White House report on 'big data'

I have zero time to read this ... maybe not even to skim.

Passing it along.

Big Data: Seizing Opportunities, Preserving Values

2-bit lit crit and quality control

Terrence Moore's The Story-Killers was a revelation to me in any number of ways, one being the idea that English teachers should not spend their time teaching what Moore calls two-bit lit crit. (I'm sure Carol Jago has something intelligent to say on the subject -- will report once I finally get to her book.)

In the meantime, just a few minutes ago I came across the video below, which appears on the flipped learning network site's "Examples of Videos page." The lesson pretty much exemplifies two-bit lit crit, I think.

But the two-bit lit crit-ness is the least of it, which is why I'm posting.

Watch the first 30 seconds or so. See what you think.

The oddness of this flipped-classroom offering brings up an issue I've been wondering about: where is the quality control?

Here in New York, administrators are now required to make at least two visits to each teacher's classroom per school year (my district is doing four) -- but if teachers are recording their lessons, who's watching the videos?

Do the 'board members' and 'staff' of the flipped learning network watch lesson videos before posting them to their site?



Plot Structure at the IMA (7:08, Cockrum)

Massachusetts School Law of 1789

From Terrence Moore's The Story-Killers:

Whereas the Constitution of this Commonwealth hath declared it to be the duty of the General Court, to provide for the education of youth: and whereas a general dissemination of knowledge and virtue is necessary to the prosperity of every State, and the very existence of a Commonwealth:

     Section 1. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives, in General Court assembled . . . That every town or district within this Commonwealth . . . shall be provided with a School-Master or School-Masters, of good morals, to teach children to read and write, and to instruct them in the English language, as well as in arithmetic, orthography, and decent behavior . . . And every town or district containing two hundred families, or householders, shall be provided with a grammar School-Master, of good morals, well instructed in the Latin, Greek, and English languages . . .

     Section 4. Be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid, That it shall be and it is hereby made the duty of the President, Professors and Tutors of the University at Cambridge [Harvard], Preceptors and Teachers of Academies, and all other instructors of youth, to take diligent care, and to exert their best endeavors, to impress on the minds of children and youth, committed to their career and instruction, the principles of piety, justice, and a sacred regard to truth, love to their country, humanity, and universal benevolence, sobriety, industry and frugality, chastity, moderation and temperance, and those other virtues which are the ornament of human society, and the basis upon which the Republican Constitution is structured. And it shall be the duty of such instructors, to endeavor to lead those under their care (as their ages and capacities will admit) into a particular understanding of the tendency of the before mentioned virtues, to preserve and perfect a Republican Constitution, and to secure the blessings of liberty, as well as to promote their future happiness; and the tendency of the opposite vices to slavery and ruin.

Virtues are the ornament of human society and the basis upon which the Republican Constitution is structured.

Reading comprehension and knowledge and something else

I was finally reading Michael Goldstein's terrific blog when I came across this post:

E.D. Hirsch

If you teach English, or you're a school leader — and I'm particularly looking at you, friends in No Excuses charter schools, with our collective student gains in math that are 4x higher than those in English — I think a bare minimum threshold is that you can:

a. Explain E.D. Hirsch's arguments

b. Describe the degree to which your class/school adheres to or rejects his view

c. Justify why

I got turned onto re-reading Hirsch through Robert Pondiscio, who until recently worked for Hirsch's Core Knowledge Foundation as a blogger.

To the best of my knowledge, students at Morningside Academy make the same gains in reading they do in math: two years' progress in one year's time. That is the guarantee Morningside makes to parents. Their child will make two years' progress in one year's time or tuition is refunded.

More specifically, Morningside guarantees that each child will make two years' progress in one year's time in the child's most difficult subject. Since many of students there have diagnoses of dyslexia, presumably the worst subject is reading, often as not. Morningside's students are middle and upper-middle class, but Kent Johnson and his group have worked with disadvantaged populations, too. As far as I know, two-years-in-one applies to low-income students, too.

