dangling modifiers on SAT writing

Say you're taking the SAT next Saturday, and you want to know the one thing you can do to improve your writing score.

For my money, the answer is: figure out dangling modifiers.

Dangling modifiers are ubiquitous on the test, and they are especially ubiquitous in the multiple choice selections. Not infrequently, you can identify the correct answer simply by identifying the only answer that is not a dangling modifier.

This is so often the case that I now routinely read through the multiple choice options and cross out all the dangling modifiers (and the comma splices) before I even bother thinking about what's wrong with the sentence. I don't know whether that's a good idea for everyone, but it's a shortcut for me.

My goal with C. is to get him to the point where dangling modifiers 'jump' off the page at him, which is what they do with me. 

Here's an example of what I mean (based on College Board materials, but clunkier):

One of the first women to serve in Congress, more than twenty significant laws were introduced by Jane Doe, making her a leader in her era.

(A) more than twenty significant laws were introduced by Jane Doe, making her

(B) Jane Doe's introduction of more than twenty significant laws made her

(C) introducing more than twenty significant laws made Jane Doe 

(D) her introduction of more than twenty significant laws led to Jane Doe being considered 

(E) Jane Doe introduced more than twenty significant laws, making her

Choices A, B, C, and D all contain dangling modifiers. You don't have to read the final sentence to make sure it's correct because a dangling modifier is always wrong. Choice E has to be right, and it is.

The problem with a dangling modifier is that it isn't close enough to the thing it modifies, which is presumably why it is said to be 'dangling.' A dangling modifier is not firmly attached to the thing it modifies.

(Modifies means adds information to.)

When I get further along with Martha Kolln, I'll come back to this, but for now I'll say that generally speaking a modifier needs to be directly 'next door' to the thing it is modifying.^*

Since the phrase "one of the first women" modifies (adds information to) Jane, Jane has to come next in the sentence -- and just Jane, not Jane-apostrophe-s. Jane-apostrophe-s isn't Jane-the-person; Jane-apostrophe-s is a modifier, too.

So:

Choice A is wrong because "One of the first women to serve in Congress" modifies "more than twenty significant laws," which amounts to saying that the laws were women.

Sometimes you can see this better when you cross out the 'extra' words:

(A) One of the first women to serve in Congress, more than twenty significant laws 

means:

the laws, not Jane, were the first women to serve in Congress

(B) One of the first women to serve in Congress, Jane Doe's introduction of more than twenty significant laws made her

means:

the introduction of laws was one of the first women

(C) One of the first women to serve in Congress, introducing more than twenty significant laws made Jane Doe a

means:

introducing [20 laws] was a woman

(D)  One of the first women to serve in Congress, her introduction of more than twenty significant laws allowed Jane Doe to be considered a

means:

the introduction was a woman

(E) One of the first womento serve in Congress, Jane Doe introduced more than twenty significant laws

means:

Jane Doe was [one of the first] women, which is correct.

I am positive that sentence diagramming would help with SAT writing.

Too bad no one knows how to do it.


update: Martha Kolln on dangling modifiers:

The participle can open the sentence only when its subject is also the subject of the sentence and is located in regular subject position. Otherwise, the participle dangles.



^* I'm sure there's more to it that that. 

Courtney James - math tutoring

Crimson Wife writes:

I have heard really high praise for Courtney James as an online math tutor. 

update: For some reason, the link works for me only when I cut and paste the address into my browser, so here it is: http://mathperfect.net/Tutoring.aspx

update update:

Andy writes:

The link is broken because there is a trailing non-breaking space in the link (it ends Tutoring.aspx%20 instead of .aspx)

Thanks!

slower math students in Singapore

from the Air report on math education in Singapore:

The topic structure in Singapore’s framework is efficient because topics are not taught and retaught as students move through the primary grades. Instead of repeating topics that students have already learned, teachers simply reintroduce them as a foundation on which to build new mathematical content. This practice, however, may not be suitable for students who have more difficulty with mathematics. The Singapore system recognizes that students who have trouble with mathematics may not attain mastery by following Singapore’s regular program of mathematics instruction and that these students may need special assistance to attain competence.

Beginning in grades 5 and 6, Singapore identifies its weaker students on the basis of a general examination of mathematics and language competency. These students receive special assistance and are taught according to a special fifth- and sixth-grade mathematics framework. This special framework mandates that students in the slower track

• receive approximately 30 percent more mathematics instruction than students in the regular track, and

• be exposed to the same mathematical content as students in the regular track, although at a slower pace.

The mathematics framework for students needing compensatory assistance adds review material to strengthen students’ understanding of previously taught content. For example, topics on numbers and geometry taught in grade 4 are repeated at a faster pace in grade 5. The introduction of some new concepts such as ratios, rates, and averages, which are normally introduced in grade 5, are delayed until grade 6 for the weaker students (Ministry of Education, 2001a). What is important, however, is that because slower students spend extra time studying mathematics, topics usually taught in grades 5 and 6 do not have to be completely sacrificed to make room for repetition.6

To support the framework for slower students, Singapore has developed a Learning Support Program to help educators identify these students and provide them with extra help (Ministry of Education 2003c). Mathematics Support Teachers (MST), who receive on-the-job supervision and specialized training to ensure that they are professionally competent, deliver compensatory assistance.

In the United States, we expect all students to meet the standards in state frameworks, but the standards do not help teachers address the needs of slower students. In fact, U.S. standards do not acknowledge that students learn at different rates. No Child Left Behind addresses the needs of failing schools, but it does not directly require that failing students receive help. Although some research evidence supports the belief that students benefit when the curriculum is adjusted to match their ability levels (Loveless, 1999), a distinct alternative curriculum would raise concerns in the United States about potential harm to students from ability grouping. Singapore’s approach differs from traditional ability grouping in that Singapore establishes a framework that requires students to master the same content as other students, not a watered-down curriculum as often happens in U.S. ability grouped classrooms. Singapore also provides extra assistance from an expert teacher.

What the United States Can Learn From Singapore’s World-Class Mathematics System: An Exploratory Study (and what Singapore can learn from the United States)

Apparently teachers in Singapore do not deliver 10-minute mini lessons followed by 40 minutes of one-on-one work with the students who are "struggling."

400 point gain on SATs

Ms. Xu, who was born and raised in China before emigrating to suburban California at age 9, had high hopes that she would be the first in her family to go to college. But poor results on a practice SAT and a dearth of extracurricular activities convinced Ms. Xu, 17, that she needed a scholastic makeover if she were to make it into a school her parents could brag about to relatives.

ThinkTank sent her to a public speaking camp, helped her improve her college essay and gave her the e-mail addresses of all the members of the Stanford University history department. At the company’s prompting, she found two internships with department professors. She also enrolled in ThinkTank’s college prep courses, which helped improve her SAT score 410 points to 2160 out of 2400. Next autumn, she will start at Harvard University.

Coaching and Much More for Chinese Students Looking to U.S.

By DAN LEVIN
Published: May 29, 2011
NY Times

39,947 Chinese undergraduates

With China sending more students to American colleges than any other country, the competition for spots at the top schools has soared. During the 2009-10 academic year, 39,947 Chinese undergraduates were studying in the United States, a 52 percent increase from the year before and about five times as many as five years earlier, according to the Institute of International Education, a U.S. organization.

