Kathy

I am really hyper-organized, but everyone has their breaking point which sends them over the edge. I think mine has been Megan in 4th grade. My Kindergartener seems to remember everything, though, sometimes even when there is no note sent home.

I just read this!

Right — there's that now-I'm-over-my-limit moment.....

Unfortunately, I don't usually recognize mine.

I'm like those cartoon characters who run off the cliff and don't notice it. They're just standing there in mid-air, still running.

-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Jan 2006

Kathy

My husband and I had a talk about this yesterday--was I being too "hard" on Megan re schoolwork and Math in particular. But I think it's my job to organize and help her. I'll be the first to stand up and cheer when she succeeds and the first to step in when she's in trouble.

No, kidding!

I'm constantly getting the you're-too-hard-on-him message (although that message has become radically attenuated now that Ed, too, is teaching math).

The principal warned me not to put too much pressure on Christopher.

-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Jan 2006

Carolyn

You know, this reminds me of the press hoopla when 12 year old Drew Barrymore was found to be a cocaine addict. Her mother had basically given up managing her life. When Newsweek or whatever interviewed Drew's mother, she said, "Drew was having a tough time, and I felt she needed her space."

I love it!

That's what my friend J. was saying about the girl's mom.

J. said, 'If she's that independent she needs to move out of the house and get a job.'

-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Jan 2006

Karen

I think part of our failure to act forcefully at the time was that we had a younger daughter and we were reluctant to rock the boat. Our daughter is incredibly sensitive and as I recall, I think we also were afraid of a backlash.

Parents feel this way, universally.

But I wonder how true it is?

Here in Irvington, rocking the boat gets results. Plus there's zero backlash against kids; at least, I've never seen such a thing. We probably have some of the most aggressive, in-your-face parents on the planet, and I've NEVER seen a child take heat for his parents; I've never heard it so much as suggested that a child would take heat because his parents are obnoxious.

You know, ktm guest's Comment is evidence of that. He or she is quite angry with me, and furiously angry with the administration, but there's not one word that suggests he or she is angry with the children.

That is absolutely standard.

There can be all sorts of conflict going on, and there is all sorts of conflict going on.

Everyone keeps the kids out of it. (I've mentioned that we routinely tell Christopher 'You have a great principal and your teachers are smart and nice.' I suspect that's typical of parents, too. Parents may be railing at the administration, but they keep their kids out of it.)

I'm not going to contact other parents about the math course for a couple of reasons.

First, they know they've got big problems with the course. Last year's parents went ballistic; Ed and I have been clear about the problems this year. The math department has obviously been working on the course; changes were made over the summer; etc.

As a result of our Team meeting, the teacher is now making further changes. My sense is that she's doing more formative assessment; I wouldn't be surprised to find that she and perhaps the department are actively thinking about how to incorporate formative assessment into what has been a sink or swim proposition.

The pop quiz yesterday was a good development. This is the pop quiz she gave on integers. ALL OF THE KIDS DID WELL! That reminds me; I have to send her an email to say thanks & congratulations.

She's done a couple of other things like that.

Ed has written a fairly long memo to the principal, which I'll post here after he revises it and we give it to Scott; we'll be talking to him more as we go along.

When we collect our thoughts, I think we'll suggest some kind of informal committee or gathering — someething along those lines —

We're still thinking it through.

I'm getting long-winded.

Basically, Ed feels that our best role now is as informal.....informal something-or-others. He's an administrator and a long-time professor; I'm a writer who's delved into the literature; plus we're seeing the school from the parents' side.

We're a resource, and I think the principal sees us as a resource.

-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Jan 2006

I keep reading about middle school kids and responsibility and consequences. Sure, by the time a kid is 18 he's going to need to be responsible for himself. And middle school probably is a time when kids can start to take some of the responsibility for themselves.

But, and it's a big but, you can't pass responsibility onto a kid who has not been taught how to organize their school life. Middle school actually seems like a great time for a "study skills" class (a real one), to teach kids how to start taking more responsibility for the material they're learning. I think middle school is when you start the transition, and (obviously) the transition should be complete by the time a kid goes to college.

Every kid is different, and some will be taking this responsibility for themselves automatically. I advocated for myself as early as 6th grade - I was a year ahead in math, but they weren't set up to deal with that. They gave me a 6th grade "supplemental" textbook, covering all the stuff I already knew. After a couple of days, I showed the teacher that I could do all of the problems on the "end of book" test, and they finally found another class for me where I could actually learn some more math (I was competitive and wanted to get further ahead). Obviously, some kids would be thrilled to coast through a year without doing any math. If I had been that sort of kid, my parents would not have noticed, and I would have lost a year of math instruction. That's why you can't pass the responsibility entirely to the kid. They're still a kid.