For (remedial) reading comprehension, Morningside uses Robert Dixon's Reading Success. Dixon's approach to teaching "main idea" is sui generis: his program teaches students to identify anaphora first. Dixon's definition of anaphora: "a pronoun or other words used to refer to some other word or name." (And here's a simple example of anaphora)

Morningside students become fluent at identifying anaphora and their referents in the text. As I recall, they then identify the main idea by counting the anaphora. The main idea has the most. (Still haven't read my Dixon handout...if I'm wrong about that, I'll correct.)

Once students have completed Dixon's curriculum, they continue to improve their reading within the subject areas.

We've talked about this before, so this is a repeat: the idea that you would teach reading comprehension by focusing very specifically on anaphora was a revelation to me. I've been teaching anaphora to my students ever since.

My experience at Morningside makes me skeptical of the claim that lack of background knowledge is the only meaningful explanation for the decline in reading comprehension in the U.S., or for the failure of the good charter schools to make much headway improving reading comprehension.

I was mulling this over, trying to think how one might separate background knowledge from some kind of 'textual knowledge' students also lack, when I remembered the fact that my students can have difficulty understanding fables.

One of my best students -- a bright, capable young woman -- did not understand this fable, which she had read out loud to the class:

A dispute arose between the North Wind and the Sun, each claiming that he was stronger than the other. At last they agreed to try their powers upon a traveller, to see which could soonest strip him of his cloak.

The North Wind had the first try; and, gathering up all his force for the attack, he came whirling furiously down upon the man, and caught up his cloak as though he would wrest it from him by one single effort: but the harder he blew, the more closely the man wrapped it round himself.

Then came the turn of the Sun. At first he beamed gently upon the traveller, who soon unclasped his cloak and walked on with it hanging loosely about his shoulders: then he shone forth in his full strength, and the man, before he had gone many steps, was glad to throw his cloak right off and complete his journey more lightly clad.

Moral: Persuasion is better than force.

When one of my students has trouble understanding a fable, the problem isn't background knowledge.

I'm not sure what the problem is, but the fact that Morningside Academy achieves such amazing results using a reading comprehension curriculum that teaches anaphora leads me to believe that, at a minimum, cohesion devices should be directly and explicitly taught in English class.

On that subject, here's Sally Hampton: The Importance of Writing Structures, Coherence, and Cohesion to Writing and Reading.

Liberals and Pearson...(thinking out loud)

After my musings about "real conservatives" versus "real liberals" and their respective (and hypothesized) reactions to Pearson, Hainish's comment  cracked me up:

Liberals hate Pearson. Teachers hate Pearson. Anything that ties Pearson with CC is going to result in those groups of people hating CC.

True!

So, quick follow-up: I have no business talking about "true conservatives" and "true liberals"!

But since I did....

The feeling that political conservatives 'have to leave public schools' came over me so forcefully, as I read Moore's chapter on The American Experience, that I sallied forth.

What I was trying to say but not saying (because I was beating around the bush) was that I think Pearson's American Experience textbook would be offensive to conservatives in an immediate and visceral way that it would not be to liberals -- except for liberals who are much better educated than most Americans, including me.

That is: an American like E.D. Hirsch. E.D. Hirsch, a political liberal, would find The American Experience appalling.

I'm not saying conservatives are better educated than liberals!

I'm saying that the values informing The American Experience (assuming Moore's analysis is accurate, which I do) are pretty much anathema to conservatives but not to liberals.

(A lot of liberals I know would find the values annoying. But annoying is not anathema.)

Liberals are going to dislike the content (Hainish is right on that one!), but conservatives are going to dislike the content and the values -- and at some point people reach a tipping point.

That said, the fact that I had such an intense, visceral reaction reading Moore on Pearson tells you more about the quality of Moore's book than it does about conservatives and liberals. The book is a tour de force.


Disciplinary specalists redux

Public education would be a lot less fraught if disciplinary standards were written by disciplinary specialists.

