be so bent out of shape if the local high school CST scores indicated that the honors classes were full of elite math stallions, but that just isn’t the case.

N finished the high school’s study guide exam and took 40 minutes longer than the 2 hour time limit they are setting on the exam. Hopefully the multiple choice exam he will be given next Tuesday will be easier to complete within the time limit otherwise, N will be getting the gate slammed shut in his face.

UPDATE: I’ve just learned the ruling we will get as a result of this test is not the final end – I can always appeal the decision! This is great! I can spend my summer vacation fighting with the school district -- and my son isn’t even in their classrooms yet.

THERE IS HOPE:

On a happier note, I do have some good news to report. N took the California High School Proficiency Exam last Saturday. The CHSPE allows students to exit high school early, and continue their education at the community college level. Though the exam is designed for students 16 years and older, N (only 14) was able to take the exam with the permission of his “non traditional” school (heh). We will get the results in mid July.

Previously parents have posted on KTM that skipping the high school math program and moving a student up to the college level for math isn’t perhaps the best move. I do remember Wayne Bishop having once written about saving a student from the public high school system and getting him placed into a college math program early. I would like to know what those of you who frequent KTM think about taking this approach.

With the CHSPE proficiency certificate in hand, N will be able to enroll in community college courses without permission from the high school and receive dual credit for his courses. Some local home school parents even send their middle school students to the community college. N will still be able to attend the HS and play sanctioned sports as long as he attends 4 classes. A few of the ambitious local students have managed to graduate high school having also completed an Associate Arts degree.

The CHSPE does NOT allow a student to stop attending school. Students must (by law) attend classes until they reach their 18th birthday. Additionally, it’s possible the HS will refuse to allow N to receive a HS diploma and be in the graduation ceremonies if we go this route (though there may be a way to work this out). The CHSPE certificate is supposed to suffice as an equivalent document in lieu of a high school diploma and is accepted by the state of California and, I believe, the armed services though I am not sure about that.

I would appreciate hearing what KTMers think about this opportunity and look forward to reading your comments.

Diminishing marginal returns

An interesting hypothesis  

My hypothesis is that it is precisely the dumbing down of U.S. education over the last decades that explains the increase in willingness to pay for education. The mechanism is diminishing marginal returns to education. Typical graduate business school education has indeed become less rigorous over time, as has typical college education. But typical high school education has declined in quality just as much. As a result, the human capital difference between a college and high-school graduate has increased, because the first increments of education are more valuable on the job market than the later ones. It used to be that everybody could read and understand something like Orwell’s Animal Farm, but the typical college graduates could also understand Milton or Spencer. Now, nobody grasps Milton but only the college grads can process Animal Farm, and for employers the See Spot Run–>Animal Farm jump is more valuable than the Animal Farm–>Milton jump.

The author goes on to suggest that the signalling value of a college education is actually declining as well - something which tracks with a notion that I've been noodling with that online higher-education (really online certification) will start breaking down the existing higher-education structure very soon.

Once that happens - and I think it will happen - I tend to think that such a seismic shift might make it easier to add rigor back to the lower forms of schooling.  Am I hopelessly optimistic?

the leafy suburbs, part 3: other people's children

another issue re: the responsibilities of the school versus the parent

One of the issues Ms. Slaughter mentions confronting is her son's disruptive classroom behavior.

Well, suppose Ms. Slaughter and her husband fail to improve their son's classroom behavior.

Where does that leave the other kids in the classroom?

We experienced this ourselves when C. was in middle school. I remember one day talking to him about his math class, where he was learning virtually nothing due to the Death March to Algebra nature of the curriculum, we assumed. So I was interviewing him, trying to nail down whatever was or was not going on that week, and at some point in our conversation C. mentioned in passing that he could not hear what the teacher was saying in class.

You can't hear?

I had no idea what he was talking about -- I'd certainly never noticed him having trouble hearing. I was thinking, Is this one of those boy things where boys' hearing is slightly not as good as girls' hearing? 

No.

It wasn't.

It turned out - news to me - that C. could not hear what the teacher was saying because he was in "the bad class," which is to say the noisy, hyperactive, out of control class. So every day was pretty much bedlam, and C. couldn't hear anything the teacher was saying because the other kids were so loud.

The other kids are so noisy you can't hear? Mind you, this was the accelerated class, the class with the kids who were headed to calculus and selective colleges. So noisy C. couldn't hear the teacher.

I was probably in my 2nd year of dealing with the school's insane curriculum at that point. It had never crossed my mind there was another whole dimension of awful going on.

At least one boy in the class had ADHD; there may have been as many as 3 boys with ADHD (I don't know). I happen to know that their parents were doing everything they could do on their end, but even if they weren't, the classroom disruption was (apparently) such that my own child could not hear what the teacher was saying.

Which of course got me to wondering whether C., who was a bit shy, had been placed in the class precisely because he was a bit shy. One of his other teachers had told me that he always had C. sit next to the noisy children as a means of classroom management (fine in that case), and C. had told me an endearing story about a very quiet little girl in his math class who, he said, was always being used as a separator for the noisy boys. "She hates it," C. said.