-- StephanieO - 27 Jan 2006

Catherine, after those experiences I'm not surprised you stopped. In fact, I'm amazed you keep going at all let alone writing a best-seller! I know that vision therapy for learning disorders is very controversial. Also that doing anything involving your eyes is extraordinarily stressful.

(My mother, who lived to be 91, lost a year of college due to an eye operation and the therapy to strengthen her eye muscles afterwards. She often spoke of how she'd dreaded the therapy appointments.)

Can Christopher read aloud fluently? I'm talking about reading a simple story below his grade level but one he hasn't seen before. That should at least give you a clue as to whether there's something significant going on with his visual processing.

-- SusanJ - 27 Jan 2006

"What were they doing in class? (Were they 'a day behind'? Were they covering the homework from the day before?)"

I think that is what was happening. According to our kid, the teacher did a great job of explaining the material when she did cover it. I think that practice has stopped.

I'm guessing her philosophy was this: if the students have tried to engage with the material ahead of time, they will "know what they don't know" when they come to class and then more efficient learning will take place. And, as a corollary, to motivate the kids to do the homework, the "stick" was in the form of a grade attached to doing the homework.

BTW, I do not think that approach represented the school's philosophy, nor does it represent mine.

I think the art of teaching and parenting is knowing when to use the carrot and when to use the stick. BTW, I personally don't have that mastered yet. And, I'll hold for another day the challenges of teaching a spatially challenged, but hyper-specific teenager to drive.

I'm with you on the notion that it does matter what happens in middle school in that there is a great danger that students will just shut down completely if the message is conveyed to them that they aren't capable of doing the work. Then, it is left to the parents or to a teacher the following year to rehabilitate the kids.

What is the expression? If you hear something often enough, you start believing it. I am also a firm believer in the idea that "success breeds success." Doing well feels good and motivates us to want to continue doing well. This is where I think Direct Instruction and teaching to mastery comes into play.

I have so many thoughts and opinions on this and some of the other discussion topics, and I just have to get my befuddled mind organized to share them in a logical and coherent fashion.

I am whole-heartedly with you on the notion that we need to do a better job of educating boys; we also think the culture that "YOUR WORTH IN SCHOOL IS MEASURED BY YOUR ATHLETIC SUCCESS" is particularly damaging to boys.

However, based on our experiences with two girls, they face some pretty tough challenges as well, especially if they are sensitive. My brother says that the school environment is even harder for sensitive boys.

I think my philosophy can probably be summed up as a "one size fits all" approach to education may be efficient, but it certainly isn't effective.

-- KarenA - 27 Jan 2006

New Zig Article: How Scientific is Reading First? posted today at zigsite.com:

In her interview with Dr. G. Reid Lyon (1/18/06, Effective Reading Programs Share Common Characteristics, EducationNews.org), Nancy Salvato asked a direct and reasonable question: "What particular instructional programs do you endorse in order for teachers to implement what you've learned through your research?"

Lyon's short answer to this question was, "I have never nor will I endorse a program."

As part of his long answer, Lyon asserted, "Everything I do comes from my scientific training."

If that's true, his scientific training was curious. In his long answer, he observed, "The value of any program is data driven and based on its impact on kids."

We know from reports like those published by the American Institutes for Research that there are two programs that have substantial evidence of effectiveness with whole-school reforms, Direct Instruction and Success for All. We assume that Lyon has this information. A combination of these facts would create an argument that goes something like this:

Programs are judged according to their impact on kids.
Program D creates a large positive impact on kids.
Therefore, I will never endorse program D.

The argument doesn't make a lot of sense because we assume that the programs an investigator would endorse are the programs that create a substantial impact on kids. We would recognize that Salvato's question was reasonable, something a thoughtful teacher might ask. If the teacher is working with at-risk kids, the chances are 9 out of 10 that her kids are failing. She is failing, and knows that she is failing. She wants her kids to have a chance. So she asks someone who has specific data on which programs create a great impact on kids, and the response is, in effect, "I know the answer, but I'm not going to tell you."

[snip]

The main problem with Lyon's position is that it is what is called an argument from ignorance. For any program without experimental evidence of effectiveness, the reasoning goes like this:

We don't know if program A is effective or not.
Therefore, we'll assume that it is effective.

Translated into a response to the teacher who asks the question about what works, the answer now becomes something like this: "Well, I can tell you this much: There are at least two programs in this group that work, and some that we don't really know about, but instead of identifying which are which, I'm going to treat them all the same because they have some of the same features. So you just have to make your best guess. Good luck."