Coaching and Much More for Chinese Students Looking to U.S.

By DAN LEVIN
Published: May 29, 2011
NY Times

The admissions people at SUNY Binghamton told us they have undergraduate students from over 100 countries.

the exact science of college admissions?

As a record number of students from outside the United States compete for a limited number of spots at the most selective American colleges, companies like ThinkTank are seeking to profit from their ambitions.

In the United States, students have long turned to independent college counselors, but in recent years, larger outfits have entered the market, offering full-service designer courses, extracurricular activities and focused application assistance. These services have spread to the fast-growing and lucrative market in China.

With China sending more students to American colleges than any other country, the competition for spots at the top schools has soared. During the 2009-10 academic year, 39,947 Chinese undergraduates were studying in the United States, a 52 percent increase from the year before and about five times as many as five years earlier, according to the Institute of International Education, a U.S. organization.

[snip]

Capitalizing on the increasingly globalized education system, ThinkTank Learning has tapped into the market in the United States and China.

The founder of the company is Steven Ma, 32, a former Wall Street analyst who started the company as a business for preparing students for college entrance tests in 2002 before expanding into application consulting in 2006, starting with seven students. In 2010, that number had risen to 300, including 75 from China. The company said it made about $7 million last year, with 50 percent from admission consulting.

ThinkTank said it was able to distill the college admissions process into an exact science, which Mr. Ma compared with genetic engineering. “We make unnatural stuff happen,” he said.

Students, whose parents often pay tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, are molded by ThinkTank into well-rounded, socially conscious overachievers through a regimen often beginning as early as the year before entering high school. The company designs extracurricular activities for the students; guides them in essay writing; tutors them for the SAT, the U.S. college admission exam; and helps them with meet-and-greet sessions with alumni.

“There’s a system built by colleges designed to pick out future stars and we are here to crack that system,” Mr. Ma said.


Coaching and Much More for Chinese Students Looking to U.S.

By DAN LEVIN
Published: May 29, 2011
NY Times

Dyscalculia vs Lack of Math Facts

The other day someone emailed me about a new word he'd learned:

Dyscalculia

(He clarified that he didn't think I had it, he just wanted me to know that it existed.)

I have been starting to wonder why it is so difficult for me to improve my math SAT score though.....

.....Which lead me to Daniel Willingham's article about whether or not it's true that some people are "bad at math." After reading it, I believe I fall squarely in the "lack of automaticity" category, rather than "dyscalculic."

Headed to Kumon this summer with my son to brush up on math facts so that I can free up some working memory for the fall SAT. Surprisingly (miraculously?), my son is psyched; daughter is another story.

(Cross Posted on Perfect Score Project.)

C's SAT writing section minority rule

A couple of weeks ago, C. told me that on the Identifying Sentence Errors portion of SAT writing, sentences pertaining to minorities are error free. The correct choice is always E.

Darned if I haven't seen the same thing ever since he pointed it out.

Then today C. missed an answer because the sentence was about minorities and had an error.

"I used my rule," he said, "and it was wrong."

Starting this week, I am going to re-direct his attention to dangling participles, subject-verb agreement, pronoun antecedent agreement, tense consistency, parallelism, and idiomatic usage, among other things.

If that's possible.

Barry Garelick on mini lessons and inequality

The history of tracking students in public education goes back to the early part of the 1900′s. By the 20′s and 30′s, curricula in high schools had evolved into four different types: college-preparatory, vocational (e.g., plumbing, metal work, electrical, auto), trade-oriented (e.g., accounting, secretarial), and general. Students were tracked into the various curricula based on IQ and other standardized test scores as well as other criteria. By the mid-60’s, Mirel (1993) documents that most of the predominantly black high schools in Detroit had become “general track” institutions that consisted of watered down curricula and “needs based” courses that catered to student interests and life relevance. Social promotion had become the norm within the general track, in which the philosophy was to demand as little as possible of the students.

[snip]

By the early 80’s, the “Back to Basics” movement formed to turn back the educational fads and extremes of the late 60’s and the 70’s and reinstitute traditional subjects and curricula. The underlying ideas of the progressives did not go away, however, and the watchword has continued to be equal education for all. While such a goal is laudable, the attempt to bring equity to education by eliminating tracking had the unintended consequence of replacing it with another form of inequity: the elimination of grouping of students according to ability. Thus, students who were poor at reading were placed in classes with students who were advanced readers; students who were not proficient in basic arithmetic were placed in algebra classes. Ability grouping was viewed as a vestige of tracking and many in the education establishment consider the two concepts to be synonymous.

The elimination of ability grouping occurs mostly in the lower grades but also extends to early courses in high school. The practice of such full inclusion is now so commonplace that theories have emerged to justify its practice and to address the problems it brings. “Learning styles” and “multiple intelligences” are now commonplace terms that are taught in schools of education, along with the technique known as “differentiated instruction” to address how to teach students with diverse backgrounds and ability in the subject matter. Teachers are expected to “differentiate instruction” to each student, and to keep whole-group instruction to a minimum. To do this, the teacher gives a “mini-lesson” that lasts 10 to 15 minutes; then students work in small groups and told to work together. The prevailing belief is that by forcing students to solve problems in groups, to rely on each other rather than the teacher, the techniques and concepts needed to solve the problem will emerge through discovery, and students will be forced to learn what is needed in a “just in time” basis. This amounts to giving students easy problems, but with hard and sometimes impossible approaches since they have been given little to no effective instruction to the mathematics that results in effective mathematics problem solvers.

[snip]

Brighter students are seated with students of lower ability in the belief that the brighter students will teach the slower ones what is needed. And frequently this occurs, though the fact that the brighter students are often obtaining their knowledge via parents, tutors or learning centers is an inconvenient truth that is rarely if ever acknowledged. The result is that brighter students are bored, and slower students are either lost, or seek explanations from those students in the know. Another inconvenient truth is that in lower income communities, there are unlikely to be students who have obtained their knowledge through outside sources; they are entirely dependent on their schools.

[snip]

Through the efforts and philosophies of otherwise well-meaning individuals, full inclusion and equality for all has served as a form of tracking.

Protecting Students from Learning: Raymond
by Barry Garelick

In my experience, when a school opts for "differentiated instruction," parents have no way to know whether their children are being taught the same curriculum as other children -- especially since differentiated instruction tends to go hand-in-hand with a reduction in quizzes and tests and the introduction of "standards-based" report cards parents don't know how to interpret.

A less-able child is treated equally in the sense of being placed in a classroom with more-able children.

But is the less-able child taught the same curriculum?

Is the less-able child given the same problems to do?

And, if he is given the same problems but can't do them, what then?

In Singapore, somewhere around 4th or 5th grade, less able children are given more time in the day to master the curriculum. Equality means that all children are taught the same curriculum.

the children of immigrants

One surprising characteristic unites the majority of America’s top high school science and math students – their parents are immigrants. While only 12 percent of the U.S. population is foreign-born, 70 percent of the finalists in the 2011 Intel Science Talent Search competition were the children of immigrants, according to a National Foundation for American Policy analysis. Just 12 of the 40 finalists at this year’s competition of the nation’s top high school science students had native-born parents. While former H-1B visa holders comprise less than 1 percent of the U.S. population, 60 percent of the finalists had parents who entered the U.S. on H-1B visas, which are generally the only practical way to hire skilled foreign nationals. Finalists’ parents sponsored through a family preference category represented 7.5 percent of the total, about four times higher than their proportion in the U.S.