We can argue about the extent to which parents are responsible for their children's behavior at school.

But the school, not the parents, has to be responsible for maintaining classroom order.

It's not just that the quality of a troubled child's K-12 education shouldn't depend on his parents, which is my belief.

The quality of the other children's K-12 education shouldn't depend on that child's parents, either.

Jen on children and fate

from Jen:

I just met up with someone I hadn't seen in a while. Older child doing very well, taking a break from college to pay down loans. Has a good job, has been advancing well, lives on own, in a steady relationship, etc.

Next child has had no end of problems. Has good friends but attracted to "bad" kids. Drugs, running away, alcohol, mental health issues, etc. Parents very involved, doing everything they can to straighten child out. Have just over a year left where they can legally wield influence over child. Have been very proactive.

These parents are involved, pushed education, know kids' teachers, talk to the school, make sure homework is done, have fairly strict rules and keep track of kids, assign chores and expect them to be done. Basically, everything you would want them to be doing.

Worked on first kid. Didn't on second kid.

As this person said yesterday, "I used to think it was only bad parents who had kids that went in such a wrong direction."

It's easy to think that your child's successes are due to you and that your child's failures are due to _________ (bad teaching, society, spouse, genetics). Truth is it can be any and all or none of those things. And that the amount of control we have is similarly up in the air and diminishes with each year of age they gain!

There but for the grace of God.

What is that old saw they tell you when you come in for your SPED intake?

Mental illness is genetic. You get if from your kids.

I hope I haven't offended passersby repeating that --- I was a little shocked the first time I heard it (and, yes, I heard it when I took one of the kids in for SPED eval). But I appreciated the sentiment and still do.

As far as I can tell, nature is real. Nature and chance.

I am a strong believer in authoritative parenting. The research is there, and I was raised by authoritative parents myself; Ed, too. I know it works.

I also believe I've seen authoritative parenting work its magic with kids who have mental illnesses or behavior disorders as well as with typical kids.

But in the case of a child with a mental illness or a developmental disability or ADHD (etc.) authoritative parenting is not a cure. It is a long slog.

In my experience, when authoritative parents raise children who have significant challenges, those children may still face challenges as adults (though not always). BUT their upbringing equips them with the resilience, the determination, and the sense responsibility they need to forge their way.

That reminds me of something an editor of mine once said to me. She was a bit of a wild character, but she was keeping it together, and she told me: The secret to life is Put your demons in the back seat and TELL THEM TO KEEP THEIR HANDS OFF THE WHEEL.

Good advice!

I tell my friends who are doing everything they can do to straighten out a child, but it's still not enough: time is on your side.

I believe that.

re-run: authoritative parenting & schools

The leafy suburbs posts and comments all relate to authoritative parenting:

• warm/strict (schools and parents)
• authoritative parenting and smoking
• authoritative parenting and constructivism

and, from the first ktm:

• Beyond the Classroom (Steinberg on maximal power of peers, minimal power of parents, & authoritative parenting)
• Laurence Steinberg on the adolescent brain (including graph showing power of peers)
• are homeschooled pre-teens as difficult as pre-teens attending middle school?
• Steinberg on Asian students, IQ, and achievement

leafy suburbs, part 2

re: the leafy suburbs, Jen asks:

I have to be a bit of a devil's advocate here. Why is it that teachers are expected to do what parents here are saying they can't do?

That is, parents can't get one or two children to, say, do homework and study at home for a bit, whereas a teacher who has them for 45-50 minutes a day (or twice that every other day if block scheduled) is not only supposed to teach but also supposed to motivate them enough to do the homework and studying?

I actually have an answer to this question!

A few of them.

FIRST: Kids are often much more cooperative with other adults than with their own parents. That's why so many parents I know, parents who were trying to reteach content at home, finally gave up and hired tutors.

C. is your classic cooperative kid, and when he was in 8th grade, as I recall, we reached the point where I was shouting so much something had to give. That was when I discovered Karen Pryor's work. I remember, going into Christmas break, devouring Pryor, having a major heart to heart with myself, and vowing to do a 180 as soon as the new semester began, which I more or less did. The household was pretty close to being in crisis, and C. is a mild-mannered kid! (If Susan S is around, she'll vouch for me on that one - )

I used to think: what would be happening around here if C. weren't a mild-mannered kid?

Meanwhile, C. was having precisely zero problems at school. I think he had one - no, two - detentions in his entire 3 years at middle school, and one of the 2 was a group detention most of his math class (math again) served for being disrespectful to a substitute teacher.

SECOND: Parents really, truly don't have the training we need to deal with a lot of the stuff we deal with. Not that parents should have to have training! I'm not suggesting anything of the kind. I'm just saying that, for instance, using the principles of positive reinforcement to deal with a challenging autistic child (or a completely non challenging nonautistic child you're trying to reteach math to) does not come naturally to anyone, as far as I can tell.

Of course, teachers don't get a lot of training in behavior management, either, but schools do seem to have school psychologists these days, and at least some of them have had some real training and experience.