Here's an example.

Terrence Moore, a political conservative, has a Ph.D. in history from the University of Edinburgh.

My husband, a liberal, is a historian at NYU.

Moore's explanation of why it's wrong to base an entire discussion of the Declaration of Independence on the observation that when Thomas Jefferson wrote "all men are created equal" he really meant "all white men are created equal" was pretty much a revelation to me. It was a revelation to me because I know next to nothing about the debates and politics that surrounded the founding of our country.

The next morning I mentioned Moore's chapter to Ed, who proceeded to give me the same reasons why it's wrong to base an entire discussion of the Declaration of Independence on the observation that when Thomas Jefferson wrote "all men are created equal" he really meant "all white men are created equal."

History is a discipline. You can be conservative, you can be liberal, doesn't matter. If you're a historian, you're against anachronism and presentism. You also possess -- and remember -- knowledge about the specific circumstances surrounding the finding of our country.

I do realize that politics can affect scholarship. (And I can't tell whether literary studies are or are not a proper discipline at all these days).

Nevertheless, not only do I personally want my disciplinary standards written by disciplinary specialists, I think that if disciplinary specialists wrote disciplinary standards, we'd have less education wrangling than we do now.

Kai Musing on Common Core

Comment left by Kai Musing (I added the passage from CC):

I haven't read the Moore book, but as a teacher in a major metropolitan school district I have had to read the common core.

I also used to teach at a Core Knowledge (E.D. Hirsch) charter. I think the problem is more that educationalists and progressives see what they want in the common core.

Hirsch has actually quoted from the common core and expressed tentative support for it:

Why I'm for the Common Core

He quotes from this part specifically in the common core as well (last paragraph on the page):

English Language Arts Standards » Anchor Standards » College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Reading

To build a foundation for college and career readiness, students must read widely and deeply from among a broad range of high-quality, increasingly challenging literary and informational texts. Through extensive reading of stories, dramas, poems, and myths from diverse cultures and different time periods, students gain literary and cultural knowledge as well as familiarity with various text structures and elements. By reading texts in history/social studies, science, and other disciplines, students build a foundation of knowledge in these fields that will also give them the background to be better readers in all content areas. Students can only gain this foundation when the curriculum is intentionally and coherently structured to develop rich content knowledge within and across grades. Students also acquire the habits of reading independently and closely, which are essential to their future success.

The problem is, in my view, that progressive continue to co-opt whatever standards there are into reinforcing useless progressive pedagogy.

One more for the road:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.9
Demonstrate knowledge of eighteenth-, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century foundational works of American literature, including how two or more texts from the same period treat similar themes or topics.

(Unfortunately, it shows up in the 11-12th grade band. In fourth grade, where I teach, it asks students to:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.4.4
Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including those that allude to significant characters found in mythology (e.g., Herculean).

Hirsch makes the point that the people who made the standards could not dictate content knowledge to be taught, because no one would have adopted the standards.

Take that as you will.

Common Core going well in froggiemama's district

froggiemama writes:

I really like the Common Core standards. My district has dramatically improved instruction since they went to it 2 years ago. They have eliminated many (not enough, IMHO) of the time wasting arts and crafts projects. My youngest did not have to spend first grade math drawing pictures of math facts like 2+3. My oldest, in 8th grade, is now being held to a writing standard far above what my current college students are capable of. I am really hoping that I will see improvements in my college students skills as we move to a generation who has actually been taught to use evidence from the text when writing about it. I am hoping I might finally get students in my CS1 course who actually understand placevalue and have some number sense. We will see.

Terrence Moore on the twenty-first century global economy

To their credit, the authors of the Common Core, while they are not completely clear on their aims of education, certainly repeat the same phrases concerning their ends again and again. The principal phrase they use is "career and college readiness." On the first page of the introduction to the English Standards, they use that phrase or some variant at least six times in what cannot be more than seven hundred words. It appears throughout the rest of the document, too. Some people might say that the repetition of the phrase produces clarity. Others might say it makes the document sound like a broken record, or that the phrase is like a bad cough that won't go away. Either way, these are their end of education: career and college readiness.