THE IMPACT OF THE CHILDREN OF IMMIGRANTS ON SCIENTIFIC ACHIEVEMENT IN AMERICA (pdf file)
BY STUART ANDERSON

Today's Mantra: Learn to Mastery, Then Add 20% More Study Time

Willingham's advice has been incredibly useful as my son heads into finals this season.

Interestingly, my son seems as intrigued by the study advice as I am, and wants to read the articles and book for himself when school ends.

(cross-posted on Perfect Score Project)

And speaking of books, I am currently obsessed with brain/how we learn books. In the past month I have read:

Moonwalking with Einstein (about memory -- but includes brain research)

What Can I do to Help my Child With Math When I don't Know Any Myself (GREAT study advice)

The Shallows (I'm about 3/4 done. Well worth the read. I'm identifying strongly.)

About to read:

Why Students Don't like School

Welcome to Your Brain

another Chinese mom

Caught this line in a Wall Street Journal review of The Woman Who Could Not Forget:

..."As my mother used to say to me, the success in one's life was dependent on 70% hard work and only 30% talent or genetic makeup."

Stigler and Stevenson found that "American children, teachers, and parents emphasize innate abilites as a component of success more strongly than their Japanese and Chinese counterparts do."

I'd be interested to know what percentages American parents would slot into Ying-Ying's statement on the subject of math and math learning.

I'd really be interested to know what percentages American math teachers would pick - !




The Woman Who Could Not Forget: Iris Chang Before and Beyond the Rape of Nanking- A Memoir



Learning Gap: Why Our Schools Are Failing and What We Can Learn from Japanese and Chinese Education

Engineering Professor: Out of 18 Ph.D's I advised, 16 were from China

Interesting comment from Engineering professor in post about Chinese students taking SATs:

As a professor in Engineering, I see that the Chinese students who study in the US are just incredible. Out of 18 Ph.D's I advised, 16 were from China and we don't get any Americans into the doctoral program with nearly their qualifications. When they go back home, they will just leap-frog the US within the next 10 years.

The Benign Cousin to Rote Knowledge

I'm savoring these Willingham articles. Just one more to go, then I will read his book.

It's not only helping me with my own learning process, but I feel armed to help my kids study with specifics about what works best.

(cross-posted on Perfect Score Project)

lsquared on what you must know to take calculus

(lsquared couldn't get this comment to post on Blogger):

Yes, you need to be very good at algebra. Think factoring, equation solving and complex fractions.

You also need to be quite good at trigonometry: knowing right triangle trigonometry is sufficient for almost everything except calculus--for calculus you need to know how to solve equations that have trig functions in them, and you need to know your trig formulas (the double angle formulas are particularly useful). You don't actually do any of the "verify this trig formula" stuff in calculus, but those "verify the trig formula" problems are very useful for teaching the algebraic trigonometry you use in calculus. Oh--and radians. I'm morally convinced that radians were invented to make trig functions work for calculus. Degrees are better for everything else, but in calculus, you have to have radians.

You also need to know logs: solving exponential equations with logs, solving log equations with exponents, and manipulating logarithms.

Back to rational functions. Be able to solve rational equations, simplify rational expressions that are not equations, and graph (by hand, not by calculator) rational functions (using properties of the rational function to graph, not by plotting points) (I may be unusually picky about this).

Sequences and series, including finding sums using the formulas for arithmetic and geometric sequences. Also the binomial theorem.

You don't need matrices, though you do need to be able to solve simultaneous linear equations. If there's a section in the pre-calc book on find partial fraction decompositions, that's directly a calc algorithm.

I think that might be everything you need for pre-calc.

This was an excellent exercise for me. I’m going to have to keep a copy of this to use when counseling students about whether they are ready for calculus or not. Indeed, the homeschooled kid next door wants to get into my calc class in the fall, and I shall be handing this to him I expect. Good luck finding a good class--I think the community college might be a good choice (assuming that they have a pre-calc course).

help desk - precalculus

This year's math course has been a disaster. Beyond disaster, actually. Where math is concerned, this year has been epically^* bad.

Some kind of emergency repair has to happen this summer - but what?

Any suggestions?

I could conceivably sign C. up for an algebra 2/precalculus course at the local community college - but are the teachers there going to be any better? At this point, we desperately need an actual math teacher: a person who can teach math to a student who doesn't teach math to himself.

We could do ALEKS, but ALEKS is super-slow and overwhelmingly procedural; the 1 1/2 courses I took on ALEKS taught me one disembodied procedure after another. At this point disembodied procedures might be better than nothing -- but then again to the extent C. learned anything this year he learned disembodied procedures.

I could insist that the two of us work through Foerster (I own the teacher's edition).

We could work our way through Saxon.

I could advertise for a math teacher or check out the various tutoring companies....

We also have to do serious SAT prep (though that's not going to be onerous & time-consuming).

I'm thinking this wasn't the summer to sign up for the precision teaching institute at Morningside.

^* My neighbor's son, who is a terrific writer, is constantly inventing words he says ought to exist, and having watched him do this a few times, I think he's right. Epic is an excellent word, and its non-existent cousin epically is the word I need today.

Over 20,000 Students Took SAT Prep in China Last Year

According to the dean of admissions for the University of Virginia, 1200 applicants from China scored an average of 783 in math.

Not bad ;)

(Cross-Posted at Perfect Score Project)

Edgemont High School

Jay Mathews' Newsweek Challenge Index is now at the Washington Post (very glad to see it survive Newsweek's sale), where it is now called The High School Challenge.

How schools are ranked:

The formula is simple: Divide the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or other college-level tests a school gave in 2010 by the number of graduating seniors.

Edgemont High School is ranked 197 in the country, which is not surprising given the high socioeconomic status of its students.

What is surprising - what is astonishing, really - is Edgemont's "Equity and Excellence" score, which gives the percent of graduating seniors who have scored a 3, 4, or 5 on at least one AP exam by graduation: 86.6% of Edgemont's graduating seniors passed at least one AP test.^*

Can that possibly be true?

I assume it can, given that Rye and Chappaqua have reported similar scores now or in the recent past. 

Their figures over the past several years are very high compared to the percent most schools - including most affluent suburban schools - post.

^*IB scores count, too, but I don't think Edgemont has IB courses.

Familiarity Fools the Mind

I *feel* like I'm getting better at SAT math.

Turns out that feelings aren't facts. Practice test scores not improving (yet), despite being able to solve formerly elusive slope and function problems.

I told my son this morning, Daniel Willingham says, when you think you know the material cold, study 20% more.

(cross-posted at Perfect Score Project)

Telling truth from fiction

One of these stories appeared as a front page, May 18th Philadelphia Inquirer article. The other one is made up. Which is which?

Story A:

Some teachers swear that the best way to establish their authority is to avoid smiling for the first two weeks of class.

David Hall takes a very different approach with his students at North Penn High School by cracking self-deprecating jokes and pretending to be the dude who thinks he is hip but so is not.

In the classroom, Hall brings social studies alive, bypassing textbooks in favor of original sources and creating his own lesson materials. Inside and outside the classroom, he spends time getting to know students, hoping to connect with them and inspire them.

