Posts
the world's funniest joke
I actually laughed out loud when I read this, and immediately afterwards thought: That joke's pretty dumb.
The fact is, though, that I didn't see the punchline coming, and I laughed.
Humor depends on surprise.
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?
Saturday, December 14, 2013
Eureka, part 3: MOOCs and flips and dopamine
Eureka
Eureka, part 2
Eureka, part 3
Eureka, part 4
Eureka, part 5
So, MOOCs. Why don't they work (setting aside, for the moment, Anne D's experience)?
I had just gotten to the point where sitcoms gave me the answer I was looking for when I had to take a train to the city.
So, to reprise:
"Reward prediction error"
In graduate school (I have a Ph.D. in film studies) I was intensely interested in comedy; I wrote my dissertation on 1950s comedies. 1950s comedies are fabulous, but what I really wanted to know was: what is humor?
What makes things funny?
I've wondered about that for my entire adult life, and have probably, finally, found at least a partial answer, which has to do with -- hold your breath -- the basal ganglia. (For passersby, I have been slaving over a basal ganglia writing project for years now.)
Research on the basal ganglia is very new, so take what I'm about to describe as provisional.
The basal ganglia seem to be all about reward prediction error.
"Reward prediction error" means that learning happens when you predict a reward and you are wrong.
Here's how it works. (Or may work).
Dopamine spikes or drops in response to "prediction" errors, that is to mistakes we make predicting rewards.
(I've learned just this week that "because" has become a preposition.)
So, if you're expecting a check to come in the mail and the check comes in the mail, no dopamine spike. You open the check, you're mildly happy (if that), you deposit the check. Life goes on.
If you're not expecting a check to come in the mail and a check in the exact same amount as the expected check-in-the-mail arrives without warning, that feels great because dopamine.
A surprise check in the mail feels great because dopamine fires in response to good surprises (or to "better-than-expected" rewards.)
Reinforcement learning
Reward prediction error is the basis of reinforcement learning.
It's unfortunate that "reinforcement learning" is called "reinforcement learning," because "reinforcement," to me, sounds as if learning takes place when the same thing happens again.
Instead, reinforcement learning takes place when something new happens, something you didn't expect.
("Something new" includes something old but better -- or worse -- than you expected. I know the whole thing gets incredibly confusing right around this point, but just remember the surprise check in the mail: how different it feels from the fully anticipated check in the mail. The surprise check in the mail produces reinforcement learning; the expected check in the mail does not.)
For the record, I don't know how learning via distributed practice, via repetition, relates to reinforcement learning, so that question will have to remain a mystery for the time being.
Reinforcement learning in the sense of the incidental learning we do naturally throughout the day (what should I do again? what should I not do again?) depends on mistakes. "Reinforcement learning" happens when we are wrong, when we are wrong in a very specific way: reinforcement learning happens when we are wrong about the goodness or badness of what comes next.
Drug addiction is probably a phenomenon of reward prediction error, btw.
Normally we habituate to good things. We get used to them; we no longer feel ecstatic when they occur. But addictive drugs always spike dopamine -- that is their effect inside the brain -- and that is what makes them addictive.
Cocaine spikes dopamine every time you use it, so your brain is always getting a 'REMEMBER THIS AND DO IT AGAIN' message, and your interest in taking cocaine always increases. Addiction is a form of learning, a form of overlearning, more exactly.
At least, that is the way I understand the reward prediction error theory of drug addition, as a "disease of learning and memory."
(Interesting 2012 research here…dopamine and GABA…)
Surprise is good
The long and the short of it: surprise is good.
Good surprise is good.
Bad surprise is bad.
All surprise, however, appears to be informational. Our brains react strongly, and we learn.
Which brings me to sitcoms.
Why are funny things funny?
Funny things are funny, at least in part, because humor -- humor that works -- is surprising. If it's not surprising, it's not funny.
And that means humor tells your brain you've made a reward prediction error. The punchline of a good joke or gag is unexpected, so dopamine spikes up. Dopamine spikes feel good, so we come back for more.
A good sitcom doesn't need an immersive setting or loud music or arresting imagery to hold our attention.
A good sitcom sets the reward prediction errors coming one on the heels of another, and that is plenty.
Eureka, Part 4 t/k
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?
Eureka, part 2
Eureka, part 3
Eureka, part 4
Eureka, part 5
So, MOOCs. Why don't they work (setting aside, for the moment, Anne D's experience)?