The other phrase that is only slightly less important is "twenty-first century globally  competitive society." Anyone who pays attention to what is said about education today has heard this phrase countless times. In fact, it seems to be the only thing that most of the politicians and bureaucrats can say when addressing education. "We have to prepare our young men and women for a twenty-first-century global economy," say all the talking heads. The twenty-first-century global economy, you see, is a very scary thing. It is much carrier than the twentieth-century global economy that we grew up in (though there is no Soviet Union and no Cold War). So we need to do whatever it takes!

[snip]

Slyly but unmistakably, the phrase "twenty-first-century global society," whatever others may mean by it, is being used by the authors of the Common Core to bring about radical, progressive ends of education, ends that would not be supported by the majority of parents if they knew what was really going on in the schools. Thus the insufficient and radical ends of education pursued by the Common Core Standards will make the nation's public schools both less and more than they should be: inferior schools academically, and officious, overreaching schools politically and socially. The remedy to these shortsighted and radical ends is a traditional, classical, liberal education.

The Story-Killers by Terrence Moore

Thoughtworld

I had just dipped back into Hirsch's The Schools We Need: And Why We Don't Have Them when Lisa J. posted a link to a lecture by Terrence Moore, whose book The Story-Killers: A Common-Sense Case Against the Common Core turns out to be a barn burner: a barn burner and a tour de force, take your pick.

Reading Moore, I have the recurring perception that "real" conservatives, conservatives of the heart, simply have to leave the public schools because the gap between Pearson and a "conservative of the heart" can't be bridged. Not on the ELA side. (I say "Pearson" because the most appalling section of Moore's book is  Chapter 7, a lengthy analysis of Pearson's Common Core literature textbook for high school juniors.)

My sense of "liberals of the heart," at least where Pearson is concerned, is much less clear. Any liberal who is well-educated in history or literature would be appalled by The American Experience Common Core Edition, but how many Americans are well-educated in history and literature these days? Certainly not me. If you don't know anything about the Declaration of Independence, you also don't know why it's so wrong to base an entire discussion of the Declaration of Independence on the breezy assertion that when Jefferson wrote "all men are created equal," he really meant all white men are created equal. (I didn't know.)

So I'm guessing that, for many politically liberal parents, textbooks like Pearson's will seem not-completely-horrible, superficially at least.

Then again, Moore's sobriquet for the powers behind Common Core is "the arch testers." He is no slouch in the anti-testing department, which I had heretofore assumed was the province of parents voting for Democrats. And here in New York, of course, the parents who actually are "opting out" are largely left of center (I assume), if only because the population is largely left of center. The gap between liberal and conservative parents looks pretty small to me.

But who knows? I can't get a clear read on the politics of Common Core. But, more importantly, I can't get a read on what is happening inside the institution of public education. All I can come up with is that someone, at some level of decision making, has messed up very badly. Very badly.

Which brings me to the reason I opened up my Blogger window in the first place, which was to post a quote from sociologist Diane Vaughn in the Times video on the Challenger explosion:

"We can never resolve the problem of complexity, but you have to be sensitive to your organization and how it works. While a lot of us work in complex organizations, we don't really realize the way the organizations that we inhabit completely inhabit us."

Diane Vaunghn (The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA)
Major Malfunction: Revisiting Challenger | New York Times

"The way the organizations we inhabit completely inhabit us": Exactly!

She could be speaking of Hirsch's thoughtworld:

Why do educators persist in advocating the very artifact, anti-rote-learning, antiverbal practices that have led to poor results--persist in urging them, indeed, even more intensively than before?

