In the world of MOOCs, 2 + 2 is never 4

The statistical model found that measures of student effort trump all other variables tested for their relationships to student success, including demographic descriptions of the students, course subject matter and student use of support services. The clearest predictor of passing a course is the number of problem sets a student submitted. The relationship between completion of problem sets and success is not linear; rather the positive effect increases dramatically after a certain baseline of effort has been made. Video Time, another measure of effort, was also found to have a strong positive relationship with passing, particularly for Stat 95 students. The report graphs these and other relationships between variables examined by the logistic-regression models and pass/fail.

While the regression analysis did not find a positive relationship between use of online support and positive outcomes, this should not be interpreted to mean that online support cannot increase student engagement and success. As students, Udacity service providers and faculty members explained, several factors complicated students’ ability to fully use the support services, including their limited online experience, their lack of awareness that these services were available and the difficulties they experienced interacting with some aspects of the online platform. It is thus the advice of the research team that additional investigations be conducted into the role that online and other support can play in the delivery of AOLE courses once the initial technical and other complications have been addressed.

Conclusion: The low pass rates in all courses should be considered in light of the fact that the project specifically targeted at-risk populations, including students who had failed Math 6L before Spring 2013 and groups demonstrated by other research to be less likely to succeed in an online environment. Previous studies (see Section 1) have found that these students do less well in online than in face-to-face courses. Further, student groups in at least one major study (Jaggars and Xu, 2013) who were found to experience the greatest negative effect from taking courses online share many of the characteristics found among the AOLE partner high school students in particular, a group with very low pass rates in Spring 2013.

Overall, much was learned during and from the first iteration of AOLE and improvements are already in progress in the second AOLE iteration. Perhaps most importantly, the faculty members who taught these courses, although they had to contend with major difficulties along the way, believe that the content that has been developed has tremendous potential to advance students’ critical thinking and problem solving abilities. One faculty member summed it up this way: "Udacity has brought to the table ways to make the courses more inquiry-based and added real life context."
PRELIMINARY SUMMARY SJSU+ AUGMENTED ONLINE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT PILOT PROJECT September 2013

Let's reprise.

• The clearest predictor of success in the course was the number of problem sets students completed. In other words, practice. 
• The online mentors, aka teachers-slash-tutors, didn't help. But they might have helped if students had a) had lots of internet experience (practice) & thus could figure out how to get to the mentors; b) known the online mentors existed; and c) been able to get the MOOC site to work.
• "Previous research" had found that weak students do better in face-to-face courses, so….SJSU opted to run a MOOC and fill it with weak students.
• "Most importantly," the teachers who taught the MOOCs think the "content" has "tremendous potential to advance students’ critical thinking and problem solving abilities."

Practice is what matters, so the instructors are focused on inquiry; weak students do badly in online courses, so the MOOC people put weak students in online courses; educational technology never works.

A person who lives in the world where two plus two equals four would be doing something else.

Eureka
Eureka, part 2
Eureka, part 3
Eureka, part 4
Eureka, part 5

Flipping the Classroom: Hot, Hot, Hot
MOOCs grow the gap
The New York Times is surprised
In the world of MOOCs, 2+2 is never 4
World's funniest joke: humor depends on surprise
Dick Van Dyke on comedy
Philip Keller on the flipped classroom
If students could talk
Who wants flipped classrooms? (Salman Khan on liberating teachers)
True story
Are math & science lectures boring in a way humanities & social science lectures are not?

The New York Times is surprised

Two years after a Stanford professor drew 160,000 students from around the globe to a free online course on artificial intelligence, starting what was widely viewed as a revolution in higher education, early results for such large-scale courses are disappointing, forcing a rethinking of how college instruction can best use the Internet.
After Setbacks, Online Courses Are Rethought by Tamar Lewin December 10, 2013

Who could have predicted the coming of a MOOC rethink? Apart from every single person reading, writing, & commenting on this blog, who?

I ask you.

And perhaps the most publicized MOOC experiment, at San Jose State University, has turned into a flop. It was a partnership announced with great fanfare at a January news conference featuring Gov. Jerry Brown of California, a strong backer of online education. San Jose State and Udacity, a Silicon Valley company co-founded by a Stanford artificial-intelligence professor, Sebastian Thrun, would work together to offer three low-cost online introductory courses for college credit.

Mr. Thrun, who had been unhappy with the low completion rates in free MOOCs, hoped to increase them by hiring online mentors to help students stick with the classes. And the university, in the heart of Silicon Valley, hoped to show its leadership in online learning, and to reach more students.

But the pilot classes, of about 100 people each, failed. Despite access to the Udacity mentors, the online students last spring — including many from a charter high school in Oakland — did worse than those who took the classes on campus. In the algebra class, fewer than a quarter of the students — and only 12 percent of the high school students — earned a passing grade.

Meanwhile I'm pretty sure I heard our curriculum director say, at the last board meeting, that our classrooms have been flipped.

One of the board members said, "What's that?"

Eureka
Eureka, part 2
Eureka, part 3
Eureka, part 4
Eureka, part 5

Flipping the Classroom: Hot, Hot, Hot
MOOCs grow the gap
The New York Times is surprised
In the world of MOOCs, 2+2 is never 4
World's funniest joke: humor depends on surprise
Dick Van Dyke on comedy
Philip Keller on the flipped classroom
If students could talk

Done!

Semester over.

Whew.

Mission creep

Sharon Necaise, a public school educator at West Feliciana High School, in St. Francisville, La., told FoxNews.com her experience with Common Core has been positive.

"This is the thing, [Common Core] brings a critical thinking and cognitive awareness component that will ensure our students and children are not robots," Nercaise said.

Teachers complain Common Core-linked lessons little more than scripts to read
By Perry ChiaramontePublished December 05, 2013 FoxNews.com

AP Test $$$

Having written a check for $445 this morning to cover the cost of the 5 AP tests my son will take in May, I figure I'm allowed to gripe a little bit. I came close to telling him not to bother taking the tests. They will have NO influence on whether he gets into one college or another. However, his school won't give him the weighted value for the course unless he can get at least a '3' on each test. Never mind that all of his grades are A's. Does anyone know of students who do not bother to take the tests? I think the cost is too high and parents should not have to pay for them 6 months ahead of time. I feel like I'm at the car dealership for service. I just write the check.

Math scores & loss aversion

Enhancing the Efficacy of Teacher Incentives
Loss-aversion incentives increased math test scores between 0.2 and 0.4 standard deviations
In recent years, a number of U.S. states and school districts have implemented teacher financial-incentive plans, also known as merit pay, with the goal of increasing student achievement. Some past studies have shown that such reform attempts, which pay teachers bonuses after their students hit certain goals, have had limited effects on student achievement.

In Enhancing the Efficacy of Teacher Incentives Through Loss Aversion: A Field Experiment (NBER Working Paper No. 18237), co-authors Ronald Fryer, Jr., Steven Levitt, John List, and Sally Sadoff find that using an alternative "loss aversion" incentive -- with teachers being paid bonuses in advance and asked to give money back if students don't achieve specific results -- significantly improves student achievement. Their results also suggest that loss-aversion incentives might be used in the corporate world in the pursuit of profits.

Although earlier studies have confirmed a correlation between teacher quality and student achievement, the challenge to date has been identifying quality teachers and providing proper incentives for all teachers to successfully strive for improved and lasting student achievement. At least ten states and numerous school districts in the United States have adopted programs that reward teachers with extra pay after students achieve certain goals on tests or report cards, but these "traditional" incentive programs generally have not had large effects on long-term student performance.

