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Entries from LanguageArts

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HowCatherineReads 07 Jul 2005 - 23:37 CarolynJohnston


A gem has been emerging in the comments thread on the SlideRules post. Catherine is telling us about how she reads.

I've known Catherine for about a year now, and I'm permanently amazed by her ability to sift through masses of reading matter, in print and on the internet, and find the best stuff to read in seemingly any and every field.

Go ahead: ask her what the best cookbooks are, the best books on knitting and psychology and film and graphic design. She knows. And anyone who hangs out here knows that she's digested a lot of the literature in math education, and even made sense of some of it; a feat that surely deserves some kind of serious prize.

Catherine is also quietly famous for bringing out the best in her co-authors. She's a gifted interviewer. And now I want to interview her! -- about how she reads. I'd really like to know, because I want to be able to read and comprehend a lot more than I seem able to absorb these days, and because I suspect that some of her techniques can help kids learn to really read as well.

The first shocker: Catherine writes in her books. In pencil, but she used to write in pen! She even used to write in different colors of pen!

I must have gotten smacked for writing in books a few times: I just don't know if I can make myself do it.

So what does she write?

I very frequently simply re-write what the author has written, in a shorter phrase, maybe.

Basically I'm making a kind of skeleton outline of the points I want to remember.

But I also write anything else that I want to remember, like associations to what the author has said.

If I think something is wrong, I'll write 'No!'

If I think something is super-right I'll write 'Yes!'

Let's see...

• I 'copy,' in probably the exact same sense you copied reading your math text
• I argue & evaluate
• I MAKE CONNECTIONS (YAY! as Christopher would say)
• I create my own PERSONAL index. All the white pages at the beginning and end of the book (if I need them) are covered in the page numbers that are important to me, along with a summary of what's there -- some of the pages have asterisks by them
• I also highlight the bibliography & footnotes

Catherine literally digests her books. I did that once or twice: first with my graduate math text that I almost copied -- I say 'almost' because I did a bit more than just copy it; I wrote notes and worked out little prooflets that the author omitted. And I was embarassed: I felt silly to be copying a book in my own handwriting.

More recently, I did it again with a book on Kalman filtering (I've been trying to understand Kalman filtering on and off for years; for some reason I find it a very slippery concept -- I just haven't grokked it yet). This book had a lot of gaps in it, so it was as much filling those in as it was copying. But I only read this way when I have to drag out the big guns and read something really hard.

Most of the other stuff I read has a tendency to get lost too quickly. How much more would I absorb if I read the Catherine Johnson way all the time? I'm going to give it a try and find out.

Here's another peek into Catherine's reading style, this time from the RUSSIAN MATH book:

Inside the front cover of RUSSIAN MATH, here are some typical things:

* page 18 'nice way of explaining prime factorization (this is noted because I want to remember the Russian way of doing prime factorization, and will want to review this page, but also because I'll probably want to write about why their way is good for teaching)

* page 6 "teaching factors & multiples together" I may have blogged about this already. I constantly confuse factors and multiples, which I realize must sound simply bizarre to math people. The Russian way of teaching them reminds me of de Saussure's dictum that all meaning comes from difference, because the Russians teach factors & multiples together, as OPPOSITES....giving me a kind of...I visualize a strong board or sturdy stick holding these two collapsing definitions apart inside my brain

* page 37 "easily transition from factor sequence (skip-counting) to equivalent fractions -- I'd have to look that up to see the details, but there, again, I'm making note of what was, for me, a fantastically good way of organizing content so that I SAW it, understood it, could do it on the problem set, and so on

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TeachYourKidsToWrite 10 Jan 2006 - 13:37 CatherineJohnson


This sounds just great:

"If you write for a living," says Jefferson D. Bates in Writing with Precision, "this book is probably not for you." But if what you do for a living involves writing, then this book can help you do so "clearly, concisely, and PRECISELY." Bates is fond of italics, boldface, CAPS, exclamations!, quirky footnotes, and the word crotchet. He's over 80. He's been editorial director of the U.S. Air Force's Effective Writing Program and a chief speechwriter for NASA. The cornerstone of his campaign is the elimination of bureaucratese and jargon. Writing with Precision, originally published in 1978, is divided into four parts: writing (mainly letters, memos, instructions, regulations, and reports), editing (mostly copyediting), usage, and exercises. There is a definite personality behind this readable, conversational book. It's mostly updated, though a little checking by Bates could have prevented the reference to some books as being "probably out of print now."

Talk about a book that's withstood the test of time. 1978. Wow.

I may have to order a copy.

Especially since it has EXERCISES.

Writing with Precision: How to Write So that You Cannot Possibly Be Misunderstood
by Jefferson D. Bates

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BestGrammarBook 15 May 2006 - 02:07 CatherineJohnson


I have appointed Susan grammar diva, because....she knows grammar! (And, more to the point, grammar books!)

Susan, what book should I order RIGHT THIS MINUTE?

Christopher got a 63 on his grammar test, because he 'mixed up subject and predicate.'

I can't take it.

He's ELEVEN.

And he doesn't know subject & predicate.

So.....which one of the books you told me about should I get NOW. I need something with MAXIMUM direct instruction, MAXIMUM coherence (if possible), and PRACTICE EXERCISES.

Sigh.


Another commenter once recommended the Shurley grammar series--how involved is this series?

(Does anyone know?)

Can I fit it in with everything else?

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GrammarSchool 14 May 2006 - 15:09 CatherineJohnson


So, yes, I am now in the grammar instruction business, too.

Ed asked Christopher last night what the subject and predicate were in the sentence, I ate too much food, and Christopher didn't have a clue.

He flat out couldn't say what the subject was, and he thought the predicate was 'too much food.' Then, when Ed corrected him, he sobbed for 15 minutes.

Middle school stinks.

We're only....3 weeks in? Already I've got at least 4 crying children stories, 4 that I can remember, anyway; there may have been more. Today Christopher's close friend M. started crying when the math teacher docked him a point on his math test for telling his twin brother, 'It's easy, you can do it.'

M. protested that he had only been telling his brother he could do the test, and the teacher said that didn't matter, he could have been cheating.

So back to grammar, Christopher has no clue what a subject and a predicate are. He rejected outright Ed's claim that 'I' was the subject: How can 'I' be a subject??????' Then collapsed into sobs brought on by the sudden realization that the reason he 'put the line in the wrong place' was that he didn't know where the subject ended and the predicate began. A classic example of a child not knowing what he doesn't know, which Willingham has written about. (Why Students Think They Understand—When They Don’t and How To Help Students See When Their Knowledge is Superficial or Incomplete)

I'm guessing Christopher probably thinks 'subject' means 'topic,' as in the topic of an article or book; and, by extension, 'predicate' means the topic of the second half of the sentence. Which would pretty much rule out pronouns & verbs as subjects & predicates, respectively.

Christopher is 11.

His school has two hours of 'English language arts' a day, TWO. And in two hours a day this teacher--this tenured, health insuranced, pensioned individual--did not manage to teach Christopher what a subject and a predicate are.

Teaching math is hard. I'm not going to be wildly critical of a math teacher who is trying. (A math teacher who docks a twin a point because he might have been cheating is another story.)

But teaching subject and predicate to a bright child with a good attention faculty whose strength is English language arts.......

Rolling off a log.

And I'm the one who's going to be doing the rolling.

I'm not happy.

update

I just thank God I started teaching Christopher spelling when I did.

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GrammarQuestion 14 May 2006 - 15:10 CatherineJohnson


What is the complete subject of this sentence?

While taking the dog for a walk, she stepped in poop.

Thank you in advance.

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WickelgrenOnYoungChildrenAndMath 17 Sep 2006 - 01:14 CatherineJohnson


back story:

My neighbor, the statistician, showed me her copy of Math Coach: A Parent's Guide to Helping Children Succeed in Math quite awhile back, before either of our kids had had any trouble in math class. I ordered a copy just because I order lots of copies of books I'd like to read but then don't.

So the book was sitting there on my shelf when Christopher came home with his 39 on the Unit 6 test & I subsequently failed to teach him fractions using SRA Math. I needed help.

It was the right book at the right time. A page-turner.

Most of what I believed to be true of math ed & math achievement, I discovered, was wrong. Severely wrong. I had been operating on the basis of sheer ignorance, naivete, and boneheaded cliche.

This is the observation that probably shocked me the most. It appears in Wickelgren's chapter on finding a school for your child:

There are schools with even less structure than Eastside. Take the Sudbury Valley School, a private K-12 school in a Boston suburb. This school gives each child complete freedom to choose how they spend their time at school. There are no classes except those specifically requested by a group of students. Children learn largely on their own, reading books, talking to each other and to teachers or outside experts, solving problems, playing games and sports, practicing musical instruments, doing arts and crafts, and anything else that can be done on the school grounds.

While you can read at length about the school's strengths on its web site, one of its biggest potential benefits is that every child can proceed at his or her own pace, in math and in other subjects as well.

There are also potential drawbacks. Since young children are not generally highly motivated to learn math, they may choose not to study much of it.

I was bowled over.

I had always thought kids want to learn things they're good at. Christopher is good at social studies, and he wants to learn it. At night he'll bug his dad to 'give me trivia questions.' (Give me superficial facts, Daddy!) Ed finally refused to do it anymore, because he ran out of trivia.

Christopher also has a collection of geography trivia books that he reads, and when he was 7 I read all of the first volume in the History of US series out loud to him as his bedtime story.

That was the book he wanted to hear.

So...I assumed kids wanted to learn subjects they had a talent for.

According to Wayne Wickelgren, this is not the case with math.

Or, at least, not generally. Math talent doesn't (necessarily) manifest itself in an obvious desire to learn the multiplication tables. (Or to write essays on My Special Number.)

late bloomers

That one observation pretty much changed my life. I decided, then and there, that I didn't know whether Christopher had any talent for math or not, or what his eventual level of interest in the subject might be--or, more importantly--could be, given a decent education K-12.

I also knew he had good general intelligence, which meant he had the ability to learn a whole lot of math whether he was going to end up in a math-related career or not.

I decided right then and there that that was what was going to happen. Christopher was going to learn math, lots of it, and learn it well.

We were going to keep the doors open.

When Christopher reached college, he would be in a position to decide to pursue a math-related career or not. That decision would not have been made for him in 3rd grade, when he got sorted into Phase 3.

It wasn't too long after this that I met Carolyn and heard her story: flunked algebra in high school (right?), didn't decide to major in math until senior year in college, then got a Ph.D. In math. Another wake up call.

more late bloomers

Two more stories.

One comes from Christopher's 4th grade teacher. Her daughter was reaching the end of high school, and it was time to do SAT prep.

So her mom hired a tutor, and within a couple of weeks the guy was reporting that her daughter had strong talent in math.

She had no idea. Neither she nor her daughter had the first clue that this kid had a knack for math. Now, working one-on-one with a tutor who, IIRC, had a Ph.D. in math (or engineering, possibly) she was flying.

I have no idea where that girl will end up, what she'll major in, or which job or career she'll pursue.

It doesn't matter. The point is: she's good at math, and she went through 11 years of formal education thinking she wasn't.

you can't predict the future, or even the past

Story number two comes from a friend of ours. As a boy he had two or three chums who sat by each other in class & were bright kids. They were the kind of kids who could learn whatever you threw at them, and they got As in all their subjects & went to good colleges & universities. They got As in math, too, of course, but none of them was a whiz. Our friend became a lawyer.

One of the gang shocked everyone by growing up to become a world-famous econometrician.

No one can understand how this happened. This kid never showed any special talent for or interest in math. He was just a smart kid, like the rest of them. Our friend said that to this day, whenever any of them get together, they always ask each other how that friend could turn out to be not only an econometrician, but a world-famous one.

Go figure.

What I like about this story is the fact that not only could this boy's future as World Famous Econometrician not be predicted when he was 8, it can't be back-predicted now, when he's 40.

Barbara Oakley's bio

I just remembered: Barbara Oakley is in the same category. Here's her bio:

I started studying engineering much later than many engineering students, because my original intention had been to become a linguist. I enlisted in the U.S. Army right after high school and spent a year studying Russian at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey California. The Army eventually sent me to the University of Washington, where I received my first degree–a B.A. in Slavic Languages and Literature. Eventually, I served four years in Germany as a Signal Officer, and rose to become a Captain. After my commitment ended, I decided to leave the Army and study engineering so that I could better understand the communications equipment I had been working with.

Barbara sent me an email that I won't quote without her permission (I'm WAY behind on email). But her story inside an email is more dramatic than her story here, though no different in outline. Barbara is a person who earned an entire B.A. degree in a humanties field and served a full stint in the Army before figuring out she wanted to major in engineering.

And the reason she decided to study engineering is pretty similar to the reason I've suddenly decided to study math; she got tired of not understanding the stuff she was working on. In her case, that was communications equipment; in my case it's K-12 math.

Obviously, Steve H is right, we simply cannoy be assigning grade school kids to our two Standing Committees: math whiz & math's not his thing.

all English Language Arts all the time

from The Learning Gap by Harold Stevenson and James Stigler:

....American teachers like to teach reading; Asian teachers like to teach mathematics. When we asked teachers in Beijing, nearly all of whom were women, the subject they most liked to teach, 62 percent said mathematics, 29 percent said language arts. The reverse was found in Chicago: 33 percent mentioned mathematics and 47 percent mentioned language arts. There is more to the story than preference, however. Americans simply emphasize reading more than mathematics. Despite the large amount of time already spent in reading instruction, more than 40 percent of the suggestions made by Minneapolis mothers who wanted an increased emphasis on academic subjects said they thought that the subject should be reading. Fewer than 20 percent mentioned mathematics.

These data lead to the obvious conclusion that American children do less well in mathematics than do Chinese and japanese children partly because they spend less time studying mathematics....Conversely, American children may fare better in reading, relatively speaking, because they spend more time on this sujbect.

I mentioned yesterday: it's a commonplace for people to say, 'I was never any good at math.'

No one says, 'I was never any good at reading.'

English Language Arts in Irvington

I've seen this here in Irvington.

My sense is that Irvington does a good job teaching reading. Not that I know what I'm talking about, but that's my sense. (fyi, after trying to teach out of the SRA Math book myself, I also think our grade school teachers are near-geniuses at teaching math, too.....& I'm not kidding about that. It was tough.)

Christopher's 6th grade schedule includes:

• 2 periods of English language arts, one for reading & one for writing
• 1 period of social studies, taught by a teacher who told us, on back to school night, "I am an English language arts teacher at heart"
• 1 period of drama

That's 4 periods out of 8, half his day devoted to English language arts. He has 1 period for math, 1 period for science, and that's it. The other 2 periods are specials: study skills, music, art, drama, P.E., technology. Technology will mean creating an online 'portfolio' of his best work in 6th grade, not learning how to program. Study skills is about reading & taking notes, not doing problem sets.

And, on back to school night, the math teacher told us the kids would be keeping a math journal, because a lot of kids in accelerated math probably aren't as strong in ELA, so 'we try to help them with English language arts.'

Thus far she has done nothing of the sort, thank heavens, and she's stopped grading the kids' math tests on spelling, which she did last year. I gather she had a lot of complaints about it, and I made a point of asking her, in front of the other parents, whether she would be grading spelling this year, too. (This is what we call a warning shot.) So she told the kids she wouldn't, and she hasn't. otoh, Christopher is now spelling parenthesis parenthies, so be careful what you wish for.

another story

This last story pretty much sums it up, I think.

I know I've mentioned the fact that we were clueless back when Christopher was in his early elementary years.

So, unbeknownst to us, he was placed in Phase 3 ELA as well as Phase 3 math. Actually, we're still clueless; I have no idea what kind of sorting & phasing they do with ELA. All I know is that in K-5 they divide the kids up into ability groups within the classroom, rather than separating them into different classes taught by different teachers, as they do with math.

In the hall outside Christopher's 4th grade class, after the year was over, I happened to run into his teacher and we fell into conversation, which led to the subject of Christopher's progress that year. I remember I was expressing gratitude for some especially good teaching she'd done, but I don't remember the details. It was probably about English language arts, since she taught him every subject but math.

One thing led to another, and suddenly I heard her saying, "Oh, I could see when he came into my class he wasn't a 3. He was much better than that. Sometimes you just have to ignore the tests."

Christopher had taught himself to read in Kindergarten, had tested two years above grade level in reading back in the 2nd grade, and had just received 4s on both the ELA & the math sections of the NY state tests. He'd been in the advanced reading group all year long as far as we knew.

So when was he a 3?

It took me a moment to recover, but I managed to keep her talking. "I pushed him," she said. "I knew he could do it." And, again: "You can't believe the tests."

Wow.

Think about the implications.

Here we have your dufus mom, completely out of the loop about tests, 3s, & 4s. And it doesn't matter; it doesn't hurt the kid. The teacher steps up to the plate, checks out the kid, decides for herself 'he's not a 3,' then sees to it he stops being a 3, and becomes a 4.

No extra reward, no extra praise, no extra payment or promotion. She just does it, because it's her job, and because she's good at it.

Perfect.

(And yes, I know; I'm tired of 3s and 4s, too. But 3s and 4s are a kind of shorthand, and a useful one.)


The point is: I have never heard this story told about a Phase 3 kid in math. Never.

Until this fall (that's another story), only a tiny handful of kids had ever moved from Phase 3 to 4. Maybe one 1 per year.

I've talked to the Chair of the middle school program about this issue, to one of the guidance counselors, to our 4-5 principal, and to numerous other teachers & parents.

Not one of them has mentioned the school or a teacher pushing a kid out of 3 and into 4. Whenever a move is made, the impetus has come from the parent, not the school. And the school resents it. (I've mentioned this before. We have a meta-narrative about pushy parents pressuring the school to put their kids in Phase 4 math when they don't belong there. Everyone subscribes to this narrative, including aides & other parents.)


The lesson I take away from this is that we really do have some major talent in some schools in this country, in the teaching of English Language Arts. I'm lucky to have my own kids in one such school district.

We need the same kind of teachers, with the same kind of know-how and confidence, in elementary mathematics.


Wickelgren on introducing algebra
Wayne Wickelgren on algebra in 7th & 8th grade
Wickelgren on math talent & when to supplement
late bloomers in math & Wickelgren on children's desire to learn math
Wayne Wickelgren on mastery of math & on creativity & domain knowledge
Wickelgren on why math is confusing


Confessions of an engineering school wash-out
more confessions of an engineering school washout
the Terminator, or 'the magical number 7, plus or minus 2'
On Having a Math Brain (by Carolyn)
math brain debunked (by Carolyn)
math professors versus computer science professors

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KumonReadingPart2 17 Nov 2005 - 13:25 CarolynJohnston


Catherine and I were talking yesterday about how it seems reading curricula are completely missing from elementary schools. Once a kid has the mechanics of reading, it doesn't seem there is a clear road forward; and it seems to have been that way for quite a while. As a kid in elementary school, for example, I didn't get grammar instruction; my husband did. Core Knowledge, at least, tries to standardize at least on the content of the reading kids do in elementary school, but it doesn't otherwise try to impose any teaching philosophy.

Apparently kids like mine -- who get the mechanics of reading very early, are fluent readers and writers, but who have persistent problems with understanding what they are reading, and cannot organize a short theme to save their lives -- are pretty rare. That must explain the absolute absence of actual teaching on the subject, and the fact that Ben was always the odd man out in his special reading and writing groups in elementary school. They'd all be struggling with spelling and slow reading, and he was a perfect speller and a fast reader; but he'd misinterpret things he read literally. You'd be amazed at how typical kids are able to learn idioms by osmosis, for example; and you'd be amazed, too, at a very young autistic kid's response to phrases like "keep your eye on the ball".

So the Kumon reading stuff looks kind of appealing, actually. Ben's been tracked into remedial reading and writing, and if I'm not careful, he won't surface. We've been addressing vocabulary, which is a good bit of his problem; he doesn't learn words in context, and needs explicit instruction in vocabulary (he picks it up quickly, but it needs to be explicit!). It doesn't look as though Kumon addresses vocabulary, but it addresses most of the rest of the issues he has trouble with: main ideas, reasoning, inference, comparing and contrasting.

So, ironically, I may end up taking Ben to Kumon for reading.

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KumonAndFormativeAssessment 22 Nov 2005 - 20:38 CatherineJohnson



The new trauma is that apparently Ms. Roth gave a practice ELA test to the class, and Christopher & his friend M. hosed it.

Fortunately, M.'s mom is radically on the ball; nothing escapes her notice. She called me Saturday morning, majorly ticked off, and said she wanted to know how Christopher did, because ELA is 'Christopher's thing,' which is true. He's the standard to use.

Well, of course, I didn't even know Christopher had taken a practice ELA, much less that he had scored 2-slash-3, so now I'm not happy, either. Not that I was brimming with good cheer and satisfaction before that, but still.

The fact is, when there's a Cone Of Silence surrounding your child's school, it's impossible to know what's going on.

Is Christopher learning what he's supposed to be learning?

And what is he suppoed to be learning, anyway? (Which reminds me, time to finally hit 'Purchase' on my Amazon order. E.D. Hirsch's What Your 6th Grader Should Know has been sitting in my cart since summer.)

So tonight, Christopher did his KUMON reading sheets, and I was shocked to find that he missed these items:


The newsletter that was available at the stores had advertisements in [it  them] (Christopher picked 'them')

The parents enjoyed the school play because _____ children were in it. (Christopher wrote 'her')


I had no idea he could get questions this simple wrong.

The first one he really did get wrong; the second one he probably misread, but either way.....he's at a level now where he has to learn to force himself to take in every word, whether he's got visual 'issues' or not.

The point is, I have no way of knowing where he is in English language arts, whether he's on track, whether he's off track, what he knows, what he doesn't know, etc.

With KUMON reading I'll know what's going on.


I desperately need KUMON for expository writing

I'm starting to get some ideas on how to do it.....

And I'm thinking KUMON reading may help.


update

I sprang for a copy of this book on Saturday:

Which I see has now dropped to 39 cents.

sigh

UPDATE 11-7-2006: ended up never using it; sold it back to somebody else on Amazon Marketplace this fall


formative assessment

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TheBarneySong 04 Dec 2005 - 00:08 CatherineJohnson



I have spent a huge quantity of my life listening to the Barney Song.

Jimmy, at 18, still watches Barney, and Andrew is obsessed. This morning when I glanced inside Andrew's bedroom I saw a small plush Barney toy standing bolt upright in the middle of the floor wearing an enormous wide-brimmed straw walking hat from Australia.

Here in my parallel universe, he looked a bit like a Canadian Mounty.

Needless to say, Christopher loathes the Barney song. He probably hasn't gone a day of his life without hearing it, so he's entitled.

Well, guess what?

I have just this moment discovered a Barney Verb Song!

Title - helping verb song
By - Beth Fryer
Primary Subject - Language Arts
Secondary Subjects -
Grade Level - 4
My students learn the helping verb list with an idea by a former student...Sing these words to the tune of the "Barney Song" - or, for those of you who don't know THAT, it's "This Old Man"!

have - has - had
do - does - did
be - am - is - are - was - were - been
can - could - shall - should - will - would - may
might - must - being
are helping verbs!
E-Mail Beth Fryer bfryer@clsd.k12.pa.us!

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DescriptiveNormativeAndCritical 10 Jan 2006 - 13:40 CatherineJohnson



Now that it's become clear I'm going to have to teach Christopher how to write, I'm on the prowl for material and ideas.

I'm posting this cartoon because I'll be showing it to Christopher at some point, and I want it where I can find it.

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NortonSampler 10 Jan 2006 - 13:41 CatherineJohnson



One of you (I have to find the Comment again—) left a link to the Johns Hopkins CTY Summer program, specifically to the page that lists all the courses.

All of the writing courses have posted syllabi, including the course called Crafting the Essay.

The readings for 'Crafting the Essay' seem far too weighted towards the personal essay—what is it with all this memoir writing?^*—but, at the end of the syllabus, there's a list of 'Supplemental Texts' that includes this book:





Here's the jacket copy:

As a rhetorically arranged collection of short essays for composition, our Sampler echoes the cloth samplers once done in colonial America, presenting the basic patterns of writing for students to practice just as schoolchildren once practiced their stitches and ABCs on needlework samplers. This new edition shows students that description, narration, and the other patterns of exposition are not just abstract concepts used in composition classrooms but are in fact the way we think—and write. The Norton Sampler contains 63 carefully chosen readings—classics as well as more recent pieces, essays along with a few real-world texts—all demonstrating how writers use the modes of discourse for many varied purposes.

Wow.

Depending what's actually in the book, this is exactly what I'm looking for—and I found it thanks to ktm commenters. Incredible. Thank you.

I've mentioned that I learned how to teach writing at the University of Iowa. At the time (and perhaps still today) Iowa had one of the best freshman writing programs in the country.

We used the The Norton Reader of Expository Prose. We lived by that book. Later on I used the short version, I believe, to teach the same course to gifted middle schoolers for Johns Hopkins CTY.

I looked at the Norton Reader again the other day, and had been planning to order it this weekend....but it isn't exactly what I want.

If I were teaching a full-fledged writing course at school, then sure. The Norton Reader would probably be the book.

But I'm going to be trying to hammer my massively resistant middle-schooler into adding afterschool writing to afterschool math, and the mere sight of a 1214-page NORTON READER is going to be trouble.

I haven't looked at The Norton Sampler yet, but I'm almost certainly going to be buying it tonight.


Susan explains the shift to early writing

Part of the problem is that, like New Math and Whole Language, there is a movement afoot to push what I consider middle school skills down into grade school, all with the assumption that grade school skills will just be learned by osmosis (or shoved onto the middle school teachers...again.) These are your two camps.

In the beginning this new way of teaching writing looks very impressive as little persuasive essays come home and state tests appear to improve. Like math, we didn't learn it that way and so what do we know? I believe this is what you would label teaching Whole to Parts.

The traditional way of learning writing (or math, for that matter) has always been Parts to Whole, starting with building blocks for younger children (handwriting, grammar, sentence structure, punctuation) and then moving to more complicated techniques requiring better critical thinking skills (notetaking, outlining, etc.)that actually match the child's growing opinions and ideas. This strikes me as common sense, but what do I know?

Whether this new way is really better in the long run is still unsure, from everything I've read, yet one can't help notice that something is wrong when college professors complain loudly about students' bad writing skills, and then even request a grammar section on the SATs.

That explains a lot.

I've never given it any thought, but offhand I would say that writing isn't 'foundational' or 'hierarchical' the way math is foundational or hierarchical.

Still, I think it's nuts to plunge right into paragraphs and short essays in grade school. Doesn't make sense to me.

Without knowing much about it, I'd say the focus in the early years is words and sentences; then paragraphs.

I don't know what to think about all the journal-writing tiny little children do these days. I like having a record of Christopher's 6-year old thoughts, but whether journaling helped him learn how to write, I don't know.

I was over at a friend's house the other day, looking at books on how to write. My friend was traumatized by a nasty writing teacher in high school and has only recently started to recover from that experience. She's read a number of books for people who want to write but are anxious or blocked, the writing equivalent of Math Anxiety.

All of these books, universally, promote journaling, freewriting, etc., etc......and they all seem utterly foreign to me.

I have no idea whether professional writers 'journal' or 'freewrite.' Maybe they do. If so, they don't talk about it much.

I do neither. I have zero interest in journaling or freewriting; I find the very word 'freewriting' slightly repellent. (Because it doesn't sound free?)

I have so little interest in journaling that I don't do it even though I wish I would. From time to time I remind myself that I'm letting my kids' childhoods pass by unrecorded & unremembered. Then I carry on not journaling.

I suspect that professional writers of nonfiction, which is what we're talking about, are motivated to 'communicate' more than to 'express.' I write every day, but I write to other people, not to myself. I used to write letters; now I write emails & blooki posts & comments on Kitchen Table Math.

I'm also motivated by curiosity, and nonfiction writing means Learning New Things virtually every day. That's another reason I write Kitchen Table Math. Once I write a post, people chime in with interesting comments and factoids I've never heard before. I love that, and it doesn't happen with Journaling or Freewriting.

Given that I've been a professional writer for quite awhile now, and given that I never, ever Journal or Freewrite, I'm not inclined to think that students should Journal or Freewrite as a means to learning to write themselves.

One other thing.

I never took a writing course.

I never even wrote a paper in high school. I arrived at Wellesley not knowing what a paper was.

I never took a writing course because I was terrified I would be told I was no good. I desperately wanted to be a writer, but didn't think I was good enough, and I figured if a teacher told me I wasn't good enough that would be the end of it.

So I didn't get near any teachers.

The funny thing is, when I finally got on track to write, just short of age 30, two different Authority Figures instantly popped out of the woodwork to tell me I wouldn't be able to do it. One said I didn't have the commitment or the drive; the other told me he'd never liked my writing. This person actually took the time to sit down and write me a letter saying, 'I've never liked your writing.'

People are bizarre.

In any case, they were too late. I'd made up my mind.

Getting back to how to teach children to write.....I think my own personal narrative tells me that writing isn't a hierarchical skill the way mathematics is, and I think it tells me that expository writing isn't a direct or natural outgrowth of Journaling or Freewriting, but may be a natural outgrowth of reading, thinking, and talking to other people about what you're reading and thinking.

I know that in order to write nonfiction you have to be reading nonfiction.

That's about as far as I can go tonight.


Johns Hopkins CTY course list (including math courses):
Crafting the Essay WRT3
Crafting the Essay 3B


KTM Commenter suggestions and recommendations:
First Language Lessons by Jesse Wise (recommended by Ken &, I think, Susan, looks good; apparently there are more books coming in the series)
Classical Writing series (Nick's Mama left the link for this series)

The two biggies amongst homeschoolers seem to be:
Writing Strands (the Well Trained Mind people use this series)
Excellence in Writing



KUMON reading

I'd bet money the KUMON reading program teaches writing as well as reading, if only incidentally. I've scanned in one set of KUMON reading worksheets and will get them posted to a separate KUMON page & linked here, so you can see what I'm talking about. KUMON Reading is as good a nonficiton, critical reading program as any I've ever seen.

Actually, KUMON Reading is the only nonfiction critical reading program I've ever seen. At our school, and apparently at many other schools, the kids read wall-to-wall fiction. No one teaches them how to read nonfiction.

KUMON does.


update: Norton Sampler TOC

This is fantastic:

Introduction

Annie Dillard, The Death of a Moth
Annie Dillard, How I Wrote the Moth Essay—and Why
The Processes of Writing
The Modes of Writing
Mixing the Modes (great)

1 Description

2 Narrative

3 Example

4 Classification and Division

5 Process Analysis

6 Comparison and Contrast

7 Definition

8 Cause and Effect

9 Argumentation and Persuasion

10 Classic Essays for Further Reading


It doesn't look overloaded with partisan picks, and there are two student essays included, which could be a lot of fun. Ann Hodgman ('No Wonder They Call Me a Bitch') is the author of three of my favorite cookbooks: Beat This, Beat That!, and One Bite Won't Kill You.

This is the one.


1918 version of Elements of Style online





^* My neighbor's son has now written so many personal narratives he says he's running out of memories.

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SmartestTractorsAssessmentForm 19 May 2006 - 21:54 CatherineJohnson







"Attached is a page from our Guide to the Provincial Report Card. It is not required we use it in our classrooms, but I find it helpful in focusing some students. At worst, it is an alternative to the page you have been handed."


thank you





my contract to improve Christopher's grades
a Grade Contract that makes sense
the book
Grade Contract for married people
climb down
Smartest Tractor saves the day
KIPP Academy contract

---

EngelmannOnRulesForInstallingCurricula 19 May 2006 - 21:55 CatherineJohnson



Ken's done more of the typing!

Thank you!


Here's Engelmann on rules School Boards should insist the school district follow when installing a new curriculum:


1. Don't install any practice or reform unless you have substantial reason to believe that it will result in improvement of student performance.

Test on small scale before wider implementation. Research validation. Field tested.

2. Don't install any approach without making projections about student learning.

The benefits of the approach must be measurable. Tests are needed to determine success. The tests should be "do it" tests, one that requires actual reading, answering questions, working math problems, etc (not multiple choice).

3. Don't install any practice without monitoring it and comparing performance in the classroom with projections.

formative assessment. Installed programs should be limited to a reasonable period of time such as no more than an hour aday for reading. The monitoring should deal with what the teachers do and how it relates to what the students have learned. Is the projected material being presented on schedule? Do the teacherfs need help? Is the program being followed faithfully? Are the kids mastering the material in the projected time.

4. Don't install an approach without having a back-up plan.

5. Don't maintain practices that are obviously not working as planned.

6. Don't blame parents, kids, or other extraneous factors if the plan fails.

The only factor that affects the plan is whether the kids and teacher are in attendance on a regular basis."If the teaching failed, it was because the teaching failed, not beacause the parents didn't get involved."

on manipulatives

The same problem exists with manipulatives. Kids play with rods that represent different values--based on the length of the rod. Kids can use these rods to perform a variety of "act-outs" that are consistent with complicated math notions, such as the idea that 10x2 equals 5X4, but the kids doing the acting-out are typically not learning the relationship. They're simply making one group of rods the same length as the other group. The great meanings that they're deriving are not in their minds but in the imagination of the educational observer.

