Portlander and Anonymous 1 & 2 on Looking it up

Portlander said...

Sheesh. A cynical person would point out that Google is notorious for putting a thumb on their search results. If one has to rely on Google to get facts every time facts are needed, well that's giving Google an enormous amount of power to bias perceptions.

It's not a whole lot different than the mainstream media running pictures of a 12 y.o. Trayvon Martin in a football uniform instead of a 17 y.o. Trayvon Martin smoking a joint and sticking out his middle fingers on Facebook.

So yes, all the facts you need to know Walter Duranty, er... Walter Cronkite, er... The Googleplex will deliver.

Anonymous said...

Not only that; but a person who has a good knowledge base in a field or topic will get much better information out of Google (or any search engine) than an uninformed person will.

Anonymous said...

So if I can look up the translation of an English word into Spanish, that's as a good as being able to speak Spanish?

I think not.

I'm laughing!

Of course, to be fair, Marissa Mayer does not say that looking things up on Google is the path to success.

But the point still stands: how does one become good at looking things up?

To a very large degree, you become good at looking things up by acquiring knowledge of the field you're looking things up in. I go back to my struggles with the basal ganglia. Today I'm better able to 'look things up' productively because I've developed a sense of the field, of who the major researchers are, and, to a lesser degree, what the differences of opinion are amongst them.

When Marissa Mayer says "It's not what you know, it's what you can find out," she is misformulating reality. You have to know something to find things out.

Beyond that, how often is it actually true that you have to acquire new knowledge/information in order to do your job?

I don't know the answer to that question, but as far as I can tell a great deal of work depends upon doing what you know how to do: applying the knowledge you possess to the situation at hand.

Marissa Mayer is misinformed

2010: HOW IS THE INTERNET CHANGING THE WAY YOU THINK?

Marissa Mayer: It's not what you know, it's what you can find out. The Internet has put at the forefront resourcefulness and critical-thinking and relegated memorization of rote facts to mental exercise or enjoyment. Because of the abundance of information and this new emphasis on resourcefulness, the Internet creates a sense that anything is knowable or findable — as long as you can construct the right search, find the right tool, or connect to the right people. The Internet empowers better decision-making and a more efficient use of time.

---

Thoughts:

1. There was an "abundance of information" available before the internet, too, yet somehow nobody thought that the presence of a World Book Encyclopedia in your house meant you didn't have to know anything.
   
2. Interesting that Mayer sees "memorization of rote facts" as something you might do as a form of "mental exercise" or for "enjoyment." She's right! Learning stuff is fun! Thinking, on the other hand, is not fun. Not for the most part. 
3. Better decision-making and more efficient use of time...I have no way of guessing whether either of those things is true (I'm skeptical of the first claim), but the internet is beyond fantastic for writers. Ed is writing his textbook now, and he can't believe how easy it is to find the sources and information he needs. As a historian working with primary documents, he hadn't really joined the JSTOR revolution. Now he has, and he's amazed.
4. Speaking of JSTOR, the general public needs access, too. 

Former Reddit co-owner founder arrested for excessive JSTOR downloads

Prior knowledge gets around working memory limits

[I]t’s well known that extensive background knowledge allows one to circumvent the limitation of working memory. To take an obvious example, if I ask you to hold six letters in mind for one minute, it will be much easier to do with B-R-A-K-E-S than with X-P-W-M-Q-R. Although both are a string of six letters, the first forms a word, so you can treat it like a single unit. It’s like holding one thing in working memory, not six. Naturally, this saving of space in working memory only works if you know the word “brakes.” The same phenomenon is observed in many other domains. The chess expert looking at a board does not see 16 white pieces—she sees several clusters of pieces, each cluster defined by the relationship of the pieces to one another and to opposing pieces. Whether it’s chess pieces or letters in a word, the compacting of many things into one thing in working memory is based on prior knowledge.
Have Technology and Multitasking Rewired How Students Learn? by Daniel T. Willingham

Jeopardy

I hope some of you are watching Jeopardy.

Ben, the contestant who has won at least 5 days in a row, I think, looks very familiar.

Here he is.

This is funny:

With great intentions, he bought two “very thick books filled with lists of facts, and promised myself I’d read through them every night,” he says. “That lasted exactly one night. I can’t memorize facts very well. I spent a lot of time adding and subtracting large numbers with pen and paper, because I didn’t want to mess up the final wager, especially being a math major.”

VB6

C. has lost 10 pounds on Mark Bittman's VB6 diet!

VB6 ("Vegan before 6") is an amazingly user friendly diet: it's the first diet I've ever tried that uses eating things you like to positively-reinforce not eating things you like without causing the whole diet to crash and burn. I've spent years trying to make the Premack principle work for weight loss, and I think Bittman has actually done it.

The funny thing is, back when I briefly became a hard-core vegan (I've been a 'part-time' vegan since then), I started out by doing exactly what Bittman did: I stuck to a vegan diet during the day, then ate a regular dinner with the family.

But I saw my own 'VB6' as a way station to full-time veganism; it never occurred to me that you could actually lose weight on that regimen.

Turns out I was wrong.

Here's an excerpt:

Six years ago, the man I most trusted with my health said to me, “You should probably become a vegan.”

Not exactly the words I’d wanted to hear, and certainly not what I was expecting. But I’d asked Sid Baker, my doctor of thirty years, what he recommended, given that he’d just told me that at age 57, I had developed the pre-diabetic, pre-heart-disease symptoms typical of a middle-aged man who’d spent his life eating without discipline.

He’d laid out the depressing facts for me: “Your blood numbers have always been fine but now they’re not. You weigh 40 pounds more than you should. You’re complaining of sleep apnea. You’re talking about knee surgery, which is a direct result of your being overweight. Your cholesterol, which has always been normal up until now, isn’t. Same with your blood sugar; it’s moved into the danger zone.”

A more conventional doc would’ve simply put me on a drug like Lipitor, and maybe a low-fat diet. But Lipitor, one of the statin drugs that lowers cholesterol, is a permanent drug: Once you start taking it, you don’t stop. I didn’t like the idea of that.

Furthermore, its effectiveness in healthy people has never been established, and it’s also been implicated in memory loss and other cognitive complications; I didn’t like the idea of any of that, either. And at this point, low-fat and lowcarbohydrate diets have essentially been discredited: They might help you lose weight, but they’re not effective for maintaining that loss in the long term, and they may even wreak havoc on your system.

But becoming a vegan? A person who eats no animal products at all? Calling that a radical change to my lifestyle was more than a bit of an understatement. Yet it was clear that something had to be done. I asked Sid, “Is a compromise possible? Any other ideas?”

“You’re a smart guy,” he said. “Figure something out.”

The answer, to me, was this: I’d become a part-time vegan. And for me, this part-time veganism would follow these simple rules: From the time I woke up in the morning until 6 in the evening, I’d eat a superstrict vegan diet, with no animal products at all.

In fact, I decided to go even beyond that: Until 6 p.m., I’d also forgo hyper-processed food, like white bread, white rice, white pasta, of course all junk food, and alcohol.

At 6 p.m., I’d become a free man, allowing myself to eat whatever I wanted, usually—but not always—in moderation. Some nights, this meant a steak dinner; some nights, it was a blow-out meal at a good restaurant; other nights, dinner was a tunafish sandwich followed by some cookies. It ran, and runs, the gamut.