Fryer and his co-authors conduct a field experiment of teacher incentives using the concept of loss aversion -- that is, by framing incentives as losses rather than gains. They worked with schools in Chicago Heights, Illinois, which is located thirty miles south of Chicago and has nine K-8 schools with a total of about 3,200 students, during the 2010-11 school year. Chicago Heights' schools are made up of primarily low-income minority students who struggle with low achievement rates.'

In cooperation with school administrators and the teachers' union, the authors randomly selected 150 volunteer teachers and divided them into two main categories. The "gain" group was subject to traditional merit-pay incentives distributed after student achievement levels were determined and met; the "loss" group was subject to loss-aversion incentives that gave bonuses in advance, with the stipulation that money would be returned by teachers if students didn't hit stipulated test goals at the end of the school year. With a pool of $632,960 to distribute in incentive payments, the authors further subdivided the "gain" and "loss" groups in order to measure individual-based and team-based teacher incentives.

Using benchmarks from prior student test scores and final end-of-school-year ThinkLink Predictive Assessment test results, the authors find that loss-aversion incentives increased math test scores between 0.2 and 0.4 standard deviations, or the equivalent of increasing teacher quality by more than one standard deviation. The traditional "gain" incentives yielded "smaller and statistically insignificant results." Similar patterns were found in reading test scores -- and in both individual-based and team-based teacher incentive approaches. The authors did not identify any other factors, such as student absenteeism or outright cheating in test scores, which could explain the differences in achievement results.
--Jay Fitzgerald

Anonymous weighs in

Here's a weird thought to ponder: across the land, future teachers are being taught that direct instruction is bad, that they should be the guide on the side, that the discover method is the best way to educate...but exactly HOW are they being taught this? Does a guide on the side help them to discover the enduring understanding that this is the best way to teach? I bet not. I bet they are being directly instructed not to directly instruct. Hmm...

The reason this came to mind is that I was remembering a curriculum writing workshop in which I was instructed (and it felt direct to me) that if a question has a single correct answer then it is not an essential question.

What has happened is that the understanding-by-design crowd has claimed the term "essential question" as their own special buzzword. I guess the common core crowd is using it too.

Tom Loveless on the algebra 2 problem

From Algebra II and The Declining Significance of Coursetaking:

...taking and successfully completing an Algebra II course, which once certified high school students’ mastery of advanced topics in algebra and solid preparation for college-level mathematics, no longer means what it once did. The credentialing integrity of Algebra II has weakened.

The declining significance of successfully completing Algebra II highlights a dilemma. Pushing students to take more advanced coursework has been a mainstay of American school reform for several decades. That prescription has worked in boosting enrollments. In 1986, less than half of all 17 year-olds (44%) had completed Algebra II, and for Black and Hispanic students, the rate was less than a third. Completing Algebra II is now commonplace. In 2012, about three-fourths of students completed Algebra II, and the race/ethnicity gaps associated with taking the course have narrowed significantly. (All NAEP data below are from the NAEP data explorer.)

Getting more students to take higher level math courses may be a hollow victory. It has not coincided with students learning more math.

Worse than you think, non-Common Core edition

After a 3-year hiatus, I have returned to my district's school board meetings. I am, once again, a regular.

It's been somewhat fun.

It's also been interesting in that I discovered, on my first night 'back,' that I had missed the board. Missed as in missed members of the board as people for whom I feel a great deal of affection. I was happy to see them again, after so long away.

Crazy!

I've spent years attempting to reform my district, and being frustrated by the administration and by whoever was currently serving on the board who wasn't someone I helped elect.

And Chris's middle school years were harrowing.

But Chris's middle school years are well behind us now, and come to find out, my essential emotion today, where board members are concerned, is: affection. I am fond of our school our school board members, collectively and individually.

I seem to feel the same way about our administrators. (That's really weird.)

Ed says I have become the loyal opposition.

Anyway, it's somewhat fun to be back.

The somewhat comes from the content of board meetings, which is never what I want. Or, rather, it's (sometimes) in the vicinity of what I want, but it's not what I actually want.

Plus, there are surprises.

Last Tuesday night's surprise was the revelation that the district does not have an early reading curriculum.

At all.

I had been assuming we had a bad one. Last I checked we have something like 18% of kids going into 'Tier 2' intervention, and I'm pretty sure that number would be 10% with a good reading curriculum. (I hope palisadesk is around to weigh in.)

So I had just naturally been assuming that we have a really bad early reading curriculum the same way we had a really bad math curriculum in K-5 and a really bad reading curriculum in the middle school.

But no.

We don't have any early reading curriculum at all.

The funny (ha-ha) thing about this is that back when Ed and I first moved to town we became dimly aware of what seemed to be chronic conflicts at the board level re: not enough textbooks to go around. Various classes didn't have enough textbooks, and somehow enough textbooks were never bought or budgeted for or who knows what, and teachers were getting in trouble for spilling the beans to parents about the not-enough-textbooks situation, until finally the then-board president took matters in his own hands and decreed that enough textbooks be ordered at once and distributed to students. That's the story I heard, at any rate.

So it's path dependency.

We have always been a district with a not-enough-textbooks problem, and we are evolving into a district with no textbooks at all.

I'm sure regular attendance at board meetings will reverse that trend.

Resources for the ACT test?

My daughter is a junior and in the middle of the test taking year. I went back through all the posts and gathered the resources on the SAT. Does anyone have a similar set of resources for the ACT test?

Wrecking rigorous math in high school, non Common Core edition

Lots of folks are up in arms about the "lowered" standards in high school, courtesy of Common Core. Meanwhile STEM preparation is degrading here, no CC necessary.

Let's recap:
In 2007, MN adopted "better, more rigorous!" standards that they claimed were the tops in the nation, matching MA and CA. In these, all 8th graders were required to take Algebra through the algebra of the line. This would now be called "algebra 1", and algebra 1 was no longer a credit bearing course in high school. Also in these changes, all high schoolers were required to take algebra 2 before graduation. The standards defining algebra 2 covered only those subjects expected to be
learned to mastery. These standards did not include trigonometry nor logarithms nor other kinds of mathematics.

In 2011, the standards were rolled in. The state did not change the teacher credentialing requirements for 8th grade math teachers.

The new Algebra 1 class looked like old Algebra 1 to parents. Except it's only 1/2 of the algebra they knew. And Algebra 2 is about 1/2 of the algebra 2 they knew. But there's no way to be half a year ahead, though, for most schools, and therefore, for kids. So the new alg 1 is the only alg 1, and the only alg 2 is the rest of the old alg 1 and 1/2 of old alg 2.
Content including trig, logs, complicated factoring, circular functions, all of this is now in pre calc.
Limits, sequences and series, graphing of high order functions, de Moivre's theorem, etc. is now in most APcalc classes.

Now, schools cheat this by offering a year  for AP calc AB, they claim, and a year for AP calc BC.

But this is a sham. A 5 of the AB test is mathematically no less than a 4 on the the BC,  because the BC test simply does not offer that much more material than a competent calculus course would already have offered. While it does offer new topics, it most definitely does not offer multivariate calc, which is the 2nd term of calc in any semester-based engineering or STEM calculus sequence, and the third term at any quarter based university calc sequence.

So...to recap: we in MN, without CC, teach algebra earlier now, and as a result, kids leave no better off where they did before in terms of knowledge, but a year behind the titles of the courses they are taking.  They and their parents are misled about what they know and what they have been taught when.

For the majority, they basically take pre calc, same as always. But for the honors kids who used to get a real AP course that really was the equivalent of the first semester of calculus, they are screwed. They no longer get that, or they only do by taking finding some school supposedly giving them alg 2 in 8th grade--who is qualified for that???? and then, they still only get as far as 1 term of college calc. Likely they waste a year instead of learning something for real.