Good teachers do acquire an extremely impressive set of skills where classroom management is concerned, something I'm still working on. A behaviorist I know told me that classroom discipline is THE issue every new teacher faces, and that includes a new teacher who has just served a tour of duty as a Marine.

THIRD: Even if the parent is highly skilled at maintaining law and order inside the home, the parent is not inside the classroom. I can't tell you how often I've heard about school personnel assuming that parents can magically, from miles away, directly influence their children's behavior inside the classroom.

My own funniest story on this score concerns Andrew, who, a few years ago, was being very difficult on the bus. Now Andrew, as I think a fair number of you know, is autistic and nonverbal. He doesn't talk. We can talk to him, but it's not clear how much he understands.

(Andrew is also weirdly smart - this is something the teachers and aides say, btw, not just a parent fantasy .... Andrew is sui generis. I need to say that out of loyalty and also out of honesty. btw, Susan can probably attest to that one, too. Susan watched Andrew during my mother's funeral, and afterwards said to me, "I think he ordered something from Amazon.")

Anyway, Andrew was being difficult on the bus, and the head of transportation called to discuss the situation. He wanted me to make Andrew stop. Somehow I, as the parent, was supposed to be able to change my autistic child's autistic behavior on a bus. When I expressed skepticism that I would be able to influence Andrew's behavior from afar, the transportation director asked me: Can you have a talk with Andrew?

I said: Andrew doesn't talk.

The thing is: the transportation director knew Andrew doesn't talk. And yet he was on the phone asking  me to 'have a talk' with my nonverbal son.

That's an extreme example, but I've seen the same thing with ADHD kids: I've seen school personnel assume that a parent can affect an ADHD child's behavior without being present to do so.

That's not how ADHD works. In fact, it is pretty much the opposite of how ADHD works. I know a family that has done a fantastic job with their very ADHD son: meds, therapy, very strong behavioral boundaries, lots of love, authoritative parenting --- a fantastic job. Their son is a very good kid.

Nevertheless, as far as I know he was quite disruptive in classrooms through all of through middle school (not sure about high school). The classroom disruption problem in his case was really, truly a "school problem" in the sense that it was taking place inside the school. His parents had his behavior  well under control at home; I saw it. They had also taught him terrific manners; I saw those, too. But  keeping his classroom behavior under control inside a classroom without being inside the classroom themselves was not possible.

With disorders like autism and ADHD, if the school doesn't deal with the problem, it doesn't get dealt with.

FOURTH: This brings me to my final answer, which is that when a teacher can't manage a student in his or her classroom, other arrangements need to be made by the school.

This isn't just my personal opinion; it's pretty much the law. By law, a student who can't function inside a regular classroom must be evaluated, must be given an IEP (if that's what's called for), and must be educated -- by the school.

That said, I know this is an area where schools often miss the boat. The horror stories I've heard .... I think the phrase "radical inclusion" (not my term) captures it. When school administrators decide that full inclusion (what is it called now - collaborative classrooms?) is the way of the world come what may, when full inclusion collaborative classrooms include a child the teacher absolutely cannot control no matter how much special training and support s/he is given, that is wrong for all concerned. It's wrong for the child, it's wrong for the teacher, and it's wrong for the other children.

Also: full inclusion for all is a decision the school has made, not the parents. The school has a responsibility to provide a calm and safe learning environment for all children.

That is my opinion; general education children have no entitlement to nondisrupted classrooms, sad to say.

in the leafy suburbs

Eighteen months into my job as the first woman director of policy planning at the State Department, a foreign-policy dream job that traces its origins back to George Kennan, I found myself in New York, at the United Nations’ annual assemblage of every foreign minister and head of state in the world. On a Wednesday evening, President and Mrs. Obama hosted a glamorous reception at the American Museum of Natural History. I sipped champagne, greeted foreign dignitaries, and mingled. But I could not stop thinking about my 14-year-old son, who had started eighth grade three weeks earlier and was already resuming what had become his pattern of skipping homework, disrupting classes, failing math, and tuning out any adult who tried to reach him. Over the summer, we had barely spoken to each other—or, more accurately, he had barely spoken to me. And the previous spring I had received several urgent phone calls—invariably on the day of an important meeting—that required me to take the first train from Washington, D.C., where I worked, back to Princeton, New Jersey, where he lived. My husband, who has always done everything possible to support my career, took care of him and his 12-year-old brother during the week; outside of those midweek emergencies, I came home only on weekends.

Last spring, I flew to Oxford to give a public lecture. At the request of a young Rhodes Scholar I know, I’d agreed to talk to the Rhodes community about “work-family balance.” ... What poured out of me was a set of very frank reflections on how unexpectedly hard it was to do the kind of job I wanted to do as a high government official and be the kind of parent I wanted to be, at a demanding time for my children (even though my husband, an academic, was willing to take on the lion’s share of parenting for the two years I was in Washington). I concluded by saying that my time in office had convinced me that further government service would be very unlikely while my sons were still at home.
Why Women Still Can't Have It All
by Anne-Marie SlaughterAtlantic Monthy | July-August 2012

Anne-Marie Slaughter is talking about a phenomenon I never see addressed in popular articles about "balancing work and family": the teen years are the hard ones. Or can be. When I was young the feminist model was: stay home for 3 or 4 months while you're nursing, then go back to work. The demanding years were assumed to be a child's pre-school years; once the child reached school age, you were 'done,' in a sense. It made sense to work outside the home at that point.