The basic answer is this: Within the educational community, there is currently no thinkable alternative. Part of essential American educational doctrine has consisted of the disparagement of so-called "traditional" education. The long dominance of antitraditional rhetoric in our teacher-training institutions has ensured that competing, nonprogressive principles are not readily available within their walls. No professor at an American education school is going to advocate pro-rote-learning, profact, or proverbal pedagogy. Since there is only one true belief, expressed in one constantly repeated catechism, the heretical suggestion that the creed itself might be faulty cannot be uttered. To question progressive doctrine would be to put in doubt the identity of the education profession itself. Its foundational premise is that progressive principles are right. Being right, they cannot possibly be the cause of educational ineffectiveness.

[snip]

In sum, since progressive doctrine cannot be at fault, the only proper cure for our ailing schools is homeopathic "reform," that is, even stronger doses of progressive principles administered even more intensely. E.D. Hirsch 

There it is. There is the explanation for why the Common Core reading standards, in spite of their references to the importance of knowledge, are turning English into social studies.

Review of The Challenger Launch Decision by Samudra Vijay

Allison and Palisadesk on high-SES versus low-SES kids and schools

ALLISON:

Here in the Twin Cities, we are experiencing multiple and opposing forces at the same time.

Hainish, I see some low-SES kids in private schools here that are worse off than if they were in high performing low SES schools. The rest of the school is barreling along doing discovery math, and these kids have no chance to learn. High SES kids are eventually tutored privately, but low SES kids aren't. It is more noticeable in reading, where these kids get no phonics instruction, but the high SES kids eventually get IEPs and massive services to support terrible reading comprehension.

But, they are better off than being in Minneapolis public schools, where they would get no phonics and TERC investigations.

Plenty of low SES charters here are a total disaster. they may not be quite "guide on the side" but the teachers largely have no idea content matters. So there are no drills in math, no sense of what must be known year to year. No urgency.

Another big factor I see here is the "school expects home to teach math facts, but forgets to tell home that." A typical example for me is parents are shocked to find out their 4th grader is not competent at multiplication, and teacher is recommending summer school. They come to me to ask what is going wrong, and how do they help their child. Among other things, I suggest they ask teacher "how many minutes a day is spent on math facts in class?" They do, and receive the response "none".

Meanwhile, I see other schools where the parents are involved but to negative effect. In another typical example, the parents provide a steady steam of complaints if their child is not getting an A. This encourages group work and discovery learning, rather than tests that can be graded.

PALISADESK:

HAINISH: "Palisadek, if you are correct, then low-SES students in high-SES-area schools should be worse off than those in low-SES schools."

I think this may well be true, for several reasons. As Allison explained, the low-SES kids don't have the outside tutoring/afterschooling etc. that higher-income families routinely provide, and they tend (this is a generalization) to respond poorly to unstructured learning situations, which much "group work" and "exploratory learning" seems to be. They haven't got the resources at home or school to do artsy projects, may not have access to a computer or the Internet (or even a telephone!) at home, may have other responsibilities after school, not be able to afford field trips and school clubs/sports etc.

A previous school I worked at was in a neighborhood separated by a large city park from a very wealthy area of manicured million-dollar homes. The school for that neighborhood served these very affluent families, who comprised most of the enrollment, but on the edge of the neighborhood, bordering a freeway, there was a smallish public housing project. The children there also attended this school. So you had the very poor and the extremely rich. The school got allocated some extra special education staff for the "project" kids, but both socially and academically those children were isolated and tended to be academically unsuccessful. A top teacher from my school transferred there a few years ago and tells me that the great divide is still present, and the school does not have the kind of supports low-SES kids need.

For example, at my school the library has been kept open after school for parents and children to come in and use the computers for research, skill practice, homework and so on. Even though math facts are taught, many children need much more practice than can be given in class; we recommend some online sites for practice and pay for some sites where children can practice reading skills online (about 40% of our students have internet at home). Teachers also provide tutoring and support over the lunch hour and run academic clubs like math clubs and spelling clubs to reinforce basics in an engaging way.