This means without 2 years of supposed hs calc, they are not ready for calc based physics in college.

This can't be blamed on Common Core. This can't be blamed on ed schools, either.

This is the Cargo Cult of education (a phrase I coined here UPDATE! below) and the Cargo Cult of politics. We walk around, mimicking what real people once did, pretending that coconut headphones and a guy waving sheets as if they are semaphores on the tarmac will bring back the cargo planes.

The legislature pretended that decreeing students do something earlier was the same as doing it well.
The legislature pretended decreeing everyone take algebra 2 would make them capable of it.
The Dept of Ed pretended to concur and changed the content of the standard.
The publishers pretended to concur and changed the content of the books.
The schools pretended to concur and changed the content of the courses.
The teachers pretended to concur and gave everyone high grades.
The parents and students ...well? some pretend their schools are still great. Some are duped until college. And even then, most just want someone else to pay for the student loans they had to take for remediation, not yet angry about the remediation.
 But the kids who used to be ready for an engineering degree program are no longer ready, and are losing ground compared to their foreign counterparts.

Until people admit reality we will keep playing these games.

From the MN dept of ed Math 2007 standards FAQ
"Some algebra II material is introductory in nature and lays the foundation for future courses. Students are not expected to master such material. For example, logarithms are usually introduced in algebra II, but mastery of the fundamentals of logarithms is not expected until precalculus or college algebra. For this reason, logarithms are not mentioned in the 9-11th grade standards and benchmarks."

UPDATE: E. D. Hirsch first used the phrase Cargo Cult here  http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/7262 to refer to the state of educational research. My use of it was independent of this, and somewhat different.

Help desk, Common Core edition

Cruising Common Core materials (there seem to be lots on Prezi), I find this (slide title: "Two Types of Essential Questions: Overarching and Topical"):

Isn't there one right answer to "how many ways can we achieve the sum of 23"?

Isn't the answer: "There are an infinite number of ways to achieve the sum of 23"?

Another thing: would this question be asked, in this way, in combinatorics? (In the time I've spent trying to learn combinatorics, I haven't encountered a question with more than one right answer. Nor did I encounter a question with an answer of infinity.)

(And how is this question "topical"?)

I am watching in amazement as Common Core rolls across the land.

It's as if every constructivist in the country has suddenly been handed a lifetime prescription for anabolic steroids.

All those years of No Child Left Behind and Adequate Yearly Progress must have created a massive pent-up desire in the breasts of America's educators to conduct mini-lessons and ask math questions with no right answer.

GRE scores by intended field of study for college seniors

Source: Educating School Leaders, p 32

Steve H on the mailing list

Have just read this comment by Steve H:

My son also has a college brochure stack two feet tall. He also made the comment that if you put your hand over the name of the college, you could not tell which one it is. (That would make a good YouTube video. Name This College.) I also liked the survey where they asked students why they got into a top college and the general response was: "I have no clue whatsoever." For others, however, it seemed like the extra oblong interest and special talent made the difference. It has to be special or at some particularly high level.

Unfortunately, the segment talks only about the most egregious application mistakes and stupid parents. I would like to be a fly on the wall when admissions people make the final decision. After they process race, gender, sports, and alumni parents, (grades are given), there will still be many to choose from - maybe one in five. what are the deciding factors? It might depend on whether you catch the eye of one of the strong or powerful admissions people. It might be your essay that does it, but it might also be your special talent.

Steve is in his year of viewing dangerously....college viewbooks are a world unto themselves.

My favorites were the ones from Grinnell, which were so striking, and so indecipherable in terms of who the intended audience was supposed to be and what message we were supposed to be taking away, that I kept scans.

What is the story Grinnell is telling prospective parents with these images?

After the mean girls reject your son, he'll gel his hair and take up violin?

And this is worth $50k a year?

By the way, if I were the parents of the three girls, I would have been furious. They are sisters whose parents -- both university professors in Kabul -- immigrated from Afghanistan. They're beautiful girls, and Grinnell had no business a) taking a photo like that and b) using it to promote the college.

Of course, maybe the parents weren't consulted. Which makes it even worse.

Younger

As the nation's schools undergo a wave of teacher retirements, some 25% of teachers have only five or fewer years in the classroom, "a precipitous decline" in experience since the late 1980s, when the typical teacher had 15 years' experience, according to a study by the National Commission on Teaching & America's Future, a Washington, D.C. nonprofit advocating teacher quality.

That may explain why some 43% of parents report being "extremely worried" about their kids' elementary-school teacher assignments, according to a poll last month of 306 parents by CafeMom, a social-networking and community website.

Dread of August: The Kids' Teacher Assignments | By SUE SHELLENBARGER | Aug. 6, 2013

This generation of teachers has been trained in pure constructivism.

According to Robert Slavin, direct instruction hard been all but dropped from teacher training by 1991.

An Interesting Common Core Exchange

Common Core and Curriculum Controversies

Something really struck me as strange during Fordham's panel discussion last week. At 54min 50sec in the video, there's a very basic, yet revealing, question posed by this young lady.

 Question: Garrett Fryer American Youth Policy Forum Was there ever a discussion, when you all were designing it, to implement it on a kindergarten level and letting it grow with the students as they aged on through each grade, as oppossed to implementing it with the entire school system nation wide? 

Answer: Jason Zimba This is something that states have each approached differently. Some states have done something more like that, some states have done something less like that. I seem to remember at one point I saw a MA plan where the grade level wasn’t the key parameter, but they had a Venn diagram, you know, what we do now the Common Core doesn’t do, what the Common Core does that we don’t, and then what sort of overlap, where we want to do it better. And they decided to take those three... in year one, we’re gonna focus on the overlap and do it better. In year two, we’ll drop things… and then in year three, we’ll add… I got the details of that wrong, but… my only point is that different states all approached it differently, and we may find out that some states were much wiser than others in this way. Singapore has a long standing, high functioning system in which they not only revise their syllabus ever so often, but they do it actually on the basis of how kids do, so think about that, a performance-based loop, a feedback loop. Which is something we are taking halting steps toward, but can only imagine. And so roughly every six years or so, they’ll put out tweaks to the thing. This year I noticed that they’ve rolled out a new thing in kindergarten. 

Lisa wonders... How in the world can one "image" OR take "halting steps toward" creating a "high functioning system" based on a "performance-based feedback loop" when we are STARTING with a top-down DESIGN by the name of Common Core?

The chairs

From the "High School" section of Illustrativemathematics.org:

Mathematically proficient students start by explaining to themselves the meaning of a problem and looking for entry points to its solution. They analyze givens, constraints, relationships, and goals. They make conjectures about the form and meaning of the solution and plan a solution pathway rather than simply jumping into a solution attempt. They consider analogous problems, and try special cases and simpler forms of the original problem in order to gain insight into its solution. They monitor and evaluate their progress and change course if necessary.

This video shows an excerpt of a conversation between two students comparing approaches to solving a problem and trying to understand why they got different answers and where one of them made an error.

PROBLEM:

Three halls contained 9,876 chairs altogether. One-fifth of the chairs were transferred from the first hall to the second hall. Then, one-third of the chairs were transferred from the second hall to the third hall and the number of chairs in the third hall doubled. In the end, the number of chairs in the three halls became the same. How many chairs were in the second hall at first.

I haven't watched the video, but I hope one of the approaches the two students consider involves asking the teacher what the problem means by "the chairs."

By happenstance, my students and I read the first half of G.K. Chesterton's essay on fairy tales in class today. When I say "read," I mean that my students and I read each sentence individually and out loud and then stopped so I could explain what the sentence meant and why after first asking the person who had just read to take a crack at it.