That always struck me as wrong, even before I had kids. My question was always: so when your child turns 13 and goes sprong, where are you? Not that all children go sprong at age 13. C. didn't, and thank God for that. Nevertheless, plenty of kids do go sprong, and if you have more than one child, that would seem to raise the odds of your someday being the parent of a teenage kid who has come unglued.

So I like the fact that this high profile woman has actually spoken, out loud, about what happens to a high profile career when a teenager is in distress.

That said, I was struck by the list of problems Ms. Slaughter's son is having:

• skipping homework
• disrupting classes
• failing math
• tuning out adults who try to reach him

With the possible exception of the fourth item, all of these issues are school problems, requiring school solutions.

You can see this easily if you imagine a 14-year old student who has no parents, or, alternatively, has parents who are dysfunctional. When that student skips homework, disrupts classes, fails math, and tunes out helpful adults, who deals with it?

The school. At least, it's the school that is going to have to deal with the problems if they're to be dealt with at all. There's no one else. And, over the past ten years, some schools have come to see things just this way.

But word hasn't reached the leafy suburbs (Slaughter teaches at Princeton and presumably sends her boys to Princeton public schools.) Nominally high-performing schools believe it is up to parents to solve school problems. More accurately, nominally high-performing schools believe students don't actually have school problems. Students have student problems, which stem from the student's upbringing and genes and have nothing to do with the school one way or another. ^*

The problem with this philosophy is that parents can't solve school problems from home, no matter how engaged and well educated and emotionally stable they are themselves. Most obviously, parents can't fix disruptive classroom behavior from home. And while in theory a parent can make sure homework gets done, in practice it's not easy and in some cases it's not possible. (I've seen the not possible scenario firsthand.) Typically, parents have no idea what the homework assignments are or when they're due (echalk notwithstanding), and a parent who has no expertise in a subject can't tell whether her child actually did his or her homework property, or just wrote something down on paper.

As to math, teaching math has got to be the school's job, period. It doesn't matter what emotional problems a student is having; the school has to teach math to struggling students, too.

Affluent schools won't be good schools until they ask themselves Richard DuFour's question: "What will we do when students aren't learning?"Ask, and answer.

the leafy suburbs: School Reform Moves to the Suburbs by Mike Petrilli

^* True of the bullying issue, too. Bullying is something kids do, and parents are responsible for kids, so parents need to stop their kids being bullies. Not sure what this means for parents of the child being bullied, of course. 

Help Desk: algebra remediation

A friend of mine is a special ed teacher at a highly selective science-oriented magnet school. She has observed a number of incoming freshman who are unable to handle beginning (9th grade) algebra. I'm guessing that some (most? all?) of them have no inherent math disability, but have merely been poorly instructed (most come from elementary schools that use Everyday Math/Investigations and from middle schools that use Connected Math).

Anyway, when she asked me what I knew about math remediation programs that might help prepare these kids for algebra, I realized I had absolutely no ideas and should turn to ktm for help. Any suggestions?

a chicken in every pot

SINCE the new government of prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra took office last July, Thailand has been treated to a soap-opera about the supply of tablet computers to all children starting school. Ms Yingluck’s “one tablet per child” pledge during the campaign was probably her single most vote-catching policy, yet fulfilling it has turned into a national ordeal.

A few weeks ago a deal was at last signed with Shenzhen Scope Scientific Development, a Chinese firm, for the provision of 400,000 tablets. On June 7th a beaming Ms Yingluck gave the first batch to a group of smartly dressed pupils.

Some argue that the focus on the tablets has distracted attention from a deeper malaise affecting Thai education. Although the proportion of children attending school has grown over the past decade, the quality of their education has deteriorated.

The chief problem is that children’s educational attainments are falling, even as more money is being lavished on the schools. Thailand now spends about 20% of the national budget on education, more than it devotes to any other sector. The budget has doubled over a decade. Yet results are getting worse, both in absolute terms and relative to other countries in South-East Asia.

[snip]

Why does Thailand fare so badly? Somkiat Tangkitvanich, an expert at the Thailand Development Research Institute, claims that there is no mystery. Most of the swelling education budget has gone on higher pay for teachers (who now often earn more than the starting salary of a university lecturer), yet no improvement in performance has been extracted in return.

Let Them Eat Tablets
THE ECONOMIST | June 16, 2012

and then there was one

Bedford drops Trailblazers, adopts Singapore Math.