Upper-income schools don't, in my experience, provide this kind of thing. Their students are leaving after school for Little League, swimming, horseback riding and gymnastics. Our students are leaving to care for younger siblings or help mom and dad at the bakery.

Adding to the difficulty is the fact that the lower-SES parents feel uncomfortable in a milieu of affluence (less so if it is a mix of working poor and working class), so parents aren't as involved in the school as they would be in one that was more reflective of their own social station.

One benefit, we do get away with a lot of direct teaching (phonics included) even though it is less than optimal. I compared my school's test results with those of one near my home, which has a median family income of 250K (I live on the poor side of the highway, LOL). My school roundly trounced this school, despite being 60% ESL and 95% nonwhite. Test results are only one indicator, but it does show that our kids are learning and we hope they will have a chance to make their way in the world.

Palisadesk says discovery learning has disappeared from low-SES schools

palisadesk writes:

I haven't seen much if any "discovery learning" emphasis outside of Kindergarten for 15 years or so, and the primary approach is definitely teacher-centric. Not so much "lecture" -- attention spans of young children are limited, so an interactive direct teaching model is more effective -- but definitely not "guide on the side." I've been in 4 low-SES schools in that time, one of them high-performing, but have seen similar instructional emphases in all of them. The quality of the instruction certainly varies (my current colleagues are almost all very effective but in other schools there was a wider spread of teaching ability).

However, I've never seen the attitude that seems to prevail in upper-SES schools, even in my district, where responsibility for kids' learning the basics is offloaded to the home. It was hammered into me from the get-go that it was MY responsibility to teach kids the things they needed to learn, not the parents' responsibility (which in many cases they did not have the resources to do anyway). It helps that the families in general support a more instructivist stance and expect us to be hammering the foundation skills. We allocate 20 minutes daily across the grades to structured practice of math skills. Counting, math facts, metric conversions, fractions, formulae -- depending on the grade. Our math results are better than those in some of the middle-class schools, which I find interesting. We are doing something right.

Even so it is an uphill struggle because many kids need far more instructional time than we can provide, and issues like absenteeism, frequent moves, family crises and hunger do affect kids' learning no matter how well we can teach them. But I haven't seen the following in any of my schools for over a decade:

1) movies shown during instructional time

2) "art" projects in reading or math.No dioramas, foldables, posters etc.

3) "discovery" learning."Guided discovery" is a bit different -- in a science activity, students might be led through a series of steps to "discover" something (really, to observe it) and detail their observations, but they aren't turned loose with stuff and expected to "discover" something.

4)"group" work with the exception of leveled groups for reading and math; when not directly taught by the teacher the groups will have individualized seatwork or follow-up assignments.

I think it may be a very different ethos in the low-SES schools. Three of my four were schools (large, with around 600-700 kids) with NO middle-income families among them. The curriculum is, supposedly, the same, but how it is delivered is very, very different.

It's a matter of where the locus of responsibility is believed to be. I and many of my colleagues believe the kids' academic progress is OUR responsibility. Perhaps in better-off neighborhoods this "locus of responsibility" is not the same. Certainly many parents here (and on some of my listservs) have shared stories that suggest it is not.

Down the rabbit hole

The opt-out movement may become a force to be reckoned with, if and when it organizes effectively. What has to happen, it seems to me, is that the movement must also be FOR something. I suggest a straight trade: two weeks of project-based learning for every day of testing AND test-prep! In other words, don’t just stay home; fight for positive changes.

The Common Core Brouhaha by JOHN MERROW on 24. APR, 2014 in 2014 BLOGS

I was sitting here mulling what a terrible fate this would be when it came to me: "two weeks of project-based learning for every day of testing AND test-prep" probably isn't a bad  description of what's happening in my district now.

That along with insane homework loads in the run-up to the tests. Parents here were complaining a couple of months ago about having to drive their kids through hours of HW every night because the middle-school teachers were worried about their evaluations.

I've seen the same thing in a neighboring district, where middle-school kids seem to spend their time either doing group projects and group discussions OR test-prep.