I had just gotten to the point where sitcoms gave me the answer I was looking for when I had to take a train to the city.
So, to reprise:
Ed brought up movies.
When you go to the movies, he said, the screen is huge, the sound is deafening, all the lights are turned off, you can't talk to your friends, and you have to stow your cell phone. Plus a movie lasts only a couple of hours, then you never have to see it again unless there's a sequel that you really want to see, and you don't have to see that for at least a year.
And even at the movies, even with all the ploys and devices filmmakers and theater designers have developed to hold your attention, if the plot sags, your mind wanders.
MOOCs don't have any of those things, so good luck. The wonder of it all is not that the drop-out rate for MOOCs is catastrophic, but that anyone thought they were a good idea in the first place.
Ed continued.
TV, he said, had had to follow in the footsteps of movies. TVs are bigger, the sound is louder, the experience more immersive….
That's not really true, I said. It's definitely not true of sitcoms. Sitcoms are the exact same hokey, flat-lit, 3-camera affair they always were, with the laugh track telling you when to laugh, and they work. They always have.
That's when it hit me.
"Reward prediction error"
In graduate school (I have a Ph.D. in film studies) I was intensely interested in comedy; I wrote my dissertation on 1950s comedies. 1950s comedies are fabulous, but what I really wanted to know was: what is humor?
What makes things funny?
I've wondered about that for my entire adult life, and have probably, finally, found at least a partial answer, which has to do with -- hold your breath -- the basal ganglia. (For passersby, I have been slaving over a basal ganglia writing project for years now.)
Research on the basal ganglia is very new, so take what I'm about to describe as provisional.
The basal ganglia seem to be all about reward prediction error.
"Reward prediction error" means that learning happens when you predict a reward and you are wrong.
Here's how it works. (Or may work).
Dopamine spikes or drops in response to "prediction" errors, that is to mistakes we make predicting rewards.
- If you expect something good to happen & it doesn't, dopamine drops. That feels bad.
- If you expect something bad to happen and it doesn't, dopamine spikes. That feels good.
- If you're not expecting anything good to happen one way or another, and all of a sudden, out of the blue, something good does happen, that feels great. Because dopamine.
(I've learned just this week that "because" has become a preposition.)
So, if you're expecting a check to come in the mail and the check comes in the mail, no dopamine spike. You open the check, you're mildly happy (if that), you deposit the check. Life goes on.
If you're not expecting a check to come in the mail and a check in the exact same amount as the expected check-in-the-mail arrives without warning, that feels great because dopamine.
A surprise check in the mail feels great because dopamine fires in response to good surprises (or to "better-than-expected" rewards.)
Reinforcement learning
Reward prediction error is the basis of reinforcement learning.
It's unfortunate that "reinforcement learning" is called "reinforcement learning," because "reinforcement," to me, sounds as if learning takes place when the same thing happens again.
Instead, reinforcement learning takes place when something new happens, something you didn't expect.
("Something new" includes something old but better -- or worse -- than you expected. I know the whole thing gets incredibly confusing right around this point, but just remember the surprise check in the mail: how different it feels from the fully anticipated check in the mail. The surprise check in the mail produces reinforcement learning; the expected check in the mail does not.)
For the record, I don't know how learning via distributed practice, via repetition, relates to reinforcement learning, so that question will have to remain a mystery for the time being.
Reinforcement learning in the sense of the incidental learning we do naturally throughout the day (what should I do again? what should I not do again?) depends on mistakes. "Reinforcement learning" happens when we are wrong, when we are wrong in a very specific way: reinforcement learning happens when we are wrong about the goodness or badness of what comes next.
Drug addiction is probably a phenomenon of reward prediction error, btw.
Normally we habituate to good things. We get used to them; we no longer feel ecstatic when they occur. But addictive drugs always spike dopamine -- that is their effect inside the brain -- and that is what makes them addictive.
Cocaine spikes dopamine every time you use it, so your brain is always getting a 'REMEMBER THIS AND DO IT AGAIN' message, and your interest in taking cocaine always increases. Addiction is a form of learning, a form of overlearning, more exactly.
At least, that is the way I understand the reward prediction error theory of drug addition, as a "disease of learning and memory."
(Interesting 2012 research here…dopamine and GABA…)
Surprise is good
The long and the short of it: surprise is good.
Good surprise is good.
Bad surprise is bad.
All surprise, however, appears to be informational. Our brains react strongly, and we learn.