Direct work with symbols and notations of math is a far safer method of teaching relationships because symbols are consistent with far fewer misinterpretations than noisy and often time-consuming act-outs. The [NCTM] Standards do not favor pencil-and-paper work, however, because such work implies skills, and the Standards are very ambivalent about skills.

War Against the Schools' Academic Child Abuse, p. 115

on the shelf life of learned material

Typically about 60 school days pass before any topic is revisited. Stated differently, the spiral curriculum is exposure, not teaching. You don't "teach" something and put it back on the shelf for 60 days. It doesn't have a shelf-life of more than a few days. It would be outrageous enough to do that with one topic-- let alone all of them.

...Don't they know that if something is just taught, it will atrophy the fast way if it is not reinforced, kindled, and used? Don't they know that the suggested "revisiting of topics" requires putting stuff that has been recently taught on the shelf where it will shrivel up? Don't they know that the constant "reteaching" and "relearning" of topics that have gone stale from three months of disuse is so inefficient and impratical that it will lead not to "teaching" but to mere exposure? And don't they know that when the "teaching" becomes mere exposure, kids will understandably figure out that they are not expected to learn and that they'll develop adaptive attitudes like, "We're doing this ugly geometry again, but don't worry. It'll soon go away and we won't see it for a long time"?

The Underachieving Curriculum judged the problem with the spiral curriculum is that is lacks both intensity and focus. "Perhaps the greatest irony is that a curricular construct conceived to prevent the postponing of teaching many important subjects on the grounds that they are too difficult has resulted in a treatment of mathematics that has postponed, often indefinitely, the attainment of much substantive content at all."

War Against the Schools' Academic Child Abuse, pp. 108-9

what people know and don't know

I was saying in a Comment on the Smartest Tractor thread that there are many aspects of DI & formative assessment everyone already knows. They just don't know they know...they probably haven't realized that what they know about DI & formative assessment amounts to an entire alternative educational philosophy, or would if they filled in the gaps.

But this 60-day figure is a statistic people really do not possess.

I had a funny experience with this at a PTSA meeting once. I was running the after-school program (this would be the program in which I hired myself to teach Singapore Math, btw). All of the program chairs were meeting to be filled in about forms, money, procedures, etc.

When the question of kids who couldn't afford the fees for the after-school program arose, the president said that the PTSA picks up the tab. The president said the teachers knew about the policy and would steer these children to us (something like that).

One of the volunteers said the teachers didn't know about it. She'd worked with a teacher the year before who had no idea this option existed. The president looked annoyed, and said, 'We sent them an email at the beginning of the year.'

That was a striking moment, because here we were, highly educated ourselves, devoted to our kids' schooling, and everyone in the room appeared to believe that if you've told someone something once they've learned it.

I think this is a common perception; I often have it myself. I'll think, 'I told him/her/them that already.'

I should know better.

It's true that in job situations—in any situation where you're responsible for hearing what people tell you, writing it down, and remembering and acting on it—people can say something once and expect it to stick.

But that's not the norm, especially when you're talking about one email sent to teachers at the beginning of the school year when they're swamped.

This is a factoid that needs to get out there.

---

AnimalsInTranslationInDiscoverMagazineBestBooks 10 Jan 2006 - 22:23 CatherineJohnson



Temple says Discover Magazine has chosen Animals in Translation as one of its Top Science Books of the Year (link to last year's list).

yay!

Plus the paperback came today.

I was going to take a picture of it with my dogs, but the camera battery is out of juice.


this is cool

I just went over to Barnes and Noble to pull a picture of the paperback, and found this:





Animals in Translation is a recommended holiday gift.

Good.

---

CommentsToCome 15 Dec 2005 - 20:33 CatherineJohnson



I have a boatload of Comments to get pulled up front.....which means it's going to take awhile.

I thought I'd mention that the reason I pull Comments up front is that a) I don't want casual visitors to miss the super-meaty ones and b) once a Comment is on the front page it's part of the Category thread, so anyone reading that thread will be sure to see it. (All Comments stay connected to the original blooki posts, but a person reading through the KUMON category, say, isn't necessarily going to have the patience to click on each post individually so he/she can read each Comments thread individually.

So these things need to come up front.....

I've finally begun disciplining myself to KEEP A LIST, and here's what I've got at the moment:

• boys hate journaling

• JD (& others) on Houghton Mifflin Math & long division

• Susan on grading handwriting (Christopher is going to be reading this one out loud)

• Steve on epiphany

• Suzuki

• teaching to mastery

• Rudbeckia Hirta on finding stats on colleges "Random factoid (before I disappear into a cloud of office hours, reviews, calming of panic, and then grading): if you want a statistical profile of a college/university (like graduation rates, etc.) search their web page for the Office of Institutional Research and look for the Common Data Set."

• Doug on 'the margins'

• J.D. email

• Verghis on KUMON honor roll

If there are things I've forgotten, let me know.


other

Since I'm posting a public to-do list, I also need to:

• locate Ken's reading test & post links everywhere

• post links to FERPA (thank you, Rudbeckia)

• post links to the Rewards Reading Series, which both Dan and Smartest Tractor have mentioned (Smartest Tractor has purchased SOPRIS' writing program, IIRC)

• post ALL links to reading/writing materials on the how-to-teach-writing page

• collect the science-teaching links from.....was it today? (it's all a blur!)

I should probably go ahead and buy DON'T MAKE ME THINK....

---

ReadingFluencyTable 19 May 2006 - 22:15 CatherineJohnson



AIMSWeb Growth Table Reading

We should all be keeping our eyes open for free and/or inexpensive ways parents can do their own assessments.

For math, remember that we have David Klein's problem sets, which he wrote to match the State of CA tests, and the Singapore Math assessment tests.

Looks like AIMSWeb may be what we need for reading.


No Child Left Behind No Parent Left in the Dark

I've just remembered this book (hope I can find my copy).

It's fantastic, invaluable.

Lists all the questions your teacher should be prepared to answer in a parent-teacher conference, including all the standardized tests the school will have given that year.

Our own teachers answered none of these questions, ever.

When I showed this book to my sister-in-law, who teaches in central IL, she took it for granted that all teachers routinely answer the questions the teacher-author of No Parent Left in the Dark recommends.


update—I found my copy. The author says 'there are tests' schools give children that take no more than an hour, and give you all the information you need to know about where exactly a child is in math achievement, and what & where the gaps are.

If he's in 5th grade, where is he in 5th grade? Does he score at 5.1 or 5.6? (Not sure what the decimal represents. I assume it's either one-tenth of the school year or 1 month.)

But he doesn't say what these tests are.

Is KeyMath one of them?

[pause]

wow

It is. Takes 35 to 50 minutes to administer.

I'm going to ask the guidance counselor to give Christopher the test. Heaven only knows what kind of response that will get.

Domains: Subtests assess content in three areas—Basic Concepts, Operations, and Applications.

Subtest names: Numeration, Rational Numbers, Geometry, Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication, Division, Mental Computation, Measurement, Time and Money, Estimation, Interpreting Data, Problem Solving

Sounds good to me.

---

RoundOne 19 May 2006 - 22:07 CatherineJohnson




ding, ding, ding

We're off to our meeting with the principal.


I predict:

• no to changing Christopher's English class

• no to changing the grades on his photo essay and feature story/persuasive essay/major research product

• suggested move from Phase 4 math to Phase 2/3

• minimizing of Grade Contract; "it's just an exercise," "it doesn't mean anything," "I don't know where you got the idea that we blame the kids" etc. This will be a concession.

what I'm wearing

• tight jeans from Paris

• see-through crinkle mock turtleneck from Weathervane

• Armani blazer, collar turned up

• discreet Judith Jack lapel pin; Christmas theme

• Italian boots

I wonder if Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers is still in print?



next stop: Pupil Personnel



the good news

Christopher is out of the line of fire.

Yesterday Mrs. Roth screamed 'Shut up' at one of her perceived favorites.

She says nothing to Christopher that could be remotely interpreted as negative, hostile, teasing, or bullying.

That's the way it is with bullies.

If they're not slamming your kid, they're slamming someone else's.

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BeckyOnHowNotToTeachWriting 10 Jan 2006 - 13:38 CatherineJohnson



Let me just say that my 4th grader had to write a five-paragraph "persuasive essay" this weekend on why students should be allowed to return to the classroom unescorted if they forget their lunchboxes. I didn't help him with that one, except to correct his spelling. In fact, I was bursting with pride that my son figured out 3 different ways to state his 1 reason, so that he could form an essay body of 3 short paragraphs... he deserves a gold star for recognizing and attempting to execute the convention of using 3 independent supports for his argument. Even though he didn't.

But in regards to developmentally inappropriate writing assignments for 3rd graders:

The Book Talk, that comes home with these instructions, in this order:

1. Give the name of the book and the author.

2. Tell your favorite part.

3. Tell what other books this book reminds you of.

4. Show your favorite illustration from the book.

5. Tell the first sentence of the book.

6. Would you recommend this book to others?

Seem reasonable? Except there is no instruction for:

How much or how little to describe the main and supporting characters that are featured in your favorite part, so that when you read a paragraph from your favorite part, it will make sense to your classmates.

How much or how little plot information to give so that your favorite part will make sense to your classmates.

How to pick a good favorite part that you can read to your classmates and have them grasp what is funny or scary or mysterious in one paragraph.

Whether your favorite part should match the favorite illustration you pick.

Whether the best order to answer questions 1 - 6 in your book talk is 1 - 6.

And don't forget the poster for your talk!

As Steve said, it's (finding,) organizing, reducing, and localizing the information with your child that is so incredibly hard. Important, yes; easy, no. It just still takes me by surprise when I'm called upon to teach my child how to write in these situations.

But for a science fair project? It's much more pleasant to teach my son how to write in that context. That is entirely parent-driven, and it's not a surprise: I know I'm on the hook for how clearly my child presents his information. Children have not developed the ability to step outside themselves and figure out what their audience needs to know, and when they need to know it.


Yes, yes, and yes.

I find writing books incredibly hard.

But the hard part isn't the writing & revising.

The hard part is the researching and thinking.

---

IndependentGeorgeOnWriting 19 May 2006 - 16:04 CatherineJohnson



responding to posts by Becky C and Steve:


This reminds me of two things: Mr. Jacobs' AP American History class in the 11th grade, and Paul Salley's Calculus class in college. Mr. Jacobs' was the first class I ever took where the ratio of red marks (his comments) to blue marks (my sentences) approached 1. He didn't grade the first few essays, but instead wrote short essays of his own telling us what we needed to change. It was the first time I'd ever seen comments like, "You have offered no evidence to support this", "You claimed the exact opposite in paragraph 2", or, my personal favorite: "Interesting point - where's the followup?". (That was generally with regard to provocative points in the opening paragraph, which I never backed up later on). It was blunt, but, after that initial shock (and hurt, to be quite honest), I soon came around to seeing that everything he said was dead on.

I could write beautifully, but I'd never learned to formulate, and sustain, a coherent argument. The thing is, though, that even by the end of that year, I was still having trouble composing my essays, and would revert to my old tricks when pressed. If I couldn't find a supporting argument in one of the documents, I would just make a declaration without citing evidence. If I had two unrelated points, I would link them together with a well-turned phrase which sounded great, but held together with only the most tenuous of logic. And no matter how many times Mr. Jacobs called me out on it, and no matter how much I knew he was right, I continued to have trouble. My re-writes always fixed the problem, but I could only do it after he had already pointed them out to me. I still aced the class (I got a 5 on the AP Exam), but nevertheless couldn't get over the hump intellectually.

I finally figured it out in college, in Mr. Salley's calculus class. Unusual for a freshman class, Mr. Salley had us working on proofs from day one (easy ones, but proofs nonetheless), and would always enjoin us to "prove it" when we stated ideas that just seemed so blindingly obvious. It was in that context - seeing logic and deduction stripped almost entirely of language - that I finally learned out how to put everything together. What I couldn't do with words, I could do with a bunch of weird squiggles on a page; all I had to do was translate. It was an epiphany.

I'm not sure how useful this anecdote is (I guess I needed to spend a little more time working on the thesis). But I think it does illustrate difficult it can be to teach good writing. Mr. Jacobs wasn't a good teacher - he was a great one. And not to put too fine a point on it, I was a great student. And yet, I still had trouble. I don't think I would have ever 'gotten it' on my own, without the explicit training Mr. Salley gave us. At the same time, I never would have been able to make the connection without Mr. Jacobs' instruction; until then, I never even realized that there was a problem with my writing. Without that help, I don't think I ever would have thought to apply the same brain which decoded algebra to encode good rhetoric.






formulate and sustain a coherent argument

Ed says his entry-level Masters candidates can't write an argument (and often can't identify the argument of a text).

He doesn't say this as a 'students are so dumb today' lament. These are smart, well-educated students who possess strong skills and domain knowledge.

Another thing. There is research showing, and it's so true as to be obvious in Ed's experience, that college students can talk an argument or an idea far better than they can write an argument or an idea.

That may sound obvious, but when you see it, it's startling. People who can be cogent, coherent, and intelligent in conversation or debate can produce very poor prose—prose in which the argument they are making unravels or disappears altogether.

Neither of us knows how early in a child's education he or she can learn to formulate and sustain a coherent argument in prose. What we do know is that it's very difficult, and it seems to come after a number of years of practice.

This may not have to be the case with proper teaching, which is one of the reasons I want to know how the British teach composition. I think the British may be doing it better than we, and perhaps earlier in a student's career (though, again, I don't know).

Nevertheless, here in America, at the moment, that's the way it is. It takes a long time for a student to learn how to formulate and sustain a coherent argument in prose.

This is why I'm going to spend a great deal of time simply having Christopher read quality nonfiction essays and identify the argument, supporting evidence, and logical structure.

I'm going to use the British exercise of having a student condense and re-condense a 500-word argument into ever-shorter statements.

And I'm going to experiment with Ben Franklin's practice of reverse-engineering of persuasive essays by cutting apart the sentences and trying to reassemble them himself, like a puzzle.

It worked for him.


terrific Comments thread

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ThereAreOrAreNotShortcutsChooseOne 10 Jan 2006 - 16:13 CatherineJohnson



This is funny.

I picked up a book called Shortcuts for the Student Writer at Barnes and Noble today. When I looked it up on Amazon to post a picture of the cover, Rafe Asquith's book about teaching Shakespeare to disadvantaged kids also popped up. (Asquith is the Jaime Escalante of ELA.)

Title: There Are No Shortcuts.

---

IfTheStudentHasntLearned 23 Dec 2005 - 22:16 CatherineJohnson









revision

From Catherine:

Our new pretend-shirt specifically says "If the student hasn't learned, the school hasn't taught," not 'the teacher hasn't taught'.

No more thoughtless (and unintended) teacher-bashing.

Seriously. I'm the last person to want to make teachers feel blamed and bashed, seeing as how half my relatives have been or are currently teachers. I'm sure I'll be one again at some point, too.

The problem is that, when you talk about schools, it's the teachers who are visible. They're in the trenches, so they get the blame. (I realize I'm not telling teachers anything they don't know.) I know better than that, but I've been sounding like I don't.

Time for a course correction.

From Carolyn:

Hey, my entire family on my mother's side were also teachers, every man and woman Jack of them. I've been a teacher too; so has Catherine.

My observation is that policy flows downhill in a school, and the buck stops with the teachers. They get the responsibility, but not the authority; policy changes really have to start with upper management.

We're here to put the pressure on upper management, and support the teachers in doing what they know how to do.

---

OnwardAndUpwardWithMsKozak 23 May 2006 - 22:25 CatherineJohnson



Oh boy, Christopher is a happy guy.

He's in heaven.

He moved to Ms. Kozak's class today, and came home filled with Ms. Kozak stories.

"Ms. Kozak is giving us spelling," he said. "She gives a weekly spelling list. We have to take a spelling test on Friday."

"Ms Kozak taught us all the verbs, and she made us take notes. She told us about active verbs."

"Ms. Kozak taught us what constructive criticism is. Then she made everybody trade their drafts with their 5 o'clock peer partners."

Apparently Ms. Kozak has the kids fill out a clock with different peer partners, so they can switch around amongst the different kids when they exchange their work. Today they were looking at the subparagraph (something like that), the lead, and the 'hook.'

"They were really good," Christopher said, speaking of the other kids' works in progress. "I read them. They were really good."

"She gives us homework, too," he said, sounding like homework from English class was a gift.

So that's the silver lining, one of them anyway. Christopher now believes that a teacher who teaches isn't someone you take for granted.

"I did a good impression," he said, too. "I answered all the questions. I did a good impression."

That frosts me.

Here is a child so eager to please, so wanting to do well in school, that he's thinking how to make a good impression even though he's still too young to know that people 'make a good impression,' not 'do a good impression.'

Mrs. Roth has a criminal heart.



meanwhile, back at the ranch

The other kids are still ragging Christopher about Mrs. Roth.

"You made Mrs. Roth feel bad." etc. The girl who's Mrs. Roth's perceived favorite gave him the finger. They don't make teachers' pets like they used to.

Another child reported that Mrs. Roth had said to the children, in class today, that the grade she gave Christopher 'was fair.'

Needless to say, that prompted an email to the principal.

---

ReadingDiagnosticAtKumon 10 Jan 2006 - 14:47 CarolynJohnston


Ben and I visited Ginny at the Kumon Center tonight, so that Ben could take the diagnostic test for placement in the Kumon reading program.

Ginny and I had a great time talking while Ben ground away at the diagnostic test (just kidding about the grinding-away part -- I just wanted to leave you with the accurate picture of Ginny and Ilaughing and yakking while Ben swotted away on his exam). She was a Japan consultant for a long time, working with American executives to help them learn to deal with Japanese executives. She started a Kumon franchise about 8 years ago because she really believed (and believes) in what Kumon can do for students.

It looks as though Kumon might be able to do a lot for Ben. She gave him the primary 6 placement exam in reading, for 6th graders. When he sat down with it, he actually said, "Finally, some real language arts! With real grammar practice and writing! Not this stupid lit log stuff all the time."

I was surprised to hear him say that. I know he's treading water in his language arts class -- I know he is not learning much, and he's doing no real expository writing at all. It's a joke, actually. He went to a Core Knowledge school, and they did extensive research reports on topics in history every year after 2nd grade. That was intense; maybe even a little too intense. But when it gets to the point where BEN HIMSELF is complaining about the lack of teeth in his language arts class -- then I sit up and take notice.

I was delighted with his performance on the reading exam. She gave him the 6th grade diagnostic test and he went all the way through with one small error. It wasn't easy material, either. What really impressed me was one problem -- which he aced -- in which a short story had been broken up into 8 or 9 single sentences and rearranged; the testee was supposed to number them in their correct order. It wasn't a trivial task.

What's amazing about the fact that he aced this question is that sequencing -- correctly ordering things -- was one of Ben's weakest areas, cognitively, as a young child. We spent hours with the Playskool stacking rings and stacking cups, trying to help him put them in the correct order; later, we worked with sets of 3 or 4 simple cards that told a story if you put them in the right order. It is something that typical kids do pretty easily, and we had to work hard to catch up. Eventually we left them behind and moved on with his childhood, because you have to, but to find that he has somehow magically more than caught up in this area is an extremely pleasant extreme surprise.

He placed into a section in which he'll work on dependent clauses, mastering the main idea of a paragraph, and vocabulary. Extracting the main idea of a paragraph is one of the most difficult tasks for any autism spectrum kid -- as Catherine and Temple say, autism is a disorder of hyperspecificity. People with very high-functioning autism will seize on a million irrelevant details in a narrative, and completely miss its main point, something we typicals can extract almost without thinking. I am excited about Ben's starting Kumon reading; his success on the diagnostic test is a good omen.

And it also did me good to hear Ginny say, "he does well." Because I've known in my heart for years that he does really well, and is someone to be proud of, but I'm often out there waving the flag all by myself.



(Comments thread: notes on DOUBLE YOUR CHILD'S GRADES by Eugene Schwartz — teaching your child to read analytically & take notes)

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SteveOnTeachingWritingPart2 10 Jan 2006 - 14:00 CatherineJohnson



I'm trying to pull together the Writing thread for my neighbor, and just re-discovered this Comment from Steve:

I just helped my son (4th grade) complete his report/map/craft project on Chirstmas in Greece. (All of the kids had a different country.) As with his other projects, the problem is that the school doesn't prepare them to do the job. They may talk a little bit about what to do, but they don't see what goes on at home. The kids just can't do the project by themselves. If I let him do the project all by himself, it would be horrible, take FOREVER, he would learn very little, and he would get a poor grade. I end up doing the teacher's job. I don't do it for him, but he needed major help in organization, reducing the information down to a reasonable size, and putting it all into his own words. No parent I know likes school projects like dioramas, research reports, and other thematic displays of educational pedagogy and feel-good-ness. Perhaps they expect and want parental involvement?!? I'm more than willing to do my part, but, I really don't want to do their job. Please don't ask me again to practice basic math with my son at home.

There are so many fantastic Comments on this site. I've got a list to pull 'up front,' and am going to carve out some time today to get started, at least. The archived entries on how to teach writing are here.

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RootWordVisible 11 Jan 2006 - 16:42 CatherineJohnson



Does visible have a root word?

Is the root word vis?

I'm confused, because the GRE Vocabulary prep site says that 'vis' in 'visible' is both the root and the prefix.



ktm pool

A horrifying thought just crossed my mind.

It's entirely possible that every single ktm contributor knows the answer to this question.

I'll lay odds.




English from the Roots Up




Vocabulary from Classical Roots



update

Google Master recommends Word Power Made Easy. It looks fantastic. I've just ordered a copy.

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SusanOnPartsAndWholes 11 Jan 2006 - 16:04 CatherineJohnson



This way of looking at the edu-world has been terrifically helpful to me:

Part of the problem is that, like New Math and Whole Language, there is a movement afoot to push what I consider middle school skills down into grade school, all with the assumption that grade school skills will just be learned by osmosis (or shoved onto the middle school teachers...again.) These are your two camps.

In the beginning this new way of teaching writing [beginning in Kindergarten] looks very impressive as little persuasive essays come home and state tests appear to improve. Like math, we didn't learn it that way and so what do we know? I believe this is what you would label teaching Whole to Parts.

The traditional way of learning writing (or math, for that matter) has always been Parts to Whole, starting with building blocks for younger children (handwriting, grammar, sentence structure, punctuation) and then moving to more complicated techniques requiring better critical thinking skills (notetaking, outlining, etc.) that actually match the child's growing opinions and ideas. This strikes me as common sense, but what do I know?

Whether this new way is really better in the long run is still unsure, from everything I've read, yet one can't help notice that something is wrong when college professors complain loudly about students' bad writing skills, and then even request a grammar section on the SATs.

key words: parts to whole whole to parts two camps

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SentenceCombining 18 Jan 2006 - 16:43 CatherineJohnson



....speaking of books coming in the mail, my copy of Don Killgallon's Sentence Composing for Middle School arrived today. (Killgallon's website)

I don't exactly know what sentence combining is, but I have a Bayesian conviction it's going to be the answer to my Writing-Instruction problems at the sentence level, thanks to this fellow:

Grammar teaching and writing skills: the research evidence

Richard Hudson (dick@ling.ucl.ac.uk)

Dept of Phonetics and Linguistics, UCL, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT

Does a training in 'formal grammar' improve a child's ability to write? At one time it was taken for granted that the answer was yes, so children were taught grammatical analysis as part of the effort to improve their writing. However when educational researchers sought evidence for the expected effects, the results were negative; for example, one of the classic experiments concluded: "It seems safe to infer that the study of English grammar had a negligible or even harmful effect upon the correctness of children's writing in the early part of the five secondary schools." (Harris 1962) A number of studies in the 60s and 70s have since been accepted as 'classic' support for the view that grammar teaching does nothing for children's writing. By the late 60s the dominant view in both the UK and the USA, and possibly throughout the English-speaking world, was that "most children cannot learn grammar and ... even to those who can it is of little value." (Thompson 1969) No doubt this view fitted the spirit of the times both in English teaching (where grammar was seen as a shackle on children's imagination) and in linguistics (where Chomsky was arguing that grammatical competence develops 'naturally' according to an innate programme, so teaching is simply irrelevant).

Since then much has changed in both the UK and the USA, and the pendulum seems to be on the return swing. It would be naive to think that the pendulum is driven by academic research - indeed, there has been very little research on grammar and writing since the flurry in the 60s and 70s; rather it reflects very general attitude changes in education and more generally throughout society. However the result is that there is now much more enthusiasm in some educational circles for the idea that conscious grammar (resulting from formal teaching) could have the useful benefit of improving writing.....

What, then, does the published research really say about the effects of grammar teaching?

[snip]

Grammar teaching could be surreptitious, as it were, with a clear underlying theory of grammar but minimal use of grammatical terminology. This is in fact how a lot of grammar teaching has been done; and in particular there is a well-recognised activity called 'sentence combining' which seems to be widely used in the USA. There is some evidence, apparently good, that this kind of activity benefits children's writing (Abrahamson 1977; Barton 1997; Hillocks 1986; Mellon 1969; O'Hare 1973), and in some studies it turned out that this kind of grammar teaching produced better results than more traditional teaching of grammatical analysis. For example, " Hillocks surveys the many studies of the effects of sentence combining, and finds them overwhelmingly POSITIVE at all levels (grade 2 to adult). 60% show significant gains in syntactic maturity; 30% non-significant gains; 10% no gains." (Weaver 1996, reporting Hillocks (1986)).

Why should these exercises be so much more successful than traditional analysis? It seems reasonable to assume that it is at least in part because they are exercises in the production of language, and specifically in the production of written language, so they feed much more directly into the child's growing repertoire of productive skills than exercises in grammatical analysis do. In short, they are more closely integrated into the teaching of writing, so the skills acquired in isolation are more likely to transfer directly into a usable skill. However this conclusion does not necessarily rule out the possibility of transfer from grammatical analysis under the right conditions.

This makes sense to me, so I'm going with it.

5 reasons:

• it makes sense

• I'm a writer, so my intuition about what works in writing instruction is probably worth listening to

• I used to teach writing, so my intuition that sentence combining makes sense is, again, probably worth listening to

• KUMON Reading uses sentence combining

• sentence combining seems somewhat analogous to the way Ben Franklin taught himself to write

We need a Bayesian Rating Scale

That way, we could assign numerical values to the question of, Just how strongly do I think I guessed right?

Here's a possibility:

On a scale of 1 to 7, 1 being 'no clue' and 7 being 'death and taxes, how certain do I feel that sentence-combining will make Christopher a better writer?

6

or

6.5

I'm not feeling a lot of doubt here.



I love this

back to Hudson:

In conclusion, the idea that grammar teaching improves children's writing skills is much better supported by the available research than is commonly supposed. However there is no denying the need for more research in this area, so we finish with quotations (from Walmsley 1984) by two of the twentieth century's most distinguished psychologists who have taken an interest in this question.

Robert Thouless (1969:211):
"If a small part of the research effort that has been put into demonstrating the uselessness of grammar ... had been distributed over a wider field, more might be known about how skill in the use of English can best be developed."

John Carroll (1958:324):
"I am reasonably sure that unless the student gets a feeling for sentence patterning ... his own sentence patterns will show many obvious defects. Research on the effectiveness of teaching English grammar in improving English composition has been mainly negative, but until this research has been repeated with improved methods of teaching English grammar, I will remain unconvinced that grammar is useless in this respect."

I went on a Sentence-Combining treasure hunt on Amazon, and came up with Don Kilgallon as the likeliest prospect. Just glancing through the middle school book, it seems like exactly what I want.

From the back of the book:

With the first edition of his book, Don Killgallon changed the way thousands of high school English teachers and their students look at language, literature, and writing by focusing on the sentence. In this revised edition, Killgallon presents the same proven methodology but offers all-new writing exercises designed specifically for the middle school student.

Unlike traditional grammar books that emphasize the parsing of sentences, this worktext asks students to imitate the sentence styles of professional writers, making the sentence composition process an enjoyable and challenging one. Killgallon teaches subliminally, nontechnically--the ways real writers compose their sentences, the ways students subsequently intuit within their own writing.

Designed to produce sentence maturity and variety, the worktext offers extensive practice in four sentence-manipulating techniques: sentence unscrambling, sentence imitating, sentence combining, and sentence expanding. All of the activities are based on model sentences written by widely respected authors. They are designed to teach students structures they should but seldom use. The rationale is that imitation and practice are as valuable in gaining competence and confidence in written language production as they are in oral language production.

Since the practices have proven successful for the great majority of students who have used them in all kinds of schools, it's demonstrably true that Sentence Composing can work anywhere--in any school, with any student.

I believe it.

Kilgallon has written books for all grade levels.

















Bayesian statistics & false positives
Bayes & the human mind
Bayesian reasoning, intuition, & the cognitive unconscious
most bell curves have thick tails
ECONOMIST explanation Bayesian statistics
Bayesian certainty scale

sentence combining
Smartest Tractor on Killgallon & 5 ways to combine sentences

Bayesianprobability


-- CatherineJohnson - 17 Jan 2006

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NoGradeInflationInTheSuburbs 16 Sep 2006 - 21:07 CatherineJohnson



I say we get rid of middle schools altogether.

Ed just called.

On the train he had a chat with a distinguished academic, a Brit.

Her daughter is in middle school, and is doing badly. As the mom put it, 'my very bright daughter who is getting bad grades.'

The mom just wrote a paper, start to finish, for her daughter.

The grade?

C-

Ed said, "Very few Brits who've become distinguished professors can't write."

update: Ed now says it was a C+, not a C-. He also talked to the professor again, and learned that the only reason she'd written the paper was that her daughter was completely overwhelmed with work that night. There was no way she could finish everything, so the mother wrote the paper and the daughter did everything else.



Ed gets a B-

So Christopher just handed in his first paper to his new English teacher.

Ed worked closely with him on it.

He didn't write it. He read Christopher's rough draft and made comments, as a teacher would do, and as this teacher does.^*

Then Christopher revised.

Ed checked grammar, punctuation, paragraph structure, and topic sentences.

The paper came back yesterday with a grade of 80.

I better try my hand on the next one. See if we can get that baby up to 83 or 84.

[update: ok, bad idea ]



my Secret Plan

This reminds me of my Secret Plan.

Back when Christopher got his two Ds from she-who-shall-be-nameless and was asked, in front of the class, 'Are you trying to do the work at all?' I mentioned that Christopher would not be writing any more papers for this teacher.

What I didn't say was that, henceforth, I would be writing Christopher's papers for this teacher.

Ed and I agreed on that course of action the day he wrote his email to the principal.

My plan was to write all of Christopher's papers, start to finish, collect my Cs and Ds, and then, at the end of the school year, publish the whole lot of them on the internet - or, better yet, publish the whole lot of them on the internet and write an article about my experience.

Bestselling author flunks middle school English.

No!

Make that Bestselling author with glowing reviews flunks middle school English.

That works.

I would have done it, too.



at Princeton

Ed told me a great story from his Princeton days.

He met his first wife there. In one of her history courses, she got stalled; just could not bring herself to write the paper that was due.

Finally a professor friend of theirs, also a historian, wrote it for her. I find that shocking, but there it is. This was a famous professor; I think he's well-known & respected to this day. (Come to think of it, he may have been a Brit, too.)

When Ed read the paper he told his girlfriend, "This is too good, you can't hand this in."

She handed it in anyway.

She got a B+.



grade inflation for children who are struggling, grade deflation for children who aren't

I'll write a serious post about this at some point, but that's for later. Suffice it to say that, from where I sit, the notion that there is massive 'grade inflation' in American schools has it exactly backwards. We're experiencing grade deflation. We have a child who does better work at a younger age than either of us ever did, and he's getting worse grades. Much worse.

Other parents have said the same.

I don't know why this should be. But I have to consider the possibility that Grading Hard is another form of false rigor.

You know the curriculum is rigorous because the kids are getting Bs, not As. Or Cs and Ds, not Bs.

As things stand, the system is filled to overflowing with bad incentives.

A behaviorist would tell you that 'incentives' operate mostly outside conscious awareness. That's certainly what I believe.

There are many, many incentives in our school system - perhaps especially in well-financed school districts like my own - to look like you're offering a rigorous, high-quality curriculum whether you are or not.

It would be a miracle if schools hadn't responded to these incentives - and it would be a miracle if they had any idea that they have responded to these incentives.



alternative hypothesis

OK, this makes more sense (from Ken & Steve) [update: this makes sense, but it isn't what's going on in Irvington]:

Ken:

My theory is that in courses where there is subjective grading (most courses outside of math and science) a student's grades are mostly determined by his academic reputation.

[snip]

I transferred schools often as a kid -- in 5th grade, in 7th, and in 10th. Every time I transferred, my grades would always dip a little (I'd get more Bs than A's) until the teachers got to know me. After a quarter or so, they'd always return back up to where they'd always been. I basically I had to re-prove I was an A student before the teachers handed out A's again.

Then there was the time in senior year of high school where I had to take a lower track class (religion I believe) because it was the only class that I could fit in my schedule and even then I had to go seven periods straight through without a lunch. For the first half of the year, the teacher knew who I was and knew I was in his class and graded me accordingly. But, he left after the first semester and a new teacher taught the course. He was new so he didn't know me. I was just another non-college bound kid to him and he didn't exactly have high expectations of the class. Needless to say, he gave me the lowest grade that semester. This wasn't a class of A students; these were mostly B students and they deserved Bs.