Now in his 13th year of teaching, Hall, 37, recently received a "Teacher as Hero" award from the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia, the latest in a long string of teaching laurels. The Liberty Museum cited Hall's field trips to courtrooms and prisons in Philadelphia and his work as an adviser for the school Gay-Straight Alliance. During summer vacations, Hall does corporate training on workplace diversity issues.

Lauren Ewaniuk, 28, who graduated from North Penn in 2001, called Hall her "all-time favorite teacher by far."

"The best thing about his class was we didn't use the textbook very often," said Ewaniuk, now a teacher in Cheltenham. "He taught us in different ways. The classroom was set up as a circle - it was all class discussion. We read court cases, we did interactive things, watched videos - it was very engaging."

Story B:

Some teachers swear that the best way to engage with students is to crack jokes and relate to them as peers.

David Hill takes a very different approach with his students at South Penn High School. He spends most of his time standing in front of the class and rarely goes off topic

Hill brings social studies alive by ensuring that students can make sense of it. His approach bucks what has become a common trend among award-winning teachers: creating lessons from scratch out of original source materials. Noting that students often find such materials confusing or overwhelming because they lack the necessary background knowledge, Hill makes teaching this knowledge his number one priority.

"My job is to get them ready for the kinds of serious, primary source research that occurs in college and graduate level courses," Hill explains.

Now in his 13th year of teaching, Hill, 37, recently received a "Teacher as Teacher" award from the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia, the latest in a long string of teaching laurels. The Liberty Museum cited the well-informed essays that Hill's students wrote about the history of prison reform in Philadelphia and Hill's own original research on Gay-Straight relations in Philadelphia high schools. During summer vacations, Hill seeks out the most informative, interesting history texts and conducts workshops for teachers in what he calls "Textbook Resuscitation."

Evelyn Lemaniuk, 28, who graduated from South Penn in 2001, called Hill her "all-time favorite teacher by far."

"The best thing about his class was how he renewed my interest in reading history," said Lemaniuk, now a teacher in Cheltenberg. "Most of the approved textbooks are incredibly low-level and boring, and so the better teachers tend not to use them. The problem is that, without a textbook, we're really at a loss when it comes to understanding primary source materials and how they fit into the bigger picture."

(Cross-posted at Out In Left Field)

Music While You Study?

My kids are always trying to convince me that they can study just as well while IMing and BBMing and video chatting and listening to music. In fact, they may have even said they study better while multitasking.

Turns out my gut was right.

They can't.

(Cross-posted at Perfect Score Project)

fuzzy charters

My email correspondent gave me permission to post this email response to "Building a Better Edsel":

This is an important issue, and I'm glad Pondiscio and Joanne Jacobs have put it out there. Many, even most, of the charter (and private) schools offer the same "all fuzzery, all the time" curricula and instruction as your neighbourhood Everyday Math Academy.  They can and do get better results (in some cases, but not in most) by creating an achievement-focused school climate, hiring young people with loads of energy (who rarely stay for long), having a certain selection bias -- not necessarily the accused "creaming" of high performers, but simply the ability to select students whose families support the "mission" of the school -- and the ability to remove students who are clearly dysfunctional or misplaced.

Nevertheless, schools like KIPP and HSA^* (who are firmly committed to fuzzery) could and should do much, much better and probably would do so with a better-constructed curriculum. They need to start out with an intensive compensatory model (DI or DI-like) that gradually morphs into more student-led investigative and project-based work. Morningside does this (Catherine, you may not see that so much at the summer session, because the summer school is not organized like the full-time school) with empirical evidence of success. The students need to develop the critical foundation skills early and fluently and then there can be more balance between teacher-directed instruction and student investigation (still pretty teacher-directed).

All the hoopla about teacher accountability, incentive schemes etc. is missing the mark.  It's like saying we're going to hire the top doctors and forbid them to use antibiotics, effective surgical techniques or diagnostics and simply command them to "heal the sick." 

Right.

What I see is few to NO "bad teachers" in the last 15 years -- the demands of the job are such that those who can't, quit or are pushed out. Not publicly "fired" but counseled out.  There are incredibly talented and hard-working (and smart and well-educated) people in the ranks now, but weak curricula and demands for "all fuzzery all the time" seriously handicap them -- and the students.

In a follow-up, my email correspondent suggested I point out that not all charter schools are fuzzy:

The Charter Day School has a significant precision teaching component.

The Arthur Academy has strong Direct Instruction and Core Knowledge elements.

^* Harlem Success Academy

Robert Pondiscio on building a better Edsel

Robert writes:

A fascinating email found its way into my inbox last week describing a visit to a high profile, “no excuses” charter school.  The email was written by someone who is solidly pro-reform and strongly pro-charter.   She spent the morning visiting Big Name Charter and pronounced herself aghast.  “The school is fantastically well run, and the kids are on task —- and it is all fuzzery all the time. The reading curriculum is Fountas and Pinnell; the math curriculum is so bad it has sparked parent uprisings across the country,” she writes.

I've had an email from a person involved in public education who says KIPP is firmly committed to constructivist curricula. I'll post if the person who wrote gives me permission.

For now, I'll share my correspondent's analogy: giving excellent teachers bad curricula and expecting them to perform miracles (which they do) is similar to depriving the best doctors of antibiotics, diagnostic tests, and effective surgical techniques and telling them to "heal the sick."

From my perspective as a parent who values a traditional liberal education taught via direct instruction and deliberate practice, I find myself asking once again: why is it parents in my group can't have what we want?

Why do we have to have what other people want?

And why do we have to pay for it?

Speaking of what other people want, our board of education election was held last Tuesday. The candidate we supported lost.

The candidate who won pledged to keep Math Trailblazers and said we would not be replacing Trailblazers with Singapore Math.

One of the candidates who won last year made the same promise.

Meanwhile we've got parents in town who are paying to have their children take private classes that use Primary Mathematics.

Are there any parents anywhere in the country paying out of pocket to provide their children private lessons in Math Trailblazers?

More and more, I'm thinking micro-schools could be an answer for parents like me.


update: my correspondent's email is up

Michael Goldstein on teacher choice

Vocational Education on Throwing Curves

Finland has done an amazing thing -- embraced vocational ed rather than treat it with disdain (as we do in the U.S.). A new post on Throwing Curves gives some reasons to rethink our national strategy of college for all when we know most won't finish with a degree.

Can't Believe It Took Me this Long to Discover Willingham

I've just discovered the work of Daniel Willingham and am finding it to be so relevant and helpful, not to mention seeing examples of "inflexible knowledge" everywhere I look.

Check out the comments in this post for real life examples of "inflexible knowledge" from an SAT tutor.

And Catherine's post about the woman who calls 911 because she can't figure out how to open her car door is worth reposting.

help desk - online tech

Does anyone know what technology they're using? I would love to be able to write out a problem and post.

The ShowMe SAT videos seem to be terrific, by the way. I've only looked at one or two, but they were very helpful.

Paying for college is top priority for parents

Is College Worth It? Pew Survey:

In the eyes of parents, being able to pay for their children’s college education is just as important as being able to own a home or live comfortably in retirement. And it’s more important than being able to leave an inheritance to their children....

A parent’s own educational background does not have a significant impact on the importance they place on being able to provide for their children’s educational needs. Parents who never attended college are just as likely as those who earned a four-year college degree to say being able to pay for their children’s college education is extremely important.