IQ & dyslexia

ABSTRACT:
The Brain Basis of the Phonological Deficit in Dyslexia Is Independent of IQ

Although the role of IQ in developmental dyslexia remains ambiguous, the dominant clinical and research approaches rely on a definition of dyslexia that requires reading skill to be significantly below the level expected given an individual's IQ. In the study reported here, we used functional MRI (fMRI) to examine whether differences in brain activation during phonological processing that are characteristic of dyslexia were similar or dissimilar in children with poor reading ability who had high IQ scores (discrepant readers) and in children with poor reading ability who had low IQ scores (nondiscrepant readers). In two independent samples including a total of 131 children, using univariate and multivariate pattern analyses, we found that discrepant and nondiscrepant poor readers exhibited similar patterns of reduced activation in brain areas such as left parietotemporal and occipitotemporal regions. These results converge with behavioral evidence indicating that, regardless of IQ, poor readers have similar kinds of reading difficulties in relation to phonological processing.

The Brain Basis of the Phonological Deficit in Dyslexia Is Independent of IQ
Hiroko Tanaka, Jessica M. Black, Charles Hulme, Leanne M. Stanley, Shelli R. Kesler, Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli, Allan L. Reiss, John D. E. Gabriell and Fumiko Hoeft
Psychological Science
Vol. 22, No. 11 (NOVEMBER 2011) (pp. 1442-1451)
Page Count: 10

Help Desk: Home Strategies for the Very Mathy Child

I am looking for some advice in how to best help my very, very mathy child.

Background: She's 8.  In her April Peabody, she scored as a 50th percentile 9th grader, 4th month, in math.  (That's how they score you -- which grade/month your child would be 50th % -- the tester said she only started to miss questions when it was clear she had never even seen it before, like exponents.  Technically, she hadn't "seen" algebra before either except for reading the Basher book about it, but was apparently able to reason out how to do the single variable stuff on the test.)  As of yet, we haven't come across a concept that she hasn't immediately "picked up." The only troubles we have ever had were, for instance, when we were doing multi-digit addition and subtraction -- not because she didn't "get" it, but she was frustrated with having to line up the numbers, etc.  (Her handwriting is weak.)  

Currently, we are finishing up Singapore 2, we are also halfway through MathUSee Gamma (mastery of single and multi-digit multiplication -- though we're flying through it as fast as she can get her facts memorized), and do daily work in Math Whizz and Dreambox.  She reads Life of Fred for fun (and a whole stack of other math books floating around).  She's working through Art of Problem Solving's Beast Academy 3A and all of the Critical Thinking Company Math/Logic books.  I got her the Hands On Equations iPad game a few days ago and she immediately chewed through it and now is all, "Hey, mom, look at me solve 4x + 5 = 2x + 13; can you find me more algebra stuff?"

So.  I'm not 100% sure how I should be handling this.  On the one hand, I don't want to hold her back or have her bored, on the other, I want to make sure she's solid on, and doesn't miss any, fundamentals.  Right now it feels like I'm throwing stuff at an insatiable math monster and I'm not sure how best to teach this girl.  (Ha!  Like *I've* actually taught her any math.)

My current strategy is to plod along with our "regular" daily curricula (Singapore and MUS), to ensure proper drill and mastery of her foundational skills-- though I'm trying to stay sensitive to the fine line between useful practice and mindless busywork.  (I do let her "test out" of some sections.)  And then, after that is done for the day, she can go crazy with whatever else she wants, like the resources I mentioned above.  Then I was also looking at the physical Hands-On Equations set if she really wants to do some early algebra.  (Challenge math?  EPGY?  Math contests?)  I got her a Khan Academy account and occasionally look in to see that's toodling around with absolute value and symmetry and ray lines or whatever else she stumbled upon.

Any thoughts or recommendations?

Raymond Chandler on writing & school

from Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney:

Chandler had his own system for turning out The Big Sleep and other classic detective stories. "Me, I wait for inspiration," he said, but he did it methodically every morning. He believe that a professional writer needed to set aside at least four hours a day for his job: "He doesn't have to write, and if he doesn't feel like it, he shouldn't try. He can look out of the window or stand on his head or writhe on the floor, but he is not to do any other positive thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines, or write checks."

Thie Nothing Alternative is a marvelously simpe tool against procrastination for just about any kind of task....Just follow Chandler's regimen:

"Write or nothing. It's the same principle as keeping order in a school. If you make the pupils behave, they will learn something just to keep from being bored. I find it works. Two very simple rules, a. you don't have to write. b. you can't do anything else. The rest comes of itself.

Write or don't write, but if it's don't write, don't do anything else, either.

Never thought of that. 

all about motivation

For years, I've been wanting to know who is doing the major research on motivation and what I should read.

I think I've found the answer:

Gabrielle Oettingen's homepage

"Mental contrasting" is key: mental contrasting and "implementation intentions."

If you're trying to persuade your kids to study for high-stakes exams, both are probably good to know about.

the problem in a nutshell

Why does accelerating algebra for everyone not help? Moving on the same curve with a relabelled x axis does not change the curve.

sounds promising

from Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change by Timothy D. Wilson:

Several companies now market [educational] videos for kids and millions of children have watched them. As a result, these kids are now exceeding smart, right?