Chesterton's opening lines:

Some solemn and superficial people (for nearly all very superficial people are solemn) have declared that the fairy-tales are immoral; they base this upon some accidental circumstances or regrettable incidents in the war between giants and boys, some cases in which the latter indulged in unsympathetic deceptions or even in practical jokes. The objection, however, is not only false, but very much the reverse of the facts.

I asked my students what the words "the objection" meant. When nobody knew, I pointed out that the words "the objection" function as an anaphora: the definite determinative (the) tells you that you already know which (or what) objection because you've seen it before, in the text. It's the objection, not "an objection."

So, if you've already seen "the objection," and you've only read one other sentence, what is the objection? It's got to be inside that one other sentence.

At that point, my student who was educated outside the United States in his early elementary years (and who speaks very lightly accented English) figured it out.

..................

My answer to the Illustrated Math problem, which I arrived at on my own and without a lot of conjecturing and solution-pathway-planning and special-case mongering and the like is: 4,938.

..................

The Common Core era is going to be an unhappy one for mathematically gifted children.

I predict.

Help desk - Illustrative Mathematics

Illustrative Mathematics 

Thoughts?

Trailblazers kids in a Common Core world...

At the Irvington Parents Forum blog.

I'm waiting for the many apologies due to come rolling in from all the central administrators & board members who insisted on sticking with Trailblazers for lo these many years.

My favorite was the board member who said, during the candidates' forum, "We're not changing the math curriculum because of 20 people on a blog."

He meant list serve.

Daniel Wilingham on Paul Tough

He likes the book -- I may have to read!

Meet the new boss, part 2

I've updated "Meet the new boss." (Scroll down)

State of play, Common Core edition

Parents are in an uproar here.

We've hired a curriculum director who is a smart, fantastically hard-working true believer in the wisdom of mini-lessons and students designing their own "literacy" curriculum by choosing their own books to read for class and discussing them in pairs or pods.

A smart, fantastically hard-working true believer gets a lot more done than a dull and lazy true believer.

(Ed and I and numerous others fought to keep that position from being filled, by the way. Fought.)

So, where Common Core is concerned--Common Core as understood by a public school curriculum director--we are ahead of the curve.

Which means that after 10 years of strife over Math Trailblazers we have unceremoniously dumped Trailblazers and adopted the engage^ny math modules, which are being written and posted as we speak. No teacher has ever taught engage^ny math, no student has ever learned engage^ny math, engage^ny math does not yet exist in toto, and the vast set of engage^ny material has to be downloaded from the internet.

And this is what we're using.

Because, you know, COMMON CORE.

Those are the magic words, COMMON CORE. Once an administrator invokes the name of COMMON CORE, s/he is absolved of all responsibility for children actually learning math.

So here we are:

1. The children have no math textbooks
2. Because Trailblazers was so slow, children in later grades don't have the skills to begin grade-level engage^ny units, but they have all been forced to begin grade-level engage^ny units anyway, regardless of preparation
3. Because we've never had a scope and sequence for any subject in the district (this state of affairs finally came to light at the last board meeting, after I requested a copy of our scope and sequence) no one has any idea what skills the kids are supposed to possess 
4. Because the district has never held itself responsible for children actually learning the content being covered in class (and retaught at home by parents & tutors) there is no mechanism in place to figure out what skills kids are missing
5. Because no one apart from high school math teachers has any expertise in math, neither teachers, building principals, nor the curriculum director has any idea what the proper sequence of skills actually is & thus no idea how to assess the kids' "gaps" (lots of gaps talk amongst parents and teachers; calls to mind the early days of ktm) 
6. Although engageny promises a year-long "scope and sequence" for its curriculum "modules," the promised scope and sequence for math either: a) does not yet exist or b) does exist but is unusable by people absent a deep and hands-on knowledge of K-5 math and math curricula.

I attended Thursday night's Common Core meeting, and the atmosphere in the room was pretty much one of controlled pandemonium.

No one knows anything, and, very clearly, no one is going to know anything any time soon.

I've seen a lot of bad math teaching in my day (a whole lot), and a lot of bad math curricula, but I've never seen anything like this.

Recent comments widget

Looks like Blogger has a new "Recent Comments" widget I'll have to figure out....

Googlemaster strikes again

In the Comments section of an earlier post (Wrong again) I was banging on about nominalizations being essential to academic writing because a nominalization lets you combine a noun and a verb and then use another verb to write about the new noun-verb combination...and Google Master made the point a lot more succinctly:

Heh. The word "nominalization" is a nominalization.

I wish I'd thought of that.

The degradation of school textbooks

We know the myriad ways Everyday Math, TERC Investigations, etc. are terrible, but the rot extends to new editions of old textbooks.

I'm often asked what algebra book I'd recommend.
The answer is Modern Algebra, Structure and Method by Mary Dolciani et. al. Copyright 1960 or 1962. But I can't recommend any edition of it written after 1970 without reservations, and the 1980s and later one should probably be pulped.

The same book title with same author has over 100 versions with over 100 different ISBNs. The old ones I recommend don't even have ISBNs.

What's the difference? Here is a tiny slice.

Modern Algebra, Structure and Method, Dolciani, Berman, and Freilich, Hougton Mifflin Co., Boston. c. 1965, 1962. No known ISBN.

This is a great book. Mathematically rigorous, 30+ oral exercises per lesson, 40+ written exercises per lesson, and ten problems as well per lesson and real content.

Chapter 3, Addition and Multiplication of Real Numbers(p. 69) begins with a discussion of axioms of equality (3.1). It states clearly:

"you learned to perform many operations with numbers because you abided by certain rules.These rules, which are statements accepted as true are called assumptions, axioms, or postulates...The first fundamental assumptions that you will meet are the axioms of equality which govern your work with equations..."

3.2 covers axioms of closure. The language is sophisticated--

"Any set S is said to be closed under an operation  performed on its elements, provided that each result of the operation is an element of S. This is known as the closure property of a set under an operation. Calculations in arithmetic are based on the often unstated assumption that the set of numbers is closed under addition and multiplication."

The text goes on to list and explain the closure properties of addition and multiplication,
explains the set of numbers of arithmetic is not closed under subtraction.

A later but still similar edition is
Modern Algebra, Structure and Method, Dolciani and Wooton, Hougton Mifflin, Boston c. 1970,
(this one has the pendulum picture on the cover.)

Yet already content is removed and moved.

3.1 leaves out all discussion of axioms of equality, relegating them to one pink box, no explanation.
The bit I quoted above, "you learned.....fundamental assumptions..." is not here at all.
The content of 3.2 and the axioms of closure are in 3.1 instead, including what I quoted above, "Any set S..." so the language that is preset isn't always simplified, but some is missing.
A discussion of how the set of odd numbers is closed under multiplication but not addition stayed in, but the statement that the set of numbers of arithmetic is not closed  subtraction is taken out.

3.3 and 3.4 in this 1970 edition are totally different, however. Their material is about
adding and subtracting real numbers on the number line, material in chapter 4 of the 1962 edition. still,  it's similar, some of it the same.

This book is one I managed to procure ten of to teach with. I need more, but so does everyone else, whether they know it or not. Anyone know if HMH ever grants permission for a fee to someone to copy their out of print books?

Then we come to lousy. Algebra, Structure and Method, Dolciani, Wooton, Sorgenfrey, and Brown, ISBN 0-395-26637-8, c. 1979 is a horse of a different color.
Gone are the explanations. Gone are the depth of problems. Gone is the mathematically deep and proper language.  Wholly new material is added and it is watered down.

3.1 is now "Rules for Multiplication". It states:

"To learn how to multiply negative numbers, notice that
2 x (-1) = -1 + (-1) = -2
3 x (-1) = -1 + (-1) + (-1) =-3
and so on."