The vast majority of parents expect that their children will pursue a college education. Among those with one or more children under age 18, 94% expect at least one of their children will go to college. There are no significant differences across racial or ethnic groups—white, black and Hispanic parents are equally likely to think their children will go to college. In addition, there is very little variance across income groups. While 99% of parents with annual household incomes of $75,000 or higher think their children will go to college, 93% of those with incomes between $30,000 and $74,999 say the same, as do 91% of those making less than $30,000 a year. Again, parents’ own educational experience does not seem to influence the aspirations they have for their children. Parents who did not graduate from college (93%) are just as likely as college graduates (97%) to say their children will go to college.

The most surprising part of these results was that parents across the board have high expectations that their children will attend college.  However, these expectations are unrealistic according to the ACT study that found only 24% of high school graduates are prepared to do college-level work.  Colleges are adjusting, with 36% of first-year students taking at least one remedial class.  Meanwhile, high student loan default rates and graduation rates of under 50% suggest going to college is not the right path for everyone.

In a future post I'll address the issue of how many parents have actually started saving for college. 

(Cross-posted at Education Quick Takes)

The Finland Phenomenon on Throwing Curves

The latest post on Throwing Curves is a review and commentary on the recently released Bob Compton film, The Finland Phenomenon, which bloggers Rosemary and Lynn viewed at MIT last week.

Not learning how to write, apparently

Salon has an article from the point of view of a college comp prof re: just what are high school students *doing* in English class these days?

When I ask her why she thinks there's such resistance to prioritizing and teaching writing, given its numerous applications, given its overlap with critical thinking skills, analytical skills, basic communication skills, she hesitates for a moment, then answers in three words: "It's not fun."

Parker on the equal sign

On the subject of American students not knowing what the equal sign signifies, Parker writes:

I told my spouse the other day that I was convinced that many of my chemistry students did not understand what the equals sign meant and therefore they couldn't handle equations. It was just a hunch, but maybe I wasn't crazy. When they rearrange an equation they tend to just move letters around.

I don't know how we could screw up teaching this stuff.

I'm curious about this -- what happens in a chemistry class when students don't understand the equal sign?

damn you autocorrect

have just discovered this -- hilarious!

Autocorrect is constantly tripping me up, but so far it's produced nothing as diverting as the stuff on other people's phones, it seems.

equation

from Science Daily:

Texas A and M University researchers ... have found that not fully understanding the "equal sign" in a math problem could be a key to why U.S. students underperform their peers from other countries in math.

"About 70 percent of middle grades students in the United States exhibit misconceptions, but nearly none of the international students in Korea and China have a misunderstanding about the equal sign, and Turkish students exhibited far less incidence of the misconception than the U.S. students," note Robert M. Capraro and Mary Capraro of the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Culture at Texas A&M.

[snip]

The problem is students memorize procedures without fully understanding the mathematics, he notes.

"Students who have learned to memorize symbols and who have a limited understanding of the equal sign will tend to solve problems such as 4+3+2=( )+2 by adding the numbers on the left, and placing it in the parentheses, then add those terms and create another equal sign with the new answer," he explains. "So the work would look like 4+3+2=(9)+2=11.

"This response has been called a running equal sign...

[snip]

The Texas A&M researchers examined textbooks in China and the United States and found "Chinese textbooks provided the best examples for students and that even the best U.S. textbooks, those sponsored by the National Science Foundation, were lacking relational examples about the equal sign."

Students' Understanding of the Equal Sign Not Equal, Professor Says
August 11, 2010

They had me until that last line.

How do Everyday Math and Terc teach the equal sign?

a grave injustice

The interesting thing is that the teacher had tenure. We can fire teachers over personal past history within weeks, but it takes years to fire a teacher with tenure over professional competence.

I have two master's degrees, five years' experience in the nonprofit sector and three years' experience teaching -- and I cannot get a job. Why? Just google me. I'm the "Hooker Teacher" -- at least that's what I've come to be called ever since Sept. 27, 2010, when I found myself on the cover of the New York Post.

"Meet Melissa Petro," the story began," the teacher who gives a new twist to sex ed." The piece describes me as a "tattooed former hooker and stripper" who was "shockingly upfront about her past." Indeed, earlier that month, I'd written an Op-Ed on the Huffington Post that criticized the recent censoring of the adult services section of Craigslist and came clean about my own sex-worker past. Because I was arguing that sex workers shouldn't be ashamed to speak for themselves, I signed my name to it. The New York Post wasn't interested in my politics, however; its interest seemed only in cooking up shock that an elementary school teacher would dare admit such a shady history.

http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/05/04/hooker_teacher_what_i_was_thinking/index.html

I mean I wouldn't have minded her as a teacher I think. She had clearly separated her private past from her public present.

My country's elections are finally over; so the NY Post's reporting-with-an-agenda-to-destroy now really sickens me. More than a teacher's hooker past.

tired and overpaid

patentlawyer, Bonnie, and Steve H on careers in computer science and manufacturing--

patentlawyer:

We read this story every few months but most of these "manufacturers" aren't telling the whole truth.

They aren't talking about how they gutted their own training programs in the 80's and 90's, because someone @ the WSJ/Harvard Business School told them to get lean, downsize, rightsize, or out source.

They aren't talking about how automation has really decimated their bread and butter parts and they have to move up to small runs of specialized parts @ high margins to make the money they're used to making.

They aren't talking about how most of their want ads require years of experience and often times a degree.

They aren't talking about how boring it is to work on a lathe for 8 hour stretches.

The reality is that they want experienced people, but they do not want to spend the money to train and retain their employees.

At least in Houston, there are more than enough people that can read blue prints, calculate sin/cos/tang/hyp if necessary. That area of Houston they're talking about is about 10 miles away from NASA and the aerospace/defense contractor hub in Clear Lake City.

We shouldn't have any sympathy for short sighted companies. Nor should we think that the US is in some kind of STEM bind.

There are plenty of out of work born in America engineers now, and plenty of would-be-engineers creamed by grade curves and weed out courses. If you head over to any of the comp sci/it/science/engineering fora, you'll see just how vast and deep the pool is.

Bonnie:

Actually, in CS, enrollments have plummeted in the last few years, to the extent that CS departments are being closed. However, I agree with you on the role of companies. The reason students chose not to major in CS is that they saw their parents laid off from their tech jobs, forced to train their replacements in India (and I know several people personally that had to do that, including my husband). Companies refuse to invest in training or education for their technical employees, instead figuring they can be replaced once their 10 year technical lifespan has expired. Kids saw this happen, and decided that they would rather major in finance, where they can actually be paid well. 

Steve H:

I agree with patentlawyer. I've seen this argument before, and once again, it's not clearly defined. I deal with many companies that bring in computer-aided design and CNC technology. There is more demand than supply. Companies don't like to train because they see these people move on to better paying jobs. Why pay to train someone in SolidWorks who will immediately leave? Just demand that education provide them ready to go. But what, exactly, are these skills? It's not trigonometry.

"Manufacturers say the U.S. education system doesn't produce enough students strong in math, science and engineering."

People with science, math, or engineering degrees won't fill these positions, and companies can train bright high school graduates to meet this demand.