Whatever happened at dinner, though, the next morning I turned not to bacon and eggs or a bowl of Trix but to oatmeal or fruit or vegetables. For lunch, rice and beans or a salad—or both. Throughout the day I snacked on nuts and more fruit.

I called the diet “vegan before six,” or VB6. And it worked.

A month later, I weighed myself; I’d lost 15 pounds. A month after that, I went to the lab for blood work: Both my cholesterol and my blood sugar levels were down, well into the normal range (my cholesterol had gone from 240 to 180). My apnea was gone; in fact, for the first time in probably thirty years, I was sleeping through the night, not even snoring. Within four months, I’d lost more than 35 pounds and was below 180—less than I’d weighed in thirty years. And the funny thing was, the way I ate in the daytime began to change the way I ate at night.

An excerpt from Mark Bittman’s “VB6″

AND SEE:
I Answer Frequently Asked Questions about VB6
Help for the afflicted
Application of the Premack principle to the behavioral control of extremely inactive schizrophrenics

Why students have to memorize things - revised

I've been trying to get this post right, and it's getting closer.

I'm sensing an uptick in anti-knowledge sentiment, so I need a rebuttal.

What do children want?

Fabulous post from a substitute teacher in Great Britain

Knowledge and memory posts

6/24/2006: Mastery learning and IQ (warning: broken links; page can't be edited)

10/25/2006: On not teaching to mastery (warning: broken links; page can't be edited)

4/26/2007 How to build a fast learner

4/26/2007: Extremely fast learning

6/10/2007: On Intelligence (Jeff Hawkins)

9/9/2010: The rule of 20

1/23/2012: Why students have to memorize things

3/30/2012: Look it up

8/13/2012: Jeff Hawkins: intelligence is memory, memory is intelligence

6/18/2013: Deeper shmeeper

7/2/2013: Why students need to memorize, Common Core edition

President Obama has a really bad idea

President Obama recently visited a school that "relies 100 percent on project-based learning." Not just visited, lauded.

Sigh.

Apparently the White House is launching a "High School Redesign" initiative, which appears to be supported by the National Governors Association and the National Association of State Boards of Education:

Today's global economy requires new approaches to teaching and learning in America's high schools to foster problem solving and analysis, to support creativity and collaboration, and to connect student learning directly to the real world. Students learn best when they are engaged in complex projects and tasks aligned with their interests and when they work with others through practical examples and case studies that engage them in rigorous academics and in the application of knowledge.
Fact Sheet: Redesigning America's High Schools

Manor New Technology High School, a 100% project-based school, is cited as one of five Promising Examples of Redesigned High Schools.

From the President's speech:

• at Manor a history teacher might get together with a math teacher and develop a project about the impact of castles on world history and the engineering behind building castles
• or a group of students might be in charge of putting together a multimedia presentation about the moral dilemmas in literature as applied to WWII
• folks who use mathematical equations to build musical instruments
• tests on bungee jumping with rubber bands and weights
• robots that were being built
• all kinds of great stuff
• there's a lot of hands-on learning here
• part of what makes this place special is that there's all this integration, various subjects and actual projects, and young people doing and not just sitting there listening
• I could not be prouder of what's happening here at Manor

AND SEE:
Help Desk: Project-Based Learning
High School Redesign Gets Presidential Lift
Smartbrief on How to Make Project-Based Learning Work
Tips for Transitioning to Project-Based Learning
Manor New Technology High School

The founder, chairman, and CEO of Netflix has a really bad idea
Larry Summers has a really bad idea
David Brooks has a really bad idea
David Brooks has a really bad idea, part 2
All is forgiven.

The good news

The good news....

A recent report shows that although project-based learning is a growing trend in education, only about 1% of schools nationwide use the practice on a regular, committed basis.

How to make project-based learning work

One percent!

One percent is not a growing trend for a teaching method that dates back at least one hundred years. At least, I hope not.

There's bad news, too. (President Obama has a really bad idea.)

Willingham on interdisciplinary work

. . . Gee retells (via Jonah Lehrer) the story of a building at MIT that housed professors from a wide variety of disciplines, with a concomitant flowering of intellectual cross-fertilization. Gee quotes (with approval, I guess) Lehrer: “The lesson of Building 20 is that when the composition of the group is right—enough people with different perspectives running into one another in unpredictable ways—the group dynamic will take care of itself.”

As an academic who has been doing interdisciplinary work for 20 years, I would counter: “Like hell it does.”

Virtually every school of education is housed in a building with people trained in different disciplines, and interdisciplinary work remain rare. For reasons I won’t get into here (and much to the despair of university administrators) interdisciplinary work is hard.

Book Review: Theory and Practice
7/1/2013

Why students need to memorize, Common Core edition

"...anything that occupies your working memory reduces your ability to think."
- Daniel Kahneman | Thinking Fast and Slow

The only way to clear space in working memory is to store knowledge in long-term memory.

AND SEE:
Why students have to memorize things
#whystudentsneedtomemorize

"Wasting time in school"

Have just this moment stumbled upon a UK education blog: Wasting Time in School."

Check out this post.

Brilliant.

This reminds me of that business idea we all had a while back, doing school projects for beleaguered parents.

Thought experiment: since the parents are already doing the projects & everyone knows it....wouldn't a School Project Business be legit in a way a term-paper business is not?

I think it might.

Gone fishing (and did NCLB work?)

In Princeton, NJ, waiting for our room to be ready.

While I wait I'm looking at NAEP scores, and wondering.

Are we seeing evidence that No Child Left Behind worked?

• Compared to the first assessment in 1971 for reading and in 1973 for mathematics, scores were higher in 2012 for 9- and 13-year-olds and not significantly different for 17-year-olds.
• In both reading and mathematics at all three ages, Black students made larger gains from the early 1970s than White students.
• Hispanic students made larger gains from the 1970s than White students in reading at all three ages and in mathematics at ages 13 and 17.
• Female students have consistently outscored male students in reading at all three ages, but the gender gap narrowed from 1971 to 2012 at age 9.
• At ages 9 and 13, the scores of male and female students were not significantly different in mathematics, but the gender gap in mathematics for 17-year-olds narrowed in comparison to 1973.

About NAEP
NAEP Summary

the "triple dissociation" and slow and fast readers

re: We can see just 7 or 8 letters at a time

The NYU reading-speed study, which has come up a couple of times on ktm, found a "triple dissociation" amongst three contributors to reading speed:

• Decoding by phonics (62% of reading speed)
• Whole-word recognition (16% of reading speed)
• Word-prediction via knowledge of grammar and context (22%)

"Triple dissociation":

Surprisingly, the effects of the knockouts on reading rate reveal a triple dissociation. Each reading process always contributes the same number of words per minute, regardless of whether the other processes are operating.

I've just this moment realized the implications of the triple dissociation they found:

1. If students don't know phonics, they can never read quickly enough to do college-level reading,  which requires at least 200 wpm. 
2. Students who don't know the grammar of written English well, will be significantly slower readers than students who do. ("Know" in the procedural sense of being able instantly to comprehend grammatical structures such as appositives and relative clauses and anaphora and the like.)
3. Until you have substantial background knowledge in a subject, you will be a slow(ish) reader in that content area. 