Then there was the time in college when I gave all my psych class papers to my friend who was taking the same class two years after I took it (different teacher though). I got all As in that class, don't know whether they were deserved or not. He got out with Cs using the same papers that got me As. Go figure.

Steve:

This is the competitive ice skating grading philosophy. Some skaters can never win no matter how well they do. It's kind of like a running average grade.

wicked thought for the day

This is reminding me of that famous social psych experiment where perfectly normal people checked into mental hospitals as patients with psychiatric diagnoses, and then acted normal.

All of their normal behaviors, IIRC, were interpreted by staff as acting-out or psychotic. (NOT FACT-CHECKED)

Some writer-parent with time on his/her hands ought to write all his/her kid's papers some year as an experiment.

PLEASE NOTE: THIS PERSON WILL NOT BE ME.

I'd love to see someone do it, though.



update: fact-checked

"On Being Sane in Insane Places"

I was right.

After the 'pseudo-patients' were admitted to the psychiatric hospital, all acted sane. None of the doctors picked up on it, but some of the patients did:

The pseudo-patient's sanity went undetected. They spent an average of 19 days (range of 7 to 52 days) on the ward, before being released. When released, they were diagnosed as being `schizophrenic in remission' not as being sane. Some visitors and patients detected the pseudo-patients' sanity (35 out of 118 patients).

^* I must add this: Christopher's new English teacher is lovely, and is teaching a serious course. Christopher comes home nights and reads me the notes he's taken; he's shown me the grammar and spelling they're working on (excellent); I've read the writing instructions she's given them (also excellent). She's even working on his handwriting, which is almost enough in and of itself to put her in my pantheon. Her grading may be stricter than I think right (we'll see), but she is teaching and Christopher is learning. Perhaps even more importantly, he's motivated to learn. In her class, he wants to do his best. UPDATE 9-27-2006: She was a pretty harsh grader, but Christopher was able to improve his work over the course of a semester. The comments at rate my teacher are interesting.


no grade inflation in the suburbs
grade deflation in Irvington
grade deflation in the suburbs, part 2
is there a dangerous myth of grade inflation?

gradedeflation



-- CatherineJohnson - 31 Jan 2006

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SomethingElseToWorryAbout 01 Feb 2006 - 13:22 CatherineJohnson



penmanship

Cody Lesko and his second-grade classmates practice legibility at Don Juan Avila grade school in Aliso Viejo.
(Mark Boster / LAT)

The heyday of penmanship instruction was in the 1910s and 1920s, when students were taught to practice shapes in unison as teachers shouted orders in military-like drills, said Tamara Plakins Thornton, author of "Handwriting in America" and a history professor at the State University of New York in Buffalo.

At the time, the discipline required to master penmanship was believed to build character and foster virtue, she said. Juvenile delinquents were forced to do rote drills in an effort to rehabilitate them. It was foisted upon new immigrants to help them assimilate.

[snip]

Also, a soon-to-be-published nationwide survey of primary school teachers found about 90% had received little or no formal training in how to teach penmanship.

"They didn't feel they were prepared, or they had little training and it wasn't something they particularly liked to teach," said Steve Graham, a professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville who has studied handwriting since 1979 and who conducted the survey.

[snip]

But penmanship remains crucial to a student's success, Graham said. A prime example is the SAT's new timed essay section, which must be handwritten.

Though SAT graders are instructed not to let legibility influence how essays are scored, at least 10 studies have concluded that that's impossible, Graham said. A 1992 study of graders who had been so trained found that neatly written essays received the equivalent of a 2.5-point benefit on a 100-point scale. Among untrained graders, the advantage grew to more than four points.

"You say, 'I want you to rate this for quality and content and ignore the handwriting.' They can't do it," Graham said. "The compositions with poor legibility get lower ratings and the ones with more legibility get better grades, even though the content is the same."

The new SAT section is among the factors prompting a few suburban school districts to revive the emphasis on penmanship, according to Gisele Ragusa, a USC professor who studies language and literacy instruction.

One reason graders don't/can't ignore handwriting is that they almost certainly know, at some level, that very bad handwriting tracks with learning disabilities.

When Christopher was in Kindergarten, we were told that he was at risk for dyslexia because his handwriting was so poor.

I checked with John (Ratey) who confirmed it; bad handwriting & LD track. You can have bad handwriting & no LD, but if you have LD odds are your handwriting stinks. (Apparently this has to do with 'handwriting' regions in the brain being next door to 'reading' regions....something like that. So you can get a spill-over effect when regions involved in reading aren't working so well.)

I've spent a fair amount of time working on Christopher's handwriting, against a backdrop of Major Spousal Dismissal.

Then we had a birthday party and one of the guests was a kid with a fair number of learning problems. The kids had all signed their own birthday cards, and that kid was the only kid with handwriting as bad as Christopher's.

After that, Ed had a (somewhat) different attitude. If Christopher's handwriting looks like the handwriting of a kid with major learning problems, that's not a Good Thing.

Ed's handwriting is psychotic, fyi. Mostly because he's a lefty.

Back to Kindergarten: after we got the word on Christopher's high-risk handwriting, I freaked. I figured: OF COURSE. We've got two kids with autism; our 3rd kid can't possibly escaped unscathed.

So dyslexia it is!

Ed dismissed the whole thing (he's a Dismisser), and, fortunately, turned out to be right.

Two weeks later Christopher started reading on his own. He just burst into literacy, suddenly & without warning.

As an aside, IIRC, about 10% of kids who are given systematic phonics instruction - which I think Christopher was - learn to read 'on their own,' without further instruction. After that he scored incredibly high on all reading tests, sometimes as much as 1 1/2 to 2 years ahead of grade level.....

....and then he had a 4th grade slump that took us completely by surprise. All of a sudden, he just stopped reading.

I've told this story before, but since so many of you have little kids, I'm repeating it. Reading is a skill you need to stay on top of at least into middle school. (And maybe beyond? I don't know.) As far as I can tell, the fact that your little one reads well isn't a guarantee that he's going to continue to read well.

I think the wall Christopher hit — and that kids in general hit — was multisyllabic words, which crop up in 4th grade texts.

Here's the reading factoid that surprised me:

Perfectly normal, good readers can't sound out nonsense multisyllabic words.

I didn't believe this until I tested Christopher myself. I gave him some two-syllable nonsense words to read, and, sure enough, he couldn't read them.

My perception now is that kids need more reading instruction once they hit 4th grade — and a different form of reading instruction. (I think one of you posted an interview with Reid Lyon who said that we need more research on older readers, not just on the little kids, right? I may be able to find it.)

Christopher recovered quickly from his '4th grade slump.' I dont know why.

I do know that I started the Megawords spelling program with him the summer after 4th grade, and he started reading again shortly thereafter. Whether or not Megawords was the help he needed, I don't know. I tend to think it was.

We've been using Megawords ever since. It's an 8-year spelling program for grades 4 through 11. We're in the middle of Book 3, and I'm hoping to be into Book 5 by fall.



Megawords research base

The Megawords paper is terrifically useful, and jibes with what I've read in materials that weren't produced as marketing materials. I'd pull some passages, but Adobe Acrobat won't let me copy text from the file.

Suffice it to say that 4th grade is a turning point for reading skills. That's the year when children begin to read words syllable-by-syllable instead of letter-by-letter; it's also the year they shift from decoding words to decoding the meaning of the words.

My feeling is that schools probably drop the ball at this point. Phonics is about letter-to-sound correspondence; syllables are a whole different thing. I've never heard of schools formally teaching children to decode syllables.

Megawords also teaches word structure, vocabulary, (some) reading comprehension, and reading fluency. Each unit includes a timed reading test.





back to handwriting

Two years ago I went on a tear, researching handwriting philosophies, curricula, and programs.

It was semi-fun. (The World Handwriting Contest, or whatever it's called, is cool.)

The book I decided on is Write Now by Barbara Getty and Inga Dubay. It's essentially a remedial program for people like doctors whose handwriting is so bad even a pharmacist can't read it, which was exactly what I need & needed. I like it.



update: an Amazon reader dissents!

He might be right.....



Handwriting without Tears

If you're serious about a handwriting curriculum (I wanted something quick & dirty), this may be the one to use.

from the TIMES article:

The Capistrano Unified School District in Orange County is among them. Last fall, the district's elementary schools began using a new penmanship curriculum, Handwriting Without Tears, that's intended to be easier for students to master.

This is not your mother's penmanship course. Printed letters are not learned in alphabetical order but in groups of similarly formed letters. Cursive letters do not slant to the right, and most flourishes have been eliminated.

"Make it cleaner, make it vertical and keep it simple," said Jan Olsen, an occupational therapist in Maryland who developed the curriculum. "I don't do loop-de-doops. I don't do curlicues. I don't do all that frou-frou stuff."

-- CatherineJohnson - 31 Jan 2006

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SandraStotskyOnReadingAndEdSchools 30 Jun 2006 - 16:42 CatherineJohnson

Abstract: Reading instruction is one of the very few areas where it is not the case that “more research is needed.” Educational policy makers already have the theory and the evidence supporting it to guide the implementation of effective reading programs from K-12. In fact, they have had the theory and the evidence for decades. The central problem they face in providing effective reading instruction and a sound reading curriculum stems not from an absence of a research base but from willful indifference to what the research has consistently shown and to a theory that has been repeatedly confirmed. Using Jeanne Chall’s The Academic Achievement Challenge as a point of departure, I suggest why our education schools, through their influence on teachers, administrators, textbook publishers, and state and national assessments of students and teachers, have come to be the major obstacle to closing the “gap” in student achievement.

source:
Why Reading Teachers Are Not Trained to Use a Research-Based Pedagogy:
Is Institutional Reform Possible?
Sandra Stotsky
Research Scholar
Northeastern University
Prepared for the Courant Initiative for the Mathematical Sciences in Education Forum:
“Delivery on the Promise of Mayoral Control”
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
New York University
October 2, 2005

David Klein on Bennet-Kew

Not all teachers can accept the kind of environment one finds at Bennett-Kew. Newly credentialled teachers from prestigious universities are sometimes turned away after a semester or two. Education college doctrine is often at odds with what works at Bennett-Kew, and Mrs. Ichinaga has found that in some cases noncredentialled teachers provide better instruction than credentialled ones.

source:
High Achievement in Mathematics:
Lessons from Three Los Angeles Elementary Schools
by
David Klein
Commissioned by the Brookings Institution
August 2000

I have never heard of it

Notices [of the American Mathematical Society]: Starting in 1968, the government funded a huge study called Project Follow-Through. It cost a billion dollars and ran almost thirty years. The purpose was to examine how different teaching methods or philosophies affected student performance. What they found was that the traditional, “direct instruction” method was the most effective. Are you familiar with this study?

[President of NCTM,] Gail Burrill: I have never heard of it.

source:
Interview with Gail Burrill by Allyn Jackson

Project Follow-Through — what happened?

I've barely skimmed the surface of writing about what happend and why.

However, out of my very small sample of articles on the subject, Cathy L. Watkins' piece is the first thing I'll read in full.

excerpts:

The history of Follow Through and its effects constitute a case study of how the educational establishment functions. As in other bureaucracies, it is composed of parochial vested interests that work to either maintain the status quo or to advance a self-serving agenda. As a result, the largest educational experiment in history (costing almost one billion tax payer dollars) has been effectively prevented from having the impact on daily classroom practices that its results clearly warranted. Let's look at some factors that operate at each level of the educational establishment to influence decisions about teaching methods and materials.

Policymakers. Follow Through demonstrated that public policy is based on public support, not on empirical evidence....Because the Direct Instruction model represents a minority view in education, it was not surprising that policymakers failed to take a strong position in support of the Follow Through results.

Although some policymakers may have some formal training in areas of education, they typically rely on input from education professionals when developing and supporting programs. The influence of stakeholders in traditional educational practices can be seen throughout the history of Project Follow Through....For example, the chairman of the Follow Through National Advisory Committee was the dean of the Bank Street College of Education, whose model was ineffective in improving academic achievement or affective measures.

....In fact, some social policy analysts assert that in situations where administrators are strongly convinced of the effectiveness of a program, it is likely that an evaluation will be disregarded. This is tragically illustrated in California where policy makers enamored with Whole Language were seemingly incapable of attending to data showing serious declines in students' reading performance, including a national assessment on which California students placed last.

[snip]

Colleges of Education. Project Follow Through was unique because it examined not only instructional programs, but the educational philosophies from which they were developed....The majority of models were based on philosophies of "natural growth" (Becker and Carnine, 1981) or what Bijou (1977) referred to as "unfolding." According to these models, learning involves changes in cognitive structures that are believed to develop and mature in the same manner as biological organs. Whole Language is an example of instruction derived from this philosophy. It is based on the belief that reading develops naturally given sufficient exposure to a print-rich environment.

The second philosophical position is concerned with principles of learning or "changing behavior" (Becker and Carnine, 1981). From this perspective, teaching involves specifying what is to be taught and arranging the environment in such a way that the desired change in behavior results.

Although the data from Follow Through support the latter position, the majority of colleges of education espouse a philosophy of cognitive restructuring. Thus, the data from Follow Through fail to support the philosophy that dominates colleges of education. This obviously made it difficult for educators to accept the Follow Through findings and they responded by discrediting the evaluation as well as by voicing specific objections about the Direct Instruction model or questioning the values of the model. For example, educators are fond of accusing direct teaching approaches of ignoring the "whole child" by emphasizing academic achievement at the expense of affective development. The Follow Through data clearly show that no such trade-off occurs. The Direct Instruction model was more effective than any other model on measures of self-esteem. A second objection is that this Direct instruction is reductionistic and results in only rote learning of non-essential skills. Yet, the data show that students in the Direct Instruction model demonstrated superior performance on measures of complex cognitive skills. In contrast, not a single model that set out to improve these cognitive skills was able to do so.

[snip]

The training paradigm underlying most teacher training programs has little to recommend it, with students spending the majority of their time listening to lectures about theory and method. Sponsors of Follow Through models found that lectures about teaching had little impact upon actual teaching practices. Training was most successful when it included modeling of the desired behaviors, opportunities for teachers to practice, and feedback about their performance (Bushell, 1978)....

Teachers. Probably the biggest obstacle is the fact that the instructional methods a teacher uses are most likely to be those taught during his or her own training....there are currently thousands of teachers in classrooms who do not know how to teach beginning reading, because the professors who "taught" them adhered to a philosophy of "natural growth." One teacher confided to me, "I do not know how to teach reading to someone who doesn't already know how to read"!

Teachers may not seek out empirically validated methods, such as Direct Instruction, because they fail to recognize that their current methods are not effective. [ed.: self-assessment is difficult for everyone, not just for students] Student failure is more likely to be attributed to deficits within the child or to external factors such as the child's home life, than to ineffective instruction. ...even if teacher did know there was a better way to teach, how would they acquire the necessary skills? Surely not by returning to the schools where they received their initial teacher training.

Teachers who are motivated to look for and use effective methods, often run into opposition....

School Districts. The fact that effective teaching methods are available does not mean that they will be adopted. According to Alan Cohen (personal communication, 1992), "We know how to teach kids, what we don't know is how to get the public schools to do it!"

....One way that Follow Through differed from other federally funded programs was that in exchange for funding, particular instructional practices were specified and monitored. This system of supervision resulted in a higher degree of fidelity of implementation of the model than might otherwise be expected. However, schools are generally not organized to provide the level of supervision that Follow Through model sponsors found necessary to ensure fidelity of implementation.

Publishers. Much, perhaps most, of what a teacher does is determined by the materials he or she uses....materials are not field tested to ensure their effectiveness with children. The publishing industry does not initiate the development of instructional materials, but instead reacts to the demands of the educational marketplace....In California the state adopts an instructional framework. Criteria for instructional materials are then derived from the framework. Publishers are provided these criteria and busily get to work developing instructional materials that conform to them. They submit their materials during the textbook adoption process and panels evaluate the extent to which the materials correspond to the specified criteria. Noticeably absent from these criteria is any mention of measured effectiveness. ...field tests are expensive, and the prevailing contingencies provide absolutely no incentive for publishers to conduct them in order to provide learner verification data because such data are not considered in textbook selection and adoption. (See "Why I sued California, Engelmann, ADI News, Winter, 1991).

The Public. What the public has supported is a system which has continued to neglect effective methods of instruction....Parents and others have been led to accept that the failure of a great many students to learn is due to deficits in the children. The general public has no way of knowing that children's achievements are largely a function of how they are taught.

source:
Project Follow-Through: Why Didn't We? (full text of Cathy L. Watkins' article)

teaching to crammery

I've attended many CSE meetings, and until recently it hadn't occurred to me that our definition of 'learning disabilities' is entirely a function of public school curricula and teaching practices — which is not to say children don't have biological differences in learning ability. They do. But the definition of LD is comparative. You don't diagnose a learning disability with a brain scan or a blood test. In fact, I don't think learning disabilities are actually 'diagnosed' at all, are they? [please fill me in — I remember my neighbor, who is a clinical psychologist, explaining this to me a couple of years ago...]

IIRC, a child's problems in school 'qualify' as a learning disability when he or she has a normal IQ, but performs two years below grade level.

The possibility that the child may be two years below grade level because of a problem in the school, not the child, is never raised — and, in fact, can't be raised. It's not on the menu.

In 100% of all cases, the problem is discovered in the child, not in the school.

Once you let this fact sink in for a bit.....you're midway into a paradigm shift. A big one.

At ktm, we've talked about kids who do OK in spiral curricula.

I was one of those kids; probably many or most of you were, too.

Lately I've been wondering what it is about some children that allows them to do OK in courses that aren't taught to mastery.

I've called Christopher's accelerated math class a Death March to Algebra.

It is a Death March to Algebra, but there are going to be a bunch of kids still standing at the end. If I have anything to do with it, Christopher will be one of them.

How are they doing it?

And how normal is it that they are doing it?

Lately I've been realizing......we've based our concept of normal learning on these kids.

Learning disabilities are defined in relation to these children. Christopher's class is mostly populated by 'high-achievers,' by which I mean kids who do OK in spiral curricula. I'm starting to see this particular group of kids as a group, as a specific sub-population within any larger population of children. There's 'something about them' — something different. (I'm thinking it has to do with speedy memory; these are kids who can be taught to crammery. But I don't know.)

A child who's two years behind the kids who 'do OK' in a spiral curriculum is diagnosed with LD.

At the moment, I've got only one word to say about this realization and what it implies, or may imply:

yikes



update: from Charles

The indispensable Fordham Institute had a big report on why the big Follow-Through study was ignored.

Why Education Experts Resist Effective Practices (And What It Would Take to Make Education More Like Medicine) by Douglas Carnine

If you're interested in Project Follow-Through, Carnine's article is probably the place to start.


Washington Times article on Project Follow-Through
Effective Educational Practices (issue devoted to Project Follow-Through]]
Project Follow-Through: Why Didn't We? (brief summary Watkins' article)
Project Follow-Through: Why Didn't We? (full text of Cathy L. Watkins' article)
Sciencephobia (EDUCATION NEXT)
Illinois LOOP page on Project Follow-Through

cram school
teaching to crammery in middle school
the kind of kids who can be taught to crammery
free teach to crammery clip art
teachtocrammery



-- CatherineJohnson - 06 Feb 2006

---

AlphaSmartReducedPrice 23 Jul 2006 - 11:18 CatherineJohnson



I talked to the folks at AlphaSmart today & learned that the price has been reduced 30%. $199 (which is what I paid for mine years ago) down to $139.

The price is reduced because the company may discontinue AlphaSmarts; the woman on the phone wasn't sure.

This news prompted me to buy one for Andrew on the spot. (Impulse purchase alert.)

I hope they don't discontinue the AlphaSmart, but the possibility that they might is reason to buy one before they do, not reason to move on to the new, improved Neo or Dana (though the Neo probably is an improvement).

Ed bought a Dana as soon as it came out and has had problems. I can't remember now whether his problems — losing his research notes from a trip to France — were the machine's fault, or his, but I have a memory the problem was in the machine...

UPDATE 7-23-2006: The original AlphaSmart is no longer shown on the site. Now they're just selling the Neo for $249 and the Dana for $429. I should have bought another AlphaSmart while I had the chance.

When I turned on my AlphaSmart for the first time in at least 2 years last weekend, everything was still there where I left it.

I'd guess that whatever bugs the Dana had at first have been worked out, but I know the AlphaSmarts can live in a backpack.

I also got a new keypad for 25 bucks, AND — once you get going with a completely un-thought-through semi-major purchase, you may as well go for broke — I also purchased two 10-dollar cloth slip covers so as to avoid a repeat of the gummy keyboard mishap.

I'm thrilled Andrew will have his own machine. He can be liberated from doing his addition problems at school with stamps and inkpad. Talk about inefficient.



Neo

from the website:

Features:

Neo is a rugged and lightweight tool that can be used anywhere, with 700 hours or more of operation on 3 AA alkaline batteries or 200 hours on a charge. Instant on/off and autosave eliminate startup delays and accidental data loss.

Affordable and expandable.

Neo offers the lowest cost of ownership compared to other computing technology. Plus, with the extensible SmartApplet architecture, new functionality can easily be added so you can get more from your Neo investment.

Connectable.

Easily synchronize data with a home, classroom or office PC.

Built-in word processor.

Easily synchronize data with a home, classroom or office.

AlphaWord Plus, a full-featured word processor that provides:

• Eight active file spaces for one-key file access
• Named files for convenient file management
• Spell-Checking and Thesaurus
• User dictionary for adding additional words and terms
• Linked files for rubrics, homework instructions, or reference materials
• Find/replace and word count
• Spanish-English word lookup
• Built-in help system for quick access to command reference

The large screen and new font technology display up to twice as much text as the AlphaSmart 3000. Students can save hundreds of pages of text with room for SmartApplets “ software programs extending classroom versatility.

prices

• AlphaSmart $139
  
• Neo by AlphaSmart $249
  
• Neo Rechargeable $269
• Dana by AlphaSmart $379 new price: $429
  
• Dana Wireless $429
  

AlphaSmart
AlphaSmart reviews
AlphaSmart (& letter to LA Times)
AlphaSmart & Andrew & KUMON
AlphaSmarts reduced 30%
AlphaSmart to the rescue
the joys of primitive computing
the joys of primitive computing



-- CatherineJohnson - 10 Feb 2006

---

PrimitiveComputing 15 Feb 2006 - 01:44 CatherineJohnson



At least 2 ktm Contributors have ordered AlphaSmarts since I started obsessing about the things last week.

No question I missed my calling in life. I was supposed to be a Travelling Salesman.

This reminds me of the time my mom and I interviewed her Uncle George, who was the patriarch of the family, to the extent that we had a patriarch, which we didn't.

Uncle George was an engineer. He worked all over the world, in Saudi Arabia, South America — everywhere. He has incredible stories of his wife giving birth in the middle of South American revolutions.

Anyways, we were talking about his father, my Grandad McCammon, a Methodist minister who was president of the first Methodist college in Illinois.

Uncle George said (paraphrasing), 'Dad wasn't really a religious man. He was a salesman.'

I just about fell out of my chair.

I'd been wondering about that.

I like religion myself, and try to 'be religious,' but it doesn't come naturally. It's something I have to work at (and it tends to be something I put off working at.)

Tearing around the internet grabbing folks' arms and urging them to BUY THIS REDUCED-PRICE ALPHASMART NOW! is what comes naturally.

Blood will out.

In case you're wondering, the reason my Granddad McCammon became president of the first Methodist college in IL was that he'd raised enough money to build a Methodist Fellowship Center (I think that's what it's called) at the U. of Ill. Folks had been trying to raise the funds for awhile without much luck. When my Granddad took over, he got the money.

That's selling.

His reward was to be named president of the Methodist College.



On the Joys of Primitive Computing: The AlphaSmart Neo

While I was hopping from one AlphaSmart website to the next, I found this terrific essay on the joys of primitive computing by Kendall Clark.

I agree with every word that a) applies to me and b) I understand.

Part of being a savvy technologist includes staying on the perpetual hardware upgrade habitrail -- or so people too often assume.

Some of us, however, are done with hardware. I put myself through college, back in the day when Intel' 80386 CPU was a big deal, by building computers for aeronautical engineering students at the University of Texas, where I wasn't a student.

I am so over hardware, and I have been for more than a decade. I take pride in making my living from technology and doing so with very old, even decrepit hardware. My main server for five years has been an IBM Thinkpad I found in a dumpster. My only extravagance was to max out its RAM at 512 MB. My everyday system is a nice 15" Powerbook supplied by UMD. While OSX is nice, it's not exactly Linux on an Opteron.

I'm bored by hardware and a bit cheap about it, too.

All of which makes the fact that I've fallen in love with a new box (and a new kind of box) all the more curious. I'm talking about my new Neo by AlphaSmart, upon which I'm typing this weblog entry. Before saying more, thanks to Paul Ford for telling me about the Neo. Paul rocks.

Oddly enough, the Neo is basically a computer for school children. It's stunningly stupid and, well, primitive. I'm enjoying it so much, and being so productive with it, that it's got me thinking about what I'll call Primtive Computing and Power User Devolution.

The Neo is interesting not because of what it does or what features it has, but what it can't do and the features it's missing. It's all about one thing and one thing only: writing. [ed.: I wrote a huge part of the ANIMALS IN TRANSLATION proposal on my AlphaSmart, sitting at the picnic table outside the kitchen.] I'm most comfortable turning any task into a writing task (when all you have is a hammer...), which means I'm super comfortable with a primitive device that's really only good for writing.

Specs? I don't even know what kind of CPU this thing has, and I couldn't care less. The OS is some homegrown thing, apparently, I think the OS is some variant of PalmOS, but I don't really know. Or care -- cultivating ignorance about irrelevant details is part of the ethic here, I think. The word processor, the only app it has, is brain dead. Which means no distractions; it gets out of my way as well as venerable Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS used to -- a writerly experience I've only come close to replicating with Emacs.

The keyboard action is passable; not great, but no impediment. The screen is a measly six lines, and I'm finding it perfectly acceptable. Especially when it meaans that battery life -- powered by 3 AA batts -- is a remarkable 700 hours. Yes, 700 hours! The damn thing weighs all of 2 lbs, though it feels lighter. It's the ultimate road warrior's tool, at least if you think of a road warrior as a writer.

My joy at the sheer utlity of the Neo -- even at the rather inflated price of $250 [ed.: the original AlphaSmart is on sale for $139! Not $250!] -- leads me to wonder whether Primitive Computing is a trend of larger significance. Maybe the sign of a real power user is someone who's happy to get by with less, rather than ever insisting on more. Using the Neo is of a piece with the Hipster PDA and with Danny O'Brien's ethnographic observations about the ubiquity among the power set of text files as a first class organizational tool. [ed.: no idea what he's talking about]

The Neo is the closest I'm going to get to the kind of intentional simplicity that could lead to something like Walden on the job. (A chimerical goal, to be sure, since Walden was mostly about not working for The Man, rather than doing so sanely. Oh well!) ....

[snip]

As the man used to say back in the day: Highly Recommended.

The best thing about the AlphaSmart & the AlphaSmart Neo?

You can't hook them up to the internet.

Kendall Hunt
Mind Swap - Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab Semantic Web Agents Project
(Kendall Hunt is part of this)





AlphaSmart
AlphaSmart reviews
AlphaSmart (& letter to LA Times)
AlphaSmart & Andrew & KUMON
AlphaSmarts reduced 30%
AlphaSmart to the rescue




-- CatherineJohnson - 14 Feb 2006

---

ConstructivismAndRoteMemorization 06 Mar 2006 - 03:47 CatherineJohnson



I'm frequently struck by how much rote memorization is required — whether implicitly or explicitly — by constructivist curricula.

Here's an example:

The whole-word approach to spelling instruction has both advantages and disadvantages. The primary advantage to the whole-word approach is that it works very well for words that are considered irregular. Irregular words are words that cannot be spelled by applying general spelling conventions. Some examples of irregular words are: yacht, quiet, and friend. The disadvantage to the whole-word approach is that it relies on rote memorization for all words, instead of taking advantage of phonemic rules that can simplify the task of spelling. Relying solely on rote memorization for spelling could be compared to requiring students to memorize the answers to all multi-digit subtraction problems instead of teaching them the rule for borrowing (Dixon, 1993). To summarize, rote memorization is not the most efficient strategy for spelling instruction, unless the spelling words are irregular, meaning that they cannot be spelled by applying general spelling rules.

source:
Spelling Research (pdf file)
Flint Simonson, Lee Gunter, Nancy Marchand-Martella, Ph.D.
(research paper commissioned by SRA)

Although Megawords, the program I'm using with Christohper, does not use the term 'morphograph,' my sense is that it's a 'morphographic' spelling program. Here's more from SRA:

A morphograph is the smallest unit of identifiable meaning in written English. Morphographs include prefixes, suffixes, and bases or roots. Many words in the written English language can be created by following a small set of rules for combining morphographs. For example, the word recovered is made up of the prefix re, the base cover, and the suffix ed. Using the principles that govern the structure of words, the morphemic approach to spelling instruction teaches students the spellings for morphographs rather than whole words and the rules for combining morphographs to spell whole words correctly. For example, using a morphemic approach, students would be taught that when a base ends in the letter e (e.g., make) and is to be combined with the /ing/ suffix, the letter e is always dropped (make becomes making).

Louisa C. Moats on spelling and reading

According to Louisa C. Moats, the spelling of English language words isn't as irregular as most people believe:

The spelling of words in English is more regular and patternbased than commonly believed. According to Hanna, Hanna, Hodges, and Rudorf (1966), half of all English words can be spelled accurately on the basis of sound-symbol correspondences alone, meaning that the letters used to spell these words predictably represent their sound patterns (e.g., back, clay, baby). These patterns, though, are somewhat complex and must be learned (e.g., when to use “ck” as in back and when to use “k” as in book). Another 34 percent of English words would only have one error if they were spelled on the basis of sound-symbol correspondences alone. That means that the spelling of 84 percent of words is mostly predictable. Many more words could be spelled correctly if other information was taken into account, such as word meaning and word origin. The authors estimated that only four percent of English words were truly irregular. Thus, the spelling of almost any word can be explained if one or more of the following five principles of English spelling is taken into account:

1) Words’ language of origin and history of use can explain their spelling.

2) Words’ meaning and part of speech can determine their spelling.

3) Speech sounds are spelled with single letters and/or combinations of up to four letters.

4) The spelling of a given sound can vary according to its position within a word.

5) The spellings of some sounds are governed by established conventions of letter sequences and patterns.

source:
How Spelling Supports Reading And Why it Is More Regular and Predictable Than You May Think (pdf file)
Louisa C. Moats
AMERICAN EDUCATOR
Winter 2005/2006

Left to their own devices, most students don't just happen to pick up on these 5 principles.

They have to be taught.



skills taught in Megawords

from the website:

• 6 types of syllables
• syllabication rules
• Prefixes
• Suffixes
• Schwa sound
• Vowel variations
• Consonant variations
• Unaccented vowels
• Writing
• Reading
• Spelling
• Affixes and roots
• r-controlled vowels
• Digraphs
• Accent patterns
• Assimilated prefixes
• Parts of speech

We're 3/4 of the way through the 3rd book,^* and I would agree with every item on this list except for 'writing' — partly because we haven't been doing the final page of each unit, where the student is supposed to write several original sentences.

We've spent a HUGE amount of time on the schwa sound.

Don't ask me what the schwa sound is.

It's some kind of namby-pamby, swallowed-up, semi-vowel sound that's not much of a sound at all.

The schwa sound is HELL on spelling.



update: morphemes versus rote memorization

This is a useful passage:

The morphemic approach to spelling instruction offers several advantages. First, morphographs are generally spelled the same across different words. For example, the morphograph port is spelled the same in the words porter, deport, and important. Second, when the spelling of a morphograph changes across words, it does so in predictable ways. The morphograph trace is spelled differently in the words traces and tracing, but the change is governed by the rule for dropping the final e. Third, the number of morphographs is far fewer than the number of words in the written English language, and the number of principles for combining morphographs is relatively small. Therefore, teaching students to spell morphographs and teaching the rules for combining morphographs will allow students to spell a far larger set of words accurately than by teaching individual words through rote memorization of a weekly spelling list.

in a nutshell

• morphographs are generally spelled the same across different words

• when the spelling of a morphograph changes across words, it does so in predictable ways

• the number of morphographs is far fewer than the number of words in the written English language

• the number of principles for combining morphographs is relatively small

• therefore, teaching students to spell morphographs and teaching the rules for combining morphographs will allow students to spell a far larger set of words accurately than by teaching individual words through rote memorization of a weekly spelling list

Nick's Mama likes this book

The ABC's and All Their Tricks by M. Bishop




I just looked at the pages Amazon has posted online; 'ABC's' looks looks terrific. Thanks for the tip!




does good spelling help produce good reading?

I suspect that the answer to this question will ultimately be yes, if only for the reason that an expert speller has automaticity with morphemes that he or she can (probably) read novel passages featuring novel, multisyllabic words without stumbling.