At least some of the time, teachers who've been trained only in constructivism equate direct instruction with cramming.

Common Core is doomed: dreaming sophomore edition

Just got off the phone with Chris, who is in Venice with his best friend D. They are hunkered inside a youth hostel tent or some such with a thunderstorm raging outside. The thunderclaps were loud even across FaceTime.

Chris says D. dreamed last night that he was taking a Common Core test. The test had math and English, and D. couldn't understand any of it -- nothing at all. The teacher giving the exam told him he had to feel the exam, "like carbon dioxide."

Here's my take: when you've got sophomores in college having nightmares about Common Core, you're in trouble.

Plus which, Hillary Clinton has never allowed the words "Common Core" to pass her lips (as far as I can tell), which tells me that if H.C. is elected Common Core is going away.

Jeb Bush is another story, of course.

Speaking of J.B., he was the subject of a glowing profile in the New York Times last week -- glowing. (The title was "Jeb Bush Gives His Party Something to Think About," but stripped of the paragraphs contrasting Bush favorably with the Republican Party, the article was still glowing.)

Back to Chris and his friend hunkered down in their youth hostel tent. D. is a proponent of the view that charter schools are bad because they take resources away from public schools. He and Chris had a one-hour argument about charter schools the other night.

I told Chris, this morning, to tell D. that if all public schools were charter schools, we wouldn't have Common Core.

D., who is not enjoying the experience of living through a violent thunderstorm INSIDE A TENT, replied that he's in a death trap and in no mood to argue about charter schools.

Chris said 'I believe in charter schools, so I'm not going to get struck by lightening.'

Famous last words

"If we end up starting the higher standards process all over again," he recommends, "let's agree that teachers must be well-represented at the table."

John Thompson: Can the Gates Foundation Learn?

So next go-round it'll be Bill Gates, Chester Finn, the White House, the N.E.A., the A.F.T., . . . . and the membership of the N.E.A. and the A.F.T.

Good deal!

Here's a thought.

If we're going to be small-d democratic and all, next time let's have parents at the table.

Parents, taxpayers, and disciplinary specialists.

Lots of disciplinary specialists.

Bloom

I need a good critique of Bloom's Taxonomy -- and, oddly, I'm not finding one. Neither Daniel Willingham nor E.D. Hirsch so much as mentions Bloom.

I find people like Tom Loveless pointing out that knowledge is the essential prerequisite of "deeper learning," but I'm pretty sure Loveless is fighting the last war.

In the new war, nobody's denying that students must acquire knowledge.

Instead, acquisition of knowledge is the taken-for-granted. Has to happen, but it's nothing to get excited about. 

In my district, administrators are now using Bloom's Taxonomy to justify flipped classrooms. Because "Knowledge" and "Understanding" are the lowest intellectual skills, they can be acquired at home (or on the bus) via 7-minute lectures on YouTube. Precious class time is thus preserved for  Application, Analysis, and Evaluation.

For anyone who thinks knowledge and understanding are the highest skills, not the lowest, Salman Khan's rationale for the flipped classroom is the problem now.

More fun with passive voice, part 2

Just discovered Pullum's paper buried in my Great Unread:

Abstract Writing advisers have been condemning the English passive since the early 20th century. I provide an informal but comprehensive syntactic description of passive clauses in English, and then exhibit numerous published examples of incompetent criticism in which critics reveal that they cannot tell passives from actives. Some seem to confuse the grammatical concept with a rhetorical one involving inadequate attribution of agency or responsibility, but not all examples are thus explained. The specific stylistic charges leveled against the passive are entirely baseless. The evidence demonstrates an extraordinary level of grammatical ignorance among educated English language critics.

Fear and Loathing of the English Passive | Geoffrey K. Pullum

More fun with passive voice

Katie and I have just finished 5 chapters of exercises for Ed's European history textbook!

FIVE!

A great weight has lifted from our shoulders, soon to be replaced by Great Weight Number 2: finish another 5 chapters before Katie leaves in July.