Which brings me to sitcoms.
Why are funny things funny?
Funny things are funny, at least in part, because humor -- humor that works -- is surprising. If it's not surprising, it's not funny.
And that means humor tells your brain you've made a reward prediction error. The punchline of a good joke or gag is unexpected, so dopamine spikes up. Dopamine spikes feel good, so we come back for more.
A good sitcom doesn't need an immersive setting or loud music or arresting imagery to hold our attention.
A good sitcom sets the reward prediction errors coming one on the heels of another, and that is plenty.
Eureka, Part 4 t/k
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?
Woodrow Wilson on fathers, sons, and universities
I am interested in [this organization - the YMCA] for various reasons. First of all, because it is an association of young men. I have had a good deal to do with young men in my time, and I have formed an impression of them which I believe to be contrary to the general impression. They are generally thought to be arch radicals. As a matter of fact, they are the most conservative people I have ever dealt with. Go to a college community and try to change the least custom of that little world and find how the conservatives will rush at you. Moreover, young men are embarrassed by having inherited their father’s opinions. I have often said that the use of a university is to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible. I do not say that with the least disrespect for the fathers; but every man who is old enough to have a son in college is old enough to have become very seriously immersed in some particular business and is almost certain to have caught the point of view of that particular business. And it is very useful to his son to be taken out of that narrow circle, conducted to some high place where he may see the general map of the world and of the interests of mankind, and there shown how big the world is and how much of it his father may happen to have forgotten. It would be worth while for men, middle-aged and old, to detach them selves more frequently from the things that command their daily attention and to think of the sweeping tides of humanity.Needless to say, I personally do not agree that a sentiment such as "the use of a university is to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible" can be advanced without "the least disrespect for the fathers" even once, let alone often.
Woodrow Wilson on the Christian Men’s Association
Well, at least Woodrow Wilson thought character education happened via instruction in the disciplines, not vendor-produced character-ed "curricula" and the like.
I suppose that's something.
Friday, December 13, 2013
Eureka, part 2: why MOOCs don't work and flipped classrooms never will work
Eureka, part 1
So as I was saying, Ed and I were having lunch in the American Diner, somewhere in the vicinity of Nyack (if I am not mistaken) and we were talking about MOOCs, and I had a eureka moment re: why MOOCs don't work, and why flipped classrooms won't work, either.
The whole MOOC/flipped classroom extravaganza of lo these past 2 years------
Wait.
Has it been 2 years?
Should we date the commencement of MOOC fever to Bill Gates' anointment of Salman Khan as the new new thing?
[pause]
Two seconds on Google brings us to Bill Gates on the “golden era” of learning, thanks to massive open online courses and easy access to information, so I say Yes, blame Bill Gates. Because if it wasn't Bill Gates who launched us on the MOOCs-&-flips merry-go-round, it could have been. Pretty much wherever you see a really bad idea re: public education taking hold, you will find Bill Gates.
So I blame Bill.
Anyway, Ed and I got on the subject of MOOCs, and while I no longer recall our point of departure, we pretty quickly arrived at the simple fact that MOOCs (and flips) are fantastically boring.
The fantastic boringness of MOOCs is no secret, & pretty much everyone concedes the point (though for different reasons) but the question is: Why?
Why are MOOCs fantastically boring?
More to the point, why are MOOCs fantastically boring to me, a person who is perfectly happy, and not remotely bored, listening to a live lecture delivered inside a lecture hall?
I can prove it, too. Morningside's Summer School Institute, which I attended the summer before last, used a heavy-duty lecture format; we students sat for hours of lecture, hours on end. Lecture and Powerpoints.
It was great!
By the end of the two weeks I was exhausted and my brain was fried, but I wasn't bored (just the opposite), and, more importantly, I was still in the class. Everyone was. Which would not have been the case if we'd been taking the class via MOOC.
(For the record, the first week of the Summer School Institute is largely lecture; the second week is divided between lecture and student teaching in Morningside Academy.)
My point being: I have a very high tolerance for lecture; I have no problem showing up for, learning from, and enjoying live lectures delivered in bricks-and-mortar venues. Where MOOCs are concerned, I should be a natural.
So why can't I make it through more than 2 or 3 (usually 2) taped lectures of a MOOC?
Ed brought up movies.
When you go to the movies, he said, the screen is huge, the sound is deafening, all the lights are turned off, you can't talk to your friends, and you aren't allowed to turn your cell phone on. Plus a movie lasts only a couple of hours, then you never have to see it again unless there's a sequel that you really want to see, and you don't have to see that for at least a year.