Unfortunately not, because it turns out that toddlers do not learn very well from disembodied voice-overs on videos. 

I guess this changes when kids turn 5 and go to school in flipped classrooms.

factoid

from Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength  by Roy F. Baumeister :

Asian-Americans make up only 4 percent of the US population but account for a quarter of the student body at elite universities like Stanford, Columbia, and Cornell.

in which Glen encounters the 6th grade

As Amy P says, suitable for framing:

Chinese is the only language offered to sixth graders at the school my son will start attending in a few weeks. Many of us at middle school orientation were happy to see that Chinese would be offered to our kids. In fact, from the look of the group, it appeared as though we would have to fight each other to get our kids into the class.

Until they described the class. The kids would be "introduced" to Chinese language and culture. They would read stories about China. They would practice a few characters. They would memorize some greetings. They would even get to go on a field trip to local Chinese restaurant to witness the culture firsthand.

In a room full of Chinese parents jaws dropped. A few memorized greetings and a trip to a Chinese restaurant? WTF? (I think that stands for "What's That in French?")

We'd been afraid that competition for the Chinese class would look like Walmart on Black Friday. We were no longer afraid.

I suspect our school district will end up concluding from this that the demand for Chinese language isn't as strong as they had thought.

Explicit and implicit learning

Explicit (Declarative)	Implicit (Procedural)
facts and experiences	skills and habits, priming, classical conditioning
knowledge can be verbalized (conscious)	knowledge is inaccessible (unconscious)
tested by recall, recognition, cued recall (as in school)	evidenced via altered dispositions, preferences, judgements, behavior
one trial learning	often acquired gradually over multiple trials
requires effort and intention.....	acquired incidentally (without intention, attention, or awareness)
flexible knowledge, available to multiple response systems	inflexible knowledge, limited to response systems participating in original learning
not durable	durable
can form conjunctions between arbitrary stimuli (e.g., paired associate learning)	cannot learn conjunctions
“specialized to detect variance, i.e., what is different or unique about the events of a particular time and place” [Eichenbaum].....	“specialized for detecting invariance, i.e., for extracting what is common in stimulus environment” (i.e., regularities)
medial temporal lobe (hippocampus)	striatum (basal ganglia)
source: Learning and Memory

Various:

• I always remember the meaning of "declarative knowledge" by the sentence: "I declare that Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president of the United States." Or: "I declare that I was born in Springfield, IL." Declarative knowledge is facts and factoids you can (consciously) declare.
• I think these two systems correspond to Daniel Kahneman's System 1 and System 2. (Take that with a grain of salt.)
• It's misleading to characterize implicit learning as strictly procedural. Category learning and probabilistic learning are both handled by the basal ganglia. It's the basal ganglia that allow you to learn that where there is smoke, there is fire.
• It's the hippocampus that allows you to learn the aphorism "Where there's smoke, there's fire."
• The basal ganglia-frontal circuit understands language. Procedural memory processes grammar; declarative memory learns vocabulary. 
• "One trial learning" is a bit misleading (in column one). Declarative knowledge can be acquired in one trial in a way that procedural knowledge (e.g.: how to hit a tennis ball) cannot. But retaining declarative knowledge over time requires spaced repetition and practice.
• Not sure about 'cannot learn conjunctions [8th row].' Offhand, it doesn't jibe with scenarios like the weather prediction task. update 8/1/2012: paired-associate learning at Cambridge Brain Sciences - vocabulary learning is a case of paired-associate learning
• Must determine the meaning of "limited to response systems participating in original learning."
• Alzheimer's affects the hippocampus.

And:

Seems to me constructivism mixes these two systems up.

The basal ganglia are built to look for a pattern naturally and unconsciously. You don't have to think about it, and you don't have to go to school to do it. But constructivists want students to expend a great deal of time and conscious effort figuring out the patterns and regularities in school subjects.

Meanwhile declarative knowledge has to be attended to and consciously acquired, but constructivists seem to want students to learn content knowledge more or less by osmosis. Osmosis is the basal ganglia's department. Ditto learning by doing.

Constructivists seem to want to make easy things hard and hard things easy.

'Why Chinese is hard'

Bostonian directs us to this article by David Moser:

[Chinese is] beautiful, complex, mysterious -- but ridiculous. I, like many students of Chinese, was first attracted to Chinese because of the writing system, which is surely one of the most fascinating scripts in the world. The more you learn about Chinese characters the more intriguing and addicting they become. The study of Chinese characters can become a lifelong obsession, and you soon find yourself engaged in the daily task of accumulating them, drop by drop from the vast sea of characters, in a vain attempt to hoard them in the leaky bucket of long-term memory.

[snip]

Everyone has heard that Chinese is hard because of the huge number of characters one has to learn, and this is absolutely true. There are a lot of popular books and articles that downplay this difficulty, saying things like "Despite the fact that Chinese has [10,000, 25,000, 50,000, take your pick] separate characters you really only need 2,000 or so to read a newspaper". Poppycock. I couldn't comfortably read a newspaper when I had 2,000 characters under my belt. I often had to look up several characters per line, and even after that I had trouble pulling the meaning out of the article. (I take it as a given that what is meant by "read" in this context is "read and basically comprehend the text without having to look up dozens of characters"; otherwise the claim is rather empty.)