I'd love to know how that 22% is distributed between grammar and background knowledge. The researchers did not test to see how grammar and background knowledge

Source:
Parts, Wholes, and Context in Reading: A Triple Dissociation by Denis G. Pelli mail, Katharine A. Tillman

We can see just 7 or 8 letters at a time

I've always wondered about this:

Let us consider the behaviour in which you are currently engaged – namely, reading these words. What exactly is your brain is doing right now? What kind of behaviour is reading and what must the brain do in order to achieve it?

[snip]

Reading, when reduced to the rather prosaic level of motor actions, depends on the brain’s ability to orchestrate a series of eye movements. Now, as you read these words, your brain is commanding your eyes to make small but very rapid (about 500° per second) left-to-right movements called saccades (right-to-left or up-and-down for some other written languages). You are not consciously aware of it, but these rapid movements are frequently interrupted by brief periods when the eyes are fixed in position. Watch someone reading and you will see exactly what I mean. You’ll notice that the eyes do not sweep smoothly along the line of text, rather they dart from one fixation to another. It is only during the fixations, when the eyes dwell for about a fifth of a second, that the brain is able to examine the text in detail. Reading is not possible during the darting saccadic movements because the eyes are moving too quickly across the page. You are not aware of the blur and confusion during a saccade because fortunately there is a brain mechanism that suppresses vision and protects you from visual overload.

Reading is only possible between saccades, not only because the eyes are then stationary but also because gaze is centred on the retina’s fovea. The fovea is the only part of the retina specialized for high acuity vision (see Chapter 5), but it scrutinizes a very small area of our visual world. As a literal rule of thumb, foveal vision is restricted approximately to the area of your vision covered by your thumbnail held at arm’s length. It is a small window of clear vision within which you are able to decipher just 7 or 8 letters of normal print size at a time. The task for the brain is to generate a precise series of motor commands to the eye muscles which ensure that at the end of each saccade your high acuity vision is fixed on that part of the text you need to see most clearly next. As your eyes approach the end of a line, the brain generates a carriage return. Of course the return saccade must be to the left, of the correct magnitude and associated with a slight downward shift in gaze in order to bring the first word on the next line onto the fovea.

I have considered only the simple case of the brain directing eye movements alone, as if nothing else affects gaze direction. But of course the relative positions of the eye and page are affected continuously by head, body, and book motion. Thus the brain must continually monitor and anticipate factors affecting the future position of your eyes relative to the text. The fact that you can effortlessly read on a moving train while eating a sandwich is evidence that your brain can solve this problem quite easily. Importantly, it is done automatically and on an unconscious level without you having to think through every step. If you had to consciously think about the mechanical process of reading, you would be illiterate!

Our lack of conscious awareness of underlying brain processes can also be illustrated by reflecting on the subjective experience that the comprehension of written material represents. While reading we are not conscious of the fragmented nature of comprehension imposed by underlying move—stop—move—stop activity of the eyes I’ve just described or by the fact that only 7 or 8 letters can be deciphered at each stop. On the contrary, our strong subjective impression is that comprehension of the text flows uninterrupted and moreover that we can read several words or even whole sentences ‘at a glance’. That this is not the case can be illustrated by reading a sentence containing a word that has more than one meaning and pronunciation. For example, the word tear has two very different meanings and pronunciations in English – tear the noun of crying and tear the verb of ripping apart. Clearly such word ambiguity complicates the brain’s task of providing you with an uninterrupted comprehension. If for instance the word tear occurred at the beginning of a sentence its meaning might remain ambiguous until the subject of the sentence appears later. Because you cannot read the whole sentence at a glance your brain may be left with no option but to choose one of the alternative meanings (or sounds, if you are reading aloud) of a word and hope for the best.

While we cannot read whole sentences at a glance, the brain does recognize each word as a whole. What is quite surprising however is that the order of the letters is not particularly important (good news for poor spellers). That is why you will be able to read the following passage without consciously having to decode it.

I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdgnieg. It deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod aer, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht eth frist dan lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset cna be a taotl mses and yuo can still raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?

The Brain: A Very Short Introduction by Michael O'Shea

The NYU study of reading speed (found that reading happens at 3 levels:

• Decoding (phonics): 62% of reading speed
• Whole word: 16% of reading speed
• "Sentence or story context": 22% of reading speed

And see:
How many words can readers predict?

Life is a just a bowl of cherries

More fun with Common Core.

A few days later, though, the mood [in Ms. McNair-Lee's 8th grade English class] is more somber. In a lesson about figurative language, students are analyzing how authors compare nouns. They're mulling a quote from Lois Lowry's The Giver: [Reading Level: Grade 6] "It was as if a hatchet lay lodged in his leg, slicing through each nerve with a hot blade."

But they're tongue-tied when Ms. McNair-Lee asks if the quote compares two nouns. Finally, a boy from the front table, where Mikel sits quietly, ventures that it compares "hatchet" and "hot blade."

She takes them step by step through another quote, "The rain sounded like bullets." Does it use literal references? she asks. No, one student says, they're not actual bullets. Does it compare nouns? Yes. Does it use "like" or "as"? Yes. They're getting it. Could it be literal? No. Is this an example of a literary device? Yes, a half-dozen students say.

What kind of literary device is this? Ms. McNair-Lee presses. "Simile," says a small voice at the back of the room. The teacher remembers a question from the last interim assessment, asking students to identify the literary devices in the cited text passage. She anticipates something similar on the year-end test. "Simile," she says, smiling and nodding.

Moments later, a stumbling block: No one can identify the verb in a short sentence: "Life is a dream."

Ms. McNair-Lee resorts to a physical demonstration. She calls two students up front and has them stand on either side of her: the subject and the object. In the middle, she's the verb.

"The subject is the one doing the action," she reminds. "The verb is the action." Her frustration is tangible.

Into the Common Core: One Classroom's Journey by Catherine Gewertz | Education Week | Published Online: June 4, 2013

First of all, hoo boy.

Whatever happened to "state of being"?

Or  "subject complement"?

And forget linguistics-based grammar, which was developed in the 1950s, I think, and is a lot easier to understand than traditional grammar. For me, at least.

As far as I can tell, the action-versys0state of being explanation of verbs was always confusing to a lot of students, but it had to be better than "The verb is the action" alone. (Didn't it?)

What 'action' is the verb "is" "doing" in "Life is a dream"? (And yes, the words "It depends upon what the meaning of the word is is" are running through my mind at this moment, I admit!)

If you're an 8th grade ELA teacher teaching "close readings" and you don't know what a copula is, look out below.

Somebody better write some decent curriculum pronto. Most K-12 teachers have come out of the same public school system they are now supposed to improve via close readings of informational text. These teachers weren't taught grammar (nor was I); now they're supposed to teach students how to analyze an author's use of language---?

How is that going to happen?

I'll tell you how it happened for me, teaching at my college. After I was hired to teach freshman composition, I spent hours and hours (and hours) crash-coursing myself in grammar and linguistics, that's how. I'm still working on it. And I started with the advantage that I am a writer who has a Ph.D.; I've spent my entire adult life doing 'close readings' of the kind Common Core is talking about. Thirty-year old teachers teaching full days and raising families at night and on weekends aren't going to be able to do what I've been doing.