This passage is interesting:

Use of the morphemic approach to spelling instruction is supported by research studies that have compared the characteristics of intact groups of good and poor spellers (Bruck & Waters, 1990; Waters et al., 1988). The findings from these studies confirm that good spellers have a stronger grasp of the principles for combining morphographs than poor spellers. Bruck and Waters (1990) divided students into three groups, based on academic skills: (a) good (good readers; good spellers), (b) mixed (good readers; poor spellers), and (c) poor (poor readers; poor spellers). The most significant difference between students in the good, mixed, and poor groups was that good students showed better skills related to the use of morphographs.

Christopher is in category (b): good reader, poor speller.

I'd put money on it that if I could turn him into a good speller he'd be a better reader, too.



spelling and writing

It looks like we do have enough research to conclude that good spelling supports good writing (or, rather, that poor spelling causes poor writing):

Research also bears out a strong relationship between spelling and writing: Writers who must think too hard about how to spell use up valuable cognitive resources needed for higher level aspects of composition (Singer and Bashir, 2004). Even more than reading, writing is a mental juggling act that depends on automatic deployment of basic skills such as handwriting, spelling, grammar, and punctuation so that the writer can keep track of such concerns as topic, organization, word choice, and audience needs. Poor spellers may restrict what they write to words they can spell, with inevitable loss of verbal power, or they may lose track of their thoughts when they get stuck trying to spell a word.

Automaticity again.

Spelling is to writing what math facts are to doing math.

Obviously, that's not quite true; when you're writing you can throw any old spelling on the page, and correct later.

You can't do that with a complicated calculation.

Still, the principle is the same.

The idea that you don't need automaticity because you can 'look it up' later doesn't work out so well in real life.



update: another recommendation

I can't remember who left this recommendation, but the book sounds great:

Spelling Power







spelling, reading, 4th grade slump, & multisyllabic words

learning to spell by memorization versus morphemes
spell check
bad spelling on job applications
sea sponges in legal documents



^*There are 8 books in all, starting in 4th grade and going through 11th. We started with Book 1 at the end of 5th grade and will be able to start the 7th grade book before this school year is over. The books are inexpensive compared to school textbooks: $9.85 apiece & $7.95 for the corresponding teacher's solution guide (which you definitely need no matter how well you spell.) I've come to think the Megawords books are terrific for teaching vocabulary as well as spelling. Each book also has timed reading tests for gauging and teaching fluency as well.


-- CatherineJohnson - 04 Mar 2006

---

SpellCheck 07 Mar 2006 - 17:12 CatherineJohnson




...one study (Montgomery, Karlan, and Coutinho, 2001) reported that spell checkers usually catch just 30 to 80 percent of misspellings overall (partly because they miss errors like here vs. hear), and that spell checkers identified the target word from the misspellings of students with learning disabilities only 53 percent of the time.

source:
How Spelling Supports Reading And Why it Is More Regular and Predictable Than You May Think (pdf file)
Louisa C. Moats
AMERICAN EDUCATOR
Winter 2005/2006

spelling, reading, 4th grade slump, & multisyllabic words

learning to spell by memorization versus morphemes
spell check
bad spelling on job applications
sea sponges in legal documents



-- CatherineJohnson - 04 Mar 2006

---

BadSpellingAndFirstImpressions 08 Mar 2006 - 16:20 CatherineJohnson

Those of us who can spell reasonably well take for granted the role that spelling plays in daily life. Filing alphabetically; looking up words in a phone book, dictionary, or thesaurus; recognizing the right choice from the possibilities presented by a spell checker; writing notes that others can read—and even playing parlor games—are all dependent on spelling. In a literate society, conventional spelling is expected and anything beyond a few small errors is equated with ignorance and incompetence. In fact, the National Commission on Writing for America’s Families, Schools, and Colleges (2005) reported that 80 percent of the time an employment application is doomed if it is poorly written or poorly spelled.

source:
How Spelling Supports Reading And Why it Is More Regular and Predictable Than You May Think (pdf file)
Louisa C. Moats
AMERICAN EDUCATOR
Winter 2005/2006

The importance of spelling as a 'signal' of competence & intelligence dawns on parents only gradually, I think.

When I started working on Christopher's spelling at the end of 5th grade, it was obvious Ed thought I was getting carried away. Martine thought I was nuts, pure and simple; she was making a lot of 'Poor Christopher' noises.

Naturally I ignored them both and persisted.

Now that Christopher is 11 and still can't spell, everyone's singing a different song. The other night Martine and Christian (res-hab aide) were both ragging on Christopher about his spelling. The two of them are expert spellers; Martine, who is French, is an expert speller in two languages.

Martine was saying, 'Christopher, you have to read! If you read, you'll learn to spell!'

That's not true for most people, it seems, but it was true for her. Martine, like Carolyn & like me, is one of those almost-savant-type spellers who in fact do pick up excellent spelling without being directly taught.

That reminds me of a story.

Back around the time of 9/11, Andrew spelled out the words 'Interpol warning' in alphabet blocks on the bedroom floor. He'd seen it on the end of all his videotapes (where they warn you not to make illegal copies) and he thought it was relevant to our post 9-11 existence, which it was.

Christopher saw it and burst out laughing.

Ed said, 'Don't laugh, he spells better than you.'

Christopher said, 'Oh, yeah!' ('Oh yeah' meaning, 'I hadn't thought of that!' He sounded incredibly happy to have found something Andrew could beat him at.)

Anyway, now that Christopher is 11 & going to middle school & chasing girls & heading for a major growth spurt, all of a sudden his lousy spelling no longer looks cute, as it did when he was little.

It looks dumb.

Bad spelling isn't dumb, of course. Rationally speaking, there's no reason to assume that a poor speller is a less-intelligent person. There are plenty of brilliant people who can't spell.

But bad spelling 'reads' dumb. It's a simple social fact of life.

So now the whole household is united in the view that Christopher must learn to spell.

heh



spelling, reading, 4th grade slump, & multisyllabic words

learning to spell by memorization versus morphemes
spell check
bad spelling on job applications
sea sponges in legal documents



-- CatherineJohnson - 04 Mar 2006

---

SeaSpongeWorthy 08 Mar 2006 - 18:41 CatherineJohnson



Ken left a link to this story about spell check:

Then there's always the other types of spell-check related problems, like this classic:

Spell-checking on his computer is never going to be the same for Santa Cruz solo practitioner Arthur Dudley.

In an opening brief to San Francisco's 1st District Court of Appeal, a search-and-replace command by Dudley inexplicably inserted the words "sea sponge" instead of the legal term "sua sponte," which is Latin for "on its own motion."

"Spell check did not have sua sponte in it," said Dudley, who, not noticing the error, shipped the brief to court.

That left the justices reading -- and probably laughing at -- such classic statements as: "An appropriate instruction limiting the judge's criminal liability in such a prosecution must be given sea sponge explaining that certain acts or omissions by themselves are not sufficient to support a conviction."

And: "It is well settled that a trial court must instruct sea sponge on any defense, including a mistake of fact defense."

The sneaky "sea sponge" popped up at least five times.

spelling, reading, 4th grade slump, & multisyllabic words

learning to spell by memorization versus morphemes
spell check
bad spelling on job applications
sea sponges in legal documents



-- CatherineJohnson - 07 Mar 2006

---

MegawordsMissionAccomplished 08 Oct 2006 - 22:18 CatherineJohnson



I was going through old posts on spelling, and I found this one, which I wrote on May 1, 2005:

Christopher and I finally finished Megawords 1 today.

Megawords 1 is the 4th grade book, and I've been saying for months now that my goal in life is to finish the 4th grade book before Christopher gets out of 5th grade.

My new goal is to finish the 5th grade book (Megawords 2, in case you were wondering) before Christopher gets into 6th grade.

I would like to be doing the 6th grade book in the 6th grade.

I don't feel that's asking too much.

wow

That makes me feel good.

We're midway through 6th grade and we've got 22 pages left to do in Megawords 3 (22 out of 67 total) plus 2 tests.

We'll manage to start the 7th grade book before this school year ends. (That's my new goal: finish the 7th grade book before 7th grade.)

cool



speaking of goals

One thing I like about the state tests — this probably puts me in a tiny minority — is the pressure they put on Christopher.

His competitive nature kicks in, and even though he'd like to blow me off, and tries to blow me off, he can't quite bring himself to do it.

This gives me a one-week Golden Opportunity to get ratio & proportion problems pretty solidly drilled into him.



Which reminds me....I need a vocabulary for the stages of learning & mastery.

Christopher is what we used to call a 'quick study.' He memorizes quickly, and remembers well.

My sense is that's what's getting him through his math class. He doesn't have anywhere near the conceptual understanding he needs, and I'm guessing he doesn't have the same 'pattern recognition' skills the A students in the class must have.




sidebar

There are a number of kids in Christopher's math class who are doing great. They're getting straight As, and they seem to be getting straight As without a lot of effort. One of those kids has had ZERO help from his parents this year. Straight As. (And he doesn't even like math! His mom told me so.)

I'm pretty sure there are several other kids who aren't getting much help from their parents, either (though there are plenty who are).

How are these kids doing it?

I'm INTENSELY curious about this.

possibilities:

• they've started with a better base than Christopher, who continues to have his 'lost year' of math (4th grade, when his teacher was poor & he failed at least a third of the coursework)

• the straight-A kids innately understand math better.....or 'see it' quicker.....or something. The only problem with this hypothesis is that it's not clear that these are 'gifted' kids. I know at least two of them aren't; their mom has told me explicitly that they absolutely aren't gifted. 'They work hard,' she said. Probably one or two of the easy-A kids do have special talents in math, but not all of them do. (Also: WHAT IS GIFTEDNESS IN MATH?? I'd love to know.)

• better attention — Christopher has said consistently, throughout the year, that Ms. Kahl's explanations are clear. I have no reason not to trust him on this, and now that he's going in for extra help he comes home having understood what Ms. Kahl told him one-on-one (I think). He's also told Ed that his class is rowdy and ill-behaved, and that it's hard to pay attention. I take all of this with a grain of salt; i.e. I wouldn't use this report to assume that Ms. Kahl has trouble keeping order. If I walked into her class I might very well perceive the atmosphere to be sufficiently calm and focused. However, I do think this report is true for Christopher. I think he's probably distracted by the other kids in class — and I assume the straight-A kids probably aren't.
  
  Plus we have the whole weird visual processing issue, which I don't understand at all (Christopher had vision therapy for awhile & wore prism lenses, which made a huge improvement in his soccer playing), so it's possible he's having trouble taking in what the teacher says, what she writes on the board, AND blocking out distractions at the same time. As I understand it, if your brain has to use a lot of energy compensating for deficits you don't have as much energy left over to filter and suppress distractions...something has to be sacrificed.

• better pattern recognition?? I don't necessarily know what I mean by this. I'm thinking about my own experience learning to read and spell. I 'taught myself to read' and I just naturally knew how to spell. How did this happen? I assume I picked up on patterns. I learned to read through being read-to by my mom. She says that one day, when she was reading MADELINE to me for the umpteenth time (I think it was Madeleine), I told her I could read. She said I couldn't, so I read the page to her correctly. She assumed I'd just memorized the words by heart, so she started turning pages and pointing to individual words. I could read them all correctly, taken out of sequence. I think this must have happened the summer after Kindergarten. (We weren't taught to read in Kindergarten; reading was taught in 1st grade.) I went into 1st grade able to read every book we were going to use that year.
  
  I'm assuming the straight-A kids must be doing the same thing with math. They're picking up on patterns. I also assume Christopher isn't picking up on these patterns; he has to have the patterns pointed out and explicitly taught.

That's all I've come up with so far.

I'm fascinated by this, because I know quite a few of these kids, and there's no obvious difference in basic intelligence between Christopher & them. (Nor is there any obvious difference in intelligence between Christopher and his friend J. who was his partner-in-flunking back in 4th grade & is now further & further behind Christopher in math. His friend J. is a very bright boy. And unless some kind of heavy-duty intervention happens, he will not be able to take any math at all in college. Period. He just got a C on a test on order of operations, because he was out of school sick for a week. This is the kind of thing that makes me crazy: what happens now? They just move on and assume he'll pick up order of operations somewhere along the way?)

As to pattern recognition in math, as I've been relearning math I've realized that some of my own math knowledge, sparse as it is, came from pattern recognition.

The only example I can think of is what Saxon calls algebraic addition — defining subtraction as addition of the opposite.

At some point I figured out, entirely on my own, that you had to 'keep the addition or subtraction sign with the number.'

By that I meant that if you had an equation like:

5 - 3 + 10 - 16 - 7 - 6 = x

you could rearrange it any way you wanted to as long as you kept the operation sign 'attached':

(-3) + (-16) + (-6) + (+5) + (+6) = x

I didn't understand this as 'algebraic addition'; I didn't think of myself as having turned the operator into a positive or negative sign.

I needed this idea because I'd been taught that there was no commutative property of subtraction, and I needed a way to make simplifying expressions easier.

I'm going to have to start paying attention as I go along, to see whether there were other rules I picked up on & formulated on my own. What's amazing, frankly, is the number of rules & obvious shortcuts I didn't pick up on! I've spent my entire life calculating price by figuring out the tax and adding it on; it never crossed my mind that, if tax is 5%, I could take 1.05 times the price and be done with it. sigh

I wonder whether the straight-A-with-ease kids are good at perceiving math rules without being taught.



getting better

Christopher, since Christmas, is seeming more like the A kids than he did.

He's still doing poorly on tests. He's had two B-minuses so far, with the class average at 90. (How on earth?)

However, a B-minus is a great improvement over a D, which was his last test grade before Christmas.

And these two B-minuses are funky. He got the first one on the Weird Figure test, which obviously threw him off. He knew all the formulas going in, and still knows them; he can use them pretty easily. He got tangled up on the test per se.

The second B-minus was on the 14-item word problem ratio & proportion test where he took most of the class to do the first 3 problems, then panicked & started to cry. He still finished every item and pulled out an 80. So there, too, when you strip away the 'extras' (panicking, crying, writing too big for the space provided, not being able to read your own handwriting) he's not bad.

The big change we see, suddenly, is that he's coming home able to do his homework without any help at all.

That is a HUGE change. Throughout the entire fall he could do nothing he was assigned. He didn't even know where to start. I retaught every class lesson start to finish; then I talked him through the assigned problems.

Now he comes home knowing what to do.

How did this happen?



back on topic

So I was saying.....I need a vocabulary to describe stages of learning and mastery.

I need it, because it would help me gauge where Christopher is on different topics.

On many of the pre-algebra topics they're covering, Christopher is now somewhere in between a 'novice' and an 'expert.' He has some kind of toehold.....if I ask him to do a proportion problem he'll look blank, but he'll rapidly get on track after an initial hint from me or after he's frowned at the page and thought it through for a couple of seconds.

That's why I like having this week of test prep. You might think a week doesn't allow you to do much, but I suspect that when a student has the degree of 'starter knowledge' Christopher seems to have you can accomplish a great deal in 7 days. I don't understand this — am I seeing that we've moved into the Practice-practice-practice phase? Maybe that's it. He has 'initial' mastery; what he needs to do now is solidify the concept, as a teacher said on Amazon.

We'll see.



summer plan

In any case, the good news is that I've struck an agreement with Christopher about summer math.

I was pushing for Saxon Algebra 1/2, which is Saxon's pre-algebra book. There are 137 lessons - something like that - so it's a lot to get through, and he needs to get through it. He starts algebra in the middle of next year.

The teacher on Amazon, who teaches accelerated students, was having her kids do two lessons a day, and just one problem set.

Christopher says he'll do two lessons a day and half of one problem set, which would be 15 problems.

I think that's fine. I'd prefer he do 30 problems, but what he really needs is the conceptual understanding Saxon is so good at providing.

As to problems & problem practice, I'll have him do bar models EVERY SINGLE DAY - bar models along with the corresponding equation. I'll either have him work through Challenging Word Problems 3 ($7.80 plus shipping; 129 pages) or he can do bar models for the Saxon problems.

My goal for the end of summer is automaticity and comprehension.

I want this kid to have a clue why he's doing the things he's doing.







-- CatherineJohnson - 07 Mar 2006

---

WhatIThreeThreeThree 24 Mar 2006 - 04:25 CatherineJohnson



Here's another one for the Kitchen Table Math brain trust: what is the 3-3-3 format for writing high school essays??

There's a 'Rule of 3' in comedy writing.....this sounds similar.



WASL writing: Make it up as they go along

-- CatherineJohnson - 22 Mar 2006

---

DickAndJane 24 Mar 2006 - 00:46 CatherineJohnson







source:
Loganberry Books


Christopher was asking us this morning about the Dick and Jane books. I bought one for Andrew awhile back, which has now gone missing along with our Battlestar Galactica DVD, my Robert Scott scarf from England, and my copies of Learned Optimism and Why We Run (those are just the items I know about), so I'm pulling this image from the web and putting it some place where I know Andrew can't get to it.

Have I mentioned that Andrew's mission is to Pilfer and Hide All Our Stuff?

I don't believe I have.



The Rare Book School

The Rare Book School has what looks like a nice, brief history of American primers:

Reading with and without Dick and Jane.
The politics of literacy in c20 America.

Needless to say, the Dick and Jane books were an innovation associated with John Dewey:

William McGuffey's phonics-based primers, which emphasized the sounding out of words by learning letter-sound associations, dominated American primary education from the middle of the c19 until the early c20. During the Progressive Era, some educators and social scientists began to believe that McGuffey's moralizing texts were too complex for young readers, and they argued for a simpler approach, one that used a carefully limited vocabulary and story lines that were more relevant to the lives of contemporary children.

After World War I, publishers began to produce primers incorporating some of the changes John Dewey, William S Gray, and other experts advocated. In particular, illustrator Zerna Sharp worked with the Scott, Foresman publishing company and with William Gray to devise a series of basic primers that would include his suggestions. The new primers introduced characters with whom children could identify, and they contained stories featuring the same set of siblings engaged in normal day-to-day activities. To develop a national audience for the new series, the primers de-emphasized regional characteristics: there were no treks through snowstorms or into barren deserts.

The result was Dick and Jane, who made their debut in 1930 in Scott-Foresman's Elson-Gray Basic Readers, accompanied by a guide urging teachers using them in their classrooms to adopt the whole word (or look-say) method, one that emphasized the meaning of words, rather than using rote phonics drills.

I had no idea the Dick and Jane series went back that far.

I should have guessed. My mom has told me that her younger sister was taught to read using the look-say method, so she didn't learn to read fluently. To this day my mom's sister doesn't read for pleasure.

Pretty much your only defense in a country filled with look-say books is to be hyperlexic without the autism. Which I was (Christopher, too).



also see:
Storybook Treasury of Dick and Jane
Tom and Betty
Dick and Jane see the airplane
Father Helps the Family
Look Up



-- CatherineJohnson - 23 Mar 2006

---

IvyWiseCollegeEssayWritingTips 27 Mar 2006 - 22:25 CatherineJohnson



I love it —

Essay Writing Tips

The following are common essay mistakes:

• Using an overly-confident tone
• Reviewing your extracurricular activities and congratulating yourself on your achievements.
• Writing about something emotionally controversial or risky
• Using contrived Thesaurus vocabulary
• Writing more than two pages
• Writing about yourself in the third person

The following are some of the most common and worst essay topics:

• Declarations of love for your boyfriend or girlfriend
• Sincerely held religious beliefs
• Your political views
• Sex
• Sparkling SAT scores
• Schemes for world peace

source:
IvyWise

When Animals in Translation made the bestseller list in hardback, my agent took me out to lunch to celebrate, and, shortly after the topic turned to two-kids-with-autism, said, "Christopher's going to have one hell of a college application essay."

So naturally I was relieved to see that life-with-my-developmentally-disabled-sibling(s) does not appear on the IvyWise list of common and worst essay topics.

coda: If Andrew keeps going the way he's going tonight, Christopher will be able to write a how-I-felt-when-my-mother-placed-my-autistic-twin-in-a-group-home-at-age-11 essay.

Killer.





Here's one of Andrew's tableaus. He did this one about a day after he did the blog dog arrangement. The book title is Educating Children with Autism.







-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Mar 2006

---

WillinghamOnKnowledgeReadingThinking 05 Apr 2006 - 11:59 CatherineJohnson



How Knowledge Helps

More great stuff from Daniel Willingham. Will excerpt later. Hirsch is there, too.

-- CatherineJohnson - 02 Apr 2006

---

SmartestTractorOnKillgallon 05 Apr 2006 - 01:24 CatherineJohnson



Smartest Tractor has been using Don Killgallon's book on Sentence Composing, which I have but have yet to use (will probably wait until the summer). ST has also tracked down Killgallon's website, which isn't easy to find on Google. Make that virtually impossible to find on Google.^*

The practice sessions go very well. I present the examples in Word and use the highlighter to show the structure of the model and the example.

The activities are usually done well by the class. Some students try to get a bit too creative in their ideas and miss the structure. It is a easy situation to resolve.

I had each student write TOWL-3 (Test of Written Language) at the end of February. I will have them write the B test at the end of the school year to measure their progress.

I need a larger brain to sequence everything. Maybe eBay has something for sale?

three questions:

• what is TOWL?

• can parents give TOWL to their kids?

• why do you need a larger brain (?)
  

sentence combining

Just used ask.com for the first time [see footnote] - it is cool. A search for sentence combining (not the same thing as "sentence composing") turned up a report from the BBC:

in a pressured curriculum, where the development of literacy is a high priority, there will be better ways of teaching writing and our findings suggest that the teaching of 'sentence combining' may be one of the more effective approaches."

The teaching technique of "sentence combining" is defined as "combining short sentences into longer ones, and embedding elements into simple sentences to make them more complex".

The study is based on an analysis of previous research produced since the beginning of the last century - and it concludes that teaching formal grammar is not the best way to develop children's writing.

websites

• 5 ways to combine sentences
  
• Yale-New Haven Teacher Institute theory & research: sentence combining
  
• simple online sentence combining exercise (graded online)
  
• 10 kinds of sentences to imitate (useful)
  
• LEO sentence combing lesson - simple exercises, examples, & explanation
  
• sentence combining exercises
  
• sentence combining worksheet
  
• combine sentences into story, & links
  
• rubric for evaluating one's own writing
  
• email rubric for evaluating one's own writing
  
• Burke's pentad
  

• Prentice Hall online writing & grammar lessons for 21 chapters: Adventures in Writing
  
• 21 online lessons in sentence combining from Prentice Hall
  

• sentence de-combining exercise
  

• teaching plans, etc.
  

• online self-study grammar tests (lots of CLOZE exercises)
  

^* Speaking of impossible to find, Walter Mossberg thinks ask.com is great.















-- CatherineJohnson - 03 Apr 2006

---

GradeDeflationInIrvington 10 Oct 2006 - 01:46 CatherineJohnson



I am getting a C in English.

Specifically: a C in writing.

Which means I'm doing a lot worse than Ed, who is getting a B-. I'm also doing worse than our friend N., who told Ed, when they ran into each other a couple of weeks ago, 'I'm getting a B in middle school.'

On the other hand, I'm a couple of points out in front of the distinguished British historian.

She's getting a C-.

update: Ed now says she got a C+ and I "made it into a C- in my head."

We have a lot of these conversations.





my day and welcome to it

So yesterday, after spending all day at a funeral, I finally came home to a telephone call from Christopher's English teacher, Ms K. This is a different Ms. K, not the math Ms. K.

The English-teacher-Ms. K is a dedicated teacher who is paying attention, and is teaching real content. Spelling, grammar, handwriting (not trivial — we need it), and writing as a process of revision, topic statements, etc.

She's also a kind person who is wide awake as to the situation with Christopher and with us.

She was calling to tell me that Christopher had gotten a grade of 72 on his Book Share report, and had been visibly upset. He had put his head down on his desk, and she'd never seen him that way. So she wanted to call me, let me know, and talk about it.

That was great. It's above and beyond, and it's what a professional ought to do under the circumstances.

SO: my point is, I'm not having a problem with Ms. K-of-English. I'm having a problem with her grading, but not with her.





Book Share project

Here is Christopher's report.





What we have here is a failure to communicate

After a lengthy conversation with Ms. K, I don't know what's wrong with this paper.

What I mean to say is, I don't know what's wrong with it in Ms. K's eyes.

I know what I would think was wrong with this paper, if I were the teacher.

If I were the teacher, I would think the parent wrote it.

Ed said the same thing this morning, when he read. He said, and I quote, 'If I were the teacher I'd think this student had a lot of help.





so let's start there

I didn't write the paper.

Ed's take is right, however.

The paper is a hybrid. The ideas are all Christopher's, the structure is the teacher's, the pulling-it-all-together-into-a-coherent-form is mine.

Christopher came up with the thesis himself (unless his teacher taught this idea in class): he said, 'I call it a realistic fantasy story.' That is a terrific perception! I was so proud!

Christopher had to write this report Tuesday night, after being out sick for a week. He had a science test and a math test scheduled for the next day, too, and of course he'd missed all the classes covering the material that was going to be tested. Three massive projects to get through in one night.

We started with the Book Share.

Christopher sat next to my computer, I posted the list of required content next to my screen, and Christopher told me what he thought and put it into his own words. I suggested edits and more varied sentence structure as we went along.

I suspect this approach may be an effective way of teaching writing; I've done it before with other kids (not in this class or this school). Humans are observational learners, and this approach combines observational learning with doing....So I tend to think it's OK, in a pinch, to use this approach on a homework assignment. We were in a pinch. There was no way on earth we were going to get through one written report and two cram sessions in one night without doing it that way.

Long story short: this is more help than I would normally give Christopher, and more help than I've given him in the past.

Ed is right about what's wrong with this paper.

What's wrong is too much help from the parent.





what does the teacher think is wrong?

That's the rub.

I don't know.

She said two things specifically:


1. all paragraphs must have concluding sentences

me: That wasn't on the assignment sheet. I can have him write concluding sentences in all paragraphs, but I have to know you want him to write concluding sentences in all paragraphs.

teacher: It was on the other sheet.

me: I didn't see the other sheet. I can't keep doing this. I can't keep searching backpacks and notebooks for other sheets because What if This Sheet Doesn't Have The Whole Assignment?

teacher: I understand. I know you feel that way.

me: I can't go on like this.


Seriously.

That was the conversation. I am now having conversations with teachers in which I say, 'I can't go on like this.'


2. he needed to write a complete paragraph on the theme of the book

me: speechless


And that's it so far. I have no idea how he lost 28 points for not having concluding sentences in each paragraph and not having one full paragraph on the book's theme.

For that matter, I have no idea how any piece of writing can have a precise grade of 73.

I mean, what made it not a 74?

Or a 72?

I'm completely mystified.





did I mention I'm a writer?

So....we went round the mulberry bush a few times.

I said, in a non-hostile, non-rank-pulling tone, I'm a writer, I have a Distinguished Teaching Award, Ed's a writer, he has two Distinguished Teaching Awards (he's just been nominated for a third at NYU!), I taught writing to gifted kids at Johns Hopkins CTY, etc....and I said I just can't tell what she thinks good writing is.

I said I'm not quarreling with her view of good writing; I just don't know what it is.

I said professional writers don't have concluding sentences at the end of every paragraph, for instance.

She agreed.

Professional writers, she said, would not write the way she's teaching the kids to write.

She herself would not write the way she's teaching the kids to write in her own papers for graduate school.

What she wants, she said, is for Christopher to write the way an 11-year old writes in an English class, at this stage of the game.

This was not a veiled accusation that I had written the paper & not Christopher. I think she might have been saying that an 11-year old needs to learn a certain simple form first, before he tackles more sophisticated forms, the way you don't have an art student start with action paintings. He has to learn to draw first; then he can throw cans of paint on a canvas and make it work.

At least, it's possible she was saying that.

I don't know what she was saying.

She did say that it was very important for Christopher to learn to write the way she was teaching him to write, because he would need to be able to do it in 8th grade.^*





this isn't working, part 999

We left it that Ms. K would give me samples of 'A' papers.

She didn't want to do it.

First she said I shouldn't be thinking about grades.

I said If you're going to give the kids harsh, low grades on the work they do, then they're going to think about grades. If you don't want them to think about grades, stop grading them.

She basically agreed with that.

Then she said she had taught them, in class, what they were supposed to do.

She had told them, "A topic sentence is like an arrow hitting a target."

I said, 'I just don't know what that means. It's a nice analogy, it makes sense, but I just can't translate it to what that would look like on paper, to you.'

I said, 'We have to have models. We have to actually see what a good Book Share report looks like to you.

So then she tried her last tack, and said she really wanted 'just to work with Christopher directly.'

I said no.

I said, for about the 5 gazillionth time in the conversation, 'I can't go on like this.' (I also mentioned homeschooling several times.)

I said, "I want you to work with him, that's my preference, but we can't go on like this. We have to see models of what it is he's supposed to be able to do."

She said she would give us models, and she said she understood.





models t/k

So.

I'm going to take a look at the models Ms. K supplies, and see what's what.

I'm thinking there's a specific formua for paragraph writing that she wants the kids to master.

I'm thinking, too, that in this case 'report' actually means 'list of paragraphs.' Christopher did his last Book Share project completely on his own - we didn't even see it - and he got a grade of 86.

He wrote separate paragraphs answering each question individually. No thesis, no transition sentences, etc.

Separate paragraphs are fine, although he's capable of creating a simple organizational structure and of writing transitions between paragraphs and ideas.

It may be a good exercise to write highly formulaic paragraphs. I tend to think that once a child has shown he can write a simple paper, that's what he should do.

But I don't know.

So we'll see what the models look like and go from there.

But no more guessing games. I really can't live this way; more accurately, I won't live this way.

Ed worked on the CA social studies/history frameworks, and told me that a good framework (or was it standard?) tells you two things:

• what a child is expected to know

• what a child is expected to be able to do

I don't know either of these things about any of Christopher's classes in middle school.

Enough's enough.





waiting for me in my Amazon basket

^* The principal himself told us that the 7th and 8th grade writing programs "need work." So.....I'm guessing Ms. K knows what she's talking about here.


no grade inflation in the suburbs
grade deflation in Irvington
grade deflation in the suburbs, part 2
is there a dangerous myth of grade inflation?

gradedeflation


-- CatherineJohnson - 07 Apr 2006

---

GradeDeflationInTheSuburbsPart2 10 Apr 2006 - 15:05 CatherineJohnson



Ed got the scoop on the distinguished historian who got a C- on her middle school paper.

Turns out she didn't get a C-.

She got a C.

Also, the reason she wrote her daughter's paper was the same reason I put so much time into Christopher's C paper: her daughter was overwhelmed with projects due the next day and there was no possible way she could do it all. So her mother wrote the paper, and the daughter did the rest.





this is rigor in suburbia

At least, this is rigor in my neck of the woods. Overwhelm the children with work they can't possibly manage in the allotted time, then give them Cs and Ds on the work they do complete, and tell the parents, 'He's going to get it. Don't worry. The wheels are spinning. He's thinking.' I heard these exact words last week, from Christopher's English teacher. I don't know exactly what she meant, but judging by her tone she seemed to be saying, 'He's brighter than I thought. With hard work, I think he can learn to read and write at a middle school level.'

The message Ed and I get from our middle school — the tone of the message — is sympathetic and concerned. Don't worry, he's capable of learning, it will take time, why are you thinking about grades so much?

He's an ordinary boy, and ordinary boys are ordinary.

Everyone knows boys do worse in middle school than girls. Direct quote.

You can't compare American schools to European schools. Direct quote.

Given what I'm hearing from other parents, this is the Middle School Message in any number of schools.

I've mentioned this before, but I'll repeat myself:

Three different families have told me their 6th grade children came home not long after the beginning of the year saying that a teacher had 'come into' their classroom, had drawn something that sounds like a bell curve on the board, had told the children that they were 'average,' that 'average' is 'normal,' and that 'average' means a grade of 'C.' The children were not to be upset about getting 'Cs.' They should expect to get 'Cs.' Because they're average.

From where I sit, Irvington Middle School has a formal or informal grading policy that stresses giving Cs to 6th grade students, and perhaps to 7th and 8th grade students as well.

Why else would Mrs. R tell us, on Back to School night, that she would not be assigning 15 minutes of daily reading because middle school is so emotionally painful for children that asking them to read every day would be asking too much?

"That first D is devastating," she said. "Devastating."

I took notes. That is a direct quote. The word she used was devastating. She was telling us our children would be devastated by 6th grade.

And sure enough, my child was devastated by 6th grade — by Mrs. R herself, in fact.

Of course, I don't know that IMS has a formal or informal policy of giving Cs for average work regardless of its quality.

I don't know anything at all about the formal or informal policies governing grading at the Irvington Middle School.

I know a great deal about the appropriate way to communicate with the Irvington Middle School when I have a problem. I am not to go directly to the principal. I am to speak to the teacher first. I am to be cordial when I do.

I don't know anything about curriculum, grading policy, educational philosophy, or the results of any schoolwide testing of my child or how much of the curriculum he has mastered and how well he has mastered it.

the best defense is a good offense

"Middle schools are the place where achievement goes to die."

All middle school administrators have heard this line.

So say you're a middle shool principal who firmly believes that 'you can't expect American schools to do what European schools do' (how many times have I heard our principal and assistant principal say this?)

And say you're getting heat from parents who think that, at $18,000 per pupil spending, this particular American school should do what European schools do.

What's your move?

My move might be to institute a harsh and arbitrary grading policy.