Let's say that a company buys a CNC cutting machine and it comes with a program that nests geometry and generates the G-code to drive the machine. Is this taught in school? Also, where does this geometry come from, a 2D CAD drawing program, a 3D solid modeling program, or a surface modeling program like Rhino? Do they teach these programs in school? You don't learn this in high school geometry. Do schools teach the issues of geometry transfer that cost companies so much time and money?

Look at the skills that companies have in their job ads. Do they say "trigonometry"? Do they ask for people who have critical thinking skills? No. They want specialized skills that are rarely taught in schools. That's why our local vocational school (which offers college degrees) is so popular. They teach these applications and skills. Companies should ask for more vocational schools.

How many job ads say that they are looking for those who had good grades in trig and that they will train. No, you see ads with very specific software or machine skills required, loaded with all sorts of product names (like MasterCAM) and acronyms. Companies might want critical thinking skills, but what they have in the ads are specific product skills. That's why older workers are vulnerable. Companies don't care about general educational background. They care about the latest products and skills. It doesn't matter how experienced you are if that experience is with DEC's VMS. If you don't manage your career carefully, you will end up on a legacy path where the company will not pay for training. One company where my wife worked made a comment about how people over 40 are tired, overpaid, and don't know the latest technology.

the return of bubbling errors

arrgh

In honor of his first go at the SAT this morning, C. and I took a math section from the Blue Book last night.

C.'s score jumped to 670 (he was scoring as low as 550 in January), and I would have jumped to 750 or thereabouts if I hadn't made another freaking bubbling error.

I thought I was done with those.

The one question I missed fair and square was in the careless error dumb mistake category.

Speaking of dumb mistakes, I've now taken so many SAT math sections that I can distinguish between careless error and dumb mistake.

careless error: you misread the question
dumb mistake: you misinterpret the question

21% correct

PWN the SAT links to an SAT math question only 21% of respondents got right.

academic skills or academic content?

In the new Education Week, word that the AVID program, which apparently teaches -- or attempts to teach -- critical thinking has not panned out in Chicago:

In a report set for release in the fall and previewed at the American Educational Research Association convention in New Orleans in April, researchers analyzed how AVID, a study-skills intervention for middle-achieving students, played out in 14 Chicago high schools. They found AVID participants in 9th grade gained little advantage that year over peers not taking part in the program, and remained off track for graduation and college.

[snip]

Doug Rohrer, a psychology professor at the University of South Florida, in Tampa, found the CCSR study more rigorous than prior AVID research.

In a September 2010 analysis, the U.S. Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse found only one of 66 AVID studies met its quality standards. Based on that study, the clearinghouse found AVID had “no discernible effects on adolescent literacy.”

[snip]

“The critical question in my mind,” Mr. Rohrer continued, “is whether AVID is better than requiring students to go to another class, such as an extra dose of math or writing. Learning how to take notes is a fine strategy, but it might not help you in Algebra 2 if you haven’t learned Algebra 1.”

You can't think critically about algebra if you don't know algebra.

Here is Daniel Willingham on the subject (pdf file):

After more than 20 years of lamentation, exhortation, and little improvement, maybe it’s time to ask a fundamental question: Can critical thinking actually be taught? Decades of cognitive research point to a disappointing answer: not really. People who have sought to teach critical thinking have assumed that it is a skill, like riding a bicycle, and that, like other skills, once you learn it, you can apply it in any situation. Research from cognitive science shows that thinking is not that sort of skill. The processes of thinking are intertwined with the content of thought (that is, domain knowledge).

Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach?
American Educator
Summer 2007

a really big class size

from the Ed Week article on Reasoning Mind:

The Gates Foundation, based in Seattle, recently awarded a $742,996 grant for a pilot program of Reasoning Mind, which will test whether one Reasoning Mind-trained teacher can affect the math scores and proficiency of 250 students using the program in different grades at several schools.There will be nine teachers trained, responsible in total for 2,250 students.

Reasoning Mind

Are any of you familiar with Reasoning Mind?

The Compton students are using Reasoning Mind, an online-based math program modeled on a Russian math curriculum and developed by a nonprofit organization of the same name. The program is currently used at 165 public, charter, magnet, and private schools around the country by more than 20,500 students. Most of the schools and districts using the program, like the 26,000-student Compton district, have high percentages of minority and economically disadvantaged students, and are in communities whose schools qualify for federal Title I funding.

In the Compton schools alone, 1,170 students use Reasoning Mind in the district’s, or ASES. Because of state curriculum requirements, Compton students can use the program only in an after-school setting, not in their day classes as preferred by Reasoning Mind. But even in this environment, where daily attendance can be variable and retention uneven, the Compton students have seen notable results in improved math scores and general math proficiency the past 2½ years.

[snip]

The program is the brainchild of Alex Khachatryan, a Russian mathematician and scientist who created Reasoning Mind in 2002 after finding his son’s math education disappointing when the family immigrated to the United States. With the help of others, Khachatryan adapted a pencil-and-paper Russian math curriculum into an interactive Web-based program for American students. The program, which starts introducing some algebra and geometry concepts as early as 2nd grade, is designed to teach students in ways that the best teachers teach: adjusting content based on how students respond to the material in real time, and building on knowledge from the previous year’s studies.

“To really learn math, it’s not enough to solve simple, routine problems,” Khachatryan says.

“The reason why Reasoning Mind works so well,” he adds, “is that it brings together several important things: nonstandard problems to develop thinking skills, lots of interaction between students, individual attention from the teacher, and a solid, coherent curriculum.”

Web-Based Russian Math Curriculum Shows Positive Results
By Nora Fleming
Published Online: March 14, 2011
Published in Print: March 17, 2011, as Tailoring Mathematics for Young Minds
Education Week

Indiana

lots of changes in Indiana schools

sounds good to me, but the folks at Cato take a dim view...

calculus in prison

from the WSJ article on factories lacking skilled workers:

While community colleges and technical schools struggle to keep up with demand for skilled workers, some prisons are trying to help. At California's San Quentin prison, the machine shop offers training to prepare prisoners to pass exams demonstrating skills in such areas as operating computer-controlled lathes and mills. Some inmates get classes in calculus and trigonometry to help them work with machinery.

MAY 6, 2011
Help Wanted on Factory Floor
by James R. Hagerty

math in factory work

In the Wall Streey Journal today:

U.S. manufacturing companies, long known for layoffs and shipping jobs overseas, now find themselves in a very different position: scrambling for scarce talent at home.

Large and small manufacturers of everything from machine tools to chemicals are scouring for potential hires in high schools, community colleges and the military. They are poaching from one another, retraining people who used to have white-collar jobs, and in some cases even hiring former prisoners who learned machinist skills behind bars.

[snip]

Third, the U.S. education system isn't turning out enough people with the math and science skills needed to operate and repair sophisticated computer-controlled factory equipment, jobs that often pay $50,000 to $80,000 a year, plus benefits. Manufacturers say parents and guidance counselors discourage bright kids from even considering careers in manufacturing.

"We get people coming in here all the time who say, 'I can weld,'" says Denis Gimbel, human-resources manager at Lehigh Heavy Forge Corp., of Bethlehem, Pa., whose products include parts for ships. "Well, my grandmother could weld." He needs people who understand the intricacies of $1 million lathes and other metal-shaping equipment.