I was worried about Common Core giving students work that's way over their heads.

Now I'm worried about the teachers.

Whimbey on grammar

A favorite passage of mine, from Arthur Whimbey's Teaching and Learning Grammar: The Prototype-Construction Approach. I was thinking I'd posted it before, but haven't tracked it down.

When I was in the 9th grade at Brooklyn Technical High School, my English teacher stood at the board and said, ‘Your textbook defines a verb as a word that describes an action or state of being.’ On the board she wrote: A verb describes an action or state of being.

Next she wrote this sentence on the board:

Eating custard pie, Peter is a picture of happiness.

Then she called on me to identify the verb in the sentence.

It seemed clear to me that eating expresses an action, so I answered, ‘Eating.’

To my surprise the teacher said, ‘No, eating is not the verb.’

I protested, ‘But the book says a verb is an action word. Eating is an action.’

The teacher responded with what was to her an apparently clear explanation: ‘Yes, but eating is a participle, not the verb in this sentence.’

I had no idea what a participle was, but I began looking for another action word in the sentence—without success.

Sensing my frustration, the teacher offered a hint. ‘Remember that a verb can describe a state of being.’

State of being, I thought. What is a state of being?

Scanning the sentence to find a word expressing a state of being, I considered happiness. Happiness seemed to express a state of being. I figured that if I knew what a verb was, I would be in a state of happiness. Unsure but hopeful, I asked, “Is happiness the verb?”

‘No,’ came the judgment.

After another minute or so, the teacher answered her own question:

‘The verb in this sentence is is.’

But it didn’t matter. Grammar made no sense to me, and I dismissed it as something I would never understand.

Whimbey, Arthur and Linden, Myra J. Teaching and Learning Grammar: The Prototype-Construction Approach. Chicago: BGF Performance Systems, LLC, 2001. Print. (4-5).

Ability Grouping makes a comeback

From the New York Times: Grouping Students by Ability Regains Favor in Classroom

It was once common for elementary-school teachers to arrange their classrooms by ability, placing the highest-achieving students in one cluster, the lowest in another. But ability grouping and its close cousin, tracking, in which children take different classes based on their proficiency levels, fell out of favor in the late 1980s and the 1990s as critics charged that they perpetuated inequality by trapping poor and minority students in low-level groups.

NYC is struggling with how to teach GT students.

Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker who is running for mayor, has proposed expanding the number of gifted classes while broadening the criteria for admission in hopes of increasing diversity. (The city’s Education Department has opposed the proposal, saying that using criteria other than tests would dilute the classes.)

And teachers?

Teachers and principals who use grouping say that the practice has become indispensable, helping them cope with widely varying levels of ability and achievement.

Elementary School teacher Jill Sears:

My instruction aimed at the middle of my class, and was leaving out approximately two-thirds of my learners,

The comments are interesting.

Commenter SGC:

You need not "teach to the middle". If you aim high with your expectations and impose rigor and high standards in the classroom, most students can achieve and succeed regardless of "so-called" ability.

Enjoy.

News you can use

For the past 30 years, philosophers have debated whether zombies could exist (Kirk, 1974a).
Chapter 13: What zombies can't do: What zombies can’t do: A social cognitive neuroscience approach to the irreducibility of reflective consciousness
Matthew D. Lieberman
Lieberman, M. D. (2009). What zombies can't do: A social cognitive neuroscience approach to the irreducibility of reflective consciousness.
In J. Evans & K. Frankish (Eds.) In Two Minds: Dual Process and Beyond (pp. 219-316). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

I did not know that.

Stephen Colbert's tribute to his mother

This is exactly the way I feel about my own mother, and about my mother's death:

Stephen Colbert pays tribute to his mother on "The Colbert Report."

Good charter high schools in NYC?

Any recommendations?

sticky

At the other blog....

Deeper shmeeper

Fabulous post by Tom Loveless:

Deeper Learning is the current term for an old idea. The notion is that schools spend too much time focused on the acquisition of knowledge, especially knowing facts. In the past century, several alternatives have arisen to dethrone the prominent role of knowledge in schools: project-based learning, inquiry and discovery learning, higher-level thinking, critical thinking, outcome based education, and 21st Century Skills. Now it is deeper learning.

These ideas represent a variety of approaches to curriculum and pedagogy. They are not all the same, but they share one characteristic. All are advertised as transcending, and therefore superior to, academic content organized within traditional intellectual disciplines.

The Banality of Deeper Learning

"21st century skills" are gone?

Really?

That was quick. At least, it seems quick. I was just hearing the words "21st century skills" for the first time in 2005. Eight years ago.

What is the life-cycle of K-12 jargon, anyway?

AND SEE:
Why students have to memorize things

Common Core la la la

Priceless.

Best productivity app ever

Workflowy

• How I use Workflowy
• Workflowy review
• Workflowy review at PC Magazine
• A violin teacher using Workflowy to communicate with pupils

Looking at the "How I use Workflowy" post, I realize I have forgotten everything about GTD (Getting Things Done).

Interesting. The violin teacher is using Workflowy to assign and monitor practice.

One more reason to homeschool

The court held 9-5 that despite compulsory education laws the school did not have a "special relationship" with its students that would give rise to a duty to protect them from harm from other students.

District Not Liable in Student Bullying, Appeals Court Rules
Mark Walsh | June 06, 2013

Apple wins $50-million dollar LA contract (half-billion eventually)

Apple Recommended for Major L.A. Schools Tech. Contract
By Sean Cavanagh on June 14, 2013 8:00 AM

Apple Inc. has been recommended to receive a lucrative contract from the Los Angeles Unified School District to begin implementing one of the most ambitious education-technology projects in the country, with the city's school board scheduled to vote on the issue next week.

A selection committee that reviewed applications for the project has called for the board to vote at its meeting Tuesday to select the Silicon Valley company from the 13 proposals submitted for the project, according to a report to be presented to the panel.

If approved, the decision would award Apple $30 million to begin a project to provide the nation's second largest school district with one computing device for every student and teacher in 47 schools. But the contract could eventually prove much larger, because the district has called for eventually providing a device for every student in the 660,000-student system, a project expected to cost $500 million.

And a chicken in every pot!

Common Core la-la-la

In a memo to the board, Mark Hovatter, the system's chief facilities executive, said the initial phase of work will include providing computing devices, storage and charging stations, a learning management system, upgrades to local area networks, and other services. The overall scope of the first phase of the technology project is expected to cost $50 million.

All of the work is designed to support the district's transition to implementing the Common Core State Standards, and the creation of an "individualized, interactive, and information-rich learning environment," he said.

Heck.

Half a billion dollars is cheap if you're expecting high school kids to tell you who is to blame for Romeo and Juliet's deaths. You can't get a learning outcome like that with paper and pencil. No way.

APPR Q&A

A friend of mine estimates that my tiny district is going to spend around $1 million on APPR alone.

My entire state has gone crazy.

Crazier.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.2

Determine two or more themes or central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to produce a complex account; provide an objective summary of the text.
English Language Arts Standards » Reading: Literature » Grade 11-12

hmmmmm

Assuming this means what I think it means, I am not seeing the value of Standard CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.2.