The next sections go on to transform equations by multiplication and division,  even though in the prior books, doing those sections came after introducing the axioms of equality, closure, opposites, etc.

In 3.8, the total explanation of axioms is given:

"Many rules or number properties have been stated earlier in this book. Some are axioms. Others are theorems. An axiom is a statement that is assumed to be true. A theorem is a statement shown to be true by using axioms, definitions, and other theorems in a logical development. The axioms that account for the rules or properties used in working with real numbers are listed below."

And then there is a list. No explanation of closure at all, no explanation about the use of axioms.

Exercises are far cry in content. Six oral exercises as opposed to 30, 20 written, except with nearly all of the work done for you (2 column proofs, steps provided, you fill in the property)
no problems at all about what sets are closed under what operations.

Nonetheless, I did find 30 of these, and we use them. It still has more problems and exercises than nearly any other book these days. But the teacher really uses the other 10 books as the base.

Even worse is Algebra, Structure and Method, Dolciani, Brown, Cole, ISBN 0-395-43053-4, c. 1988.

This book managed to drop an entire chapter by Chap 2. Chap 2 "matches" the old chap 3, Addition and Multiplication of Real Numbers. But it has no mathematical language. No use of "set", no explanation in general about closure, nothing of the kind.

Now, chap 2, Working with Real Numbers", begins with

"The rules used in adding and multiplying real numbers are based on several properties that you can take for granted.  For example, the following statements are accepted as facts.
1. Every pair of real numbers has a unique (one and only one) sum that is also a real number.
2. Every pair of real numbers has a unique product that is also a real number.
3. When you add two real numbers, you get the same sum no matter what order you use in adding them.
4. When you multiply two you get the same product no matter what order you use in multiplying them."

It doesn't get much better. No precision, no formalism.

Worse, the whole thing above is misleading. Nowhere does it explain that various subsets of the reals *aren't closed* under addition or multiplication. Nowhere does it ask students to determine closure.
Nowhere does it even explain a set.

Now, I just compared 3.2 for ease. I didn't cherry pick for the most egregious. But every page, every sentence is rewritten in these later editions. The relationship to the 1970 work is not recognizable.

This phenomenon is known in college level math and physics books, certainly--my 2nd ed Thomas (no Finney yet) calculus is a thing of beauty. My 3rd edition Kittel Thermal Physics is too. The later editions are dreadful. But most people don't know this about high school texts.

Suffice to say, the 1970 books will be even rarer now that people know to look for them, but if I were homeschooling or running a small class, I would spend the premium for the oldest you can possibly find, and junk anything from the 80s on.

Steve H on Common Core in his town

from Steve:

In our town, life is going on just about the same. We still have Everyday Math and only those kids with help at home will get to algebra I in 8th grade and have a chance of getting to a STEM career. High school kids still pack their schedules with honors and AP classes while ignoring the meaningless state tests. The CC PARCC test will be no different. Students worry about the PSAT and SAT, but ignore the state tests. They are meaningless for them.

However, there are still many kids who will now have to meet these state test standards to get their high school degree. These are tests that try to judge one's thinking and understanding abilities, not just mastery of basic skills. They are the ones most hurt by these fuzzy tests. Classroom teachers should be the ones best able to judge these qualities, but it's now turned over to test makers who try to boil that ability into a few understanding-type questions on the state test.

Why should students fail to graduate high school when they pass high school courses but flunk a fuzzy state test? This is a failure of the school or the test. Why should minimal passing grades be based on fuzzy understanding rather than mastery of basic skills? How do these tests give teachers any feedback on how to improve? When my son was in first grade, I was a member of a parent-teacher team that evaluated our state test results. The test gave thinking-type questions where they (magically) split the results into areas like number sense and problem solving. Rather than directly test to see if students can add, subtract, and handle percentages and fractions, they test to see if they "understand".

So here we were sitting around a table discussing what could be done to fix a lower school score in "problem solving". The answer was to spend more time on, you guessed it, problem solving. If they tested something directly, like fractions, that would give them much better feedback. But then again, they should be doing that already. A state test should only be used as a last-resort check for systemic school failures, not as a means to check for "understanding".

The downside to CC is that many more will point to it as rigorous path that is meaningful to the development of their kids. I'm also waiting to see if our 7th and 8th grade math texts are watered down. A few years ago, we managed to get rid of CMP and replace them with the same strong algebra textbooks used by our high school. Common Core might now force us into a less rigorous path.

I attended the SRO Common Core shindig in my district last night.

Irvington kids are going to be inferencing for 13 years.

Inferencing and problem-solving because, in the real world, math has more than one right answer.

Help desk - How much do focus groups cost?

Does anyone know?

How much does it cost to hire a firm or an individual to run focus groups and write a report?

What I would specifically like to know is the prices for a firm not associated with the public education world to do this.

How much would it cost to hire a political polling firm, for instance?

If any of you has information, I'd love to hear.

Is the S finally hitting the fan?

From Allison, on EngageNY:

The problem is the name has changed, but the song remains the same.

Common Core is the new "new Math", unfortunately the umbrella name for everything happening in math ed these days as the standards get put in place, including things that really have nothing to do with standards.

The Common Core State Standards were, and are, a set of standards. Standards are lists of requirements. It's true that CCSSI were more proscriptive than typical standards, but they were still just standards. Standards are not curriculum. For more on this, see my post.

The CC standards in k-8 are better than NY's previous standards. That is about the end of the good I can say in NY's implementation of the new standards.

For whatever reasons, probably largely related federal funding, states adopted CCSS. Except they did so before any textbooks had been written. And before the assessments against the standards had been written.

So NY schools and teachers were supposed to magically teach from the new standards about which they had been told nothing, or use hastily repackaged curricula that wasn't really changed, or who knows what.

But help was on the way! Engage NY was created! It would be an entire curriculum online, free to everyone, digital! No need for textbooks! Isn't that great? And famous mathematicians and math teachers who are pro Singapore math had signed up to lead the writing of the curriculum on EngageNY.

At some point last spring, I saw several job reqs from EngageNY. They needed curriculum writers. I considered taking the position. Then I looked at what was already on EngageNY.

I saw a fraction lesson that was fundamentally wrong from beginning to end. I saw other lessons with equally egregious errors. I told someone who told someone high up at EngageNY. The response was, yes, it's wrong, and the writer was informed, but the writer could not understand what was wrong with it and refused to rewrite it, saying they knew it was better for kids this way.

EngageNY is still beholden to the same NYS ed people. The math people who were supposedly leads don't control the curriculum; the bureaucrats do, and are actually telling the math people what the scope and sequence must be.

This is now all called "Common Core."

Given the difficulty of the Common Core tests, I wonder if we'll see so many parents up in arms that .... that school boards will finally have to wake up.

Till now, the math warriors in any community were always a minority, but now everyone's child is failing math.

That said, here in Irvington sentiment in the one and only survey ever taken on the subject, was around 80% anti-Trailblazers, and the board still voted to reject Singapore Math & keep Trailblazers.

Of course, the Interim Curriculum Director announced at the time that the survey was favorable to Trailblazers. She also announced, again, that the Parents Forum (me) had misled the public.

I always enjoyed that, sitting in the audience at school board meetings, being slandered via innuendo.

Or is that libeled?

I never remember which is which.

I learned the legal meaning of the word innuendo through direct personal experience of innuendo about me, purveyed by sitting members of the school board and by central administrators.

I'm going to go read the link Allison left to Wu's piece now.

Yes, Vitamix will change your life

Just got this link from Chris....

Can a $400 Blender Change Your Life? Yes:

“I love my Vit-a-mix,” she continued, enunciating each syllable, before launching into a highly complimentary review of the company’s return and repair policy. “I love it so much, I would recommend it to the dead!”