Viewed differently, it's the educational variation of Russian roulette, in which "at least one chamber is empty and the other chambers have some of the features of the empty chamber. Good luck."

[snip]

Lyon is saying:

If a beginning-reading program is highly effective, it has various features: phonics, phonemic awareness, and so on.
Therefore, if a program has these features, it will be highly effective.

No. Programs are effective only if they have been demonstrated to be effective. The features that Lyon has identified (phonemic awareness, phonics, etc.) are global features that do not determine the details of a successful program, merely the details fairly naïve observers have noticed. In other words, one who knows how to create programs that are effective could design a beginning-reading program that produced horrible results, but that met all the criteria that Lyon specifies.

Geoff Colvin and I have written a rubric for identifying authentic Direct Instruction programs. The rubric is over 120 pages long and lists over 40 criteria. All these have been experimentally demonstrated to make a difference. [Ed: we need to get a hold of this rubric]

[snip]

Thirty-five years ago, a colleague pointed out, "We have warnings and directions for usage on a bottle of aspirin, but not a word of warning about using instructional programs that have not been demonstrated to be effective with children of poverty."

Such warning still does not exist and it probably won't occur until the public recognizes that we need some kind of pure Food and Drug Administration for at-risk kids. However, the first step in real cultural change requires a simple resolution that says, "No, kids won't fail. We will consider them FIRST, not as mere victims in the slow development of cultural change, or grist for another effort that keeps commercial interests happy and current prejudices well fed. We will use what is shown to be effective and implement it well. "

-- KDeRosa - 27 Jan 2006

Catherine,

My apologies for misreading and posting from a misunderstanding. I need to spend an hour in your archives to get a flavor for what's going on. I've watched the development of KTM from a distance and my perspective is colored from my first conclusion: "Catherine ane Carolyn's kids won the "parental draw" lottery and better be able to take advantage of it."

I'm pretty sure that the soldiers performance that you mention is predicated more upon the inculcation by caring parents of the concepts of responsibility and duty to others than to a soft and caring attitude. The 'harsh conditions' mentioned will tend (as Hobbes noted) to turn out adults for whom short term personal advantage is the only 'rule of life'.

As you are sorting through the areas in which boys are disadvantaged in public education (an artifact that is very young in terms of societal evolution) I believe that the fact that Christopher's cohort (roughly, those born between '89 and '99) has the highest incidence of illegitimacy in the history of the US will have a higher impact on cohort performance than any other. Christopher is also advantaged in that respect.

Back to the data mines.

-- RickBallard - 27 Jan 2006

Stephanie

Middle school actually seems like a great time for a "study skills" class (a real one), to teach kids how to start taking more responsibility for the material they're learning.

I think so!

So far, Christopher's Study Skills class just hasn't been doing much of anything at all.

HOWEVER, apparently she's starting to teach them note-taking skills. That will be GREAT. Christopher's very excited about it.

I keep thinking maybe the Mission of our schools (schools in general) is just too blurry......Ravitch says so.

She says we need to focus on the core mission, which is academic education.

If people stayed focused on that, it might be more obvious that 'Study Skills' should be about note-taking & organization from the get-go.

Still, she's starting on note-taking now, and that's great.

-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Jan 2006

Stephanie

Every kid is different, and some will be taking this responsibility for themselves automatically. I advocated for myself as early as 6th grade - I was a year ahead in math, but they weren't set up to deal with that.

That really is extraordinary.

How many kids could do that?????

You may be IT.

-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Jan 2006

Actually, Rudbeckia Hirta was put on independent study somewhere in there (was it 6th grade) and she was doing the work!

-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Jan 2006

But once the page got too "busy" she gets overloaded and gives up. She also loses her place all the time when reading a page with lots of print.

I have a HUGE problem with this myself.

PAGE SPLATTER

It's much, much worse now that I can't stand to wear my glasses.

-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Jan 2006

Susan J

Catherine, after those experiences I'm not surprised you stopped. In fact, I'm amazed you keep going at all let alone writing a best-seller!

LOL!

Boy, it's true. All that semi-scolding really got on my nerves after awhile.

I know that vision therapy for learning disorders is very controversial. Also that doing anything involving your eyes is extraordinarily stressful.

It's HUGELY stressful. Amazing.

I do believe that vision therapy will turn out to be enormously helpful.....but I suspect we're not there yet.

The occupational therapist, at the school, has been tracking the field; she doesn't know what to think, either.

My mother, who lived to be 91, lost a year of college due to an eye operation and the therapy to strengthen her eye muscles afterwards. She often spoke of how she'd dreaded the therapy appointments.