Off the top of my head, it strikes me that a work of literary nonfiction sufficiently sophisticated to be amenable to "thematic analysis" is going to be quite difficult for most students to read and comprehend, let alone identify not one but two themes, and analyze how the two themes interact and build on one another to produce a complex account, providing an objective summary of the text in the process.

(And does an objective summary of a text ever involve extended analysis of themes?)

Also....themes?

In nonfiction?

I'm sure essays have themes (they must, right?), but I don't personally think of essays as having themes. I think of essays as having arguments. Arguments and evidence.

I have no idea what this standard means.

Or what a successful analysis of the way two themes interact and build on each other to produce a complex account would look like.

School is going to be so not fun if teachers actually try to teach these things.

How many Common Core standards are there?

According to Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, more than 1,300.

Drear

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

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

It's always worse than you think!

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

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

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

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

Who is responsible for Romeo and Juliet's Death?

You got me.

William Shakespeare, maybe?

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

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

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

The complete list of sample ELA tasks and units.

Onward and upward

Nearly 80 percent of New York City high school graduates need to relearn basic skills before they can enter the City University’s community college system.

The number of kids behind the 8-ball is the highest in years, CBS2′s Marcia Kramer reported Thursday.

Officials: Most NYC High School Grads Need Remedial Help Before Entering CUNY Community Colleges | Basic Skills Like Reading, Writing And Math Need To Be Re-Learned | March 7, 2013 10:55 PM

Pop Quiz, Common Core edition

NOTE: the reading passage is on music.

Why does the author write that the Portuguese and the Spanish have been in California longer than the "Americans?"

A. to broaden the reader's idea of what should be considered "American" folk music

B. to argue that Hungarian, Finnish, and Armenian folk musics are not truly American

C. to suggest that "American" folk music is music that has not been imported to the continent

D. to convince the reader that the Portuguese and Spanish should not be considered minority groups in California

The moral life of downtown

Back from a quick trip to Illinois to see my niece graduate high school --- and finally posting this passage from a WSJ book review:

Almost two decades ago, Earl Shorris, a novelist and journalist, told the editor at his publishing house that he wanted to write a book about poverty in America. The editor, to his credit, said that he didn't want just another book describing the problem. He wanted a solution. So Shorris, who had attended the University of Chicago on a scholarship many years before and who was greatly influenced by its Great Books curriculum, hit upon the idea of teaching the core texts of Western civilization to people living in poverty, whose school experience had scanted the canon or skipped it entirely. His Eureka moment came when he was visiting a prison and conducting interviews for another book he was planning to write.

He asked one of the women at New York's Bedford Hills maximum-security prison why she thought the poor were poor. "Because they don't have the moral life of downtown," she replied. "What do you mean by the moral life?" Shorris asked. "You got to begin with the children . . . ," she said. "You've got to teach the moral life of downtown to the children. And the way you do that, Earl, is by taking them downtown to plays, museums, concerts, lectures." He asked whether she meant the humanities. Looking at him as if he were, as he puts it, "the stupidest man on earth," she replied: "Yes, Earl, the humanities."

What Would Socrates Do? By NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY April 16, 2013, 6:18 p.m. ET

Speaking of Scarsdale (warning: bad language)

Recording Of Angry Chaperone On Edgemont Bat Mitzvah Bus Hits YouTube

Here's the tape: https://soundcloud.com/scarsdale10583/barmitzvahrant

This reminds me of Mary Damer telling me that the single biggest challenge for a new teacher is classroom management, and that includes a teacher just coming out of the Marines.

Singapore Math explains the budget!

I'm back!

Just about.



The budget passed, making my district one of just 8 in all of New York state to pass a tax-cap override.

Damn the luck! 5.7% year-on-year increase in spending. The actual tax increase will be somewhere in the neighborhood of 8%.

I wish school districts had exit polls. How many 'Yes' voters knew they were voting for a $2.1 million dollar surplus? Not too many, I bet.

Of those 'yes' voters who did know they were voting to fund a budget surplus, many doubtlessly believed there was only $900k in the "fund balance," not the $2.1 million the district reported to the state.

Meanwhile Scarsdale voters clobbered their budget.

Maybe if we had dumped Trailblazers for Singapore Math when Scarsdale did, we'd be voting against $2-million dollar surpluses, too.

---

For the record, I was having a lot of difficulty grasping the fund balance until I drew the bar model. At least in my experience, the fungibility of money is counterintuitive. I kept getting caught up in worries about "programs" and "teachers" etc. It was quite difficult for me to grasp that we were voting on a surplus, not "programs" and not "teachers."

I'm certain many, many voters just didn't 'see' the budget in the way a bar model presents it: as one big chunk of money, with $2.1 million not dedicated to any item appearing in the budget. Yes votes were  votes for programs, not the surplus.

The corollary: it's easy for administrators and school boards to blow smoke where the fund balance is concerned. In our case, the superintendent and board president, who was running for re-election, told the local newspaper that we "really" had only $900K in the fund because a) the federal government might not send the $700K it's supposed to send and b) $400K was being used to pay a tax cert. The first claim is absurd; the second is misleading because the district ran more than the legally allowed surplus this year (you can see that on the documents).

Normally the way things work is that whenever the fund balance is too high, the district pays down debt to get back below the limit. I'm sure that's what they did with the $400K. District documents show an extra $300K surplus between last year and this, apart from the $2 million dollar surplus.)

Source:
Singapore math explains the budget

1/2 chapter left, then back to ktm!

Month of May:

• Polish Debbie's book (which is going to be a bestseller!)
• Write Introduction to "Writing Supplement" with Katie B
• Deal with annual school-board-and-budget mishegoss (we're in the 4%!)
• Either finish basal ganglia project or STOP thinking about basal ganglia
• Finish semester at Learning Center

Intense.

Speaking of the election, this year's outing features:

• a 5.7% spending increase in a 1.26%-inflation environment
• a budget that breaks the tax cap
• a 4.85% tax increase that will actually be 7 or 8% 
• multiple "She lies!" accusations flying around town
• mayoral interventions on behalf of aforementioned 5.7% spending increase
• fear mongering 
• smoke blowing 
• etc.

On the bright side, I'm thinking the best of the 4 candidates may actually get elected, which would be a big change after the last two elections. We'll see.

And the district isn't doing get-out-the-vote robo calls this year. That's fantastic.

Still. I don't want to go through another Irvington school board/budget election, ever. But I figure we've got two more to go before we can get to Riverdale. Or wherever else we decamp to.

Bonus content: subtraction is harder than addition

Early College

We just found out that someone from my son's high school will be going to Simon's Rock, which is part of Bard College. Does anyone have any comments about this college or how well early college works? Simon's Rock appears to be the only early college that's accredited.

It seems to me that a better (cheaper) way would be to take a lot of AP classes in high school and find a college that accepts those credits. Then again, don't many colleges give you only one semester credit for a full year AP class? Does anyone know of colleges where you can graduate a year early just because of AP classes? Would it be better to take classes from a local community college than to take AP classes? Do some high schools pay for college classes?

I suppose that colleges do not like accepting high school credits because that's kind of like saying that some of their courses are at a high school level. Then again, they might not like accepting credits from community colleges either. However, many state universities have specific paths that allow community college students a (no loss) transfer path after two years.