My thoughts exactly.

Worse than you think - Common Core edition

(Family motto)

So. My district.

No longer has Math Trailblazers.

Does have timed worksheets.

With the predictable results.

Lost the battles--all of the battles--won the war. That was my conclusion.

Wrong!

My district does have good math scores, comparatively speaking, and I continue to think our math scores are 'real,' not a product of random variation. But we'll see.

The appearance of timed worksheets and better math scores coincided with our losing all the battles; that part is true, too.

It's the last part that doesn't track, the lost all the battles, won the war part. Normally when people lose all the battles they lose the war, too, and that's what happened here. We lost all the battles, and we lost the war--and we got better math scores in the bargain because somewhere in there, after ten or twelve years of parent uprisings, we got timed worksheets.

The battle to get rid of Math Trailblazers culminated in the district getting rid of Math Trailblazers...and replacing it with nothing.

We have no curriculum, in my view (I'm not going to be taking this one back), and we have no textbooks. Little kids are coming home from school in tears, not knowing how to do their math homework.

When parents complain, they are told "COMMON CORE" and sent to EngageNY. Some children have gaps because of COMMON CORE, parents are told. The younger kids will be in better shape than the older kids because they started COMMON CORE from the get-go & didn't have to suddenly shift over to COMMON CORE when the state commanded schools to shift over to COMMON CORE. COMMON CORE, COMMON CORE: COMMON CORE is the problem, and COMMON CORE is the explanation of the problem, too.

So I am told.

Meanwhile our new curriculum director (another battle lost) is engaged in a multi-year effort to "map" the curriculum.

When she is done, the curriculum will be modular; we will be able to swap out old units and swap in new units whenever the state passes a new curricular mandate. No word as to whether ease of unit-swapping will solve the problem of gaps.

So yesterday I asked for a copy of the district's scope and sequence, K-12.

Not sure why I didn't do that years ago. It's funny how there are always some lines you feel you can't cross. I'm reasonably certain the district doesn't have a scope and sequence--a friend of ours was told so directly when he asked for one maybe 15 years ago--and for some reason I've felt I shouldn't put people on the spot by asking for something I'm pretty sure they don't have.

I do remember, I think, asking for copies of a math syllabus back when C. was in middle school -- I think Debbie S. may have done the same. I'll check. I think we were both told we couldn't have copies of the syllabus, but the details are hazy now....Actually, as I think about it, the then-Assistant Superintendent finally sent me a syllabus, which I discovered was for the old class with the old textbook. The district had adopted new textbooks that year, and as far as I could tell no one had written down a syllabus based on the book teachers were actually using.

I'm going to have to go through my old emails one of these days...

In any event, where the possibly apocryphal Irvington scope and sequence is concerned, now's the time. Presumably the high school classes have syllabuses (syllabi) and it's time for the community to see what K-8 has.

UPDATE: We don't have a scope and sequence and never did. Confirmed in BOE meeting of 10/22/2013.

Beyond that, I don't want to hear that young children are coming home crying over math and COMMON CORE did it.

The problem isn't COMMON CORE.

Children crying about math in Irvington long pre-dates COMMON CORE.

Heck, parents crying about math in Irvington long pre-dates COMMON CORE.

Crying and blogging.

---

I have to check in with Allison, who is I think on top of the NY situation vis a vis COMMON CORE math.

I love knowing someone in Minnesota who can explain my own state education department's  math situation to me.

UPDATE 10/26/2013: We have replaced Math Trailblazers with "math modules" from engagny, which somebody downloads from the internet. The engageny curriculum has yet to be completed, so...let's say we have replaced Math Trailblazers with part of a curriculum. A brand-new, never been taught, never been learned from math curriculum you have to download from the internet.

Meet the new boss

Our new $240K $250K superintendent, the one who was to bring accountability, college prep, and every-child-every-dayness to my district, is leading the annual fall effort to set goals.

(Fall is for goals; winter and spring are for threatening to cut Latin and Greek if we don't override the tax cap.)

Thus far, he is in charge of framing the discussion, and since the board no longer allows comments at the beginning of meetings, he may remain in charge. We will see.

Irvington parents aren't meek. A couple of weeks ago, the super attempted to push through, with just two days' community notice and on a consensus vote,  two "speech policies," the purpose of which was to sharply curtail (if not eliminate altogether) student First Amendment rights. That effort was crushed by a hardy group of parents and high school kids who shredded both the policies and the impetus behind them. It was a debacle and, judging by the look on the super's face the night everyone turned out, it may have been the first real parent uprising of his career.

In any event, the district is now the recipient of two letters from Adam Goldstein, the second of which a high school student read out loud during the board meeting. He did a fabulous job. Very witty.

But back to the goals of fall. The superintendent believes we should ask "challenging questions" (challenging questions constructed by him, not us). Last year the challenging question was: What does success look like?

A close reading of the above slide reveals a pattern in the use of evaluative adjectives:

Without the adjectives, we have:

Or, alternatively, adding evaluative adjectives to the first option, we get:

Et voilà:

So that was last year's challenging question.

This year's challenging question for parents and taxpayers to ponder is:

• [Should our district goal be admission to] Ivy League vs. schools with top programs for the areas our students are interested in[?]

e.g.: So-and-so knows a student who is super-smart and could definitely get into a top college but he wants to be "X" when he grows up, so he's going to attend a lesser-ranked college because it has the top program in his desired field of "X."

That's what we want!

We shouldn't obsess over Ivy League schools!

Fine, I won't, but I know brainy kids with very high SAT scores who are not getting into Big-10 schools. That's a problem.

The super also reports that the district has put 'technology' on the back burner (wrong), so now technology is going to be on the front burner. I bet if we play our cards right, we can be the first kids on the block to invest in Smart Tables! (The sturdy pedestal prevents tipping by even the most enthusiastic learners....)

The board asked him if he could come up with a couple of "deliverables." Last year's goals, they said, were too broad; this year they'd like a deliverable. Or two.

That is a fabulous word, deliverable. I wish I'd thought of it.

Wrong again

COOK: What are you looking into now? Where do you see the field going in the future?

PENNEBAKER: One of the most fascinating effects I’ve seen in quite awhile is that we can predict people’s college performance reasonably well by simply analyzing their college admissions essays. Across four years, we analyzed the admissions essays of 25,000 students and then tracked their grade point averages (GPAs). Higher GPAs were associated with admission essays that used high rates of nouns and low rates of verbs and pronouns. The effects were surprisingly strong and lasted across all years of college, no matter what the students’ major.

To me, the use of nouns -- especially concrete nouns -- reflects people’s attempts to categorize and name objects, events, and ideas in their worlds. The use of verbs and pronouns typically occur when people tell stories. Universities clearly reward categorizers rather than story tellers. If true, can we train young students to categorize more? Alternatively, are we relying too much on categorization strategies in American education?

The Secret Language Code
Psychologist James Pennebaker reveals the hidden meaning of pronouns
By Gareth Cook

Number one: most college applicants seem to write personal narratives. As far as I can tell.

Number two: most college composition textbooks applaud the use of verbs, caution against overuse of nouns, and condemn nominalization (non-nouns turned into nouns) with zeal.

The world is topsy-turvy.

SAT scores indicate 'most freshmen aren't academically prepared for college'

... only 43 percent of SAT takers among this year's freshmen are ready for the academic rigors of college studies.

College readiness is determined by meeting the SAT College and Career Readiness Benchmark score of 1550.