I've just this moment revised the section on passive voice after our editor cut the line saying all good writers use it. We'll get pushback on that, she says.

(We handled the possibility of pushback by dropping the claim about good writers & doubling down on the assertion that passive voice is essential to cohesion.)

While I was Googling p.v., I found this:

All good writers use the passive voice. Orwell actually uses it while criticizing it: In bad prose, "the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active," he writes. He could have recast that sentence, but his focus was on the (alleged) stylistic sin; that was the logical subject, even if that required a passive verb.

The authors of usage guides shamelessly doctor the evidence on passive by offering examples that range from unlikely to fantastic: Strunk and White's is, "My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me." But there's more to vividness than active verbs. "Someone killed my parakeet" has an active verb. "My parakeet was hacked to bits with a machete" doesn't.

What we get wrong about passive voice by Jan Freeman

And, my favorites (which I'm sure I've posted before):

• 50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice
• Passive aggression

Defense of the Sage on the Stage

The joy of lecturing--With a critique of the romantic tradition of education writing (Appendix to How to Teach Mathematics by S.G. Krantz, 2nd edition, Amer. Math. Soc. 1999, pp. 261-271) (Appendix to How to Teach Mathematics by S.G. Krantz, 2nd edition, Amer. Math. Soc. 1999, pp. 261-271) by H. Wu.

Excerpt:

"It appears to me that this rejection of the sage-on-the-stage method of instruction is unjustified. There are situations where lectures are very effective, and in fact there are even circumstances which make this method of instruction mandatory..."

Hainish suggests a 'negg' (and how to write a 4 that doesn't look like a 9)

After I mentioned how impossible I'm finding the project of creating a thesis statement 'algorithm,' Hainish suggested using my mistake as an example of how not to create a thesis statement.

That is essentially the solution Ed came up with today.

Which brings me to something I never got around to mentioning after my time at Morningside Academy's Summer School Institute.

Every day of the two weeks I spent at Morningside brought new revelations, but the two that completely upended my perception of reality were Morningside's focus on anaphora as the critical component of reading comprehension and Kent's explanation of what to do when a student writes 4s that look like 9s and 9s that look like 4s.

So, pop quiz: if you had a student writing 4s that look like 9s and 9s that look like 4s, what would you do?

What I would do -- what I would have done before attending the Institute -- would be to have my student practice writing 4s and 9s.

But no!

That's that wrong answer.

The right answer is to have your student practice seeing 9s and 4s.

More specifically, have the kids practice telling 4s and 9s apart. Give them a worksheet filled with 4s and 9s, and have them "discriminate" 4s and 9s until they can do so fluently.

After that, the kids can write 4s and 9s.

I was gobsmacked.

So Kent explained.

All performance, he said, requires internal inspection. You don't just perform a skill, you watch yourself performing a skill. You inspect your performance as you perform.

And the inspector has to be trained.

The reason students write 4s that look like 9s and 9s that look like 4s isn't that they can't physically write 4s and 9s  They can. They can write other numbers; they can write letters. A child who can write other numbers and letters can write 4s and 9s.

The reason students write 4s that look like 9s and 9s that look like 4s is that they aren't seeing the difference. They aren't discriminating.

Kent said you could make a case all learning is discrimination.

More on this later, but for now: at Morningside, people use Tiemann and Markle's work on curriculum design. To teach a concept, they teach "EGGS" and "NEGGS."

EGGS are examples (thesis statements, in this case), NEGGS are non-examples (non-thesis statements).

More importantly, they give students close-in non-examples.

Make It Stick says pretty much the same thing.

More in a bit.

David Daniel & Daniel Willingham on electronic textbooks

I missed this when it came out: Electronic Textbooks: Why the Rush?

Terrific.

Needless to say, my district, which intends to make technology "as ubiquitous in the classroom as paper and pencil" (paper and pencil are not technology, apparently) is on the fast track to all things electronic.