I can see that in some cases, AP classes are not as strong as those in college. However, I think that many high school students can handle very high level college classes. For my son, I see AP classes as ways to show that he is a strong college prospect, not as a way to graduate college early. But what if students take online classes provided by a college like MIT? Will MIT allow that student to graduate early or to just get advanced placement? Is a college degree all about time or some particular level of learning? A degree is based on degree requirements and number of credits, but colleges don't seem to give away those credits as easily as advanced placement.

single-sex schools

Ed was talking this morning with a neighbor who also sent her son to Hogwarts. He's been accepted by a very selective (and terrific) college, and she said he would never have gotten in if he'd stayed in the public schools here. (Per pupil spending: $28,517) 

I'm sure she's right.

Abstract
Despite the voluminous literature on the potentials of single-sex schools, there is no consensus on the effects of single-sex schools because of student selection of school types. We exploit a unique feature of schooling in Seoul—the random assignment of students into single-sex versus coeducational high schools—to assess causal effects of single-sex schools on college entrance exam scores and college attendance. Our validation of the random assignment shows comparable socio- economic backgrounds and prior academic achievement of students attending single-sex schools and coeducational schools, which increases the credibility of our causal estimates of single-sex school effects. The three-level hierarchical model shows that attending all-boys schools or all-girls schools, rather than coeducational schools, is significantly associated with higher average scores on Korean and English test scores. Applying the school district fixed-effects models, we find that single-sex schools produce a higher percentage of graduates who attended four-year colleges and a lower percentage of graduates who attended two-year junior colleges than do coeducational schools. The positive effects of single-sex schools remain substantial, even after we take into account various school-level variables, such as teacher quality, the student-teacher ratio, the proportion of students receiving lunch support, and whether the schools are public or private.

Home stretch

2 chapters left to go!

Monty and the pigeon

I remember, back when Carolyn J. & I first started writing the original Kitchen Table Math, the Monty Hall problem coming up. I had never heard of it.

I think I remember, too, saying a couple of times, on the blog, that I came away from writing Animals in Translation thinking birds might just be as smart as people, or smarter. I didn't want to think that, particularly; How smart are birds, anyway? wasn't the topic of the book, which was mostly about mammals, not birds. But every time Temple told me a bird story, I would think hmmmmm.

The crow-and-the-rifle story, about a crow repeatedly taunting a rancher, has never left me.

So naturally, when I saw "Pigeons, Humans, and the Monty Hall Dilemma," I had to look.

The Monty Hall Dilemma is a probability puzzle that is notorious for eliciting suboptimal decisions from humans. A participant is given a choice from among three doors, one of which conceals a valuable prize. After an initial selection, one of the remaining, nonwinning doors is opened, and the participant is given a chance to switch to the other unopened door. The probability of winning is higher if the participant switches. Pigeons maximize their wins by switching on virtually all trials of a Monty Hall Dilemma analogue, whereas humans utilize a suboptimal strategy involving probability matching. Possible reasons for the difference between these two species’ performance are considered.

Pigeons, Humans, and the Monty Hall Dilemma by Walter T. Herbranson Current Directions in Psychological Science 2012 21: 297

No time to read or even skim --- but looking forward.

1974 parody of college freshman writing

I'm on the home stretch! Four more chapters of Debbie's wonderful book, and we're there.

In the meantime, here's a 1974 parody of college freshman writing that contains not a single grammatical error, dangling modifier, comma splice, or sentence beginning with some variant of "In the report it stated." Apparently bad freshman writing in 1974 was quite a bit less bad than bad student writing in 2013.

For the record, I think it's rude to call student writing "intellectually vacuous trash."

[I wrote this parody of a freshman theme to preservemy sanity while struggling to read a batch of themes during one Christmas holiday. The lesson here may be that if we continue assigning themes on such impossible topics as friendship, love, or wisdom, we deserve to get the intellectually vacuous trash that students write for us.]

FRIENDSHIP
WALTER S. MINOT

Statement of Intent: My purpose in this theme is to define very specifically the real meaning of true friendship.

In today's modern world, true friendship is very rare and hard to accomplish. Webster defines friendship as the state or fact of being friends. Thus it can be easily seen that in order for friendship to have a state of existence there must be friends, because without friends there would be no friendship.

True friendship denotes more than just being friendly with someone. We are amicable with many people who are not really true friends. This is not true friendship. Truly real friendship happens only when two people are really true friends. In order to have a friend, you must be a friend first, or you won't have any friends. Everyone needs a friend, or his or her life will be very alienated.

A friend is a person who helps you up when you are down. You may have many but can have a few true friends. A friend is someone who acquaintances, you only  will continue being your friend even if you do something bad to him. He will adhere to you through thick and thin, through rain or shine. If you took your best friend's girl away from him, he would still be your friend.

On mutual respect is based true friendship. A good example of this is the friendship between Allen Whitehall and Robert Epstein. If Al needed a dime to buy flowers for his widowed mother who has arthritis and Bob had a dime, he would give it to him no matter what the cost of the personal sacrifice.

As I have shown, true friendshipis the greatest thing anyone can have. Without friends, no man can stand alone. I can only finalize my definition with these words:

True friendship is eternal and it should last a lifetime.

Gannon College Erie, Pa.

College Composition and Communication, Vol. 25, No. 2 (May, 1974), p. 154    

a palisadesk post

I don't remember now, but I think palisadesk may have been writing comments on kitchen table math from the beginning.

I do remember my first impression: WOW.

This person knows what he/she is talking about.

My first impression was right. In all these years, I don't think I've ever seen palisadesk stray from the mark.

So when Surfer got sick, and palisadesk turned out to have saved a dog with mast cell cancer^* (it would be palisadesk, wouldn't it?)......I was initially thinking 'vegan' and then palisadesk weighed in with her quasi-ketogenic^** approach to treating mast cell cancer via diet.....

.....And a few weeks into the whole business, contemplating my growing collection of resources on dog cancer, Kinvaet, mast cell cancer, obesity as a precursor and possible cause of mast cell cancer, diet, etc, etc......it occurred to me that my best best was just to do whatever palisadesk did and call it a day.

And that's pretty much what I did.

At this moment, Surfer is better than I've seen him in a long time. He's frisky; he's acting like a much younger dog. And he's turning 12.

Surfer may yet die of mast cell cancer, of course. Just a moment ago he walked past me and I spotted a new bump on his side. That's been another fun part of the mast cell adventure: Surfer sprouts lypomas on a monthly basis, and I can't tell the difference between a lypoma and a mast cell tumor. So I spend a lot of time palpating new growths (and old growths I can't remember whether I've seen before): a bad idea because palpating a mast cell tumor can cause it to "degranulate," sending the dog into an instantaneous and fatal case of anaphylactic shock. I have been specifically warned not to be palpating growths.

I'm sure palisadesk would say Don't do that.

Anyway, as I say, Surfer may yet die of mast cell cancer.

But if he does, my view of palisadesk's advice won't change. Mean survival time for surgical treatment alone, without chemo, is 18 weeks. (Mean time from diagnosis? from date of surgery? Nobody ever seems to say.) Surfer had his surgery February 4, and I'm pretty sure he developed the tumor in early January. (The vet found the tumor during a routine check-up.)

So it's 12 weeks since the surgery, a good 16 weeks since the tumor appeared, and the Kinavet didn't work out. And Surfer is not on his last legs.