The kids are doing badly, the parents are working around the clock to help their kids 'bring their grades up,' and nobody's got the time or energy to complain about international standing.


no grade inflation in the suburbs
grade deflation in Irvington
grade deflation in the suburbs, part 2
is there a dangerous myth of grade inflation?

bellcurve
gradedeflation

-- CatherineJohnson - 09 Apr 2006

---

StupidMayorTrick 03 May 2006 - 16:56 CatherineJohnson



Lone Ranger found a new article in New York Magazine about Mayor Bloomberg's mandated constructivism: A is for Apple, B is for Brawl:

In a far corner of the room, a girl named Enami sits cross-legged on a moss-green rug, a floppy paperback in her hands. Her selection is from the Henry and Mudge series, about a boy and his dog.

[snip]

Enami opens the book and bobs her head, the bright blue beads in her cornrows jostling as she starts reading aloud.

“On a sun day . . . ”

It says sunny day in the book. But Enami’s a little tentative. She hasn’t read this one before.

“A man with a collar . . . ”

The teacher has a suggestion. “Sometimes we look at the picture and figure out if it makes sense.”

Enami eyes the drawing of a man walking a dog. She agrees collar doesn’t seem right. After some discussion, it’s decided that collie works better.

“A dog!” says Enami, satisfied.

She continues—and a page later she trips up on the word disappeared. She takes her best guess: “Stepped.”

“Let’s see if that makes sense,” says Kolbeck.

Again, Enami checks the drawing: a man at the end of a street, turning a corner. Her eyes flash—“Disappeared!” And on she goes.

If throwing Enami into the deep end of the pool like this seems a little intense, that’s pretty much the point. What’s unusual about this lesson—and to its critics, flat wrong about it—is what’s not happening. Enami and her seventeen classmates are not sitting in a row, repeating letter and pronunciation drills. They almost never are. There’s not a textbook in sight, or, for that matter, in the whole school. Instead, they’re learning by immersion, reading books of their own choosing, and when they mess up, which is often, they’re told to keep going.

Kolbeck and the other teachers at P.S. 29 are following the dictates of what’s called Balanced Literacy, an equal parts celebrated and maligned teaching technique ordered into the city schools three years ago by Michael Bloomberg and his schools chancellor, Joel Klein. Balanced Literacy is more of a catchall concept than an actual curriculum, interpreted slightly differently in every school system that uses it, but it is invariably rooted in an education philosophy known as whole language.

And there you have it. Constructivism from the top down. Scores are up! Enami can't read Henry and Mudge, but Joel Klein became the brilliant success he is because, back when he was a kid, he once read a book and liked it:

...the only reason he did well in school, and went on to become a successful federal prosecutor, was because a teacher handed him a book about baseball, a book he actually enjoyed and read.

I remember reading the same scene-setting anecdote in an LA WEEKLY article on Bill Honig's whole language initiative in CA schools maybe 20 years ago.^* Little black girl, trying to read a real book not a basal, guessing the words from the pictures. [update 8-2-06: I found it ]

That kid must be a successful prosecutor today, you think?





Lucy Calkins, godmother of whole language learning

How likely is it that the Lucy Calkins's writing workshop model makes more sense than her balanced literacy model?

Balanced Literacy, or at least the way it’s practiced in New York, is largely the brainchild of Lucy Calkins, founder of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, who is looked upon nationally as a godmother of whole-language learning.

I'm beginning to have some doubts as to the wisdom of transferring Christopher to Immaculate Conception for grades 7-8.





stupid chancellor trick

And where hard science once had little to say about how various reading methods affected kids, a series of MRI studies done at Yale starting in the late nineties appeared to show that as many as one in every four children, regardless of class, race, or other demographic factors, needs direct instruction in basic skills before he can read. When kids with learning difficulties read with phonics, their brains light up on MRI scans like a Christmas tree. The conclusion, phonics advocates say, is clear: Kids need technical instruction in the basics before being immersed in the world of literature.

That argument doesn’t persuade Klein. He’s cultivating mindful, curious readers, he’s said, not vanilla word-decoders.^** “I’m quite convinced the curriculum we’re using, with inquiry-based learning, will serve our students throughout the city well over time,” he says. In particular, Klein likes that Balanced Literacy looks a lot like the reading approaches in successful school districts on the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side and in most of the city’s elite private schools.

direct instruction again

In 1997, Congress asked NIH to create the National Reading Panel (a commission of academics) to consider the question. The panel took three years to review and scrutinize 1,000 recent academic studies of phonics-related reading programs, eliminating all but the most carefully constructed. In 2000, the panel released its “meta-analysis” and concluded that in order to learn to read, all children must master five separate skills: phonemic awareness (separating words into distinct sounds, like the c, a, and t in cat), phonics (learning the sounds letters and letter combinations make), fluency (the ability to read with speed and accuracy), vocabulary (learning new words), and comprehension (understanding what you’re reading). These basic skills were nothing new to most people who taught elementary-school English. What the NRP added to the debate was the notion that direct instruction of these skills was the only proven method for teaching reading.

in a nutshell

• phonemic awareness (separating words into distinct sounds, like the c, a, and t in cat)

• phonics (learning the sounds letters and letter combinations make)

• fluency (the ability to read with speed and accuracy)

• vocabulary (learning new words)

• comprehension (understanding what you’re reading)
  

it's the curriculum, stupid

As a direct result of the NRP, those directing federal educational policy held up phonics as a sort of magic bullet, even though the data, critics say, fell well short of supporting such a blanket conclusion. For example, while the full NRP report acknowledged that “phonics instruction failed to exert a significant impact on the reading performance of low-achieving readers in second through sixth grade” and “there were insufficient data to draw conclusions about the effects of phonics instruction with normally developing readers above first grade,” the more widely distributed NRP summary report endorsed phonics without qualification. “Phonics instruction,” it read, “produces significant benefits for students in K through sixth grade and for students having difficulty learning to read.”

The conspiratorially minded likened the NRP study to other Bush-era tactics like payola for columnists or doctoring official opinions on the environment. Was it a coincidence, they wondered, that Voyager Expanded Learning, the company that made a phonics program that fit neatly within the NRP guidelines, was founded by Randy Best, a Texas entrepreneur who raised money for the Bush campaign and whose company Website once displayed a picture of Bush endorsing the program? Best sold the company for $360 million. “This is what I call the triumph of entrepreneurism over evidence,” says Richard Allington, president of the International Reading Association, a 40-year-old professional organization of teachers. “Even the NRP found only a small benefit for systematic phonics instruction—and they could not describe with any specificity what that ‘systematic’ instruction looked like.”

This is obviously what Seigfried Engelmann is talking about when he says isolated 'features' of a good curriculum, such as instruction in phonemic awareness, do not a good curriculum make:

The Dalmatian and Its Spots: Why Research-Based Recommendations Fail Logic 101

Until educators recognize that they are not dealing with physics and that the program-design game is more akin to inventing things than describing using broad and amorphous categories like "phonics," the field is going to progress only with baby steps.

The Wright brothers had to orchestrate hundreds of specific details to make a flying machine. Yet, if any one of those pieces had been out of place or misconstructed, the machine would have failed. So it is with educational programs.

[snip]

About the only ones who benefit from the current research-based criteria are the publishers. They don't have to become concerned with details that make a program superior, just plug in some activities, label them "phonics" or "phonemic awareness" and lo, they will probably be adopted in states like California.

I wonder how Zig feels about data warehousing.





reading is rocket science after all

In the years after the NRP report, phonics racked up more scientific support. In the Yale MRI studies, researcher Sally Shaywitz, a member of the NRP, demonstrated that kids learning the NRP way developed their occipital-temporal parts of the brain (the part responsible for reading) more dramatically than the other children did. (Shaywitz was one of three members of the NRP to co-sign the open letter to the mayor in 2003 lambasting Month by Month Phonics.) “Learning to read used to be catch-as-catch-can, but now it is real science,” she says. “There is evidence now that if you use evidence-based teaching methods, you can really rewire the brain.” Faced with these results, Shaywitz says, it’s foolish to hang on to whole language. “If you had a program that you know works, and something else you just feel pretty good about, would you volunteer your child for the one you weren’t sure worked?”

This is the first time I've seen a cognitive scientist say we have brain scan findings specific enough to guide decisions about teaching methods.

I'm going to hope that's true. The new issue of TRENDS IN COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE, which includes an article titled "Bridges over troubled waters: education and cognitive neuroscience," is completely discouraging on this issue:

Recently there has been growing interest in and debate about the relation between cognitive neuroscience and education. Our goal is to advance the debate beyond both recitation of potentially education-related cognitive neuroscience findings and the claim that a bridge between fields is chimerical. In an attempt to begin a dialogue about mechanisms among students, educators, researchers and practitioner-scientists, we propose that multiple bridges can be built to make connections between education and cognitive neuroscience, including teacher training, researcher training and collaboration. These bridges – concrete mechanisms that can advance the study of mind, brain and education – will benefit both educators and cognitive neuroscientists, who will gain new perspectives for posing and answering crucial questions about the learning brain.
source:

Bridges over troubled waters: education and cognitive neuroscience
by Daniel Ansari and Donna Coch
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Volume 10, Issue 4 , April 2006, Pages 146-151

Reading this abstract, it's hard to see the difference between cognitive science blah-blah and edu-blah-blah.





multiple bridges can be built





I say we forget about building multiple bridges and stick to field-testing, revising, and re-field-testing curricula.





back to the future

By the spring of 2004, Diana Lam was gone, but Joel Klein went out of his way to defend Balanced Literacy. He promoted Carmen Fariña, a respected Brooklyn superintendent who had used Balanced Literacy as a teacher and principal. Fariña proudly took up the cause. But behind her bluster, Fariña seemed to understand she had inherited a PR problem.

[snip]

Since then, the New York curriculum under Fariña has moderated a bit, carefully incorporating phonics in a way that doesn’t violate the whole-language ethos.

That's a relief.





Lucy Calkins, Lucy Calkins

“We need to be centrists,” says Fariña, who has even reached out to Sally Shaywitz to study the effectiveness of a particular intervention program called Fundations. “Kids come to us in various sizes with varying needs. None of us are reading the Times on Sunday on the same page at the same pace and with the same interest, and neither should kids be doing that in their classrooms.”

[snip]

To some phonics advocates, of course, this still isn’t enough. “How many schools is Fundations in?” asks Diane Ravitch. "Lucy Calkins has trained about 10,000 teachers."

Is that a lot?

Ravitch is especially angry because she believes New York is spinning its test scores. Advocates like Calkins cite the National Assessment for Education Progress .... to show how New York’s fourth-grade literacy scores have gone up the 7 percentage points since 2002.... But Ravitch notes that the big leap in those fourth-grade scores happened from 2002 to 2003, before the reforms were put in place. “From 2003 to 2005, there was no significant gain,” she says. What’s more troubling, she says, is that the 49 New York schools that Klein allowed to use the evidence-based Trophies program increased their state fourth-grade scores, on average, by 20 percent, double the increase of the rest of the school system.

get the hook

Fariña still believes that a program front-loaded with phonics can lead to rote teaching, which in turn leads to poorer teachers. Most of all, Fariña remains devoted to the proposition that the vast majority of kids just don’t benefit from being drilled. “I want kids not only to learn how to read, I want them to want to read,” she says. “And I don’t think that all the skill and drill that’s happened over the years will lead to that if we don’t do the other piece of it.”

Well, that settles it.

Carmen Fariña believes, remains devoted, thinks, wants, wants, and doesn't think.

That's enough for me!

"Piece" is a HUGE edu-word, btw. Huge. In every meeting I've gone to over the past 5 years people sat around talking about "the strategies piece" or "the transition piece" or "the occupational therapy piece," etc.

Our new interim Director of Pupil Personnel never, ever, says piece. Also happens to be great at his job.





Lucy Calkins, Lucy Calkins

The fact is, New York is most likely to remain a whole-language town. Federal mandates and MRI scans aside, progressive education is part of the academic culture here.

Not that this means peace is about to break out in the Reading Wars.

“Lucy Calkins is key in all this,” says Ravitch.

So I guess 10,000 is a lot.





Lucy Calkins, Lucy Calkins

“The big response to Diane Ravitch,” Calkins replies, “is that we’d love to have her visit schools. She’s never visiting schools. You say to her, ‘Which schools have you seen? What do you think about what’s happening in Lauren Kolbeck’s class at P.S. 29?

[snip]

She stops herself. Sometimes it’s hard to talk about reading without getting caught up in the wars.

“We do have a very divided country,” Calkins says. “In lots of ways.”

Why, yes we do, Lucy Calkins!

Just to show how right you are, I'm listening to Beer for My Horses at this very moment.

When the song is over, I'm hitting Repeat.

Justice is the one thing you should always find
You got to saddle up your boys
You got to draw a hard line
When the gun smoke settles we’ll sing a victory tune
We’ll all meet back at the local saloon
We’ll raise up our glasses against evil forces
Singing whiskey for my men, beer for my horses

stupid mayor trick
Thank you, whole language
guess and check reading
stupid mayor trick part 3: the good news

National Reading Panel (official website)
The Partnership for Reading
(govt website: "bringing scientific evidence to learning")
National Reading Panel report full text (pdf file)

who is Lucy Calkins
having a Lucy Calkins day
Cargo Cult Lucy from Becky

^* Ed worked with Bill Honig on the California Subject Matter Projects, which may have been the first and only educational reform focused on content, not process. Honig was a brilliant guy who later saw the error of his ways on whole language.

^** Because, after all, decoding words is such a useless skill. "Perchlorethylene" should be pretty easy to figure out from context.



-- CatherineJohnson - 29 Apr 2006

---

ThankYouWholeLanguage 03 May 2006 - 16:57 CatherineJohnson



Lesley pointed me to this essay posted at Illinois Loop. I'd never seen it before —

Thank you Whole Language. Thank you for your many pearls of wisdom. Thank you for Context Clues. Thank you for Prior Knowledge. Thank you for the Initial Consonant. Thank you for Picture Clues. Thank you for Miscues.

But most of all, thank you for my wife. The other day she and I were riding along the highway and saw a sign for a town called Verona, so my wife read "Veronica". It's very simple, you see. First she applied Context Clues (she knew we were looking for a name). Then she applied the Initial Consonant ("V"). Then she applied Prior Knowledge (she already knew of a name "Veronica"). She put these Whole Language strategies together and ... success! At least, as much success as we can expect, I suppose.

Like the man said, Read the whole thing.


stupid mayor trick
Thank you, whole language
guess and check reading
stupid mayor trick part 3: the good news

National Reading Panel (official website)
The Partnership for Reading
(govt website: "bringing scientific evidence to learning")
National Reading Panel report full text (pdf file)

who is Lucy Calkins
having a Lucy Calkins day
Cargo Cult Lucy from Becky


keywords: nationalreadingpanel


-- CatherineJohnson - 30 Apr 2006

---

LucyCalkins 01 May 2006 - 14:38 CatherineJohnson






source:
Developing Writers





stupid mayor trick
Thank you, whole language
guess and check reading
stupid mayor trick part 3: the good news

who is Lucy Calkins
having a Lucy Calkins day
Cargo Cult Lucy from Becky

National Reading Panel (official website)
The Partnership for Reading
(govt website: "bringing scientific evidence to learning")
National Reading Panel report full text (pdf file)



-- CatherineJohnson - 01 May 2006

---

BreakingTheRules 05 May 2006 - 15:05 CatherineJohnson




Cruising grammar & writing books this morning, I've come across Breaking the Rules by Edgar H. Schuster. Edgar H. Schuster appears to be an eminence grise in the world of edu-writing:

Edgar H. Schuster has taught English in secondary schools and in colleges for more than forty years. He has spoken frequently at national conferences, held various positions with NCTE, and is a member of the Writing Assessment Advisory Committee for the state of Pennsylvania. Author of several textbooks and articles, he has been a Master Teacher at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University and is a recipient of a Lindback Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching.

So here is the first review posted on Amazon:

If you are looking for an untraditional and creative means of helping students become better writers then this book is for you. breaking the rules by Edgar Schuster is a idealistic book about grammar that goes beyond traditional instruction. This book is meant for anyone who is interested in a better instruction of grammar, which includes college students and reflective teachers.

In the book Schuster suggest that teachers look at the works of students, writers, and other professionals and then after reviewing the works, the teachers need to decide which language rules are practical and which ones on be broken, for example the case of Finlay McQuade during the late 1970's. McQuade took a good look at his Editorial Skills class and found out that teaching grammar in a traditionally way is a failure (p. xviii.) There is too many rules in traditional grammar that has no space in the realities of spoken or written language today.

The book is full of real life anecdotes that makes it easy to read. For example, Schuster used himself in an example about a student who was told that the definition of a pronoun was a word that replaces a noun. So the student used words such as writer for author and book for novel. There are detailed instructions on how grammar rules are used, and if possible, how the rule can be broken to enhance the writing. The book includes many topics from the definition of a noun to tips on revising and editing. There are also many activities in the book that make it easier for the reader to understand the concept.

This is a wonderful book to keep on hand for a reference for anyone who is going into the field of teaching or anyone else who is interested in improving his or her writing.


Was this review helpful to you?

Yes. This review was helpful to me.





Steve & Smartest Tractor weigh in

Yup. There is too many rules to learn. There is too many numbers in math too. There is just too many things to learn in education.

- Steve



So bring on the character education...

- Smartest Tractor

-- CatherineJohnson - 03 May 2006

---

NyEducatorOnWrittenLanguage 05 May 2006 - 21:13 CatherineJohnson

It's important that kids know the rules of writing are largely unforgiving, and breaking them, if you don't know what you're doing, is going to make life awfully difficult if you can't, for example, afford to pay someone competent to write your college papers.

I think that's nicely put.

I've been submerged in writing books & programs this week, and am about to spend my next book advance on teaching materials.

(BACK STORY: 8th graders are now being accepted & rejected by the high school honors courses. Of course none of us has the faintest idea how these decisions are made, but rumor has it the 'honors application essay' (my term) the kids write is a major factor. This means Christopher has to learn to write, and I have to teach him. I'm mainstream on this one. Both Scott Fried and Raina Kor have directly told parents - Ed and I were present - that the 7th and 8th grade writing program is poor. When you've got the principal telling you his writing program stinks, your task is clear.)

One book I saw compared style & tone to clothing, an analogy I think works pretty well. The author pointed out that you wouldn't wear your skater clothes to a job interview (something along those lines).

I always talk about tone & voice, and explain that you don't use the same language in church that you use with your friends. I think the visual analogy will shore up the direct-instruction in tone.





more from NYC Educator

I had a student in a college class whose sentences covered entire pages, and who did not believe in ending paragraphs, ever. He stated that Gabriel Garcia-Marquez did that. I was never able to convince him he didn't write like Garcia-Marquez. But he didn't.

The author of this cutesy little book should be given a prison cell right next to the folks who put Beethoven to a disco beat. The key should be lost, and its location should be reported to him in an utterly incomprehensible note written by my former student.

previews of coming attractions

Ed has fantastic news from his nationalism course!

I'll try to get a first report posted today.


-- CatherineJohnson - 05 May 2006

---

LoneRangerTutorsReading 06 May 2006 - 01:00 CatherineJohnson

I think whole language causes many children to become utterly confused about reading and appear to have a disability. Then the problem compounds itself as the child begins to feel stupid and then stops trying. I think many children are suffering from poor instruction not dyslexia. I believe that becuase once these students experience systematic explicit instruction they are cured. The young teachers here also were taught as children with whole language and do not have any background with phonics. Colleges of Education also favor balanced literacy. These teachers are mystified when a child cannot learn to read using balanced literacy and speak with reverence of the savior, "Linda Mood-Bell" This phonetic approach is saved for Special Ed kids in 4th or 5th grade, when all else has failed. "All else" includes Reading recovery which is whole language applied one-to-one. It's infuriating to me because I believe it is educational malpractice and waiting until 4th or 5th grade is too long as the damage has been done. I had another little guy in 3rd grade and his Mom came to me in tears. She reported that the school said her son would never learn to read. I realized immediately that the little boy was brilliant. He knew many things about the world and his vocabulary was incredible. He couldn't read at all. We started with Phonics Pathways, a white board and my magnetic letters and worked on consonants combined with short vowels.. sa, se, si, so ,su etc. In 3 half hour lessons he was starting to read the BOB books. This was due to the explicit program I used, not me. It is not rocket science to teach someone to read, but it sure is rewarding. Too bad our school system can't seem to get it right.

Thomas Zeffiro, of Georgetown, told me a few years back that the Linda Mood-Bell folks are fantastic.

He said (paraphrasing), "If you wanted your child to become a superb basketball player you'd get the best coach you could find. The Linda Mood-Bell people are the best reading coaches out there. They're light on their feet."

I loved the image of reading tutors being light on their feet.

He meant that they were completely focused on the student and on what the student was learning.

If what they were doing wasn't working, they shifted at once.

Which brings me back to my Columbia U. story....a friend of ours told us that there was a legendary professor at Columbia Medical School who taught all the Big Medical Brains in the city.

His motto, which he drilled into his students, was: If what you're doing isn't working, try something else.





Zeffiro's study

I'm sure this is the one he was telling me about way back when:

In this study, Eden, Zeffiro and their colleagues studied 20 adults with a lifelong history of dyslexia. They divided the adults into two groups of 10 and conducted baseline brain scans on both groups. One group then participated in an intensive eight-week interventional program designed to improve reading skills, while the other group received no intervention at all. At the end of the eight-week period, brain scans showed that the group that had taken part in the reading program showed measurable improvements in reading and related changes in neural activity. The brain scans of the control group showed no differences.

"It was quite exciting to be able to see such clear confirmation of our hypothesis in the fMRI scans," Eden said. "This is a great step towards better understanding the neural mechanisms involved in reading and learning."

I'm just about positive the program he's talking about here is Linda Mood-Bell. IIRC - and I do - he said the improvements were staggering. These were lifetime dyslexics. I have a memory of him saying some of these folks were almost illiterate (that could be wrong).

I spent a long time talking to him, because I was desperate to teach Jimmy and Andrew to read. He was serving on NAAR's Scientific Advisory Board that year. Fantastic guy.





visual processing & dyslexia

Zeffiro also told me, when I repeated the standard line about dyslexica being a problem with phonological processing, that this wasn't as true as people thought. There are visual components, too:

Addressing a long-standing controversy concerning the causes of reading disability, a series of research studies done by a team at the Georgetown Center for the Study of Learning indicate that the areas of the brain used for reading are the same areas used for other visual tasks, and that these areas may not work properly in the brains of people with dyslexia. However, the researchers also found that an intensive, phonologically based reading intervention program could not only improve reading skills in dyslexics, but could also effect changes in brain activity that can be measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology.

more from Lone Ranger

I know two teachers who have jumped off the balanced literacy bandwagon.

Teacher 1 : For the first seven years of her teaching career, she taught k-2 grades. She preached balanced literacy. We would get into heated debates over this topic. She went on to get her master's and is now a Reading Specialist. She has ditched balanced literacy for phonics instruction. She has used the same workbooks (Explode the Code), borrowed many from my homeschooling library (including Phonics Pathways) to remediate the kids that are in the "pull out" programs at her school.

Teacher 2: Taught 1-3 grades for many years. She too bought into the balanced literacy approach. She decided to homeschool her own three children when they were in 2,3 and 4 grades for health reasons. She realized that her oldest (4th grade) hated to read and was struggling. Retaught her oldest to read using phonics. She has said that she could never go back to teaching using "balanced literacy" as she has seen first hand the results. If she returns to teaching, it will most likely be as a reading specialist where she can use phonics.

The whole thing is horrifying to me.

The whole language versus phonics "debate" was resolved years ago, when the NICHD came out with its findings.

Now it's been unresolved.

Now Reid Lyon is an affiliate of George Bush and the White House push to require schools to use research-based curricula is "improper" and "scandalous."

A National Institutes of Health–created commission of Ph.D.’s came down squarely on the side of phonics in a 2000 report, influencing the Bush administration to crack down—some say improperly, perhaps even scandalously—on non-phonics programs.

This really is something.

The NIH says phonics is supported by research & whole language is not, and NEW YORK MAGAZINE translates this into a possibly improper and even scandalous "crack down" on schools.

These are people who make their living writing stuff for other people to read.


-- CatherineJohnson - 05 May 2006

---

VocabularyWorkshop 06 May 2006 - 20:49 CatherineJohnson




Jerome Shostak on: The Value of Direct and Systematic Instruction of Vocabulary (pdf file) (intended for Grades 6-12, but you could start in 5th grade or possibly even 4th - which I would do, given the fact that kids take the SAT at the beginning of 12th grade, not the end)

sample lesson Level E (average student 10th grade, or advanced student 9th grade) (pdf file)

Student website for the The Norton Sampler includes writing assignments - OK, but seem skewed towards girls (first assignment requires student to write about Martha Stewart's website)

SAT vocabulary at the Free Study Materials for SAT website.

online SAT vocabulary tests, w/VocabularyWorkshop words AP vocabulary, too - retests you automatically on any words you miss

cool SAT vocabulary quiz - timed





Christopher took the diagnostic test in Shostak's Vocabulary Workshop Level A a couple of minutes ago, and scored 36 out of 50 correct. I can't tell whether that's good or bad.

Does anyone know of a free, online norm-referenced vocabulary list I can consult?

I do think his English teacher has been getting vocabulary inside the kids' heads. While we were doing the spelling test for the next-to-last word list in Megawords 3 he told me a definition for the word "malignant" that he learned from her. So that's good.

Carolyn uses VOCABULARY WORKSHOP with Ben - haven't talked to her about it lately.

An overview of the program is here. (pdf file) Now that I've taken a look at it, I'd say Christopher is behind where he should be, given the amount of reading we do around here and the super-eliteexpensive Westchester public schools he's been attending. The program recommends Level A for "above average" 5th graders and "average" 6th graders. Christopher's at the end of 6th grade.

Have I mentioned the fact that Irvington has stopped giving any norm-referenced tests?

We're carrying on with the 8-book Megawords series, obviously; we're starting the zillion-book Vocabulary Workshop series from Sadlier-Oxford; and we'll begin Don Killgallon's Sentence Composing shortly.

Next I'm going to figure out a nonfiction reading program, possibly using The Norton Sampler Teacher's Edition.

Teaching writing as an afterschooler is going to be hard (I think) because of the Compliance Issue. Christopher doesn't like doing school work for me, and I'm having trouble seeing exactly how I'm going to prevent him from simply blowing me off on writing tasks. When I gave him his spelling test just now, it turned out he can spell lots of words he missed in the lessons. He says he missed the words in the lessons because he "didn't care." (He seems to be developing excellent metacognitive awareness when it comes to learning academic material from his mom.)

If he's blowing off spelling, he's definitely going to blow off writing.

So now I'm letting this issue percolate in my cognitive unconscious. I figure my CU has got to know something I don't. All my conscious mind has been able to come up with so far is the idea of issuing constant Threats To Homeschool If I Don't See Improvement In Subjects X, Y, & Z.

Which goes to show you how plug-dumb the conscious mind is (my conscious mind, that is). If you paid someone to come up with the single worst plan for inducing your child to learn to write at home, inviting him to call your bluff on a daily basis would be it.

While I'm mulling this over, I'm beginning to work on the component skills involved in writing. I can get enough cooperation from Christopher to teach spelling, vocabulary, sentence composing, and reading at home, so that's the first step.





words he knew:
plight
mimic
ingenious
rendezvous
relish
inflammatory
indisputable
gory
designate
rummaged
pacify
adhere to
vie
abduct
rigorous
data
topple (the government)
confiscated
sage (advice)
unerring
extinct
fatalities
scant
verging on (insanity)
taut
replica
serene
profits
wholesome
discretion
far-fetched
sluggish
self-seeking
disquieting
vow
optional
global


words he didn't know:
synopsis
strapping
dissect
foil (the plot)
acute (attack)
receded
forsake
quash
enumerate
implement
reveries
blighted
amalgamated












keywords: SATvocabularyquiz
vocabularyworkshop


VocabularyWorkshop websites & books for teaching vocabulary
Hake Grammar & Writing, VocabularyWorkshop, English from the Roots Up
SAT scores & VocabularyWorkshop



-- CatherineJohnson - 06 May 2006

---

QuizSite 06 May 2006 - 19:15 CatherineJohnson




terrific quizz site - includes a link to Selected Answers to Questions at Math Forum

-- CatherineJohnson - 06 May 2006

---

NationalReadingPanel 06 May 2006 - 20:17 CatherineJohnson


Links:

National Reading Panel (official website)

Partnership for Reading (contains a link to the full 2000 report)
(govt website: "bringing scientific evidence to learning")

National Reading Panel report full text (pdf file)




stupid mayor trick
Thank you, whole language
guess and check reading

National Reading Panel (official website)
The Partnership for Reading
(govt website: "bringing scientific evidence to learning")
National Reading Panel report full text (pdf file)

keywords: nationalreadingpanel


-- CatherineJohnson - 06 May 2006

---

NewsFromNowherePart6 11 May 2006 - 23:35 CatherineJohnson



So it's official.

a) Irvington Middle School does not teach kids how to write. (source: Irvington school personnel)

b) Admission to Irvington High School Honors courses is based largely in student ability to write (source: Irvington school personnel)

c) Irvington parents find this out in one of two ways: 1) when somebody else's bright kid gets rejected, or 2) when their own bright kid gets rejected (source: me)


Lucky for us, we're in group 1, which gives me two years to teach Christopher how to write an Honors Application essay. Once he knows how to do that, we'll be in position to proceed with Plan A or Plan B, as circumstances warrant:

• Plan A: Christopher applies to the Honors Program, writes an acceptable admissions essay, and receives a letter telling him he's been admitted to the program

• Plan B: Christopher applies to the Honors Program, writes an acceptable admissions essay, and receives a letter telling him he's been rejected by the program, at which point Ed and I elbow him in against the better judgment and over the protests of The Authorities
  

Speaking of parents who elbow, Ed and I were told, this week, that more than a few graduating seniors from IHS write college application essays that aren't punctuated correctly.^* These aren't your run-of-the-mill Irvington students, either. No, these are your AP-course attending Irvington seniors.

Some of these kids also don't know how to address a manila envelope, or where to go to get stamps. (hey - at least they know what stamps are)

We were shocked.

How does a graduating senior not know where to buy stamps? we asked.

The answer was pretty much what you'd expect.

the parents

"Have you ever heard the expression helicopter parent?" our informant asked.^**

oh, yeah. been there, done that.

My neighbor says we need to get "Helicopter Parent" t-shirts and start wearing them to school events.

(update: The person who said this was terrifically helpful, and only mildly - and humorously - disapproving of helicopter parents. He/she eventually told me, unprompted, that my form of helicoptering - vigilance about deficiencies in the school's curriculum - wasn't what she meant by helicopter parenting. She meant the kind of helicopter parenting where, apparently, the kid is so sheltered he's never seen the inside of a post office.)





formative assessment at home

So I asked Christopher if he knows where you go to buy stamps.

He said "the post office?" like it was a trick question.

As of last night, however, he did not know how to address a manila envelope. He knew you had to have a main address, a return address, and where you put the stamps in relation to the address. But he didn't know which way the envelope was supposed to be oriented.

Now he does.





Irvington High School grad fills out an application

I'd been hearing these stories for awhile (will keep identities private).

Somebody's child, while filling out college applications, kept having to ask his/her parent the definitions of common words.

Like, for instance, the word academic. This person's child did not know what "academic" meant. He/she thought it meant "athletics."

Or "citizenship." He/she also did not know the meaning of the word "citizenship."

I'd been hearing these stories for awhile, without quite connecting them to our own situation.

punchline: This child is a graduate of Irvington High School.





I would like to know how this happens

This particular family is middle class. They're not your standard-issue high-SES grad-school educated Irvington types. The kid is perfectly intelligent, no learning disabilities, went to the same amount of school everyone else went to, did his/her homework etc.

Doesn't know the definition of "academic" or "citizenship."

I don't know what this means, but I suspect it means Christopher has to be in the Honors track regardless of the school's view of the matter. If you can get through the entire IHS non-honors track without learning the meaning of the word "academic," that's a Sign.





Exactly how dependent on clandestine teaching by parents and tutors are wealthy suburban schools?

Do we know?

The answer is no. We don't know. My nieces go to public schools in Narberth, around Ken's way. Lots of reteaching at home, which my brother- and sister-in-law think of as "helping with homework."

When you disaggregate the scores, black kids are doing badly, white kids are doing great. Everyone seems to think that what these scores tell us is that the school is doing a dandy job teaching white kids, then falling down on the job with black kids, possibly due to dysfunctional black parents.

Well, let me say this about that.

The kid I'm talking about isn't black, and doesn't have an "irresponsible," "dysfunctional," or "drug-taking" family.

I question how many of the black kids in Narberth have irresponsible, dysfunctional, & drug-taking families.

How many of them have perfectly responsible parents who can't teach algebra?


^* In addition to teaching myself algebra, I am now teaching myself punctuation.