... The SAT Benchmark score of 1550 is associated with a 65 percent probability of obtaining a first-year GPA of B- or higher, which in turn is associated with a high likelihood of college success. Studies show that students who meet the SAT College and Career Readiness Benchmark are more likely to enroll in a four-year college, more likely to earn a higher first-year GPA, and more likely to earn a higher first-year GPA, and more likely to persist beyond the first year of college and complete their degree.

A consistent pattern over the last few years:

SAT math scores have stagnated over the last six years while reading scores have slipped.

Leaders and laggards among SAT test-takers

Students planning to major in some of the liberal arts and sciences performed significantly better than many who are aiming at more vocationally oriented degrees. Students wishing to major in multi/interdisciplinary studies earned the highest combined SAT score (1757), followed by the physical sciences (1673), English language and literature (1665), and social sciences (1661).

Significantly lagging behind were students hoping to major in three of the most popular fields -- education (1442), psychology (1484), and business management and marketing (1497). Some of the lowest scores came from  students wanting to major in parks and recreation (1328) and construction trades (1274).

Related:

• High school graduation goals do not include getting students ready for college (Cost of College)
• Are colleges exploiting remedial students? (Cost of College)

(Cross-posted at Cost of College)

Have I mentioned I don't like policy elites?

I opened up my NY Times app the other morning to discover this opinion from Richard V. Reeves, fellow in Economic Studies and policy director for the Center on Children and Families at Brookings:

"Let" affluent children fail is a thinkable public policy goal?

At Brookings?

The logic shoots off in all kinds of horrifying directions. E.g.: granting for the sake of argument that letting affluent children fail is a good thing, wouldn't giving them a little push off the cliff be even better?

(And how much should we pay suburban teachers for that service?)

Uggh.

I haven't been able to bring myself to read the column, especially after spotting this line:

"It is a stubborn mathematical fact that the top fifth of the income distribution can accommodate only 20 percent of the population."

Twenty percent is 20%, so the "bottom" 80%, a supermajority of the population, is forevermore locked into the bottom 80% unless we "let" affluent children "fail."

By that reasoning, whenever a child grows up in the top 20% and then, as an adult, descends to the top 21%, that child has "failed."

I skimmed long enough to spot the term "opportunity hoarding" and to discover that it originates with Charles Tilly, with whom I think Ed and I had dinner in Los Angeles years ago. I remember liking Professor Tilly immensely, assuming our dinner companion was in fact Charles Tilly; Ed doesn't remember. On the other hand, Ed did know Tilly, so I think it was Tilly.

Anyway, on the strength of one nonverifiable memory of a fabulous evening with Charles Tilly, I have decided that if I want to know more about opportunity hoarding, and I may want to know more about opportunity hoarding, I will go directly to the source and bypass Brookings.

In the meantime, I am now sufficiently well-versed in macroeconomics to know that the answer both to twenty percent being twenty percent and opportunity hoarding is a roaring economy and a weaker dollar.

Today's factoid: our strong-dollar policy apparently originated with Robert Rubin.

Another member of the policy elite.

Information isn't knowledge

re: Ignorance is Blitz: Mangled Moments of History From Actual College Students, Education World reports:

[Henriksson] hastens to add, however, that the book is not a criticism of teachers. Society's interest in what is current tends to eclipse attempts to focus on history. "We are bombarded with an array of material, and it is hard for kids to sort out what's important and what's not. We are losing our common body of knowledge. Teachers are battling uphill against an information revolution that devalues the past."

Still, Henriksson, who teaches a world history survey course taken mostly by college freshmen, points out that many students lack the most basic historical and geographical background. At the beginning of a recent term, he says, he distributed a series of basic history and geography questions to 80 of his students. The majority did not know that Dublin is in Ireland. "Either they never absorbed what they were taught, or they were never exposed to it," Henriksson said.

Some students confuse periods of history in their essays, Henriksson notes, citing the following example from the book: "Wars fought in the 1950s and after include the Crimean War, Vietnam, and the Six-Minute War. President Eisenhower resorted to the bully pool pit. John F. Kennedy worked closely with the Russians to solve the Canadian Missile Crisis."

Some students are simply confused, however, including the one who claimed, "Judyism had one big God, named 'Yahoo.'"

Based on his own experience, Henriksson says, the following general understandings represent the basic accurate historical knowledge one can assume of U.S. college students:

• At some point "in the distant past," the United States fought a war of independence against a major European or Asian power.
• George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and Richard Nixon were presidents of the United States. Washington was the first president and Lincoln was in office a long time ago.
• The United States still suffers from the legacy of slavery, whenever that occurred.
• The Civil War, which took place sometime between 1750 and 1930, had something to do with slavery.
• Adolf Hitler, "a foreigner of some kind," was a bad person.
• There was at least one world war but not more than three.

On the subject of common knowledge, I'm pretty sure I have only one student who knew what an adjective was when the semester began.

How to study

Look what I just found!

Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology by John Dunlosky1, Katherine A. Rawson1, Elizabeth J. Marsh2, Mitchell J. Nathan3, and Daniel T. Willingham4

Now I need to drop everything & spend the next two days a) reading "Improving Students' Learning" and b) employing "Effective Learning Techniques" so I can remember how to Improve Students' Learning....which is sounding a bit circular as I write.

I'll get to that as soon as I finish annotating Tony Wagner's 2008 "Rigor Redefined," which our new $400K superintendent distributed to the board of ed last week.

The board is now deciding the future direction of the district, so naturally it's time to roll out a vintage piece of warmed-over, pre-crash Tony Wagner:

Daniel Pink, the author of A Whole New Mind, observes that with increasing abundance, people want unique products and services: “For businesses it's no longer enough to create a product that's reasonably priced and adequately functional. It must also be beautiful, unique, and meaningful.”1

Remember those days? The days when "increasing abundance" could simply be assumed?

That was then.

Have I mentioned lately that I am not a fan of credentialism? (and Word is not for writers)

Edel went to a college in Pennsylvania and Melinda to one in New York. Both have undergraduate degrees in elementary education, yet they both recalled how lost they felt when they first stood in front of a classroom. They hadn’t done nearly enough student teaching, they felt, and, in any case, the student teaching they had done hadn’t prepared them to deal with issues, as Edel put it, “like poverty, drugs, crime, and hunger” that she was seeing on a daily basis.

In desperation, Edel sent a note to one of her college professors asking for help. (He gave her a few pointers.) Melinda recalls thinking that even the most basic elements of her job — classroom management, organization, lesson planning — were things she had to figure out on her own, after she had begun teaching. When I asked them what they had learned in college, they shouted in unison: theory! (Denise went on to get a master’s degree in education, which she laughingly described as “not exactly hands-on.”)

Three Sisters (Not Chekhov's) by Joe Nocera | NY Times | Published: September 27, 2013

Speaking of classroom management, organization, and lesson planning, I am trying to figure out how to make my computer act like Google.

Katie Beals told me, a while back, that computers were not designed with writers in mind, and that is soooooo true. I have dozens of copies of exercises, lessons, class readings, handouts, fables, folktales, fairy tales, myths, etc. scattered all over my hard drive, and I can't tell which ones it's safe to throw out because I can't tell which copies really are identical copies and which are different.

Of late, I have taken to dating every single thing I write, create, or duplicate (making duplicates is the real problem)....but that doesn't work, either, because duplication produces multiple copies with the same date in the filename, which doesn't help.

Word does tell me, in the Finder window, which of several documents I opened most recently, BUT if I forget to read the date and open the document without thinking -- which I inevitably do--the history is gone.

I need my computer to do its own personal Google search.

I need it to go find every single copy of a document AND every single near-copy of a document (and I'd like it to find things it thinks may be related to the documents I'm looking for).

Then I need my computer (this part is nothing like Google) to tell me which copies are exactly the same, which ones are not the same, what exactly is different among the four or five copies of the same file, and when I last revised what.