That's very interesting.

Well, that's sure how we felt.

Can Christopher read aloud fluently? I'm talking about reading a simple story below his grade level but one he hasn't seen before. That should at least give you a clue as to whether there's something significant going on with his visual processing.

oh!

You know, that's an excellent point.

I 'tested' him on this quite awhile back, when I was starting Megawords, and he was quite speedy.

BUT those were word lists.

Excellent idea.

I'll see what he can do with a prose passage

You know what?

He's always objected to reading out loud.

He doesn't like to do it.

THANK YOU

-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Jan 2006

Karen A

I'm guessing her philosophy was this: if the students have tried to engage with the material ahead of time, they will "know what they don't know" when they come to class and then more efficient learning will take place. And, as a corollary, to motivate the kids to do the homework, the "stick" was in the form of a grade attached to doing the homework.

oh — you know, it sounds like she was using 'priming.'

Priming is supposed to be excellent, but this isn't the way you'd use it.....not with a grade given for how well the child learned when they were 'primed.'

-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Jan 2006

I'm with you on the notion that it does matter what happens in middle school in that there is a great danger that students will just shut down completely if the message is conveyed to them that they aren't capable of doing the work. Then, it is left to the parents or to a teacher the following year to rehabilitate the kids.

What is the expression? If you hear something often enough, you start believing it. I am also a firm believer in the idea that "success breeds success." Doing well feels good and motivates us to want to continue doing well. This is where I think Direct Instruction and teaching to mastery comes into play.

That's a great way of putting it.....'success breeds success.'

Apparently, success also breeds independence & responsibility, which I hadn't really thought about.

But shutting down, at this age, is a real danger (though probably not so much here, where people are hyper-competitive specifically on academics....)

-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Jan 2006

Ken

The features that Lyon has identified (phonemic awareness, phonics, etc.) are global features that do not determine the details of a successful program, merely the details fairly naïve observers have noticed. In other words, one who knows how to create programs that are effective could design a beginning-reading program that produced horrible results, but that met all the criteria that Lyon specifies.

This is JUST starting to sink in for me, and I'm a quick study on these particular issues.....

I've been 'fragmented' in my approach to curricula; I've thought about 'features' rather than the one central question, Does it work?

Temple wouldn't make that mistake.

Really 'getting' this, for most people, is going to take some doing.

I'm going to be doing a lot of SPACED REPETITION

Geoff Colvin and I have written a rubric for identifying authentic Direct Instruction programs. The rubric is over 120 pages long and lists over 40 criteria. All these have been experimentally demonstrated to make a difference.

We need this.

-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Jan 2006

Rick

My apologies for misreading and posting from a misunderstanding.

You have to watch out around here!

The moms will STOMP you!

I'm pretty sure that the soldiers performance that you mention is predicated more upon the inculcation by caring parents of the concepts of responsibility and duty to others than to a soft and caring attitude.

Oh, sure; at least that's what I'd expect.

Who knows if my mom even was right about this (I don't know what she'd been reading) — though I suspect she was.

Her point was that middle class kids, who'd been well-cared for, developed a huge amount of ego strength & stamina they could draw on in combat.

Ultimately, it's a simple point.

A traumatized child grows up to be a more brittle adult. That's probably almost universal (again: NOT SURE!)

The 'harsh conditions' mentioned will tend (as Hobbes noted) to turn out adults for whom short term personal advantage is the only 'rule of life'.

Good point.

As you are sorting through the areas in which boys are disadvantaged in public education (an artifact that is very young in terms of societal evolution) I believe that the fact that Christopher's cohort (roughly, those born between '89 and '99) has the highest incidence of illegitimacy in the history of the US will have a higher impact on cohort performance than any other.

I agree, ABSOLUTELY.

Fatherlessness is BRUTAL for a child.

I can't tell whether it's worse for boys than for girls.

But I can tell, just from my own life, that it is devastating to boys.

actually....I'll belabor the point

Just after Christmas, Christopher was in such bad shape I was starting to get scared, and I don't scare easily, in this realm, at least. He was looking very, very bad.

Now he's completely fine. (Obviously I'm new to this age, so I don't have any sense of how much mood-swinging I ought to be seeing.)

I can't tell you why, but I know that a huge part of the reason he's fine is his dad.

You know that expression, 'has your back'?

Christopher knows his dad has his back.

I think it's entirely possible that makes him almost 'bullet-proof' where the normal stresses and strains of childhood are concerned.

-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Jan 2006

Fatherless American by David Blankenhorn

best book I've read on the subject

-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Jan 2006

I REALIZE I SHOULD ADD (I know I'm repeating myself) that the principal also played a big role in 'de-traumatizing' Christopher.