I may be tempting fate, writing that.

But that's fine.

[pause]

Hmmm.

I'm listening to the YouTube discussion of Kinavet. You're supposed to wear gloves to pick up a Kinavet pill your dog has spit out.

How many Kinavet pills did Surfer spit out?

And how many did I pick up with my bare hands?^***

A lot.

Oh, well.

This may be one of the best review articles I've seen: Clinical Management of Mast Cell Tumors in Dogs

^* The dog is still alive today, 10 years later.
^**or really ketogenic - I don't want to put words into palisadesk's mouth
^*** I could not get pills down Surfer's throat wearing gloves. I tried. I didn't know the bit about "the seal being broken" once the pill has been spit out, however.

Home stretch! back soon--

Down to the last 100 pages of Debbie's book, which is fantastic.

So still no blogging, but ----- I have bullet points!

• The tuna cure: Surfer and Abby now eat tuna, lentils, and olive oil (plus, starting in the past week, a few carrots). Basically: a low-rent version of palisadesk's high-protein diet for mast cell cancer in dogs. Surfer--who, it turns out, can't tolerate chemo--appears to be fine. (But we'll see.) The younger vet told me mast cell cancer is the dog equivalent of pancreatic cancer: Surfer, with a Stage 3 diagnosis, was a goner unless the Kinavet worked. Older vet, back now from his own brush with death, says: "It's not a death sentence." (Ed says: Can we always see the older vet?) Funnily enough, we encountered the same division of labor during the two years my mother was sick. The younger doctors would waylay my siblings and me for The Talk (Your mother is dying. Let her die with dignity. If she doesn't want to die with dignity, persuade her.) Then the older docs would say things like "In intensive care we support your mother's organs until her body is strong enough to handle those functions again." The older docs were always right. And they never mentioned death with dignity, which was wise because my mother didn't give two figs for dignity.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
• Common Core illustrative texts v. what 7th graders read in my districtxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
• 4.6% tax increase proposed (I'm voting no, thank you for asking)xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
• Borrowing to pay teachers: the tax-cert loopholexxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
• SAT score decline (also in bullets)xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
• Erica Meltzer's book is out!!!xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
• New high school principal for Irvington who worked for TFA

One board member told me that when the board met the new principal he must have used the word accountability in every other sentence.

Are we the first affluent district ever to hire a TFA person?

We may be. A TFA alum certainly seems out of place here in Westchester, where affluent districts are snapping up superintendents fleeing New Jersey's salary cap.

Our new super replaces the superintendent against whom a number of us waged a running battle for 5 long years (or was it 6?). He is a man in his late 30s or early 40s, trained in elementary education, whose only previous experience--in New Jersey, where his wife and son continue to live--was heading a tiny K-5 district.

We are paying him $250K per year on a 5-year contract. During a minor depression.^* (Did I mention I'm voting no on the budget?)

I think it's possible, perhaps likely, the TFA hire would not have happened without 6 years of citizens' op eds on the Irvington Parents Forum.

Ed told me, when I started the Forum, that revolutions always have writers.

I believe him, and All revolutions have writers has been my essential reason for carrying on. Well, one of the essential reasons, the other essential reason being that both sides of my family came from Ulster.

That said, I don't expect a revolution. The new superintendent has thus far been more of the same, and he was supposed to be The One; all 5 board members said so. The new principal will come into a gatekeeping culture that has been in place for many, many years.

The single best observation anyone ever made to me concerning my district's unshakeable self-regard:

...[W]e're great because 10 kids do spectacular things by senior year. The other 150 will get by and there are no glaring inadequacies.

That's not going to be easy to change.

^* Depression at historinhas

Holistic College Admissions

I'll scream if I hear the word "holistic" at a college info session again. What it really means is that the admissions people love their own sensibilities and power. This might be fine if the choice was between two applicants for one open slot, but it's now a choice between 5 or 10 applicants at some colleges. They claim that there is no merit function that they use, but they don't tell you that the intangible factor has now risen to well over 50 percent of the admissions judgment. Since so many students meet some basic level of ability to handle the rigor at the college, one application out of 5 or 10 is selected based on the judgment of admissions people. They don't even turn some of their holistic decisions over to individual departments that know about academic content. They can't tell whether an applicant is at a base camp or a mountain top.

The admissions judgments are based on essays, recommendation letters, and character intangibles rather than academic intangibles. The admissions person we saw yesterday talked about their criteria of whether you would be an interesting person to have a cup of coffee with. They claim that they can see right through all applicants to tell if they are "authentic", "genuine", and "consistent". I think it just means that you have to be less authentic and hire better admissions prep people. They tell us that the essay and letters of recommendation are critical, but do they really think that the people they select did not get professional help? Sure, they can see through some applications, but what about the difference between authentic students who get help and authentic students who do not?

The other problem is that admissions people seem so anti-math and science. I'll scream a second time if I hear another admissions person or tour student tell us that the general education requirements allows you to not have to take another real math class; that there are other classes that will fulfill the requirements (ha ha). These are Ivy League schools. So here is this engaging English major tour guide who appeals to admissions more than a bookish math student who might have qualified for the AIME test.

We talked with a professor of music who said that they don't get audio portfolios of students to evaluate unless there is a final tie-breaking issue. He was having trouble getting a chance to evaluate and comment on an applicant who was a Presidential Scholar in the Arts. The holistic intangibles are closely held by the admissions people. It's OK, however, to select applicants who are clearly at the top of their math career. Then again, the admissions people may not know the difference.

teacher humor at Pinterest

In bed it's 6am you close your eyes for 5 minutes it's 7:45.
In school it's 1:30, close your eyes for 5 minutes it's 1:31.

Making it as a Middle School Teacher

I find this joke much funnier coming from a kid, I have to say.

This one's funny, though: Should I ask the teacher my question?

thinking of Boston....

If I were a carpenter....

An "unfortunate analogy" from the first SAT, administered in 1926.

A nostalgic trip down memory lane with the SAT [SLIDESHOW]

The tragedy of histogeomegraph continues

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

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

[snip]

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

[snip]

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

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

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

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

It's always worse than you think.

checking in--and decline and fall

I'm doing a very rushed polish of Debbie S's SAT book -- which is wonderful -- and we're around-the-clock, so no blogging!

But I'm amassing beaucoup SAT factoids, so I'll put some up as I go.