And even at the movies, even with all the ploys and devices filmmakers and theater designers have developed to hold your attention, if the plot sags, your mind wanders.
MOOCs don't have any of those things, so good luck. The wonder of it all is not that the drop-out rate for MOOCs is catastrophic, but that anyone thought they were a good idea in the first place.
Ed continued.
TV, he said, had had to follow in the footsteps of movies. TVs are bigger, the sound is louder, the experience more immersive….
That's not really true, I said. It's definitely not true of sit coms. Sit coms are the exact same hokey, flat-lit, 3-camera affair they always were, with the laugh track telling you when to laugh, and they work. They always have.
That's when it hit me.
Part 3 t/k
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?
So as I was saying, Ed and I were having lunch in the American Diner, somewhere in the vicinity of Nyack (if I am not mistaken) and we were talking about MOOCs, and I had a eureka moment re: why MOOCs don't work, and why flipped classrooms won't work, either.
The whole MOOC/flipped classroom extravaganza of lo these past 2 years------
Wait.
Has it been 2 years?
Should we date the commencement of MOOC fever to Bill Gates' anointment of Salman Khan as the new new thing?
[pause]
Two seconds on Google brings us to Bill Gates on the “golden era” of learning, thanks to massive open online courses and easy access to information, so I say Yes, blame Bill Gates. Because if it wasn't Bill Gates who launched us on the MOOCs-&-flips merry-go-round, it could have been. Pretty much wherever you see a really bad idea re: public education taking hold, you will find Bill Gates.
So I blame Bill.
Anyway, Ed and I got on the subject of MOOCs, and while I no longer recall our point of departure, we pretty quickly arrived at the simple fact that MOOCs (and flips) are fantastically boring.
The fantastic boringness of MOOCs is no secret, & pretty much everyone concedes the point (though for different reasons) but the question is: Why?
Why are MOOCs fantastically boring?
More to the point, why are MOOCs fantastically boring to me, a person who is perfectly happy, and not remotely bored, listening to a live lecture delivered inside a lecture hall?
I can prove it, too. Morningside's Summer School Institute, which I attended the summer before last, used a heavy-duty lecture format; we students sat for hours of lecture, hours on end. Lecture and Powerpoints.
It was great!
By the end of the two weeks I was exhausted and my brain was fried, but I wasn't bored (just the opposite), and, more importantly, I was still in the class. Everyone was. Which would not have been the case if we'd been taking the class via MOOC.
(For the record, the first week of the Summer School Institute is largely lecture; the second week is divided between lecture and student teaching in Morningside Academy.)
My point being: I have a very high tolerance for lecture; I have no problem showing up for, learning from, and enjoying live lectures delivered in bricks-and-mortar venues. Where MOOCs are concerned, I should be a natural.
So why can't I make it through more than 2 or 3 (usually 2) taped lectures of a MOOC?
Ed brought up movies.
When you go to the movies, he said, the screen is huge, the sound is deafening, all the lights are turned off, you can't talk to your friends, and you aren't allowed to turn your cell phone on. Plus a movie lasts only a couple of hours, then you never have to see it again unless there's a sequel that you really want to see, and you don't have to see that for at least a year.
And even at the movies, even with all the ploys and devices filmmakers and theater designers have developed to hold your attention, if the plot sags, your mind wanders.
MOOCs don't have any of those things, so good luck. The wonder of it all is not that the drop-out rate for MOOCs is catastrophic, but that anyone thought they were a good idea in the first place.
Ed continued.
TV, he said, had had to follow in the footsteps of movies. TVs are bigger, the sound is louder, the experience more immersive….
That's not really true, I said. It's definitely not true of sit coms. Sit coms are the exact same hokey, flat-lit, 3-camera affair they always were, with the laugh track telling you when to laugh, and they work. They always have.
That's when it hit me.
Part 3 t/k
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?
Little Drummer Boy
I spent the first 5 seconds of this video thinking This is ridiculous, and, about 5 seconds after that, This is fabulous!
Little Drummer Boy Pentatonix
You have to watch the video, and the singers' faces.
Little Drummer Boy Pentatonix
You have to watch the video, and the singers' faces.
Thursday, December 12, 2013
Eureka
This afternoon, while Ed and I were having lunch in the American Diner over in …. Nyack?
Hmm.