Manufacturers have anticipated for years that baby-boomer retirements would create difficulties. Among those who have tried to get ahead of the demographic curve—with mixed success—is Jeff Kelly, chief executive of Hamill Manufacturing Co., a family-owned company near Pittsburgh that cuts metal into parts for ships and machinery.

Hamill doesn't have any button-pushing work. The 127-employee company is constantly resetting its mills and lathes to produce small numbers of parts to meet precise and ever-changing specifications. There are no long, routine production runs.

One morning in late April, Trent Thompson, a 20-year-old Hamill apprentice wearing shredded jeans and a black baseball cap, was assigned to drill three holes in a piece of carbon steel about the size and shape of a hockey puck. To make sure he was spacing the holes exactly right, he scrawled a triangle and some trigonometric calculations on a notepad. Even a tiny error would mean wasting about $400 of metal.

[snip]

In another corner of the factory, Bill Schaltenbrand, 59, was cutting bigger, more complicated parts. A computer had worked out where he should drill and cut, but Mr. Schaltenbrand, a 40-year veteran at Hamill, does his own math to double-check the plans. Computers, he says, sometimes "punch out stupid stuff." Part of Mr. Schaltenbrand's skill is reading blueprints with myriad numbers and symbols that would baffle most people.

[snip]

Bayer has had particular trouble filling positions in such areas as chemical-process technology at its plastics plant in Baytown, Texas, near Houston. A decade ago, Mr. Babe says, a job opening typically would attract 100 applications. "These days I get about 10," he says. After screening, Bayer often finds that only a couple are qualified. Some jobs have been open six to nine months.

"This place is five acres, and it's three stories tall," says Donny Simon, 55, who has worked in the plant since 1988. It takes time to understand how all the pipes, valves, pumps and feedstock tanks work together and how to avoid explosions or other accidents. Technicians need basic math and science for such tasks as calculating the rate at which dyes and stabilizing agents need to be added for specially ordered batches of plastics.

[snip]

Manufacturers say the U.S. education system doesn't produce enough students strong in math, science and engineering. About 5% of bachelor's degrees awarded in the U.S. are in engineering, compared with an average of about 20% in Asia, according to the U.S. National Science Foundation. In the most recent comparison of math and science test scores of 15-year-old students by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, American students trailed far behind those from China, Japan, South Korea, Canada and Germany.


Help Wanted on Factory Floor

By JAMES R. HAGERTY
May 6, 2011
Wall Street Journal

and see:

blue collar
The Race between Education and Technology

wild goose chase

hilarious!

What Can I Do to Help My Child with Math When I Don't Know Any Myself?

Debbie Stier told me about Tahir Yaquoob's book What Can I Do to Help My CHild with Math When I Don't Know Any Myself? 

My copy came in the mail today, and the book is fantastic.

So wish I'd had it when C. was in 5th grade.

Or when C. was in Kindergarten for that matter.

Here's his website.

if grocery stores were schools

in today's Wall Street Journal:

Suppose that groceries were supplied in the same way as K-12 education. Residents of each county would pay taxes on their properties. Nearly half of those tax revenues would then be spent by government officials to build and operate supermarkets. Each family would be assigned to a particular supermarket according to its home address. And each family would get its weekly allotment of groceries—"for free"—from its neighborhood public supermarket.

No family would be permitted to get groceries from a public supermarket outside of its district. Fortunately, though, thanks to a Supreme Court decision, families would be free to shop at private supermarkets that charge directly for the groceries they offer. Private-supermarket families, however, would receive no reductions in their property taxes.

Of course, the quality of public supermarkets would play a major role in families' choices about where to live. Real-estate agents and chambers of commerce in prosperous neighborhoods would brag about the high quality of public supermarkets to which families in their cities and towns are assigned.

[snip]

Responding to these failures, thoughtful souls would call for "supermarket choice" fueled by vouchers or tax credits. Those calls would be vigorously opposed by public-supermarket administrators and workers.

Opponents of supermarket choice would accuse its proponents of demonizing supermarket workers (who, after all, have no control over their customers' poor eating habits at home). Advocates of choice would also be accused of trying to deny ordinary families the food needed for survival. Such choice, it would be alleged, would drain precious resources from public supermarkets whose poor performance testifies to their overwhelming need for more public funds.
If Supermarkets Were Like Public Schools
By DONALD J. BOUDREAUX
MAY 5, 2011

Having now spent a vast portion of my adult life dealing with public schools and the politics surrounding public schools, I believe every word of this!

Help Desk question: Can parents affect a curriculum change at a school?

I'm looking for success stories of parents affecting the math program taught in an elementary school.
I'd like to provide some encouragement to a commenter on my blog, who asked:

How does one get their school district to consider changing over to Singapore Math?

Most of the schools I have worked with have had teacher-led math curriculum initiatives. Does anyone have examples of parent-initiated changes to share?

Steve H on the Race

Speaking of the Race to Nowhere, Steve H writes:

At any level, there will likely be students who work harder than you do. This only matters because the top colleges pick those kids. A parent I know has most of her kids at Phillips Andover, with the goal being an Ivy League school. Does a high school think that competition will go away if they eliminate AP classes?

I like AP classes because it forces some sort of rigor on high schools, but I don't like the AP arms race. These are two separate issues. The arms race has to do with supply and demand at colleges. A senior I know is taking 5 AP classes even though she will be going to a college that is ranked only about 90th for liberal arts colleges. IB doesn't help. It's actually worse in terms of commitment. With AP, you can choose what you want to do.

Even if the demand goes down and the college SAT cutoffs are reduced, there will still be the same percent of students stressed out about getting into their first choice colleges. Is supply and demand the problem of K-12 education?

There are also the problems of curriculum and how well classes are taught. Students can be stressed by working very hard, but be quite happy when they get into the college they want. Students can also be stressed when they find out that all of their hard work didn't prepare them properly.

Of course, this doesn't say anything about the kids at the middle and lower end. I find it odd that when many see problems in high school, they think that the problem to fix is in high school. They translate everything into one problem to solve. Even in K-6, I see solutions based on remediation and not finding the source of the problem.

If the problem is overstressed students (not bad classes or curricula), then don't push them. Tell them not to take so many AP classes and do so many activities. Our son is not at Phillips Academy, but we don't ignore the game. It's my job to help him find the right balance. It's the school's job not to waste his time.

and just like that, you hate math

email from redkudu: 

Charles Benoit's YA novel You is written in second person. According to the book jacket, Benoit is a former high school teacher and Edgar-award winning author of adult mysteries. I see the "former high school teacher" all over this book, which is unrelentingly grim, but worthwhile. The main character is a high school boy who has this to say about math:

Math.

It's your favorite subject. Which surprises you.

[snip]

You like it because either you're right or you're wrong. Not like social studies and definitely not like English, where you always have to explain your answers and support your opinions. With math it's right or it's wrong and you're done with it. But even that's changing, with Ms. Ortman up there at the whiteboard saying how this year you'll be writing something she calls Mental Notes, which explain how you solved the problem and support your answer, saying that having the right answer isn't as important as explaining how you got it and bam, just like that, you hate math.

related: students must struggle

"owning" the content

From an edutopia post entitled Project-based learning made easy:

Academic Rigor -- Ask a Question

In addition to mapping from state content standards, we use inquiry as driver for almost all projects, units and lessons. A physics teacher who has a solid lab unit on bridges need only change the focus. Instead of a recipe lab that produces structurally strong bridges, she can ask the students the question, “What is the best structural design to produce the strongest bridge?” She can teach the content as she always has but now students will need to apply that knowledge to their bridge design. Not all of the bridge designs will be strong but many will. Most importantly, the students will own the content because they applied it.