The class switch was a clear message to Christopher that:

a) his parents would look out for him

b) his principal would look out for him

c) the school is a friendly place

The math class is going to kill me, and I'm going to spend the next 3 years complaining about the lack of Direct Instruction (I hope we'll get the organization stuff MASTERED sooner than that).

But I have zero issues with the school's basic moral goodness.

-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Jan 2006

"He's always objected to reading out loud.

"He doesn't like to do it."

I don't know that that indicates anything much by itself. Reading aloud is stressful. You can't read aloud at the speed that you can silently, and whenever you make a mistake, you have witnesses. Until I had a child, to whom I read nearly every night, I hated reading aloud, too.

"...I don't have any sense of how much mood-swinging I ought to be seeing."

The last half of my 7th grade year and the first half of my 8th grade year, my dad was on a remote (unaccompanied by dependants) tour of duty in Thailand. I remember it as the worst year of my life. And my relationship with my dad has never been really close. (We get along just fine most of the time; we're just not buddies.)

Now that experience was compounded by a bad school system (especially surprising for a college town in Minnesota), but at least it ended after a year. I really feel for kids who never have fathers around.

-- DougSundseth - 27 Jan 2006

Doug, can you remember why it was the worst year of your life? Did you just really miss your Dad, or were there things going on that seemed just worse without him around?

All of a sudden, I would say it started when Ben started school this year, he is a major Daddy's boy. Dad is suddenly more important than everyone else.

-- CarolynJohnston - 27 Jan 2006

I really feel for kids who never have fathers around.

Absolutely.

DADS ARE KEY.

-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Jan 2006

All of a sudden, I would say it started when Ben started school this year, he is a major Daddy's boy. Dad is suddenly more important than everyone else.

Same here.

HUGE change.

(And Christopher was always crazy about his dad. But this is different.)

-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Jan 2006

joannejacob's got a story about a dad suing a school because the girls are doing so much better.

heh

-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Jan 2006

oh, and here's Dr. Helen who apparently spotted the story first

-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Jan 2006

"Doug, can you remember why it was the worst year of your life?"

It was quite a few things all piled up.

We had moved from Germany to Moorhead, MN for the year that my dad was going to be gone (in part) so as to be nearer my grandparents. Moorhead is an incredibly insular place, especially for a university town. Fargo-Moorhead has three different four-year universities, and the population of the metro area was about 100,000, but there were people in my classes that had never been more than 50 miles away from the town. They didn't want to hear about anything from other places (bragging, don't you know), which was pretty much all I could talk about. I think I had one friend that year, and he moved during the summer.

The schools were exactly the sort that we've been lamenting (this was in 1973, so the problem isn't new), with no algebra in 8th grade, poor science curriculum, though they had a good hockey team and a very good band. (At the end of my 7th grade year, the principal called the school together for an assembly to let us know that we were the worst class he had ever had the displeasure to ... administrate? (Surely not "teach".)

I was 12 at the time, so going through all the hormonal issues attendant upon that age. And in retrospect, I suspect I was pretty obnoxious. I vividly remember raging about the unfairness of it all. (It's the raging I remember vividly, not the subject.) While I'm sure it was unfair, I suspect it was rather more unfair to my mom than to me, but kids that age are invariably convinced of their persecution. I rather doubt my dad would have tolerated my conduct; I know I wouldn't/won't tolerate it from my son. (I'm sure the fun will be unending when Alex gets to that age.)

And I was also fighting with asthma that was essentially untreated.

As you might expect, it's a bit difficult to disentangle the causes of my misery. And it's not at all clear that my misery was especially worse than any other 12 year old. When you're that age, though, it seems a torment created by a cruel world specifically for you.

I don't know how helpful that was, but there you go.

-- DougSundseth - 27 Jan 2006

In social studies, Christopher is graded on 'artistic expression' — I think that's the term. He can't draw, and his handwriting is horrific (this IS a boy thing; there's no dispute over it). He gets graded down.

In 5th grade math they had to create a big project where they were given a certain amount of money to spend on presents, and they had to show what they spent, and add it all up.

He did the entire project on his own, start to finish. It was perfect; he put enormous care into it, and picked out thoughtful, sensitive presents for everyone in our extended family — and spent the required sum.

He was graded down because the cover wasn't artistic.

It wasn't messy; it was the best drawing he could do.

He can't draw, and he's never, ever, been taught to draw. (If he were taught, and if he practiced, he could draw.)

He was graded down in math because he can't draw.

I'm completely against that.

-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Jan 2006