For starters, here are the basics on the 16-year decline in SAT scores:

• SAT scores declined from 1963 to 1980
• Verbal mean: dropped from 475 to 425
• Math mean: dropped from 500 to 470
• By 1990, the Math mean has gone back up to 475, but Verbal mean has not budged
• By 1980 College Board perceives a “definite need” to “realign the verbal and math scales”
• SAT V and SAT M averages are 50 points apart
• “there was a clear need to repopulate the top end of the score scale, especially for SAT V”

The Recentering of SAT® Scales and Its Effects on Score Distributions and Score Interpretations

And get your SAT I Score Equivalents right here:
CONVERT INDIVIDUAL AND MEAN SCORES FROM THE ORIGINAL SCALE TO THE RECENTERED SCALE

automated essay grading

In the Times today:

Essay-Grading Software Offers Professors a Break By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: April 4, 2013 | New York Times

I'm actually in favor of essay grading software, in theory. I've been interested in automated essay scoring ever since reading Richard Hudson's paper Measuring Maturity in Writing (which I need to re-read, so nothing more on that at the moment):

Abstract
The chapter reviews the anglophone research literature on the 'formal' differences (identifiable in terms of grammatical or lexical patterns) between relatively mature and relatively immature writing (where maturity can be defined in terms of independent characteristics including the writer's age and examiners' gradings of quality). The measures involve aspects of vocabulary as well as both broad and detailed patterns of syntax. In vocabulary, maturity correlates not only with familiar measures of lexical diversity, sophistication and density, but also with 'nouniness' (not to be confused with 'nominality'), the proportion of word tokens that are nouns. In syntax, it correlates not only with broad measures such as T-unit length and subordination (versus coordination), but also with the use of more specific patterns such as apposition. At present these measures are empirically grounded but have no satisfactory theoretical explanation, but we can be sure that the eventual explanation will involve mental growth in at least two areas: working memory capacity and knowledge of language.

Maturity of writing, in this sense, can be measured by software, and I would be using automated scoring software myself if I could buy essay-scoring software on Amazon. EdX says it's giving software away free to 'institutions' (does that leave out individuals?) so I'll have to see if my department might throw its hat in the ring.

That said, a lot of this is nonsense:

Anant Agarwal, an electrical engineer who is president of EdX, predicted that the instant-grading software would be a useful pedagogical tool, enabling students to take tests and write essays over and over and improve the quality of their answers. He said the technology would offer distinct advantages over the traditional classroom system, where students often wait days or weeks for grades.

[snip]

“It allows students to get immediate feedback on their work, so that learning turns into a game, with students naturally gravitating toward resubmitting the work until they get it right,” said Daphne Koller, a computer scientist and a founder of Coursera.

[snip]

“One of our focuses is to help kids learn how to think critically,” said Victor Vuchic, a program officer at the Hewlett Foundation. “It’s probably impossible to do that with multiple-choice tests. The challenge is that this requires human graders, and so they cost a lot more and they take a lot more time.”

None of these things is going to happen. Students aren't going to write essay responses "over and over again;" if they do write essay responses over and over again it's not going to feel like a fun game; and nobody's going to learn to think critically from automated essay scoring software.

Oy.

words page

In honor of the latest bulletin from palisadesk, I've started a new Blogger page.

uh oh

A note from palisadesk:

Unfortunately, it is true that using Lucy Calkins' methods can raise test scores, due to the design of the current generation of "authentic assessments" (aka holistic assessment, standards-based assessment, performance assessment). I know several schools (including my own) where test scores rose substantially when they STOPPED doing systematic synthetic phonics and moved to a workshop model instead.

So to prove the instructivist stuff works you also need to have in place testing that assesses actual skills -- phonemic decoding, vocabulary, grammar, spelling, arithmetic, etc.

It's really not all that unbelievable, if you consider how the testing has 
changed. Schools used to use norm-referenced measures (like the IOWA, the
 CTBS, Metropolitan Achievement Test, etc.) which also have definite 
limitations, but different ones.

Once they replaced those (as many states
 have done) with "constructed-response" item tests, variously known as 
performance assessments, holistic assessments, standards-based assessments 
and so on, a more fuzzy teaching approach also yielded benefits. These 
open-response items are usually scored on a rubric basis, based on anchor 
papers or exemplars, according to certain criteria for reasoning,
 conventions of print, organization, and so forth. These are variously 
weighted, but specifics like sentence structure, spelling, grammar,
 paragraph structure etc. generally carry less weight than such things as
 "providing two details from the selection to support your argument."

The 
open responses often mimic journal writing -- it is personal in tone, 
calls for the student to express an opinion, and many elements of what we
 would call good writing (or correct reading) count for little or even 
nothing.



The same is true in math. A local very exclusive private school which is 
famous for its high academic achievement recently switched from 
traditional math to Everyday Math and saw its test scores soar on these assessments (probably not on norm-referenced measures, but they aren't
 saying).



Another school where I worked implemented good early reading instruction 
with a strong decoding base (and not minimizing good literature, either),
 but saw its scores on the tests go down almost 25%. I think the reason
 for that is that teaching children to write all this rubbish for the "holistic assessments" is very time consuming, and if you spent your 
instructional time teaching the basic skills -- which aren't of much value 
on these tests -- your kids will do poorly.



So yes, you can post [my email], not referring to me of course. You can say -- 
because I don't think I've mentioned it publicly anywhere -- that I have 
been involved in the past in field-testing these assessments so have a 
more complete picture of how they are put together and evaluated, and what 
they do and do not measure.

Different states have made up their own but 
they share many similarities.

I was surprised when I read this ..... somehow I had assumed that, basics being basic, absence of basics would make any test hard to pass.

Apparently not.

seeking Tiger Mom

At the WSJ (not sure whether it's behind a pay wall): "To (All) the Colleges That Rejected Me" by Suzy Lee Weiss.

Like me, millions of high-school seniors with sour grapes are asking themselves this week how they failed to get into the colleges of their dreams. It's simple: For years, they—we—were lied to.

Colleges tell you, "Just be yourself." That is great advice, as long as yourself has nine extracurriculars, six leadership positions, three varsity sports, killer SAT scores and two moms. Then by all means, be yourself! If you work at a local pizza shop and are the slowest person on the cross-country team, consider taking your business elsewhere.

What could I have done differently over the past years?

[snip]

Having a tiger mom helps, too. As the youngest of four daughters, I noticed long ago that my parents gave up on parenting me. It has been great in certain ways: Instead of "Be home by 11," it's "Don't wake us up when you come through the door, we're trying to sleep." But my parents also left me with a dearth of hobbies that make admissions committees salivate. I've never sat down at a piano, never plucked a violin. Karate lasted about a week and the swim team didn't last past the first lap. Why couldn't Amy Chua have adopted me as one of her cubs?

This girl is a fabulous writer!

ABSTRACT

This paper shows that although the top ten percent of colleges are substantially more selective now than they were 5 decades ago, most colleges are not more selective. Moreover, at least 50 percent of colleges are substantially less selective now than they were then. This paper demonstrates that competition for space--the number of students who wish to attend college growing faster than the number of spaces available--does not explain changing selectivity. The explanation is, instead, that the elasticity of a student's preference for a college with respect to its proximity to his home has fallen substantially over time and there has been a corresponding increase in the elasticity of his preference for a college with respect to its resources and peers. In other words, students used to attend a local college regardless of their abilities and its characteristics. Now, their choices are driven far less by distance and far more by a college's resources and student body. It is the consequent re-sorting of students among colleges that has, at once, caused selectivity to rise in a small number of colleges while simultaneously causing it to fall in other colleges. I show that the integration of the market for college education has had profound implications on the peers whom college students experience, the resources invested in their education, the tuition they pay, and the subsidies they enjoy. An important finding is that, even though tuition has been rising rapidly at the most selective schools, the deal students get there has arguably improved greatly. The result is that the "stakes" associated with admission to these colleges are much higher now than in the past.

The Changing Selectivity of American Colleges Caroline M. Hoxby
NBER Working Paper No. 15446
October 2009
JEL No. H75,I2,J24

Not sure what she means by the 'deal' students get at a selective college.

Will let you know once I've skimmed the study....