I don't exactly understand what this passage means, possibly because I don't know what happens in a "recipe lab."

Do teachers teaching "recipe labs" not ask questions?

And if the teacher teaches the lesson the way she has always taught the lesson, i.e. as a recipe, how does explicitly asking the question "What is the best structural design to produce the strongest bridge?" transform the activity into a project instead of a recipe?

And what does own the content mean?

If own the content means remember the content, it's rare to remember content you've practiced just once.

If own the content means understand the content, the same principle applies: once you forget the details of what you did, you may still have a feeling of understanding, but if you had to explain the concept to another person you couldn't do it.

I know this from long personal experience.

The feeling of understanding is not the same thing as understanding.

Anonymous on Race to Nowhere and over-work

Anonymous writes:

This movie was shown in our district courtesy of our PTO. The re-cap in the local paper confirmed what a friend told me about the event: the discussion hosted afterward quickly ended up in favor of less AP classes. Parents wanted to ditch AP and Honors class in favor of more vocational and elective type classes. This would be more an annoyance than a serious concern if I didn't live in a district that has already eliminated gifted ed and doesn't support ability grouping until middle school. Eliminating AP classes is just one more way to take away opportunities for the motivated, the gifted, and/or the plain 'ole hard-working kid.

However, I do think the message may be partially right. Our kids are working too hard-- they're spinning their wheels for all the wrong reasons: poor curricula, lack of ability grouping, constructivist classrooms, lack of pedagogical content, and other issues often discussed on this website. It's really hard to waste time of a group project or power point presentation and then wonder why the SAT and ACT questions are so challenging, why you now need to hire a tutor, or why you're going to have to give up that dream of becoming an engineer because you never developed the requisite skills. Not having the proper foundation means you're going to have to work really, really hard to make things happen... and sometimes, it's just so difficult you just give up.

The peril to AP classes is a real worry to me. My district would clearly like to eliminate them (although I'm guessing they'd be interested in replacing AP with IB).

I wish I'd filmed the three college presentations we've attended. It's all AP all the time; colleges want to see AP courses on transcripts.

They make no bones about it.

Bin Laden

New York Times

You should go look at the New York Times front page right now -- amazing.

Google is not a curriculum

I mentioned the other day that our interim curriculum director recently told the community that: "We're getting away from textbooks."

In practice, "we're getting away from textbooks" means the curriculum is Google. Teachers Google lessons and download them from the internet.

I've been observing the Googleization of the curriculum for years now, but I was surprised to discover that even some textbooks have turned into Google.

peer review - con and pro

In the midst of a conversation about peer review (here and here), I happened onto a critique of peer review I though I'd post:

ABSTRACT
The US Supreme Court has recently been wrestling with the issues of the acceptability and reliability of scientific evidence. In its judgement in the case of Daubert versus Merrell Dow, the Court attempted to set guidelines for US judges to follow when listening to scientific experts. Whether or not findings had been published in a peer-reviewed journal provided one important criterion. But in a key caveat, the Court emphasized that peer review might sometimes be flawed and therefore this criterion was not unequivocal evidence of validity or otherwise. A recent analysis of peer review adds to this controversy by identifying an alarming lack of correlation between reviewers’ recommendations.

Something rotten at the core of science?
by David Horrobin

Peer review has its problems, some of which I became aware of several years ago, when Ed and I learned that autism researchers doing behavioral research were being defunded, apparently in favor of funding researchers studying the brain and biology.^* Peer review was involved.

Nevertheless, I do want K-12 curricula to be peer reviewed by specialists in the fields being taught.

Here's a case of a history textbook that was given no peer review:

Another historical malpractice foisted upon American school children came to light in Virginia last week . Once again it comes down to whether the standards of history as a discipline mean anything in the context of elementary and secondary history education.  Few of us would trust our children’s dental care to a historian.  Nor do we assume that anyone who has written a book can write a math textbook, regardless of their educational credentials.  But too often history seems different, subject to lower standards and inadequate review.

[snip]

The case at hand is straightforward.  Our Virginia: Past and Present  (Five Ponds Press, 2010) was approved by the Virginia Board of Education without a single historian involved in the review process. Fortunately an alert historian reviewing her daughter’s assignments noticed the glaring error: a statement that “thousands of Southern blacks fought in the Confederate ranks, including two black battalions under the command of Stonewall Jackson.”  It’s not true.  The reference to Jackson’s army is a total fabrication, and the broader reference to the Confederate army ignores the fact that slaves were forced into service and that there are no data available in any archive to document the statistic. 

So where did author Joy Masoff (not a historian) get her information?  From the Internet.  More specifically, from the web site of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans.  And even more specifically from a page that claims Frederick Douglass as the source for the statistic, but can’t even get his name spelled right.  The relevant quotation from Douglass is taken out of context, and there are no corroborating sources. 

Historical Malpractice and the Writing of Textbooks
By James R. Grossman Malpractice
October 25, 2010

The disciplines are disciplines: they are fields of study with established bodies of knowledge, rules of evidence, and modes of analysis.

A professional historian possesses knowledge and expertise the rest of us don't possess, and that is the knowledge we send our kids to school to acquire. At least, that is the knowledge I sent my children to school to acquire.

History textbooks should be vetted - or preferably written - by historians, math textbooks by mathematicians, and science textbooks by scientists.

That's not to say K-12 teachers should have no involvement; teachers are the people who can tell us whether a textbook is working with students. If a K-12 teacher writes a textbook that's vetted by disciplinary specialists - then great!

I think parents should have a vote on their children's textbooks and curricular materials, too, though in my dream world we wouldn't need to exercise it.



Rethinking Peer Review
The Editors of The New Atlantis, "Rethinking Peer Review," The New Atlantis, Number 13, Summer 2006, pp. 106-110.

^* I no longer remember all the details, and my understanding of what was going on may have been wrong. However, I do recall accurately that behavioral researchers were losing funding at the time. I don't know whether that is true today.

Bonnie on peer review and textbooks in computer science

Bonnie writes:

Peer review in computer science is very weird, because unlike other fields, we mainly publish in conferences rather than journals. It is a huge issue at tenure time because tenure committees assume that conference publications are meaningless - and they are in most fields - but not in computer science. Most of our conferences have acceptance rates of around 25%, and the top conferences are below 10%. That is where the peer review is happening in our field.

But that is research peer review, and I thought we were talking about textbooks. In CS, there are textbooks for certain "standard" courses - intro to programming, databases, operating systems, theory of computation, and a few others. The only real churn that I see is in the intro to programming area, because every time a new programming language hits the scene, you get 10 new books doing CS 1 and 2 in that langauge. In databases and operating systems, the same 3 or 4 authors have dominated for 20 years, issuing edition after edition of their book. So in reality, professors adopt the textbook, which isn't purchased or read by most of the class anyway, and then add lots of their own material. For courses that have no reasonable textbook - for example, everyone is adding courses on Android programming right now - we simply have the students buy a book aimed at professional developers, or cobble together notes on our own.

And here is Allison on peer review in mathematics.