[snip]

The other day one of my fellow graduate students, someone who has been studying Chinese for ten years or more, said to me "My research is really hampered by the fact that I still just can't read Chinese. It takes me hours to get through two or three pages, and I can't skim to save my life." This would be an astonishing admission for a tenth-year student of, say, French literature, yet it is a comment I hear all the time among my peers (at least in those unguarded moments when one has had a few too many Tsingtao beers and has begun to lament how slowly work on the thesis is coming).

[snip]

[C]ontrary to popular myth, Chinese people are not born with the ability to memorize arbitrary squiggles. In fact, one of the most gratifying experiences a foreign student of Chinese can have is to see a native speaker come up a complete blank when called upon to write the characters for some relatively common word. You feel an enormous sense of vindication and relief to see a native speaker experience the exact same difficulty you experience every day.

This is such a gratifying experience, in fact, that I have actually kept a list of characters that I have observed Chinese people forget how to write. (A sick, obsessive activity, I know.) I have seen highly literate Chinese people forget how to write certain characters in common words like "tin can", "knee", "screwdriver", "snap" (as in "to snap one's fingers"), "elbow", "ginger", "cushion", "firecracker", and so on. And when I say "forget", I mean that they often cannot even put the first stroke down on the paper. Can you imagine a well-educated native English speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like "knee" or "tin can"? Or even a rarely-seen word like "scabbard" or "ragamuffin"? I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"??

Then there's this:

One of the most unreasonably difficult things about learning Chinese is that merely learning how to look up a word in the dictionary is about the equivalent of an entire semester of secretarial school. When I was in Taiwan, I heard that they sometimes held dictionary look-up contests in the junior high schools. Imagine a language where simply looking a word up in the dictionary is considered a skill like debate or volleyball!

Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard
by David Moser
University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies

the list

When you boil it down this way, it's pretty hard to miss.

My district is still doing numbers 1, 2, 4, & 5.

Don't know if they've ever done 3.

rigged, part 2

Harbin Pharmaceuticals Plant

How Chinese kleptocracy is related to education:

I am now officially off the boat for funding a Chinese language program in my district.

No that I was ever on the boat, exactly, and not that we're going to have a Chinese language program in my district -- not that we're going to have any foreign language program in the early grades at all.

But still. Parents here have lobbied and labored for years to persuade the administration and whatever school board happened to be in office at the time to bring in a serious foreign language program in the early grades, and our current and newly elected board members, all of whom support Math Trailblazers, like the idea of Chinese.

As one of them told the community, Chinese is a 21st century skill.

AND SEE:
rigged
Why we switched from Chinese to French
Frauducation, Part 1
The Macroeconomics of Chinese kleptocracy
Harbin Pharmaceuticals at Business Insider

What ELSE Don't I Know?

My son informed me (while showing me his schedule for next year) that he thinks that two of the teachers asked for him in their class. He said that his English teacher from last year said she would do that. Is this common? Is this seniority-based? Of course it's better than asking to be kept out of their class, but... So what other things might I not know about?

For your consideration

Is it just me?

NY SPED increases -- affluent vs nonaffluent districts

following up on my previous post:

New York City per pupil
2000-01 – 2009-10
Gen ed: $6675
Gen ed: $11105
% change GenEd: 66%

2000-01 – 2009-10
SPED: $14979
SPED: $26888
% change SPED: 80%

---

Roosevelt per pupil
2000-01 – 2009-10
Gen ed: $6833
Gen ed: $13281
% change GenEd: %94

2000-01 – 2009-10
SPED: $27251
SPED: $44576
% change SPED: 64%

---

Scarsdale per pupil
2000-01 – 2009-10
Gen Ed: $10,513
Gen Ed: $17,324
% change GenEd: 65%

2000-01 – 2009-10
SPED: $18,202
SPED: $43,130
% change SPED: 137%

---

Great Neck
2000-01 – 2009-10
Gen Ed: $10388
Gen Ed: $15893
% change GenEd: 53%

2000-01 – 2009-10
SPED: $21509
SPED: $41955
% change SPED: 95%
at peak, in 2008-09:
SPED: $44291
% change SPED: 100%

source:
Citizens Budget Commission

Scarsdale is one of the most affluent districts in the country. Great Neck is pretty affluent, too.

Both are predominantly white.

This data is interesting because NCLB required that special education students take the same state tests everyone else was taking. Prior to passage of NCLB, black/Hispanic^* students were being put into special education, where they were exempt from state tests.

One might think that NCLB would produce a much larger spike in SPED spending in towns and cities with large black/Hispanic populations. But here we see the opposite: predominantly white districts show an enormous spike in SPED spending, far above the hike in spending on general education, and well above the hike in SPED spending by majority-white districts.