^** Not only had I heard the expression, I said, I am a helicopter parent. Then I repeated this 8 or 9 times for effect. This appeared to be the first time, ever, a parent had said "I'm a helicopter parent" as an Action Plan, not a confession.


helicopter parents, part 1
helicopter parents, part 2
helicopter parents, part 3
helicopter parents at the AFT
news from nowhere, part 6 (AP students)
helicopter parents of the word, unite
helicopter parents of the world, unite part 2a (t-shirts)
MiddleWeb says hovering is good



-- CatherineJohnson - 09 May 2006

---

TheSongOfTheAmazonBird 11 May 2006 - 22:32 CatherineJohnson



Still on my Quest, I've come across this reader review of Daybook of Critical Reading and Writing by Fran Claggett:

My Opinion..., April 14, 2002
Reviewer: A reader
The reason I gave this book two stars, is because we use this book in our class all of the time. Most of the stories and poems in here are hard to understand and complicated.

I know that you are supposed to use your mind, and there is no right or wrong answer, but you can not use your mind if you dont know what is going on. I keep getting zero's on my daybook assignments, because all I can put in the margins or the pages to write what you think, is that I can't write anything because it was hard to understand, so I get zero's for not understanding, and that to me isnt fair! So, I think that if to this book you tell your opinion, I think that if your opinion is that you didnt understand it, than that should still be counted as "no right or wrong answer".

But besides that, it is a good idea.

Was this review helpful to you? 



Yes.

This review was helpful to me.

This review helped me to remember that actually teaching content and skills is the proper goal of schools.


the song of the Amazon bird
the song of the Amazon bird, part 2
the song of the Amazon bird, part 3



-- CatherineJohnson - 11 May 2006

---

OnlineGrammarResourcesAndSingaporeGrammar 15 May 2006 - 13:11 CatherineJohnson



Parent Pundit has a question:

I have concluded that the schools don't even attempt to teach grammar anymore so that it will be mastered for the long term. They describe grammar, they give out worksheets ABOUT grammar, but they don't give ANY worksheets so the students can actually practice grammar. In other words, let's figure out how to do grammar in a conceptual manner and, voila, every kid will be able to create sentences in the "correct" manner.

HELP!

I found www.aleks.com to fix the problems with math, but I'm looking for a program like this to help with grammar. I could get out my old Katharine Gibbs Handbook of Business English, but it doesn't come with any worksheets. Furthermore, the hierarchical model of aleks combined with the ability to have instant feedback just works! And if you get the concept by getting it correct five times, Aleks moves you onto the next concept so no one is doing mindless rote because it moves as quickly as the individual moves.

Anyone have any ideas?

I've just recently become frustrated over the same issue.

Christopher's English teacher has made headway teaching him how to identify the grammatical parts of sentences, which is great (and will be important when he finally takes a real Spanish class, as opposed to the ersatz course he's taking now).

But he's had precious little practice actually writing grammatical sentences.

I'm using Don Killgallon's book this summer (Killgallon's website), but I may also use the resources a Commenter left:

• grammar workbooks from Singapore Math

• Speak Better English Czech site with terrific online exercises & immediate answers (Speak Better English homepage)

• English Language Study Zone (more online exercises with immediate feedback)
  sample page from Study Zone

sentence combining worksheet

• sentence combining worksheet
  

• tons of grammar worksheets & answers
  (some of these may require student to produce a sentence; I don't know)

• online list of sentences to be combined in various ways (w/feedback) - college freshmen

• 10 online sentence combining exercises w/feedback
  These are hard & fun. (It's hard coming up with the combination the website prefers.) I'm going to see if Christopher can do them.

If any of you finds other sentence combining and/or sentence composing worksheets online, let me know. (Not sure whether edhelper has these — I'll check.)


online grammar resources and Singapore grammar book
successive sentence combining exercise
kid-friendly explanation of sentence combining & online exercises

keywords: sentencecombining grammarpractice

-- CatherineJohnson - 14 May 2006

---

SentenceCombiningForAutisticKids 14 May 2006 - 20:01 CatherineJohnson




Apparently sentence combining is a good thing for autistic kids, too.

I wonder if I could make some simple sentence combining exercises for Andrew?

I bet I could.





Sentence combining as a technique for increasing adjective use in writing by students with autism.
Res Dev Disabil. 1994 Jan-Feb;15(1):19-37.



-- CatherineJohnson - 14 May 2006

---

SuccessiveSentenceCombiningExercise 15 May 2006 - 10:43 CatherineJohnson






directions:

Sentence combining practice (DESCRIPTION)
Lawrie Hunter 2003

Here is a description map for the PS2.
Simple sentences have been written for the map.

Print this page and write combined sentences. First make 3 sentences.
Then reduce further to 2 sentences.....or can you make just one sentence????? Ha!
When you have finished writing, go to the answers page and compare.

Lawrie Hunter's site





I think this exercise is a perfect fit with this British method of instruction:

[Judith] Koren describes how two British women she knows became effective essayists and speakers. “Each week, they’d had homework exercises like this: While preserving every essential point, reduce a 100-word essay to 50 words, then to 20, then to 10. Reduce 500 words to 50, 1,000 words to 100. Week after week, year after year. A grind? Sure it’s a grind. Who said literacy is easy? It takes practice. Few kids want to put in that amount of work. The schools have to demand it.”

• online sentence combining exercise with/immediate feedback
  

• online sentence combining exercise with/immediate feedback (same site)
  

Applied English Grammar on the Web

This site seems to be an entire book of grammar exercises posted online.




Applied English Grammar at Amazon
Applied English Grammar at Tomson Heinle





I'm getting the feeling that there are probably superb grammatical exercise books out there, most or all of them written for the ESL market.

Since finding the one I want would mean another Consuming Google Quest, I'm going to table it for now, and use the several-hundred-dollars'-worth of books I ordered this week.

Will post those later.


online grammar resources and Singapore grammar book
successive sentence combining exercise
kid-friendly explanation of sentence combining & online exercises

keywords: sentencecombining grammarpractice



-- CatherineJohnson - 14 May 2006

---

EslSentenceCombiningSiteForKids 14 May 2006 - 21:09 CatherineJohnson



ESL is definitely where the action is.



online grammar resources and Singapore grammar book
successive sentence combining exercise
kid-friendly explanation of sentence combining & online exercises

keywords: sentencecombining grammarpractice

-- CatherineJohnson - 14 May 2006

---

UnderstandingAndUsingEnglishGrammarByBettyAzar 15 May 2006 - 10:46 CatherineJohnson



Just when I was thinking the ESL books are the way to go, NYC Educator left a fantastic recommendation:

If, however, you want a very thorough grammar bible, with abundant exercises, look at Understanding and Using English Grammar by Betty Azar. It's a blue book, designed for ESL students, but there's a lot in there native speakers may be unaware of, at least consciously.

I have to get the kids off to school; back later. In the meantime, the Amazon reviews are glowing. There are a couple of good explanations of her color-coding at that link, too.

I’m afraid I will be adding Betty Azar to the tab.








online grammar resources and Singapore Math’s grammar books
Understanding and Using English Grammar by Betty Azar



-- CatherineJohnson - 15 May 2006

---

HakeGrammar 15 May 2006 - 22:56 CatherineJohnson



This Comments thread has a number of recommendations for grammar texts, including a middle school grammar and writing textbook series published by Stephen Hake of Saxon Math fame, and co-authored by his wife Mary. A 5th grade book is scheduled for this summer.

The books have the same incremental lesson structure the Saxon Math books use. I'm incredibly tempted.





sample lesson










update

I just ordered the 6th grade books from Hake.

Also, the Ridgewood Grammar books, which Nick's Mama is using, look fantastic. EPS has posted 8 pages from one of the books online. (pdf file) (Megawords comes from EPS. In a couple of weeks we'll be finished with the 6th grade book.)





update update: vocabulary

Vocabulary Workshop is a hit. Christopher loves it. You don't need an Answer Key or teacher's guide to use it, and by the time a child is in 5th grade, which I think is when the series starts, he or she can use it on his own. There are 8 levels, books A - H, each approximately 180 pages. [update: Vocabulary Workshop begins in Grade 2 and goes through Grade 12+ (pdf file) and goes through Grade 12.]

Speaking of vocabulary, in the spirit of overkill, I also ordered a not-cheap copy of English from the Roots Up by Joegil K. Lundquist. I love the idea of learning English language roots, and had worked through the first couple of pages of EPS's offering in this category, Vocabulary from Classical Roots by Norma Fifer, Nancy Flowers, when Christian admired the book so much that I gave it to him.

So now I've gone and bought English from the Roots Up.

The Amazon reviews are so glowing, I had to do it.

Another reasonably priced Greek & Latin series: Vocabulary from Latin and Greek Roots, from Prestwick House. No reviews on Amazon, but the "Look Inside" pages seem good.









VocabularyWorkshop websites & books for teaching vocabulary
Hake Grammar & Writing, VocabularyWorkshop, English from the Roots Up
SAT scores & VocabularyWorkshop



-- CatherineJohnson - 15 May 2006

---

HowToWriteABusinessLetter 18 May 2006 - 15:27 CatherineJohnson



Trying to track down an estimate of the number of mammals living in the wild (no luck), I came across a nice little graphic explaining how to format a letter asking an expert to tell you how many mammals are living in the wild.




source:
Environmental Literacy Council
what to say in your letter


Of course, this format isn't the format I was taught - and apparently isn't the correct format even for the 21st century.

I still like the graphic.


keywords: coverletter coverletters

-- CatherineJohnson - 17 May 2006

---

WhatIsAussie 18 May 2006 - 16:30 CatherineJohnson



Apparently our school district is adopting, or contemplating adopting, a writing program called "AUSSIE," all caps.

What is it?

Does anyone know?

-- CatherineJohnson - 17 May 2006

---

EmailToTheAssistantSuperintendent 19 May 2006 - 17:51 CatherineJohnson



May 11, 2006

Hi Ralph---

Have you looked into the Summary Street software?

We’re interested in this approach, but I have the sense that the Summary
Street software isn’t available to individual parents at this point. (Not
sure.) I suspect these researchers are correct that a software program could
assess summary-writing, which appears to be a core activity in good writing
instruction.

Back in the day, I taught writing to gifted children in the Johns Hopkins
CTY program. (I was trained in college writing instruction at the University
of Iowa.) I’m now putting together an afterschool program to teach
Christopher how to write.

When you have a moment, I’d love to hear more about the program you’re
bringing in next year --- I remember the acronym as being “aussie” ---
something like that ----

Thanks!

Catherine J.





5-15-2006

Hi Catherine,

Belated good wishes for a Happy Mother's Day! I hope that all is well with
you and your family. At this juncture, no decision has been made regarding
writing programs. However, we are looking closely at AUSSIE as well as several
others. I will be back in touch when we have come to a decision.

Regards,

Ralph





5-18-2006

Hi Ralph---

Thanks for your email, but I’m afraid you haven’t answered my question,
which is: what is AUSSIE?

Where can I find information concerning AUSSIE?

Thanks very much.

Catherine Johnson

-- CatherineJohnson - 18 May 2006

---

SummarizingAssignmentFromKarenA 21 May 2006 - 05:47 CatherineJohnson

Meg's 6th grade Science teacher (this was last year) required the kids to choose an article related to science that was current within the last year. The kids then had to summarize the article using three logical sentences that were grammatically correct and also state why the article was important to the field of science.

The teacher's website included a list of websites with lots and lots of sources for kid-friendly news articles about science.

I thought it was a great assignment; it forced Megan to write three logical, concise and grammatically correct sentences and learn about science at the same time.

If you have any interest, I can provide the link for the teacher's website, which includes both the form and a list of websites.

I think that's a great idea. Science News for Kids has fantastic kid-versions of their articles posted online that would be perfect for this approach.

I especially like their articles on animals and behavior.

-- CatherineJohnson - 19 May 2006

---

SatScoresAndVocabularyWorkshop 27 May 2006 - 20:26 CatherineJohnson



VocabularyWorkshop on Supplements for Kids page.



I've mentioned that Christopher has a lot of fun with Jerome Shostak's Vocabulary Workshop.

ASIDE: I've just noticed that Sadlier Oxford also publishes a VocabularyWorkshop (pdf file) series for grades 2 - 5. The grade school books are are identified by colors - Levels Purple, Green, Orange, and Blue, after which you start with Level A in grade 6.

I haven't seen one of the grade school books, but if they're similar to the upper level books, you don't need the teacher's edition.

The upper level books all open with a diagnostic test that gives you a nice idea of what your child's vocabulary is like. I was distressed because Christopher missed 14 out of 50 terms on the Level A diagnostic test, but then he missed only 4 out of 50 on the Level B test. Great!

I've been looking at the website this morning, and found this study of SAT scores commissioned by Sadlier Oxford:

pull:
Program users, on average, exceeded the national [verbal score] norm by 18 points while scoring almost 14 points below the national average in Mathematics.


...taken holistically, the following data provide encouraging support for the effectiveness of the VocabularyWorkshop program as one component of the language-arts instructional program for secondary-level students. Users of Sadlier-Oxford’s VocabularyWorkshop program typically outperformed the national norms for the SAT. More importantly, students in these schools generally showed SAT achievement levels either: (a) above those prior to instituting the program, (b) superior to that of comparable students who did not use these materials, or (c) higher in verbal area of the assessments than in mathematics portion. Each of these three possible outcomes is seen as providing a positive indicator of the success of the program in improving students’ verbal skills.

A secondary analysis of the following data was conducted to supplement the school-by-school data. Scores for all schools providing 2002-2003 SAT data were combined across sites to assess an “overall” program effect. It is important to stress once again that these analyses do not result from a controlled study in which students were all tested at the same time following a specified “treatment.” Students across the SAT sites were juniors or seniors who had used VocabularyWorkshop for a period of time ranging from one to several years.

Nevertheless, it seems appropriate to present such a set of combined data. Across the 16 schools, the following summary scores resulted:


SAT Verbal Mean = 525.1
(national average: 507)
SAT Mathematics Mean = 505.2
(national average: 519)


Note that the national average scores for the 2002- 2003 school year were 507 in Verbal and 519 in Mathematics. Program users, on average, exceeded the national norm by 18 points while scoring almost 14 points below the national average in Mathematics. Given that these data are based on a broad range of schools and almost 3,000 students, the 20-point advantage of VocabularyWorkshop users in the Verbal area of this important collegeadmission examination is impressive.

VocabularyWorkshop websites & books for teaching vocabulary
Hake Grammar & Writing, VocabularyWorkshop, English from the Roots Up
SAT scores & VocabularyWorkshop



-- CatherineJohnson - 20 May 2006

---

NutsAndBoltsOfCollegeWriting 24 May 2006 - 22:20 CatherineJohnson



The results of my latest quest have been arriving daily, and I now have so many terrific books on writing, grammar, and logic heaped on chairs, tables & the floor that I don't know where to begin. There are major surprises - a brilliant little book called Increase Your Increase Your Score in 3 Minutes a Day: SAT Essay, for instance - that I would never have found without Amazon. Long live Jeff Bezos.

I'll get the list posted shortly, but I want to get today's find posted before Safari crashes and I forget the whole thing.

The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing

Nuts and Bolts is a website so good it's produced a book, and the Amazon reviews are glowing:

The Nuts and Bolts Website helped me turn a C minus literary criticism paper (I was devastated - I couldn't figure out what I had done wrong) into an A. My particular problem is structuring my ideas logically and building a solid argument. This site, along with an hour with a good tutor ("No, what you have here is NOT a thesis statement!"), and another hour with my eminently logical husband (he's an engineer who works a lot with lawyers) helped me finally understand that I had to, in effect, build a path with brick walls on either side of it, leading my reader along by the hand, rather than wandering all over the countryside to every distraction, expecting my reader to keep up with my desultory ramblings and then find his own way back to the road. And how to do it.

The site is, unlike me, clear, methodical, and understandable, which is very important when you just can't grasp something because it's in your Writer's Blindspot.

I'm buying the book in case the Website ever goes down.

I'm (probably) buying it, too.








keywords: collegewriting essaywriting

-- CatherineJohnson - 24 May 2006

---

HallOfFame 30 May 2006 - 18:08 CatherineJohnson



I finally subscribed to The New York Sun, mostly so I can read Andrew Wolf’s columns on education.

In today’s issue, appearing at the top of a column called "Fear Factor," I find this lead:

A few days ago, while standing in line at Chase Bank, a hefty water bug sauntered across the lobby.

source:
The Fear Factor ($)
By SARA BERMAN

I’ve been reading The War Against Grammar by David Mulroy, a Verghis pick.

It’s incredible.

It's so incredible that I’ve decided to learn grammar, too.

More later.








update from Google Master

I think the rule is that, if the water bug saunters across the lobby, you can consider that it has stepped out of the line, so everyone behind it in line moves up one space.

misplaced and dangling modifiers



-- CatherineJohnson - 30 May 2006

---

SampleFiveParagraphEssay 08 Jun 2006 - 19:19 CatherineJohnson




here


Haven't read it yet, but it looks useful.

-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Jun 2006

---

HowToSucceedInMiddleSchoolWithoutReallyTrying 29 Jun 2006 - 16:34 CatherineJohnson



I think our household stumbled onto a plan for managing middle school this year.

Christopher continues to be in almost bizarrely good shape. He brought home another couple of As this week — a 92 and a 98 — both in English. One of the tests had essay questions on which he lost just one point.

This is the teacher who had been giving him grades of C on his writing.

It’s not just the sudden appearance of high grades that’s so good to see. It’s the attitude. Christopher today is the kid we’ve been trying to grow. He’s serious, friendly, cheerful, and above all non-cool.

Ed is funny on the subject of cool. We were talking about Christopher not being cool one night, and Ed said, “You never want a boy to be cool.”

I suspect you don’t want a girl to be cool, either.

Of course, he’s young yet, so I shouldn’t count my chickens. Coolness may yet emerge. For the moment, though, Christopher has no sardonic humor (middle-school quippiness, yes; sardonic humor, no), his hair is short, and his pants aren’t hanging off his bottom. I’ll take it.

I have an idea how this happened – and I think this may be a workable approach for other kids in other schools.





Toru Kumon was right

Christopher’s afterschooling is pretty minimalist at this point. At least 5 days a week he does:

• Megawords, 1 page
• Vocabulary Workshop Level A, 1 page
• KUMON Math, 1 to 2 pages
  

Christopher does this work on his own. He takes his materials down to the basement and works alongside his dad, who has set up a desk for him there.

I’m going to add grammar (sentence diagramming in particular), writing, and possibly some extra work in Spanish to the mix. But when I do I’ll follow the same formula. One page a day in each subject, assigned from the same book each day, which lives in the same place on his desk upstairs. A book he can manage on his own.

When I first went to KUMON, part of the pitch was that KUMON's daily worksheets turn children into “self-learners.”

The American website seems to have dropped that language now, but you can still find it on other sites:

Self learning and Self motivation

Kumon students study independently at both Kumon Centers and at home. The role of instructors within the Kumon Method is focused almost entirely on the development of a student's ability to learn on their own. Kumon refers to the ability to set goals and solve unfamiliar and challenging tasks independently as "self-learning" ability. Instructors foster this "self-learning" ability in students by using worksheets that allow students to learn at one's own pace, moving forward when they are ready. The students' enthusiasm for learning is aroused in this process, as the goals they set are their own goals. In addition, this process awakens a desire in the students to take on new challenges.

Instructors ensure that students can, without any hindrances, experience over and over a sense of accomplishment, thereby boosting confidence in their own abilities. Problem solving abilities are enhanced, and independent methods of solving problems are encouraged.

When I read this passage last fall, I didn’t get it.

It made sense that KUMON would increase a student’s self-confidence, but I didn’t see why “succeeding” at worksheets would produce a “self-learner.” When you talk about self-learning you're talking about executive function, and I didn’t see how filling out 5 math worksheets a day had anything to do with frontal lobe development.

Now I think Toru Kumon was right, though I still don’t quite understand it. “Drill and kill” doesn’t just lead to procedural mastery and confidence. Somehow drill and kill also helps develop independence, motivation, and a responsible nature.

Is it the same principle that’s at work in military training?

It’s probably fair to say that military training is literally “drill and kill.” I don't know anything about the military, but as far as I can tell the result of military training is a young man who can follow commands or give them, and keep his wits about him in the midst of battle. All good things.

I don't know how it works, but I do think "the KUMON principle" has proved itself around here.

I also think that, in terms of Christopher's grades, the psychology of this year's "hands-off" afterschooling has been more important than the actual content Christopher learned. His afterschool books have little to do with his present school work. He's still in Level D - 4th grade - in KUMON Math, and vocabulary and spelling will pay off in the long run, not the near term.





who's in charge

I've mentioned more than once that, before Christopher entered middle school, I had decided I needed to "own" math.

I figured Phase 4 was going to be brutal, and I needed to "own" math to limit the damage.

Then it turned out we needed to own more than math; we needed to own the whole academic enterprise. Christopher has had at least 2 — maybe 3 — good teachers this year in his core subjects, but the school is a dark place.

Yesterday a friend of mine captured the unspoken school motto in 5 words: Do this or you're f*****.

That's it. That's what our kids are up against.

Label your graph, or 50% off.

Show your work the way I want it showed, not the way you thought I wanted it showed, or 20 points off.

Use complete sentences on the science test or points off. (That's coming up next year.)

Have your mom sign your test tonight or it's points off-off-off!

I think Tracy once used the expression gale of negativity.

That's what it's been.

Setting up an "afterschooling household" strips power and authority from the school in a good way. The message to a 6th grade child is: your job is to learn stuff.

Doesn't matter what grade you got.

Doesn't matter if the other kids think you're dumb. (Christopher says the other kids think he's dumb.)

Doesn't matter that you spent 4 hours on your scale drawing and Ms. K. deducted 20 points because you showed your work the wrong way and you still don't know what the right way was.

Go get your books and learn something.

Remember when Mr. Liu said that the Asian way is to be persistent and patient?

I didn't set out trying to create our own Personal KUMON. It evolved.

But I think we ended up teaching persistence and patience. I hope so.



NEXT: LEMONS & LEMONADE, WINDS OF WAR, AND REACTIVE TEACHING REDUX


-- CatherineJohnson - 10 Jun 2006

---

WritingAcrossTheCurriculum 13 Jun 2006 - 16:57 CatherineJohnson



I've been stalking Writing Across the Curriculum images on Google.

So far this one's my favorite.





Naturally I'm now violently opposed to Writing Across the Curriculum.

I even have a Writing Across the Curriculum horror story I probably can't tell, because it would violate a young person's privacy.

Let me put it this way.

Don't send your child to a college with a "Writing-Based" Curriculum.

For example, think twice before shelling out $40,000 a year to enroll your child in Hamilton College.

-- CatherineJohnson - 12 Jun 2006

---

YoungAdultLiterature 14 Jun 2006 - 18:03 CatherineJohnson




from Diane Ravitch's review of Welcome to the Lizard Motel by Barbara Feinberg:

The books that her son, Alex, and his friends are compelled to read are highly regarded by teachers and professors of education. Many come decorated with Newbery medals and endorsements by the American Library Association. They are books known in the field of children’s literature as Young Adult (YA) literature. All are highly realistic, written in a confessional tone, usually in the first-person voice of an angry or alienated teenager. The protagonist deals with traumatic experiences: murder, suicide, the death of a parent or friend, incest, sexual abuse, rape, drugs, abortion, kidnapping, abandonment. Friendly or protective adults are virtually nonexistent; the main character’s mother, writes Feinberg, is dead, missing, or nonfunctional. Children in these novels almost never play. Often they feel guilty for whatever catastrophe befalls them. The books are uniformly humorless, earnest, and depressing. Their message, to the extent that they have one: the world is a nasty and brutish place, and you can depend only on yourself.

What is missing from YA books, says Feinberg, is any recognition of the role that imagination and fantasy play in children’s ways of experiencing life. Instead, the books seem dedicated to shocking children, destroying their fantasies, and giving them a mean dose of reality. One of the children that Feinberg knows said of these books, “They give me a headache in my stomach.” It is as though the authors, the publishers, the teachers, and the professors of education share a bizarre consensus that ordinary children need to be shaken out of their complacency, stripped of their innocence, and frightened by the horrors that the world has in store for them at any moment.

Barbara Feinberg lives two towns over, in Hastings. My friend Lisa's daughter was in her story group; she said it was fantastic.

Here's part of the op-ed Barbara Feinberg published in the TIMES two years ago:

HASTINGS-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. — I don't remember exactly what books were on the summer reading list handed out on the last day of school back when I was 10 — more than 30 years ago — but I do recall that they were merely "suggested reading." I can remember scraps of stories: children making kooky inventions; a lonely girl making a Japanese doll house out of bright fabric; something about a fat little witch afraid of Halloween.

But mostly it's the easy feeling I remember when I picture reading that summer. I imagine myself sitting under a broad, shady tree, surrounded by distant hills, turning pages of a crinkly covered library book....

I can't imagine how I would have fared if I had been asked back then to read the hard-hitting books on current summer reading lists....Less common too is "suggested" reading. "In September," reads an addendum to a summer book list handed out to sixth-graders in a nearby school, "you will be given a computer-generated test on your summer reading. This will count as 20 percent of your grade, or two quiz scores."

The required books are often the "good books" — that is, the ones that garner the highest literary prizes, like the Newbery Medal. They tend not to be about children having adventures or fighting foes in slightly enchanted realms, as the young characters do in, say, "A Wrinkle in Time," the 1962 classic by Madeleine L'Engle. Instead, they depict children who must "come to terms," "cope with" and "work through" harsh realties. Where characters in my books lollygagged in meadows, as it were, the children in these books are trying to hack their way out of cellars.

Their suffering is generally caused by adults: a parent has died, or run off, or otherwise acted irresponsibly, drunkenly, selfishly, dissolutely. The children are left trying to put together the pieces. No magic swoops in to aid a resolution; no fantasy cushions the pain. As a group, these books are well written; they have some complex characters and subplots, and are rich in cultural description. But the angst and crash landings of the books is what sticks with you. A 10-year-old attending the creative arts program I run told me, "Those books give me a headache in my stomach."

I can see why. Here are some novels assigned this summer to American sixth-graders, all winners of the highest literary prizes: "Walk Two Moons," by Sharon Creech, chronicles a daughter's search for her missing mother, who fled, it turns out, because of a deep depression after a miscarriage and subsequent hysterectomy. At the end, the girl discovers that her mother was killed in a bus accident. In "Belle Prater's Boy," by Ruth White, a missing father is found to have died because he shot himself in the face; Belle Prater, the errant mother, is never found, although her son remembers her saying that she's in a straitjacket: "Squeezed to death. I can't move. I can't breathe. I have to get out of here." A far gentler book, "Because of Winn-Dixie," by Kate DiCamillo, is about a girl who finds a friendly dog who in turn helps her rebuild her life. But she must do that because her mother abandoned her; we are told also that the mother "loved to drink."

These kinds of books, often referred to as "realistic" or "problem novels," emerged as a genre in the 1960's, and have been in full swing ever since. In the last few decades, writes a children's literature historian, Anne Scott Macleod, "the path of American adolescent novels has been from outward to inward; from concern with the young adult's relation to the larger community to a nearly exclusive emphasis on the adolescent's inner feelings." Sheila Egoff, also an expert in the field, writes that such books "take the approach that maturity can be attained only through a severe testing of soul and self, featuring some kind of shocking `rite of passage.' "

The rationale for exposing 10-year-olds to such potentially upsetting books is that children who read about situations different from their own gain a larger frame of reference for understanding human behavior and cultural diversity. Some educators believe that life is harder than it used to be; books shouldn't shield children from this. The argument is, as the head of the English department in a school here in Westchester County told parents, that anxiety is useful to children.

[snip]

The kind of realistic fiction that seems more "useful," according to my observation of my children and their friends, affords its young heroes and heroines a certain measure of emotional protection. These novels manage to relay rich material, but don't need to tell all, and instead are quirkily selective, in a way that feels consistent with how an authentic child might filter experience. "The Devil's Arithmetic," by Jane Yolen, about the Holocaust, and "The Watsons go to Birmingham — 1963" by Christopher Paul, about the racist South, are books my 16-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter loved when they were 10. While the circumstances of these stories are indeed harrowing, they are not experienced as emotionally shattering: the child characters are protected by adults throughout.

But what remains most loved, and most useful in helping children "face adversity," is the realm of fantasy, or the realm of the slightly less real world — like Louis Sachar's "Holes," for example. A universe where scary things are blunted — that is, by a blanket of fantasy — is easier to enter; it's helpful too for the main character to have access to a tiny bit of magical power. One need only to remember that Harry Potter, after all, has had to deal with the murder of his parents and an abusive foster family. His magic accompanies him; he is looked out for at every turn. Rather than confronting evil in the form of a violent realistic father, say, it is vastly less stressful for some children to contemplate evil in the form of "he who must not be named."

[snip]

Strangely, it seems that in such stories the only people who get to break free are the missing parents: these characters seem to have found their lives too stressful and boxed-in, and have fled — right out of the books.

-- CatherineJohnson - 13 Jun 2006

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GirlsAndBoysLiteracyIn1870 14 Jun 2006 - 15:05 CatherineJohnson


This is interesting:

To the Editor:

David Brooks blames an alleged feminist takeover of the high school curriculum in the 1970's for boys' difficulty in school. But boys have performed poorly relative to girls for as long as educational data have been collected.

The 1870 United States Census shows that boys had greater access to schooling than girls but lower literacy rates; by 1924, boys were 11 percent less likely to enroll in high school nd 24 percent less likely to graduate.

In 1957, presumably before "new wave" novels about "introspectively morose young women" replaced Huck Finn on reading lists, the typical girl was at the 60th percentile of her high school class, whereas the typical boy was at the 40th percentile.

Such statistics received less attention in the past, when academically disinclined young men could still count on a healthy supply of well-paying manufacturing jobs. In today's economy, however, boys' difficulty in acquiring basic skills is a major social problem; blaming feminism only distracts us from identifying and addressing its root causes.

Ilyana Kuziemko
Cambridge, Mass., June 13, 2006
The writer is a graduate student in the department of economics, Harvard University

I wonder if that's true?

Ed always says, "Boys don't like to read as much as girls do."

I was a "bookworm" as a child; Ed was always out playing sports.

-- CatherineJohnson - 14 Jun 2006

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LetterToTheEditorFromASchoolBoardMember 14 Jun 2006 - 18:31 CatherineJohnson



I want this person on my school board (scroll down):


To the Editor:

To solve the widening reading gap between boys and girls, David Brooks says educators should offer them different reading materials. He's right in one sense.

The easiest thing in the world is for elementary school and even middle school teachers to offer kids choices about what to read. But please, let's not make that old mistake of assuming that what's appealing to one sex is not appealing to the other.

Many of the social-problem stories and novels kids read in school today should be thrown right out of the curriculum: the vocabulary is weak; the ideas, simplistic. And after all, most boys and girls can enjoy Mark Twain, one of the writers Mr. Brooks mentions.

Beyond this, we need to think about other ways to inspire young readers.

Why aren't kindergarten and first-grade students reciting poetry and folk tales on a regular basis? Why aren't they performing short plays? What happened to mythology, all those great tales of adventure?

Plenty of materials exist that will teach kids a love of language and energize their imaginations.

Diane Matza
Clinton, N.Y.,
June 13, 2006

The writer, an English professor at Utica College, is a member of the local school board.

-- CatherineJohnson - 14 Jun 2006

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SummerSchool2006 03 Jul 2006 - 19:43 CatherineJohnson




Still getting my act together on the summer program around here.

Andrew's set. He's doing KUMON Math and, as of today, KUMON Reading.

Amazing KUMON moment this week: I took a set of worksheets to school to show Andrew's teacher & aide how well he does with them.

Good thing I did, because they had no idea whether Andrew can or cannot do beginning addition. The answer is that he can, and they're the ones who taught him. They were blown away when they saw him whiz through a sheet of add-ones problems. The problems were sufficiently mixed that it was clear he understood the principle; x + 1 means the next number up from x.

The sheets I'd brought in had problems in the 30s, I think (30 + 1, 32 + 1, etc.). After he did a few of those I skipped ahead to the last sheet in the stack. The final problem was:


1000 + 1 =


Andrew frowned at this and hesitated.

Then he typed "1000" on the AlphaSmart.

I was mortified. I figured this was the moment where his teacher and aide would decide he was just learning by rote.

But I was wrong. They were both watching him intently. I said, "No, 1000 plus 1."

Andrew hadn't stopped frowning at the problem, which I think is part of what had his teachers so interested.

He reached out his hand, and deleted the final zero, then typed in '1.'

1001

They couldn't believe it. The mistake was what convinced them he knew what he was doing. I don't know whether they've seen him self-correct before; they probably have.

But watching him self-correct while doing a brand-new problem no one's ever shown him was the magic.

As impressed as they were, they stilll wanted to know whether Andrew could add ones if you wrote them in a different way, on a different kind of paper. This is the "hyper-specificity" problem that's so frustrating with autistic kids, and that is the center of Animals in Translation. The reason they were so frustrated with his progress in class, apparently, is that his performance is inconsistent – and the inconsistency seems to be related to changing fonts or paper, etc.

I’d never checked to make sure Andrew could do the same problems in different fonts and on different size paper (which I should have).

They gave me a sheet of paper, and I hand-wrote a ones problem.

Andrew answered it instantly.

They were convinced.

They were so convinced that they said they wanted to use KUMON as Andrew’s math curriculum this summer.

We talked about what the problem might be for awhile, and none of us knows. I'm guessing the problem is that the school doesn’t have a math curriculum for Andrew, mainly because there isn’t one, although KUMON may serve.