I've tried to develop a habit of including a "Last Revised" notation inside every document I create, but I create hundreds and hundreds of tiny documents -- exercises and lessons and brief passages for my class -- and at any one time I'm juggling so many of them that I have not become a person who automatically and without having to think about it includes a "Last Revised" line in every document.

I will keep trying, but why should I have to become that person, anyway?

Word could easily enter a "Last Revised" line in every document I create, so why doesn't it?

As far as I can tell, Word was created for students, not teachers.

Students and student types.

Word was created for people who were going to write something ONCE, put it out there, then never look at it again.

Word was not created for people who write something once, then revise it after class, then re-revise it one year later, then re-re-revise it after that class, then re-re-re-revise it one year after that, etc.

It's a problem.

Skunk at the party

From Grammar Alive! A Guide for Teachers By Brock Haussamen with Amy Benjamin, Martha Kolln, Rebecca S. Wheeler, and members of NCTE's Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar:

A Broken Subject

At the start of this new millennium, throughout much of the K-12 English curriculum, grammar is a broken subject. If you find yourself just not knowing what to do about grammar-how to teach it, how to apply it, how to learn what you yourself were never taught-you are not alone. Grammar is often ignored, broken off altogether from the teaching of literature, rhetoric, drama, composition, and creative writing. Grammar is the skunk at the garden party of the language arts. Perhaps you've set aside time for labeling parts of speech, correcting errors, and modeling effective use of punctuation, but you may feel unmoored: you wonder whether the grammar you learned in school (what little there may have been) is sufficient or if the methods you learned by are up-to-date. And you certainly wouldn't be alone if you were embarrassed to reveal to your colleagues all that you don't know about grammar. Grammar feels like a frowning pedant reproaching you for not knowing enough about subject-verb agreement, for blithely ending sentences with prepositions, for splitting infinitives without even understanding what that means, for promiscuous use of commas and flagrant case violations. And, even if you speak and write with a confident tongue and well-schooled hand, you may tremble at the thought of trying to get your students to write complete sentences.

This is a remarkable passage.

It takes as a given the fact that English teachers know nothing about grammar. Worse, not only do English teachers know nothing about grammar consciously, they (apparently) know little about grammar unconsciously (procedurally), either. Their own writing is distinguished by "promiscuous" use of commas and "flagrant" case violations.

Why are these people paid to teach writing?

You are not alone. The obstacles to revitalizing the teaching of grammar are several. One is that our profession has lost sight of the connection between studying grammar and learning to read and write. As Robert J. Connors recounted in "The Erasure of the Sentence," our interest in analyzing sentences has faded since the 1970s. Today it is the process of writing, along with originality, authenticity, and personal writing, that we value. The change has left sentence-level work--even such proven approaches as sentence combining-in shadow. We're not comfortable encouraging students to be original and authentic one minute and then assigning them exercises in sentence structure the next. Many English departments, and highly respected English teachers, argue forcefully that sentence-level work is mechanical, behavioristic, antihumanistic, and, most scorn-worthy of all, boring.

I'm sorry.

An English teacher who has no interest in analyzing sentences is not an English teacher.

Writers write sentences. That's what writing is: it's writers writing sentences. The raw material of writing is the sentence, and a sentence is an essay in miniature.

The structure of every sentence is a lesson in logic.
John Stuart Mill (1773-1836)

The essential structure of the ordinary [English] sentence...is a noble thing.
Winston Churchill

Extracurricular hours per week

It's application time. Not only is there the Common App, but some colleges have their own app systems. My son also has a couple of other online apps (with essays) to fill out and we haven't even gotten to the scholarship season. The question for today is what to do about things like hours per week for activities. When you talk about a sport, people know that it's seasonal. Then again, some do three or four season soccer. My son does music year-round, and in the summer at camp, he could claim that it's 8 hours or more a day what with classes and practicing. If I convert this into a year-round weekly average, one might think that his hours are padded. This must also be an issue for sports kids and their summer camps. Do admissions people have red flag indicators on hours per week? Are their unwritten rules about how this number should be calculated? How about travel time to lessons or events?

Then there is the limited space for explaining extracurriculars and positions/awards. They want to make a holistic judgment about an applicant, but they give you extremely limited space to make your case. I know they don't want to see all sorts of fluff, but not only do they limit the number of activities you can enter, they give you almost no space to explain anything about the important ones.

Does anyone have any advice about this? Do you look for options to add in additional clarifying information? It seems that in their efforts to standardize format and to limit application thickness, they are missing critical information for their holistic decision. Essays are another whole topic. They were going over potential essay topics in my son's AP English class and one student talked about (the ideal place essay) how he wanted to talk about mowing the lawn. The teacher thought that was a good idea. Essays remind me of docudramas; heavy on the drama and light on the docu.

GPA and the Numbers Game

I went to a meeting at our school the other night where they said that they were changing from an unweighted GPA to a weighted GPA. Although our school calculates a class rank based on weighting courses, it's not in a typical GPA format. Actually, it's more accurate because it doesn't use buckets. However, many colleges look at whatever GPA is shown on the transcript and an unweighted GPA based on 4.0 rarely looks good against a weighted GPA based on a maximum of 5. An admissions person from our state university gave an example of how the head of admissions once said that he was "not comfortable" with someone's GPA even though he should have known it was unweighted. I was surprised to learn that many colleges value GPA, but don't bother (probably a money issue) to calculate their own even though they know there is no national standard even for weighting. It's also interesting that some people can make bad holistic decisions.

They said that across the nation, many colleges are ignoring class rank even if it is adjusted for class size. If the class rank is the only thing that reflects the difficulty of the courses taken, it will be ignored and the college may just look at the unweighted GPA. So much for holistic consideration. The admissions person said that one might get rejected in the first cut and never get to any sort of holistic evaluation. And even in the holistic process, your numbers can help or hurt. So the goal is to maximize your numbers to get into the highest holistic academic/EC bucket you can.

One formula is the Academic Index used by Ivy League colleges. Apparently, it dropped its rank portion (dependent on class size) and added in one based on GPA, although it requires recalculating the GPA into a standard form.

Academic Index

There is also this, which gives a spreadsheet calculator.

AI Calculator

Although AI was developed for athletes, they calculate it for all students.

The first part is based on your SAT scores, the second part is based on your SAT II scores, and the third part is based on your GPA. The link above talks about a GPA table supplied to the eight universities, but it doesn't explain how the GPA is calculated. It appears to use a weighted scale where the top score is 4.3. I haven't found out how this number is calculated. The spreadsheet then proceeds to choose the higher score associated with each of the two GPA numbers. It's always struck me that the SAT scores make up two-thirds of this index. Colleges might include a fudge factor if they know something about a high school, but no option for that shows up in the example spreadsheet.

The problem with rank is that you can't correct for it based on whether it uses weighted or unweighted GPA. Recalculating the GPA is good because it isolates the variable of grades. Some colleges are calculating unweighted GPAs using just the core academic courses. Then they can provide a factor for how much you challenged yourself given what your high school has to offer. Then they can correct again if they know something about the difficulty of your high school. At our meeting, they repeated the nugget that "it's best to get A's in AP classes." My nuanced view is that it's best to have the highest unweighted GPA while still looking like you are challenging yourself. Colleges want 'A' students. It's better to have them think you could have challenged yourself more rather than to do so, but slip.

Why nobody knows how to teach writing

"How Student Writers Develop: Rhetoric, Psychoanalysis, Ethics, Erotics" by T.R. Johnson

What are the odds an article with this title will provide an adjunct teaching freshman composition  substantial help teaching students where to put periods and where to put commas?

I'm starting a prediction market.