I have no idea what town the American Diner is in.
Retake.
This afternoon, while Ed and I were having lunch in the American Diner, it came to me.
Why MOOCs don't work, and why flipped classrooms aren't going to work, either.
I've got it.
Optimal arousal levels.
That's the problem.
As usual, the world of athletics is way ahead of the world of everything else.
More anon.
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?
Hmm.
I have no idea what town the American Diner is in.
Retake.
This afternoon, while Ed and I were having lunch in the American Diner, it came to me.
Why MOOCs don't work, and why flipped classrooms aren't going to work, either.
I've got it.
Optimal arousal levels.
That's the problem.
As usual, the world of athletics is way ahead of the world of everything else.
More anon.
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?
MOOCs grow the gap
This study contributes to a growing body of research on academic achievement of students in online courses. In a recent meta-analysis of studies comparing online to inperson courses (2009), the U.S. Department of Education found that there was no significant difference between student achievement in online and traditional courses, although a small increase was noted for hybrid courses that combined the two methods. However, when these studies were further analyzed by at-risk student population demographics lower achievement was found in online courses (Jaggars & Bailey, 2010). This finding has been recently expanded by Xu and Jaggars (2013) in a study that investigated how different types of students—including groups that share characteristics found, particularly, among students from AOLE’s partner high school—perform in online learning courses. Using course grade and course completion as dependent variables, Xu and Jaggars found that while all students did less well in online courses, some student groups were more negatively affected from taking courses in this mode. These students were males, younger students, students with lower levels academic skills, and African American students. [emphasis added] The study also found that the negative impact of online learning was exacerbated when groups of students comprised of those who adapt least well to online learning study together. It should be noted that the study, based on research conducted across Washington State on 500,000 online and face-to-face course enrollments (and 41,000 students), did not distinguish between different types of online learning environments, faculty preparation, or support services available to students. The Xu and Jaggars study confirms prior findings in previous smaller studies, which also found that students from at-risk demographic groups and introductory courses had lower performance in online courses compared to other students, thereby exacerbating the well-documented achievement gap in higher education (Kaupp, 2012; Xiu & Smith, 2011, Terenzini & Pascarella, 1998).
PRELIMINARY SUMMARY
SJSU+ AUGMENTED ONLINE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT
PILOT PROJECT
September 2013
Prepared for Principal Investigator: Elaine D. Collins, Ph.D
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?
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
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.Let's reprise.
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
- 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."
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.Who could have predicted the coming of a MOOC rethink? Apart from every single person reading, writing, & commenting on this blog, who?
After Setbacks, Online Courses Are Rethought by Tamar Lewin December 10, 2013
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.Meanwhile I'm pretty sure I heard our curriculum director say, at the last board meeting, that our classrooms have been flipped.
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.
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
Friday, December 6, 2013
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.
Thursday, December 5, 2013
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
Saturday, November 23, 2013
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.
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.
Friday, November 22, 2013
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?
Monday, November 18, 2013
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.
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.
Saturday, November 9, 2013
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.
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.
Steve H on the mailing list
Have just read this comment by Steve H:
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.
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.Steve is in his year of viewing dangerously....college viewbooks are a world unto themselves.
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.
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.
Thursday, October 31, 2013
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.This generation of teachers has been trained in pure constructivism.
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
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?
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:
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:
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.
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.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."
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
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.
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.
Saturday, October 26, 2013
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 engageny math modules, which are being written and posted as we speak. No teacher has ever taught engageny math, no student has ever learned engageny math, engageny math does not yet exist in toto, and the vast set of engageny 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:
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.
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 engageny math modules, which are being written and posted as we speak. No teacher has ever taught engageny math, no student has ever learned engageny math, engageny math does not yet exist in toto, and the vast set of engageny 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:
- The children have no math textbooks
- Because Trailblazers was so slow, children in later grades don't have the skills to begin grade-level engageny units, but they have all been forced to begin grade-level engageny units anyway, regardless of preparation
- 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
- 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
- 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)
- 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.
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....
Friday, October 25, 2013
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:
3.2 covers axioms of closure. The language is sophisticated--
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:
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:
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
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.
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:
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.
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.I attended the SRO Common Core shindig in my district last night.
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.
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.
Thursday, October 24, 2013
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 22, 2013
Is the S finally hitting the fan?
From Allison, on EngageNY:
The problem is the name has changed, but the song remains the same.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.
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."
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:
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.
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.
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