Clarice ordered Engelmann’s DISTAR program back when she was hired, and she gave it to me to take home. I got to spend two days holding the Presentation Book in my hands (I wish Ken had been there!) It looked like everything it’s cracked up to be, but it didn’t look like something a teacher could do with Andrew. I suppose you could type the script and have Andrew read it....which might be a good idea. I had to return the program the next day, and didn’t have enough time to think it through.

What's happening in class is that Andrew will seem to have mastered an addition fact, but then later on will seem to have lost it.

For the time being, I'm assuming that because they don't have a curriculum any one or all of 3 things has happened:

• they aren't teaching the math facts coherently

• they haven't given him enough distributed practice

• they haven't given him enough massed practice

As to the first, KUMON's worksheets are the ultimate coherent curriculum. The child does many, many worksheets on adding one to a number before moving on to add 2s to a number.

KUMON doesn't stop with the within-ten addition facts, either. Instead it takes the child all the way from 1 + 1 to 1000 + 1 before moving on to + 2. Clarice hasn't done that, I don't think. I think she had him learn all the various addition facts up to 10.

She said Andrew will seem to have mastered 6 + 4 = 10, but then when they ask him 6 + 4 a week later, he doesn't know.

I'm hoping the reason he forgets 6 + 4 is that 6 + 4 doesn't have the meaning it's going to have in KUMON.

I'm also wondering whether "massed practice" — aka drill and kill — may be especially important or even critical for developmentally disabled kids. Everyone in the U.S., constructivists & cognitive scientists alike, seems to have decided that distributed practice is the key to the kingdom. (TRAILBLAZERS & EVERYDAY MATH both claim to give children distributed practice.)

But I've always found I need to do a certain amount of massed practice in the beginning just to remember a concept well enough to be able to do distributed practice. Andrew is tough to deal with; I bet they haven't made him sit in a chair and do the same addition problems over and over again the way KUMON does. I wouldn't have.

In any case, we're moving on to +2 in a couple of days, so at that point I'll start occasionally asking him to do a +1 problem to see if he remembers.

We'll see.

As to KUMON reading, this morning Andrew was aghast at the discovery that in addition to the 5 KUMON math pages he has to do every day he now has 5 KUMON reading pages, too.

heh





summer school for Christopher

First off, I've had my second abject failure in afterschooling books: Sentence Composing for Middle School: A Worktext on Sentence Variety and Maturity by Don Killgallon.

I love this book — I even bought the college level one for me — and it's worthless for Christopher. The first exercises ask you to divide a sentence up at its natural breaks. For instance:

The only way to / keep your health is to eat what / you don't want drink / what you don't like and do what you'd / rather not.
- Mark Twain

The student is supposed to rewrite the sentence putting the slashes where they belong.

Christopher can't do it. He's so far away from being able to do it that he doesn't even really get what he's supposed to be doing. The whole thing makes no sense to him at all.

I thought he'd start to get the hang of it after awhile, but he didn't. He doesn't have an "ear."

Some kids do. My friend Kris's little guy, Charlie, has an ear. I went over one day & he came running up to show me something he'd written. He was missing a comma, and when I pointed it out he stopped in his tracks and talked the sentence to himself under his breath, and he heard where the comma was supposed to go. "Oh yeah!" he said, looking happy.

My other afterschooling flop was Daily Paragraph Editing, which I was using in 5th grade. I pushed Christopher through pages & pages of that book without his performance improving a jot. Finally I talked to his teacher, the brilliant Ms. Duque, and she said forget it. The book wasn't teaching him anything.

I interpret these failures to be more grist for the direct instruction mill. Christopher needs to be directly taught punctuation and grammar. Period. Then he'll have an ear.

I think he will, too. We've finished Megawords Book 3, and his ELA teacher, the other Ms. K, has been giving spelling tests all winter and spring. Ms. Duque taught spelling, too. So he's had a lot of spelling.

Suddenly, Christopher is using spelling rules to spell words he doesn't know, and he's getting them right, too. Boy is that great.

His spelling is so much better, it's amazing. Back in 3rd grade his spelling was A SCANDAL. It was almost psychotically bad, like those jokes about Eastern European languages with no vowels. These days he's starting to have normal not great spelling. In one paragraph of prose he might have two misspelled words, and those words will be misspelled logically.

This is why I'm sure he'll develop an "ear." He's developed whatever the analogous form of implicit knowledge is for spelling; he'll do it for writing, too.





vocabulary, writing, math...

So we're putting Killgallon on the shelf for the time being. Christopher will do Vocabulary Workshop, a book I like more and more as we go along. He does one page a day, which takes 5 minutes max. VW teaches words in 5 exercises:

• definitions — dictionary definition with sample sentences; student writes the word in the blank

• complete the sentence

• synonyms

• antonyms

• choosing the right word (student chooses which of two words on the vocabulary list "satisfactorily completes" a sentence)

• vocabulary in context — prose passage
  

There are 15 units in the book, and you review every three units. 20 words per list; 185 pages in the book. Efficient & effective.


We're big on vocabulary these days. At dinner I make Christian and Christopher learn Greek and Latin roots from English from the Roots Up. So far we've learned photos, graph, tele, metron, tropos, philia, phobos (predictable hilarity with metron, which instantly suggests the neologism metronsexual, philia & phobos), syn, and thesis, although Christian is having a horrible time remembering tropos. For quite a while there he was saying "line" whenever he heard it (too long to explain), so "line" has now become a running gag.

I told Christian to come up with a mnemonic device for tropos, but unfortunately the one he came up with caused him to start thinking tropos means revolving, which come to think of it maybe it does. (Does it?)

If anyone has a suggestion for a mnemonic device that connects tropos to turning, let me know.


I've also got an ancient copy of Word Power Made Easy (a Google Master recommendation, IIRC) next to the dining room table, so we may get to it, too, one of these days.

Then last week Martine went out and bought a dictionary of New York slang, and we all learned the meaning of ace boon coon, a phrase Christian knew and had used. I'm having as much trouble remembering ace boon coon as he is remembering tropos (I can't remember the "ace" part), so we'll see who gets to the finish line first.

Christopher is supposed to take his ALEKS placement test today, so I've got to go figure that out. More later.
















my boon companion



-- CatherineJohnson - 25 Jun 2006

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SummerReadingQuestion 27 Sep 2006 - 04:29 CatherineJohnson




Just got an email from the One Minute Reader folks:

Summer Reading Loss Can Undo School Year Gains

Students and teachers work hard during the school year to make significant and important gains in students’ reading ability and fluency rate. A typical increase is 30 to 40 words per minute.

Statistics indicate that students who do not read frequently over the summer often lose around 40% of the fluency gains made the previous year. This slide accumulates into a lag of two or more years in reading achievement, even when effective instruction during the school year is available. Considering that reading is the doorway to all other learning, the summer slide is a serious threat that needs to be avoided.

You can take action to accelerate reading achievement and avoid the summer slide. According to the National Reading Panel’s 2000 report, hundreds of studies suggest that “the more children read, the better their fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.”

The number of books students read during the summer is consistently related to academic gains. Students also need more than books—they need a system like One Minute Reader that hooks them so they get the practice they need to accelerate their reading growth.

This is marketing material, but I've often found the statistics cited in publisher's White Papers and newsletters to be accurate.

I'm not sure what the connection is between Read Naturally and One Minute Reader (I think they're the same outfit), but Read Naturally has terrific material on fluency.

Oral Reading Fluency Norms (Hasbrouck/Tindal Table)
printable version (pdf file)
Read Naturally, Scientific Research, Reading First (pdf file)





tennis & math

Today was Christopher's first day of tennis camp. Five hours of tennis instruction & playing, five days a week. He went last summer, too; then he took tennis lessons all school year.

We're trying to give him a sport he can play the rest of his life. Christopher loves sports — all sports — and loves to play. But he's not especially athletic. So we're going the practice-practice-practice route with just one sport.

The cool thing is that today Jim, the instructor, told me Christopher hadn't "regressed" at all over the winter,^* and in fact had improved considerably. He sounded like John Saxon. He said the key to becoming good at tennis is practicing over the winter. Otherwise you regress, and have to start over.

Then he said, "Learning tennis is just like learning anything else. You have to keep practicing."





any suggestions for a summer reading schedule?

If anyone has advice, I'd like to hear it.

I've been reading the various advice books on SATs, college admissions, etc., and the consensus is: reading is it. The book I bought on kids who got perfect 1800s doesn't even mention math. Apparently these kids got perfect 800s on math by reading 14 hours a week (as compared to 7 hours a week for the kids with lower scores).

Has anyone set up a reading schedule for his or her kid(s) over the summer?

I'm thinking we need one, but my mind's a blank at the moment.

Still recovering from the school year.

Now that I've discovered E.D. Hirsch, I'm thinking about buying Realms of Gold and assigning a reading or two a week. Here's the Table of Contents. (pdf file) This year, in 6th grade, Christopher was assigned 4 items in the book: 2 Greek myths & 2 poems.

I've also hatched a scheme to buy a copy of The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy and start making everyone memorize it at the dinner. At 672 pages, that ought to keep us busy for awhile.

Speaking of which, Christian mastered tropos tonight!

And I mastered ace boon coon.

Andrew, on the other hand, had trouble adding 800 + 1. He kept typing 900 and 899.

I think I'm going to pull out one of my Barnes & Noble KUMON books and see if maybe Jimmy can get somewhere. He has a terrible time seeing the lines on the page, so I don't know. I keep planning to create "moving words" using PowerPoint, but ..... I've never done it.

^* Apparently I have to worry about winter regression, too.

-- CatherineJohnson - 26 Jun 2006

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HelpDeskGrammarBookRecommendations 05 Jul 2006 - 17:12 CatherineJohnson




Verghis would like grammar book recommendations for an 8th grader.

Any thoughts?

I'm finishing up an email with the books I'm contemplating for Christopher (and for me); will post when finished.

In the meantime, let me say, again, that David Mulroy's The War Against Grammar, which Verghis recommended, has changed my life.





Diane Ravitch's review





email to Verghis

• Susan S very much likes Steps to Good Grammar by Genevieve Walberg Schaefer. (See Susan's follow-up in Comments.) I have the book, and haven’t used it too much, only because I couldn’t fit it in during the school year & because for the summer I’m thinking of using a more involved curriculum. It looks terrific, and the reader reviews at Amazon are raves.
  
  Steps has 169 lessons, exercises, and tests. Apparently it covers all grammar “normally” taught K-8.
  
  I’m contemplating using it myself (for me if not for Christopher).
  
  Around $30.
  

• The curriculum I think I’m going to use for Christopher is Curtis, Hake, & O’Rourke’s Grammar and Writing. Hake was a coauthor of the Saxon Math books, and the Hake grammar & writing is built along the same lines. At this point I’m a huge fan of the Saxon books, so I’m going to try to do Grammar & Writing with Christopher. (It’s a big commitment, so we’ll see...)
  
  At the moment they have books for 6th, 7th & 8th grade.
  
  I assume students can find the “incremental” approach trying.....I think Christopher does. But let me tell you: it works. It’s astounding how powerful the principle of repetition & distributed practice is.
  

• I may purchase one or both major textbooks by Martha Kolln (pdf file - you may have to refresh the page several times for page 1 to show), whose work Mulroy discusses in War Against Grammar. These are expensive college-level texts.
  
  Understanding English Grammar 7th edition by Martha J. Kolln
  
  Exercises for Understanding English Grammar — apparently it’s impossible to get a copy of the answer book for this. Typical.
  
  Rhetorical Grammar: Grammatical Choices, Rhetorical Effects 5th edition
  
  I’m going to see about ordering these in to Barnes & Noble so I can take a look at them before buying.
  [update: Verghis says Kolln is writing a grammar text for younger students.]

• Last but not least, I ordered, yesterday, a little book that I think I’m going to like: English Grammar for Students of Latin: The Study Guide for Those Learning Latin by Norma Goldman. You can look at it online.
  

• I know there are grammar series homeschoolers like: Shurley Grammar, I believe, and Rod & Staff. I have links to both on the Favorite Books pages. They’re probably great, but I assume they’re more extensive than what you want.
  

• I’ve been disappointed in Grammar & Diagramming Sentences by Nan DeVincent-Hayes. I bought the book to use myself, and it’s too hard. DeVincent-Hayes assumes you know all the various parts & functions of grammar, including the various phrases, and plunges in midstream.
  

• I will probably order, for my use (don’t know if it would work for a student) Cindy L. Vitoo’s Grammar by Diagram: Understanding English Grammar Through Traditional Sentence Diagramming. A second edition is due out shortly.
  

• I’ve been contemplating Rex Barks by Phyllis Davenport for about a year now. (I gather that objectivists particularly like this book. No idea what that says about it one way or the other.) Amazon link. UPDATE 9-22-2006: I've got the book; looks great. The introduction has the crispest & most succinct defense of senence diagramming I've read. (hint: sentence diagramming helps you read texts with highly complex, non-obvious uses of grammar, such as poetry) Will report back once I know more.
  

• Last but not least, The Grammar Bible by Michael Strumpf is used by editors all over the publishing industry. (Also on the favorite math books page).
  

• update: from Kathy Iggy "I used "Warriner's English Grammar and Composition" from Grades 7 through 12 and kept one as a reference in college. I think digramming was taught in those texts. Comments on Amazon are positive about this series....Warriner's has a "first course" (7th grade) all the way up to 6th course for 12th grade. I recall lots of diagramming and parts of speech as well--the nun who taught 7th and 8th grade English would have timed diagramming contests."
  
  and from Google Master:We used Warriner's in 7th through 10th grades; in 11th and 12th grades, we studied literature and wrote papers. I believe there is a Warriner's volume for each of 7th (or earlier) through 12th grades.
  
  I haven't looked at one in ages, but I recall that they were very big on parts of speech -- identifying them, using them correctly -- and moved on to tense, mood. I remember them as being almost math-like in their exactness."
  

Almost math-like in their exactness: that is exactly what I'm looking for.

Naturally these books, too, seem to be going extinct, along with Moise & Downs' SMSG Geometry. This weekend I was able to track down two of the texbooks along with their answer keys at Setonbooks. Seton has the 3rd (9th grade) and 4th courses (10th).





NYC Educator's recommendation

Also, don't forget that NYC Educator recommends Betty Azar's Understanding and Using English Grammar, a text written for ESL students.

I'm inclined to think that grammar books written for students who must learn grammar as a prerequisite to learning something else (English language in the case of ESL students, Latin in the case of Latin students) are a good bet. That's what prompted me to order a secondhand copy of English Grammar for Students of Latin for my own use.





















Language Arts Posts



-- CatherineJohnson - 29 Jun 2006

---

HelpDeskGrammarQuestion 13 Jul 2006 - 00:01 CatherineJohnson




from Indoor Plants:

Unfortunately, there is still a large number of technophobic interiorscapers slavishly addicted to weekly drench and drain top watering. They are reluctant to give up this wasteful practice but we believe energy costs and the green building movement will force them to modernize or exit the business. The market is always the ultimate boss.

"is" or "are"?

What's the rule?

-- CatherineJohnson - 10 Jul 2006

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LightningLiterature 13 Jul 2006 - 15:24 CatherineJohnson




Does anyone know anything about the Lightening Literature series?

I joined the Core Knowledge Homeschooling list serve, because I need more email to not read, and one of the parents had just gotten the books and teacher's manual & thought they looked great.






I am planning to get a post up about our summer activities around here, but until I do the 3 new books we're using are:

• Six-Way Paragraphs by Walter Pauk

• Realms of Gold, Volume 1 (Core Knowledge)
  (pdf file of TOC linked on page)

• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Core Classic Plus)

-- CatherineJohnson - 12 Jul 2006

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AndrewFirstSentences 21 Jul 2006 - 01:36 CatherineJohnson




I think Andrew may have just written his first sentences.

We were sitting on the couch, and Andrew was frustrated and mad. He'd written his usual obsessive string of unspaced Barney-words on the AlphaSmart:

barneyscolorsandshapesyellowbarneybluecharactersbarney

We have no idea what he wants when he does this. Towards the end of the school year his teacher showed him a video on her computer and he's been obsessed ever since. He thinks we can play Barney videos on our computer monitors at will. At least, that's what we think he thinks. He'll write a long string of unspaced Barney words on the AphaSmart and then drag us to the computer and shriek at us & grab our hands and fling them at the keyboard.

So he'd written his string of Barney words, but I couldn't go to the computer with him, because Travis, from Guest House (employs Christian) was here for a visit. We had to stay put.

Andrew was going nuts, so I tried to divert him by writing sentences about the conversation Travis & Christian & I were having, which had to do with the fact that Andrew will not sit still for a dental exam.

I typed, "Andrew has to go to the dentist."

Andrew erased it.

Then I typed, "Andrew has to be good at the dentist's office."

Andrew erased it.

He erased everything I wrote. It was a standoff.

Finally it occurred to me to write some sentences about Barney.

"Barney drives the car," I wrote.

Andrew stared intently at the words as I typed, then tapped the screen briskly with his finger, a sign that he approves.

"Barney plays soccer," I wrote.

He tapped the screen again.

"Barney likes Baby Bop."

Tap.

"Barney sings 'I love you.'"

Tap.

I wrote a few more sentences and stopped.

Then Andrew took the AlphaSmart away from me and wrote this:

barney friends bj
barney bj love you
barney pictures cap house
love you barney bj


I think those are sentences. I showed him how to space the words, but he hit the return at the end of each line himself. He doesn't do that when he's writting his Barney word strings.

I think Andrew wrote a story about Barney.



Andrew first sentences
Andrew writes plane
AlphaSmart

-- CatherineJohnson - 21 Jul 2006

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HowMuchReadingADay 22 Oct 2006 - 21:25 CatherineJohnson




The best readers in 5th grade spend an hour a day reading books —





By the time a child reaches the middle grades he or she must read in order to develop his vocabulary —




I particularly like the finding that college graduates use a spoken vocabulary only slightly more sophisticated than that found in books written for preschoolers.

I believe it.

source:
Reading Can Make You Smarter
by Anne Cunningham and Keith Stanovich
PRINCIPAL volume 83 number 2, November/December 2003 » page(s) 34-39



Examples of words that do not appear in two large
corpora of oral language (Berger, 1977; Brown, 1984) but
that have appreciable frequencies in written texts
(Carroll, Davies & Richman, 1971;
Francis & Kucera, 1982):

display            literal
dominance       legitimate
dominant         luxury
exposure         maneuver
equate            participation
equation          portray
gravity            provoke
hormone         relinquish
infinite            reluctantly
invariably      


WHAT READING DOES FOR THE MIND
BY ANNE E.CUNNINGHAM AND KEITH E. STANOVICH
AMERICAN EDUCATOR/AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS
SPRING/SUMMER 1998

E.D. Hirsch has been quoting Keith Stanovich's & Ann Cunningham's research:

Early reading acquisition and its relation to reading experience and ability 10 years later.
Cunningham AE, Stanovich KE.

A group of 1st-graders who were administered a battery of reading tasks in a previous study were followed up as 11th graders. Ten years later, they were administered measures of exposure to print, reading comprehension, vocabulary, and general knowledge. First-grade reading ability was a strong predictor of all of the 11th-grade outcomes and remained so even when measures of cognitive ability were partialed out. First-grade reading ability (as well as 3rd- and 5th-grade ability) was reliably linked to exposure to print, as assessed in the 11th grade, even after 11th-grade reading comprehension ability was partialed out, indicating that the rapid acquisition of reading ability might well help develop the lifetime habit of reading, irrespective of the ultimate level of reading comprehension ability that the individual attains. Finally, individual differences in exposure to print were found to predict differences in the growth in reading comprehension ability throughout the elementary grades and thereafter.

Early reading acquisition and its relation to reading experience and ability 10 years later.
Cunningham AE, Stanovich KE.
Dev Psychol. 1997 Nov;33(6):934-45.

from Cunningham's & Stanovich's American Educator article (pdf file):

In several studies, we have attempted to link children’s reading volume to specific cognitive outcomes after controlling for relevant general abilities such as IQ. In a study of fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade children, we examined whether reading volume accounts for differences in vocabulary development once controls for both general intelligence and specific verbal abilities were invoked (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1991).

[snip]

[W]e found that even after accounting for general intelligence and decoding ability, reading volume contributed significantly and independently to vocabulary knowledge in fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade children.

[snip]

In a study we conducted involving college students, we employed an even more stringent test of whether reading volume is a unique predictor of verbal skill (Stanovich & Cunningham, 1992). In this study we examined many of the same variables as in our study of fourth- to sixth-grade students. However, we decided to stack the deck against reading volume by first removing any contribution of reading ability and general intelligence.

[snip]

We found that reading volume made a significant contribution to multiple measures of vocabulary, general knowledge, spelling, and verbal fluency even after reading comprehension ability and nonverbal ability had been partialed out.

the Practical Knowledge Test

[I]n the Practical Knowledge Test, we made an effort to devise questions that were directly relevant to daily living in a technological society in the late twentieth century; for example, What does the carburetor tor in an automobile do? If a substance is carcinogenic, it means that it is __? After the Federal Reserve Board raises the prime lending rate, the interest that you will be asked to pay on a car loan will generally increase/ decrease/stay the same? What vitamin is highly concentrated in citrus fruits? When a stock exchange is in a “bear market,”what is happening? and so forth. The results indicated that the more avid readers in our study—regardless of their general abilities—knew more about how a carburetor worked, were more likely to know who their United States senators were, more likely to know how many teaspoons are equivalent to one tablespoon,were more likely to know what a stroke was, and what a closed shop in a factory was, etc. One would be hard pressed to deny that at least some of this knowledge is relevant to living in the United States in the late 20th century.

This reminds me of a story a friend of mine told me.

His wife was and is a severe dyslexic, and sometime after they married he realized that she knew almost nothing about the random dumb stuff the rest of us waste time shmoozing about at parties.

For instance, she had no idea who Kato Kaelin was.

This was back when Kaeto Kaelin was new.

I asked him, "Doesn't she watch TV?"

She did.

She was a smart, educated person who basically couldn't read and who watched TV.

Apparently the amount of information you can get from TV is pretty limited.



TV and the "cognitive autonomy" of misinformation

In other questions asked of these same students,we attempted to probe areas that we thought might be characterized by misinformation. We then attempted to trace the “cognitive anatomy” of this misinformation.

69.3 percent of our sample thought that there were more Jewish people in the world than Moslems. This level of inaccuracy is startling given that approximately 40 percent of our sample of 268 students were attending one of the most selective public institutions of higher education in the United States (the University of California, Berkeley).

[Correct] scores among the group high in reading volume and low in television exposure were highest, and the lowest scores were achieved by those high in television exposure and low in reading volume.

The cognitive anatomy of misinformation appears to be one of too little exposure to print (or reading) and over-reliance on television for information about the world. Although television viewing can have positive associations with knowledge when the viewing is confined to public television, news, and/or documentary material (Hall, Chiarello, & Edmondson, 1996;West & Stanovich, 1991;West et al., 1993), familiarity with the primetime television material that defines mass viewing in North America is most often negatively associated with knowledge acquisition.

reading makes everyone smarter

[W]e observed that firstgrade intelligence measures do not uniquely predict eleventh-grade reading volume in the same way. Thus, this study showed us that an early start in reading is important in predicting a lifetime of literacy experience— and this is true regardless of the level of reading comprehension ability that the individual eventually attains.

This is a stunning finding because it means that students who get off to a fast start in reading are more likely to read more over the years, and, furthermore, this very act of reading can help children compensate for modest levels of cognitive ability by building their vocabularly and general knowledge. In other words, ability is not the only variable that counts in the development of intellectual functioning. Those who read a lot will enhance their verbal intelligence; that is, reading will make them smarter.

I think this may answer a question I asked years ago: are early readers better readers?

I became interested in this when the principal of our grade school in Studio City told parents that it didn't matter if their children were slow learning to read. Everyone learns to read eventually, she said; the timing doesn't matter.

That struck me as unlikely given what I knew about tennis prodigies and musical prodigies and the like, who start young. Also, I'd taught myself to read earlier than the kids in my town learned to read. I think I must have learned to read the summer before first grade, which isn't especially young for a lot of ktm commenters, I realize, but was young for my school where reading instruction started in first grade. I entered first grade able to read proficiently all of the books we would use for the next 9 months. I was a year ahead, and this gap never went away. I read earlier than my peers, and 11 years later I was a better reader than my peers. I think Stanovich's research would probably predict that outcome; early reading leads to better reading. I think. I've just read a couple of his abstracts thus far, so I don't know.

In any event, Stanovich's & Cunninghams' research does show that reading early and reading a lot matter.



perfect SATs

From 1600 Perfect Score: The 7 Secrets of Acing the SAT by Tom Fischgrund, who inteviewed 160 of the 541 "perfect 1600" SAT scorers in the year 2000:

[S]tudents who ace the SAT read an average of fourteen hours a week. Average score students, on the other hand, read only eight hours a week—an immense drop-off. The biggest difference, however, was found in the amount of time students spent reading for school. Average score students spent four hours a week reading literature, textbooks, and other assigned reading for school. Perfect score students put in nine hours a week for school-assigned reading, more than double the amount of time.

[snip]

What do 1600 students read for fun?...The book most frequently mentioned—by a total of 6 percent of perfect score students—was Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.

Fischgrund on divorce and SAT scores
how much reading each day?
Vocabulary Workshop
robust vocabulary instruction (400 words a year)
15 new words a day
Engelmann says it's 3 new words a day



-- CatherineJohnson - 21 Jul 2006

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MatchlockGun 27 Jul 2006 - 18:51 CatherineJohnson




The Comments thread on how much reading reminded me that I'd been meaning to write a post about The Matchlock Gun.

The Matchlock Gun is my favorite children's novel. I discovered it only as an adult, when I read it out loud to Christopher two years ago.

I think the book can serve as a litmus test for a school's level of boy-friendliness. The fact that no school I've seen provides the book to children is all the evidence I need that the public school ban on positive images of boys is universally in place.



The Matchlock Gun tells you what's wrong with a gender war on boys, or with a gender war on girls for that matter. (Could we stop having gender wars? Now? Just asking.)

In The Matchlock Gun the boy is a hero. He's steadfast and brave, and to tell you more I'd have to give away the ending.

He's steadfast and brave, but he's ten years old. The reason he can be the hero of the story is that he listens to his mother and does what she tells him to do, even though what she tells him to do is terrifying. He is a heroic boy because he is the son of a heroic mother.

As for the mother, she is ferociously brave. She is able to think in the face of mortal danger and she is willing to die for her children. The little sister, though too young to fight, is not too young to hold herself still as the enemy approaches. Only six, she faces danger alone. She will go on to do her mother's work before she is ready, and it is she who will carry the family's story with her into the future. (I haven't given away the ending in saying this.)

The book captures most of what is good and bad about human beings. It captures the no common sense-y part, too. It's made plain to the adult reader that the young mother loathes her mother-in-law, who lives in the big brick house on the property while her son and his family live in a vulnerable little cabin. The sensible thing to do, when you and your children are about to be attacked by Indians, would be to evacuate to the big brick house where there are (male) slaves, strong walls, guns, and a good chance of staying alive. But no. That's not what they do. Evacuating to the big brick house would make too much sense. The young mother in The Matchlock Gun will fight for her children. She'll die for her children if she must. But she won't spend the day with her mother-in-law.

After finishing the story I told my neighbor that one of the things I liked best was the image of roaring family dysfunction even in the face of almost certain death. If our schools want us to read stories about family dysfunction — and it appears that they do — Matchlock Gun has got it.

It's a wonderful book.

I think the entire text may be here.

One last thing: the book is so suspenseful that my heart was pounding at the end. It is gripping.







Newberry Book recommendations from Kitchen Table Math commenters
NEH favorite summer reading K - 12
We the People reading list on "Courage"
We the People reading list on "Freedom"
We the People reading list on "Becoming an American"
We the people
We the people NEH
Newbery Medal & Honor Books, 1922 - Present

The Lexile Framework for Reading

-- CatherineJohnson - 25 Jul 2006

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VocabularyWorkshopLevelsAndGrades 08 Aug 2006 - 19:27 CatherineJohnson




This summer Christopher has been doing 2 or 3 pages a week from Sadlier Oxford's Vocabulary Workshop, which teaches words in 5 exercises:

• definitions — dictionary definition with sample sentences; student writes the word in the blank

• complete the sentence

• synonyms

• antonyms

• choosing the right word (student chooses which of two words on the vocabulary list "satisfactorily completes" a sentence)

• vocabulary in context — prose passage
  

There are 15 units in the book, with a review very three units. 20 words per list; 185 pages in the book.

Vocabulary Workshop spans grades 2 - 12+ , starting with a series for grades 2 - 5:

Level Purple Grade 2

Level Green Grade 3

Level Orange Grade 4

Level Blue Grade 5


After Level Blue the middle & upper grades series starts in Grade 6 with Level A:

Level A grade 6

Level B grade 7

Level C grade 8

Level D grade 9

Level E grade 10

Level F grade 11

Level G grade 12

Level H (advanced? gifted? SAT prep? not sure, but I'm ordering it)


Levels A - H Teacher's Guide (you don't need this)


online flash cards, Level Blue

online flash cards for several other levels, too

Vocabulary Workshop online high school tests

Vocabulary Workshop online



Wordly Wise series from EPS

word lists & sample lessons from all books in Wordly Wise series



English from the Roots Up (2 volumes)



Vocabulary from Classical Roots
Strategic Vocabulary Instruction through Greek and Latin Roots
by Norma Fifer, Nancy Flowers
Grades 5–11



Carolyn on Vocabulary Workshop
update on Vocabulary Workshop; English from roots up
Vocabulary Workshop levels & grades
afterschooling w/Vocabulary Workshop
vocabulary pre-test
SAT scores for students using Vocabulary Workshop
vocabulary at the dinner table
robust vocabulary instruction (400 words a year)
how much reading a day?
15 new words a day
Engelmann says it's 3 new words a day
Fischgrund on divorce and SAT scores

vocabularyworkshop
greekandlatinroots

-- CatherineJohnson - 25 Jul 2006

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RobustVocabularyInstruction 05 Sep 2006 - 15:57 CatherineJohnson




from the Introduction to Chapter 4 Comprehension of the National Reading Panel report:

The importance of vocabulary in reading achievement has been recognized for more than half a century. As early as 1925, in the National Society for Studies in Education (NSSE) Yearbook, this quotation appears:

Growth in reading power means, therefore, continuous enriching and enlarging of the reading vocabulary and increasing clarity of discrimination in appreciation of word values (Whipple, 1925, p. 76).

Even today, evidence of the importance of vocabulary is usually attributed to Davis (1942), who presented evidence that comprehension comprised two “skills”: word knowledge or vocabulary and reasoning in reading. The Panel reflects this position with the inclusion of the current analysis of research on vocabulary instruction with the other comprehension research analyses. Since Davis’ work, there have been questions regarding the “skills” perspective, but the finding that vocabulary is strongly related to comprehension seems unchallenged.

From Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction by Isabel L. Beck, Margaret G. McKeown, and Linda Kucan:

• First-grade children from higher-SES groups knew about twice as many words as lower SES children (Graves, Brunetti, & Slater, 1982; Graves & Slater, 1987).

• High school seniors near the top of their class knew about four times as many words as their lower-performing classmates (Smith, 1941).

• High-knowledge third graders had vocabularies about equal to lowest-performing 12th graders (Smith, 1941).

do children learn vocabulary from context?

The answer is Yes, but —

Conventional wisdom suggests that the major means for developing students' vocabulary should focus on learning words in context. This position is based on three assumptions: First, words are learned from context. Second, school-age youngsters are successfully adding words to their vocabularies. And, third, instruction must focus on learning vocabulary from context because there are just too many words to teach to get the job done through direct instruction.

[snip]


Most of the words children customarily encounter in oral language beyond their earliest years, both at home and in school, are words that they already know. Thus, the source of later vocabulary learning shifts to written contexts—what children read. The problem is that it is not so easy to learn from written context. Written context lacks many of the features of oral language that support learning new word meanings, such as intonation, body language, and shared physical surroundings.

[snip]

Studies estimate that of 100 unfamiliar words met in reading, between 5 and 15 of them will be learned (Nagy, Herman, & Anderson, 1985; Swanborn & de Glopper, 1999).

[snip]

Specific estimates of vocabulary growth vary widely, from 3 (Joos, 1964) to 20 new words a day (Miller, 1978). A figure of 7 words per day is probably the most commonly cited....Although it may be the case that some students are learning as many as 7 new words a day, many others may be learning only 1 or 2, or indeed not any at all.

are there too many words to teach vocabulary directly?

Bringing Words to Life answers this question by pointing out that a mature reader's vocabulary falls into 3 tiers:

• Tier 1: basic words like clock, baby, happy, walk that don't need to be taught

• Tier 2: "words that are of high frequently for mature language users and are found across a variety of domains....coincidence, absurd, industrious, fortunate

• Tier 3: low frequency words that are "often limited to specific domains" e.g.: isotope, lathe, peninsula, refinery
  

Obviously, Tier 2 words are the target of vocabulary instruction:

Nagy and Anderson estimate that good readers [in grades 3 through 9] read approximately 1 million words of text per year. They organized these words into word families, or groups of related words such as introduce, introduction, reintroduce, and introducing, and further estimate that half of the 88,500 word families they calculate to exist in printed school English are so rare that even avid readers may encounter them only once in their lifetime of reading. Using these figures, it seems reasonable to consider word families that would be encountered at least once every 10 years, which Nagy and Anderson calculate to number about 15,000 as comprising Tiers One and Two. These are words that occur once or more in 10 million running words of text. Our best estimate of Tier One, the most familiar words that need no instruction, is 8,000 words families...That leaves about 7,000 word families for Tier Two.