^* I assume the same phenomenon was happening with Hispanic students, but I don't actually know.

increase in special education spending in Scarsdale

Citizens Budget Commission data on increase in general education versus special education spending in NY 2000-01 through 2009-2010:

Scarsdale per pupil spending
2000-01 - 2009-10
Gen Ed: $10,513
Gen Ed: $17,324
% change: 65%

2001-10 - 2009-10
SPED: $18,202
SPED: $43,130
% change: 136%

I'm guessing this increase is related to No Child Left Behind's requirement that most students in special education pass the same state tests general education students pass.

On the other hand, most of Scarsdale's SPED students would have passed the tests without any increase in spending, same as the general education students. New York's tests were too easy.

So I don't know what to make of this.

Years ago, an education attorney told me: "No Child Left Behind is really a special education law."

AND SEE:
No Child Left Behind and Special Education Explained
Our Children Left Behind: NCLB and Special Education

Is that a fork in your pocket, or are you ....

at Charts and Graphs

(photo thanks to Barry G; punchline thanks to Matthew T)

"stop teaching"

from the Learning Cultures Journal, a poem by teacher Emily Jarrell:

Dear Ms. X,

I watched you last week.
I sat in your classroom
and I watched
your kids
I have some things
I need to tell you

I’m not quite sure how
to say all of this,
but here I go

I know
you go home each night
and plan for hours.

I know you search
the Internet for the newest
the coolest lesson plans.
You want to help
your students grow.

[snip]

I know that you look at the tests
and you think about all that you will need
to “teach”
to get your students to do well.
You make lists
genres to cover
strategies to teach.
You create practice sheets
that look like the test
so your students will be
familiar.

[snip]

I watched you plan a unit,
imagining that this unit would be the one
that might get your kids writing,
and loving it.

Here’s where this gets hard.
I know you.
I know you all too well.
I watch you
every day.

And,
I was you.

[snip]

What makes this hard is
that I have to tell you something
you probably don’t want to hear:

I have to tell you,
your time, your precious, precious time,
is being wasted.

You are
wasting
your time.

You have to stop teaching.

Simply,
your students are never going to achieve
at the levels you dream
and hope for when
you are the one doing all the work.

You have to stop teaching.

Your students need to
start doing
and struggling
and pondering.

Stop planning
those lessons
and activities and hoping
you will lead your students to new understandings.

Just stop

Have them do it.

Have them read.
Every day.

Have them write.
Every day.

Make them talk.
To each other.

Make them share.
With each other.

Watch them.
Listen to them.

Document what you see.
Fuel the flames of their intentions,
curiosities,
perplexities.

Stop teaching
for just enough time
for them to start
learning.

Think about it, Ms. X.
I know you’re scared.
But,
just dare.

Sincerely,
A Teacher, Colleague, Coach, and Mother.

1. Is the Learning Cultures Journal actually a journal? Does it have an editorial board? A peer review process? Funding?
2. Emily Jarrell
3. A Masters degree from NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development  costs many thousands of dollars.
4. Has the Urban Assembly Board of Directors read this poem?
5. Meet the parents.
6. Stop the multiverse, I want to get off.

AND SEE:
Has Constructivism Increased Special Education Enrollment in Public Schools? By Nakonia (Niki) Hayes
Mathematics Education: Outwitted by Stupidity by Barry Garelick
Growth of Special Education Spending and Enrollment in New York since 2000-01

blue

Karen H sends this link

Consequences of Common Core

Nationally, there is a movement toward standards-based teaching in mathematics education.

The main idea of standards-based teaching, that every school and classroom works from a common defined set of standards, and that therefore, a curriculum will  be designed and then implemented based on those standards, certainly sounds better than the alternative of no standards. Sadly, too many of our schools don't even know what standards are, and they define what they teach by how far through the textbook they happen to got.

Standards are enforced by assessments that claim to test exactly the standards. The whole thing is then an engineering process: write standards, write assessments to match standard, tell teachers to teach exactly that, repeat until proficient.

With the standards based zeitgeist also come the ideas of data driven instruction--check the outputs! test what they know! adapt accordingly. This gives you time to see if your student will pass the assessment before the student takes it.

But most schools still don't know how to teach to these standards, so they look to textbook publishers who claim to help. Because this push was national, Common Core was adopted nationally, giving the textbook publishers one non-moving target to hit.

The good news: Spiral Math is losing its grip. It would seem that publishers couldn't figure out how to map standards onto their spiral's scope and sequence, and opted instead to order their books to match Common Core. And schools want new textbooks. Because how can you do interim data driven instruction assessments in november and checkbox which standards your kids have passed if they haven't seen the material completely until May?

The bad news: at least some of the new textbooks teach Common core standards in order. exact lexicographic order in some cases. First the operations strand, then number and operation base ten, then  number and op fractions, then the decimals, geometry strand, etc.

Why is this bad? Because while Common Core is far more coherent than most, if not all state standards to date, the authors did not seem to understand that this line-by-line method would be how schools and publishers implement the teaching of the standards.

But, at least now it will be a lot easier to afterschool your child with Singapore's Primary Math because at least the sequence is stable.

More on cargo cult education in standards based mathematics teaching in a couple days.