[snip]

Seven thousand words may still seem like quite a large number for instruction to undertake over the course of, say kindergarten through ninth grade. That would amount to an average of 700 words per year.

[snip]

[W]e assert that attention to a substantial portion of those words, say, an average of 400 per year, would make a significant congtribution to an individual's verbal functioning. Aiming for this number of words would allow the depth of instruction needed to affect students' text comprehension ability. We believe this to be the case because about 400 words per year conforms to the rate at which we taught words in our previous research, which resulted in improvements in word knowledge and in comprehension of texts containing the instructed words. (Beck et al., 1982).

quick notes

• The Vocabulary Workshop series teaches 300 words per book.

• I wonder whether teaching Latin & Greek roots increases the number of words students can pick up from context, as Eugene Schwartz and others argue. I'm guessing it probably does, but I don't know.

• Beck's, McKeown's, & Kucan's figures make sense of my own life and times. Kris and I were talking about vocabulary & SAT scores yesterday, and I said, "How did I get a [recentered] 790 coming from the farm?" Kris said, "If you'd lived in an affluent suburb you could have picked up that extra 10 points." It seems obvious to me now that the way I did it was by learning huge numbers of words from context, which I could do because I was a compulsive reader from day one, which meant that I was exposed to zillions of words & then re-exposed to the same zillions of words often enough to learn a lot of them. (One of the words I learned, apparently, was "zillions.") On family vacations I used to walk along reading my book; as I recall, I missed most of Manhattan the one time we visited because I was reading Agatha Christie. Another data point: The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, in an article on professional writers, says that professional writers universally describe themselves as "compulsve readers." Converging lines of evidence, that!
  
  
  

Vocabulary Workshop grades & levels
Fischgrund on divorce and SAT scores
how much reading a day?
robust vocabulary instruction (400 words a year)
15 new words a day
Engelmann says it's 3 new words a day

National Reading Panel
NICHD publications on reading
summary of NRP report
International Reading Association on NRP report

vocabularyworkshop robustvocabularyinstruction

-- CatherineJohnson - 26 Jul 2006

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HelpDeskAdultReading 02 Aug 2006 - 21:40 CatherineJohnson




I have a question.

A friend of mine thinks her reading is not what it should be.

I don't know if that's true, but that's the way she feels.

What should she do?

I was thinking she should try the book Christopher is using this summer, Walter Pauk's Six-Way Paragraphs. Pauk invented the Cornell notetaking system; he also wrote the classic book How to Study in College. I have How to Study, and I like Pauk, so I ordered Six-Way for Christopher.

Six-Way Paragraphs is a quick-and-dirty way to teach kids a version of Eugene Schwartz's reading skills.

The book has 100 short passages - one or two paragraphs - all pretty interesting (Christopher thinks so, too). For each passage the student follows this procedure:


six-way paragraphs
1. read title: think about it & form mental image
2. read the passage through quickly
3. answer (multiple choice) questions quickly using pencil
4. read passage again – slowly this time
5. mark final answers with check
6. check answers against answer key
6. enter your score in diagnostic chart (p. 209)
7. correct your answers (p 203-207)
8. find total comprehension score
9. graph your progress

take corrective action
10. read wrong answers
11. read passage one more time & figure out why your answer was wrong

read each passage 3 times in all
12. first read-through: fast
13. second read-through: slow
14. third read-through: read slowly enough to find the correct answer

So far Christopher has found the passages so easy he's done none of this; he gets the answers right the first time, after a quick reading.

The one question he does miss sometimes concerns the text's "clarifying devices," such as metaphors, repetition for effect, and so on. I love those questions; I'm glad he has to think about them.

I also like the first question on the central idea. Instead of asking the child to choose the correct central idea out of 3 choices, Six-Way Paragraphs has the child identify each possibility as "too broad," "too narrow," or "central idea." Every time Christopher reads one of Pauk's passages and answers the multiple choice questions, he sees again that a good piece of writing has a central idea that's neither too broad nor too narrow, supporting detail and evidence, and clarifying devices.

I like it.

I told my friend about it, and she wants to try it.

But then I started reading E.D. Hirsch, and discovered that Hirsch loathes this kind of instruction, which he calls formalism. Kids today are spending hours and hours and hours identifying central ideas and supporting detail; they even have little mnemonic devices that help them slog through the various comprehension steps. The whole thing sounds dreadful, as Hirsch says.

Here is 9-year-old Zulma Berrios's take on the school day: "In the morning we read. Then we go to Mrs. Witthaus and read. Then after lunch we read. Then we read some more."

[snip]

"Clarify," said Zulma, who began the year reading at the late first-grade level. "When I come to a word I don't know, I look for chunks I do. Reminded. Re-mine-ded."

"Clarify," said Zulma's classmate Erick Diaz, 9, who began the year reading at a second-grade level. "When I come to a word I don't know, I look for chunks I do. Hailstones. Hail-stone-s."

School Pushes Reading, Writing, Reform
By Linda Perlstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 31, 2004; Page A01

Here's Hirsch:

The theory about reading that dominates in the schools and in the reading programs ... is that the fast track to reading comprehension is through mastery of formal comprehension skills. These bulky, expensive programs are filled with uninformative stories that leap from one subject to another, in the service of practicing of “comprehension strategies” rather than systematically acquiring knowledge. The education reporter Linda Perlstein has spent many hours in the schools observing in detail what goes on day after day in these reading classes, and is working on a book about the depressing things she has found. I learned about her work some months ago from a Washington Post article in which she described the deadening activities that are being conducted under the idea that practicing comprehension strategies such as “finding the main idea,” “summarizing,” and “questioning the author” will provide a shortcut to greater expertise in reading.

The formalistic ideas about reading that sponsor these activities are fundamentally mistaken. As I point out in my forthcoming book, The Knowledge Deficit, to be released next month, there is very slender scientific support for this huge expenditure of time and effort during the many hours being devoted to reading to the neglect of coherent and substantial subject matter. We have known for some time that reading comprehension of a text is a skill that is not governed so much by formal strategies as by actual knowledge of the topics that the text is about.

What does he know of reading who only reading knows? The ability to read a wide variety of texts addressed to a general reader, the ability to learn a variety of new skills from the spoken or written word, these are ultimately abilities that depend on broad general knowledge — the very thing that is being driven out by a narrow, formalistic focus on reading. The answer to the reading problem is a language-arts program that focuses on knowledge and is part of a coherent education in history, science, general cultural knowledge, and the arts.

Until I sat down and read Hirsch, I hadn't thought about this.

I knew, vaguely, that Hirsch was 'pro-content' while ed schools were anti-fact and pro-process. I was pro-content. But God is in the details, and I had no idea how important content - "domain knowledge" - is at how many different levels. Carolyn started referring to herself as a "content freak" sometime after reading The Schools We Need, and now I see why. Content knowledge is even more important than we content freaks think.

So now of course I'm wondering whether Six-Way Paragraphs was a mistake. The answer is, I don't know. The book isn't content-free. It's satisfyingly factual in a Cliff Claven sort of way - excuse me, I mean a Vanna White sort of way.

Give Them a Hand

Right is right. Right? Of course. But is left wrong? Well, the ancient Romans thought so. As far as they were concerned, left-handed people were mistakes of nature. Latin, the language of the Romans, had many words that expressed this view. Some words we use today still have this meaning. The Latin word dexter means "right." The English word dexterous comes from this word. It means "handy." So, right is handy. But the Latin word for "left is sinistra. The English word sinister was derived from this word. Sinister means "evil." Is it fair to call righties handy and lefties evil? Well, fair or not, many languages have words that express similar beliefs. In Old English, the word for left means "weak." That isn't much of an improvement over "evil."

Not very long ago, southpaws were often forced to write with their right hands. Doctors have since found that this can be very harmful. You should use the hand you were born to use. [ed.: is this true? really?]

People who use their left hands are just starting to get better treatment. But why all the name calling in the first place? One reason may be that there are not as many left-handed people as there are right-handed people. People who are different are often thought to be wrong. But attitudes do seem to be changing. Fair-minded right-handed people are finally starting to give lefties a hand.

source:
Six-Way Paragraphs Middle Level
page 16, passage # 8
Reading Level: D
5 levels in book: D, E, F, G, H

Ok, that's corny, but I like it, and Christopher was intrigued, because his dad's a leftie.

The "Clarifying Devices" question for this passage was:

Clarifying Devices

"Fair-minded right-handed people are finally starting to give lefties a hand" means that they are

a. applauding them

b. teaching them how to use their right hands

c. starting to give them a chance and help them out

d. shaking hands with them


Christopher got that question right on the first try (thank heavens).

The main idea question is this:

Main Idea

1. Many languages have words that express the idea that left is bad. (correct answer: too narrow)

2. Minorities often get bad treatment. (correct answer: too broad)

3. Throughout history, left-handed people have been treated poorly. (correct answer: main idea)

The other four questions are on:

Subject Matter
Supporting Details
Conclusion
Vocabulary in Context (always a question about the underlined word - "southpaws" in this case)

Anyway, I have no idea whether Six-Way Paragraphs is or is not a) a good way to use our time, or, if it is a good way to use our time, whether it is b) the best way to use our time. On balance I'm figuring that Christopher's probably learning factoids, analytic reading skills, and a literary device or two. Since we've ended up doing no writing at all this summer, I'm guessing Six-Way Paragraphs is at least providing numerous models of short, to-the-point, and engaging prose.



So back to my friend who wants to improve her reading.

Midway into Hirsch, I realized that she doesn't have a liberal arts degree. (She has a college education, but not in liberal arts.)

That was something of a "bingo" moment - my friend is super-smart, has no apparent learning or perceptual problems, and is the kind of "lifelong learner" progressive ed supposedly wants to create....what's the problem?

She says she's a slow reader, and I assume she's right - but what's making her slow?

When I told her about Hirsch, she instantly sparked to the idea of cultural literacy; she'd had the experience of being fast to answer SAT-type questions on content she knew as opposed to content she didn't know.

So should she be focusing on speed or knowledge? Should she be using books like Pauk's or Edward Fry's Skimming & Scanning series (I bought one of Fry's books to try with either Christopher or me), or signing up for one of the new speed-reading courses being marketed to executives (possible $), or giving herself the liberal arts education she missed as a college student?

For what it's worth, Ed says she should either take a college course or put herself on a structured, daily reading program in literature, history, or biography.

He thinks the problem is missing content.

How Knowledge Brings More Knowledge by Daniel Willingham
American Educator Spring 2003: issue devoted to reading comprehension
Inflexible Knowledge: The First Step to Expertise by Daniel T. Willingham
Adult Intelligence by Phillip L. Ackerman
A Lost Eloquence by Carol Muske Dukes
The Early Catastrophe: The 30 Million Word Gap by Age 3 by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley
Filling the Great Void: Why We Should Bring Nonfiction into the Early-Grade Classroom by Nell K. Duke, V. Susan Bennett-Armistead, and Ebony M. Roberts
Poor Children's Fourth-Grade Slump by Jeanne S. Chall and Vicki A. Jacobs

an approach to reading that works
an approach to reading that works, part 2

walterpauk sixwayparagraphs



-- CatherineJohnson - 31 Jul 2006

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MyLifeAndWelcomeToIt 07 Aug 2006 - 21:08 CatherineJohnson

So yesterday Christopher tells me M has been sneaking him candy bars. She goes out and buys Twix bars every day, hides them in the oven or in the meat drawer where I won’t see them, and then, when I leave the room, she slips him one. She slips one to Christian, too. Then the 3 of them huddle together in the family room, stealth-eating their illicit Twix bars.




source:
Bitter Single Guy

That explains a lot.

I’ve been killing myself this summer trying to get Christopher slimmed down via exercise as I did two summers ago after reading Trim Kids, a superb book that belongs in the office of every pediatrician in the country.

That was the summer after 4th grade. Christopher had gained weight after a brutally cold winter led the school district to cancel recess until spring thaw. When we told somebody at the school we'd like Christopher to go outside and play anyway, cold or not, we got the old, "A lot of parents want their kids inside — you'd be surprised" response. It's always those other bad parents, the ones you've never met and never will, who are gumming up the works.

Christopher gained so much weight that winter the kids were calling him “fat,” and when he stepped on the scale and discovered he’d passed the 90 mark he burst into tears.

So it was time to dive into child-weight-loss research, which led me to Trim Kids & subsequently to the discovery that kids can lose huge amounts of weight from 3 hours a day of bike riding and camp without having to count calories or swear off ice cream.

Christopher stayed thin through 5th grade, but this year was impossible. The new middle school has a state-mandated Wellness Committee but no playround. It does have a track and a football field, but the kids aren’t allowed to use them. Plus there’s no recess and if they jostle each other during their lunch break the teachers scream at them.

So: back to Trim Kids.

Two summers ago Christopher was going to the Dows Lane day camp, which is maybe a mile from our house, most of the route off-road & shaded. Christopher and I would ride our bikes over in the morning; then, in the afternoon, I'd ride my bike to camp again and we'd ride home together.

It was wonderful.

Different story this summer. This summer he’s going to Squire Camp at the Masters School in Dobbs Ferry. One and a half miles through traffic, uphill, and in the sun. Ten minute stoplights, single-file sidewalks with no setback, lousy Westchester drivers, honking, people trying to mow you down at the Pedestrian Crossing sign, other people’s dogs, the works.

I’ve been speed-trekking Christopher and both dogs to and from camp every morning. By the time I get home I’m pouring sweat and exhausted. Not exhausted, spent. Caved in. Caved in and in need of an hour or two recovery time from whatever dog-or-car (or dog-and-car) close call in the steaming heat has befallen me and my not-the-dog-whisperer pack that morning. E.g.: three weeks ago Surfer tried to eat a Welsh Corgi & the owner screamed at me. Ever since then I've been hauling Surfer and Abby off the side of the trail every time I spy another dog in the distance, putting them in sit-stays, and then enforcing eye contact between Surfer and me while the other person's dog lunges across the path and into Surfer's face as the owner beams and says things like, "She likes to boss the other dogs around."

I’ve been doing this 5 days a week.

I've been doing this 5 days a week and until 3 weeks ago, when I put everyone on ELOO, Christopher’s weight had not budged. He was getting 6 hours of exercise a day and he still had exactly the same body he did at the end of 10 months with no recess.

How could this be happening?

So now I find out M’s been slipping him candy bars behind my back. Not just candy bars; candy bars and Gatorade. Huge quantities of Gatorade, Gatorade all the livelong day. This has been going on for....I don't know, years, maybe.

I didn’t know about the Gatorade, either.

This summer, once Christopher started the ELOO, he stopped drinking Gatorade. M would hand him a glass of Gatorade and he’d say, “No thank you.” That’s when he started losing weight, finally; since going on the Shangri-La diet he’s been losing weight steadily even with the Twix bars. As of this morning he’s lost 3.5 lbs in 3 weeks. He looks great. Kids can look better fast; they only need to lose a little to tip back over the line visually. By the charts he's still heavy; by the mirror he's nice looking. He looks so different my neighbor's husband didn't recognize him yesterday. Today one of his friends said the same thing.

update 8/7: Christopher hasn't lost 3.5 lbs. He's lost 5 lbs. No wonder he looks different.

Ed thinks the fact that Christopher told me about the Twix bars is a good sign. I do, too, though I’m not sure what it’s a sign of, exactly. It’s definitely a sign Christopher wants to lose (more) weight, but I’m wondering whether it’s also a sign the ELOO is working so well he no longer craves the Twix bars as much as he did.

[news flash: Christopher just looked up from his Saxon Algebra ½ and said, “I feel like venturing in the woods.” I hope this means he’s learning the 15 new vocabulary words per day (pdf file) E.D. Hirsch calculates a high-achieving kid acquires each and every day from age 2 until age 17 when he gets accepted by a selective college.]

I haven’t come up with a plan to combat the Twix bars. Christopher doesn’t want me to tell M he told on her, and I can’t quite envision a way to casually open up the oven door and peer inside for no reason in the middle of the afternoon without raising suspicion.

The more important question is Jimmy. What is he eating that I don’t know about? Christopher says M doesn’t give Jimmy the Twix bars. That's possible. Ed took him to the doctor this week and found he's lost 4 lbs since last year. He'd been gaining steadily at a rate of 10 to 15 lbs a year; this year he didn't gain, but lost. So maybe Christopher is right.

Ed was scandalized by the whole thing until he remembered that his maternal grandmother used to sneak candy to him and his brothers. His dad was a dentist, and he didn't allow his kids to eat candy. He was so hardcore about it that he gave the neighbor kids apples on Halloween. His mother in law disapproved, so she sneaked candy to the 3 boys.

I suppose this is the kind of thing that makes young frontier wives prefer to face Indian war parties alone instead of taking refuge in their mother in law’s big brick house where the guns and the male slaves all live.

The good news is that the Shangri-La diet is a brilliant success where Christopher is concerned. Either it's working as advertised and Christopher’s appetite is suppressed, and/or it’s working as a frontal-lobe booster, creating a daily structure so compelling Christopher is able to resist sugar drinks. Either way, he’s losing exactly what he needs to lose at exactly the rate he should lose: one lb a week. Perfect.

update: It's closer to 2 lbs a week. 5 lbs in 18 days.

The jury’s still out on Jimmy and me, although at the moment I am “cautiously optimistic.” More on that anon.

I wonder if Ed’s dad knows his mother-in-law sneaked candy to the kids.







image:
Bitter Single Guy

American Educator Spring 2003: The Fourth Grade Plunge
Trim Kids: Introduction

The Shangri-La Diet at Amazon
freakonomics blog posts on Roberts
Calorie Lab review
ethesis (lost 62 lbs) "best practices"
huntgrunt

Shangri La diet in freakonomics
Seth Roberts website
Shangri La diet part 2
early adopter
diet, evolution of the brain, & McDonalds
Marginal Revolution on Shangri La
your own lying eyes
progress report 7-23-06
Jimmy 7-24-06
mind hacks & Shangri-La 7-26-06
7-29-06 update
my life and welcome to it - 8-6-06 - success
compare and contrast photo op 8-12-06
9-12-06 update
9-17-06 Jimmy is melting
Dr. Erika's olive oil diet works, too

shangrila


-- CatherineJohnson - 06 Aug 2006

---

FifteenWordsADay 09 Aug 2006 - 17:53 CatherineJohnson




Reading E.D. Hirsch, I'm finally understanding why teachers & administrators who know what they're talking about constantly push parents to read to their children and children to read to themselves:

A well educated 12th-grader knows an enormous number of words, mostly learned incidentally. But, there is also an important place for explicit vocabulary development, especially in the early years, and especially for children who are behind. Isabel Beck and her colleagues13 in their excellent guide to explicit vocabulary instruction estimate that students can be taught explicitly some 400 words per year in school. (See “Taking Delight in Words” on page 36 for an example of such instruction.) These 400 words can be of immense importance to those children who are behind and need to be brought to the point of understanding key words as fast as possible. But that is just the beginning. If we want all of our children to comprehend well, they must learn many, many more words each year through incidental means. A 12th-grade student who scores well enough on the verbal portion of the SAT to get into a selective college knows between 60,000 and 100,000 words. There is some dispute among experts regarding the actual number so we might split the difference and assume that the number is about 80,000 words. If we assume that a child starts acquiring vocabulary at age two, and that the 12th-grader is 17 years old, he has acquired 80,000 words in 15 years. Multiplying 365 days times 15 we get 5,475 days. We divide that number into 80,000, and we find that the high-achieving 12th-grader has learned some 15 words a day—over 5,000 words a year. But of course, the 15-words-a-day estimate is just a mathematical average that describes a haphazard and complex process occurring along a very broad front.

source:
Reading Comprehension Requires Knowledge—of Words and the World
American Educator
Spring 2003

the magical number 12

After 3rd or 4th grade, most of these new words have to come from a child's reading material, because he's already learned all the words grownups use in speech.

Steven Stahl summarizes what we know about how children - and adults - acquire new words:

Ordinarily, when we encounter a word we don’t know, we skip it, especially if the word is not needed to make sense of what we are reading (Stahl, 1991). But we remember something about the words that we skip. This something could be where we saw it, something about the context where it appeared, or some other aspect. This information is in memory, but the memory is not strong enough to be accessible to our conscious mind. As we encounter a word repeatedly, more and more information accumulates about that word until we have a vague notion of what it “means.” As we get more information, we are able to define that word. In fact, McKeown, Beck, Omanson, and Pople (1985) found that while four encounters with a word did not reliably improve reading comprehension, 12 encounters did.

source:
How Words Are Learned Incrementally Over Time
by Steven A. Stahl American Educator
Spring 2003

I just took a quick look at Christopher's copy of Vocabulary Workshop Level A. The word "adverse," in Unit 2, appears 6 times in 6 different contexts. Then it appears 3 times more in the Review unit.

So once Christopher is finished with Level A, he just needs to see all 300 words again 3 more times apiece, probably. That seems like a good deal to me. I'm going to have Christopher do the entire VW series, and I'm going to consider adding Wordly Wise to the mix. I've already purchased a very nice little programmed instruction vocabulary book by community college professor George Feinstein: Programmed College Vocabulary: Compact Edition (7th Edition). It's only 176 pages, so I assume the non-compact edition would be better. But Amazon had the compact edition, so that's the one I ordered.

I still want to know whether teaching Greek and Latin roots gives you a leg up. If I knew that it did, I'd order Vocabulary from Classical Roots: Strategic Vocabulary Instruction through Greek and Latin Roots by Norma Fifer, Nancy Flowers. Actually....as I think about it, I may just go ahead and order the first book and assume that "word study" is a good thing for its own sake. I hesitate only because a year ago I spent some time working with the first book and found that it's not as user-friendly as a self-teaching book should be. Too many new words are introduced too quickly, which means that you're constantly having to provide your own practice & self-testing - something I didn't feel like doing and something Christopher won't do.

Christian likes word roots, so when he started working for us two years ago I gave him my copy. But I think I'll go ahead and order a new copy and see whether there's some way I can make it work for Christopher.

In the meantime, we're chipping away at English from the Roots Up at the dinner table. We've learned 13 Greek and Latin words so far. Plus ace boon coon from the New York slang dictionary and three sheets to the wind from the Dictionary of Cultural Literacy.

Ed had never heard the expression before.



in a nutshell

• A well-educated 12th grader knows 60,000 to 100,000 words.

• This works out to 15 new words learned a day from ages 2 to 17.

• By the middle grades, most of these words must be learned from written materials.

• On average, students need 12 encounters with a word in 12 different contexts to learn it well enough to improve reading comprehension.
  

• UPDATE: Engelmann says the correct figures are in the neighborhood of 30,000 words & 3 new words a day.

Mark, Doug, & Ken on Dungeons & Dragons vocabulary & SRA DI curriculum

here (scroll down)




This is sad news (scroll down):

Steven Alan Stahl, 52, died May 6 at Carle Foundation Hospital, Urbana. Stahl, a UI professor of curriculum and instruction, joined the faculty in 2002. Memorials: Steven A. Stahl Memorial Scholarship Fund at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the International Reading Association, the American Cancer Society or the Entertainment Industry Foundation's National Colorectal Cancer Research Alliance.

Fischgrund on divorce and SAT scores
how much reading a day?
robust vocabulary instruction (400 words a year)
Vocabulary Workshop levels & grades
15 new words a day
Engelmann says it's 3 new words a day



-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Aug 2006

---

EngelmannOnHowManyWordsADay 08 Aug 2006 - 19:03 CatherineJohnson




Ken left this passage from Engelmann in the Comments thread to 15 words a day:


Engelmann thinks that Hirsch's estimates are way too high. He think's it's more like 30,000 words total and 3 new words a day.

The numbers: Hirsch selects 60,000 as the number of word meanings for the top-of-class student. I did a very unscientific experiment that may be way out in left field, but I came up with a smaller number. I didn't have a top-of-class high-school student handy, but I had a top-of-class graduate student. I opened a college dictionary that had about 70,000 entries to four random pages. I read the words, spelled them, told her the part of speech for those she questioned, and asked her if she knew what they meant. On three of the pages, she did not know all the words. On one page, she did not know bourn, bourrée, bouse, boustrophedon, bouzouki, bowerbird, bow pen, bowsprit. She also didn't know a second meaning of bower (a bow anchor). She probably didn't know bovid, but I gave her half credit. "Could that be something related to a bovine?" "It is an adjective for bovine."

Also, I did not present most capitalized entries because I didn't think they were fair (Bournemouth, Bow bells, Bowditch, Bowen, Bowie State.) I did present Bowie and Bowling Green. I did not present six entries because they were either dialect, slight variations of the same word (two bowman entries for instance), obsolete, or spelling variations (bowlder for boulder). The page had 58 entries. Eleven were discards. Of the 47 remaining, she missed 9.5 (half credit for bovid). So her score on that page was 37.5/47 or 80%. Her performance on the other pages was 100%, 65%, 39%. The low-scoring page had lots of sodium words, which she could identify only as a substance composed of sodium. (She got sodium chloride, sodium fluoride, sodium glutamate, and Sodium Pentothal, but she was not able to identify the others.) Also, I threw out a lot of items on this page-variant spellings, obsolete words, capitalized words I didn't know and that seemed trivial, affixes, and obscure slang words. She also missed sociometry, socal, socman, sokeman, sodalite.

Indeed my decisions were less than operationally delineated, but if we assume that 15% of the entries are not fair and that the top-of-class person would get average 80% on the others, the total number would be something on the order of 48,000, which is quite a bit less than 60,000. Personally, I don't believe it's that high. Also of interest is that a very extensive analysis of morphology for spelling, conducted in the '70s, came up with a number of 30,000 words that seemed to be fairly exhaustive.

At least some cognitive scientists favor this range over the one that Hirsch suggests. Biemiller and Slonim (2001) concluded that the learning rate of new words for the top-of-class student is more on the order of about 3 words per day, not 8-18. So there seems to be far from perfect consensus on number of words. Also, Biemiller endorses explicit, direct instruction. So there isn't perfect consensus on methods for inducing vocabulary.

Three new words a day sounds much more likely to me, based on nothing more than instant reaction.

I just noticed that Ken is back on the job!

Can't wait to read.

Fischgrund on divorce and SAT scores
how much reading a day?
robust vocabulary instruction (400 words a year)
Vocabulary Workshop levels & grades
15 new words a day
Engelmann says it's 3 new words a day

-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Aug 2006

---

DictionaryOfEnglishUsage 14 Aug 2006 - 00:26 CatherineJohnson




I've just noticed this comment from Doug:

My latest time sink:

Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage

Nearly 1000 pages of excellent articles on usage debates.

BTW, from this book's article on "number":

1. All commentators agree that the plural verb in the first example that follows is correct, and so is the singular verb in the second:

"Current statistics already show that, of the unemployed, a large number are illiterate" [citation omitted]

"the number of foreign-language and second-language users together adds up to 300 to 400 million" [citation omitted]

(Which pretty much answers your usage question from a couple of weeks ago.)

So now I'm in trouble.

I had no idea such books even existed.

Obviously I'm going to be ordering one or two or three of them inside the next 10 minutes.

I really like the purple cover on the Cambridge book.








UPDATE 20:42 PM (4:42 pm here) - I'm getting the one Doug has. Merriam-Webster.



-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Aug 2006

---

WritingUtensils 08 Sep 2006 - 18:15 CatherineJohnson





I've never heard that usage before.

writing utensil

Is that right?

Do people talk about writing utensils?


[pause]


wow!

they do!

Apparently they talk about it quite a lot!

-- CatherineJohnson - 07 Sep 2006

---

DiaryOfAMadHousewife 07 Sep 2006 - 23:15 CatherineJohnson




I'm a tad stressed here, starting a new year with a child in Irvington Middle School.

How stressed am I?

Stressed enough to have lost or, alternatively, not-noticed-the-theft-of my purse yesterday.

So, today, I am credit card-free, car key-free, United Healthcare-card free, cel telephone-free, Zire-free, and driver's license-free.

And that's just the stuff I remember.

Plus my groovy carbineer key ring that I got from Hold Everything a couple of years back is now irreplaceable seeing as how Hold Everything is no more.

(sob)

news flash:

It is, in theory, possible to acquire a replacement copy of a lost or stolen New York state driver's license online.

It does not appear to be possible in practice, seeing as how it's been 20 minutes now and the New York state DMV site is still trying to "Go to Payment Form."

So I'll be venturing out to Yonkers sometime today or tomorrow it seems. In the meantime I will be driving without a license, which if my luck holds should lead to further time-gulping adventures with state troopers, fines, and possible incarceration.




don't say I never gave you anything

It is unbelievably hard to track down a contact number for a credit card company.

It is unbelievably hard even to locate a FAQ page with the words "lost or stolen" appearing on it.

Amazing.

How many lost or stolen credit cards are there on the planet?

There must be zillions.

And yet finding out how to report a lost or stolen credit card is a major undertaking.

I don't get it.

So, if any of these numbers apply to you, you might want to write them down:

to report a lost or stolen credit card to:

• American Express - 800.992.3404

• Bank of America (VISA) - 800.848.6090

• Quicken (MasterCard) - 800.374.9700

• Gap 800.887.1198

The life you save may be your own.




help desk

Someone left a statistic about the number of students who fail entry level college reading tests and go on to graduate from college.

I think the number was 18% — is that right?

If not, what is the correct figure & what is the source?

Thanks!




wait! there's more —

Ed just called from the city.

The doctor Eric (Hollander) set him up with in the city, the one you're supposed to go to for delicate 4-hour surgery to remove a benign tumor on the parotid gland, is not on our health insurance.

United Healthcare says he is; he says he isn't.

Apparently United Healthcare has the wrong taxpayer ID (or something); the people at the doctor's office say they've been trying to get the whole thing straightened out for 3 years now.

If I were smart, I'd cancel the rest of today, wait 'til tomorrow, and start over.

But n-o-o-ooooo.

No, I'm going to get in my car and drive to my doctor's office without my driver's license!

Because that's the way I like to do things!

No common sense-y!




update

I'm back.

It is now 2:56 pm here and the New York state DMV website is still grinding away, trying to access the Payment Form.

What's that call they have in boxing?

The mercy call?

The call where the ref stops the match because one of the fighters is getting killed?

(Have I got the right sport?)

Whatever it is, I think it's time to call it on NYDMV.



diary of a mad housewife
Old Grouch calls it
Murphy's Law
Mark Roulo's wisdom for the ages
Susan takes the cure

-- CatherineJohnson - 07 Sep 2006

---

NorthStar 11 Sep 2006 - 14:59 CatherineJohnson




This is cool.

I just got a letter from the editors of NorthStar: Focus on Reading and Writing, High-Intermediate Second Edition.

They want to publish an excerpt from Animals in Translation.

Fun.

-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Sep 2006

---

GeekPressLogicalFallacies 04 Oct 2006 - 18:54 CatherineJohnson




My favorite:

Argumentum Ad Nauseam:

Argumentum ad nauseam is the best logical fallacy.
Argumentum ad nauseam is the best logical fallacy.
Argumentum ad nauseam is the best logical fallacy.
Argumentum ad nauseam is the best logical fallacy.
Argumentum ad nauseam is the best logical fallacy.
Argumentum ad nauseam is the best logical fallacy.
Argumentum ad nauseam is the best logical fallacy.

see also: The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

and

Logical Fallacy Bingo

-- CatherineJohnson - 11 Sep 2006

---

ItsAboutNothing 12 Sep 2006 - 22:13 CatherineJohnson

“I always did well on essay tests. Just put everything you know on there, maybe you’ll hit it. And then you get the paper back from the teacher and she’s written just one word across the top of the page, “vague.” I thought “vague” was kind of vague. I’d write underneath it “unclear,” and send it back. She’d return it to me, “ambiguous.” I’d send it back to her, “cloudy.” We’re still corresponding to this day … “hazy” … “muddy”…"

Jerry Seinfeld (SeinLanguage Bantam Books: 1993)

I've been watching Seinfeld reruns.

That got me thinking about those old Letters From a Nut books.

I could write one of those!

Years ago a friend and I were thinking about writing a book of what I called "eff off and die" letters. I'd written a few eff off and die letters already; I'd written enough that I had reached proficiency in the genre as a matter of fact.

We were going to do a book of eff off and die letters to ex-boyfriends because we got dumped a lot. (Did I mention I was living in Los Angeles at the time?) Then after we published the book we were going to do book signings where the boyfriends, not the authors, autographed whichever letter was written to them. It was going to be a "You're so vain" book party, after the Carly Simon song, the theory being that the men in question were so vain they'd want people to know they were the guy to whom the letter was addressed.

I did mention I was living in Los Angeles at the time, right?

Yes. I did.

source:
speed dating cities

-- CatherineJohnson - 11 Sep 2006

---

TeacherGenderAndLearning 16 Sep 2006 - 01:23 CatherineJohnson




One of the enduring mysteries of Irvington Middle School's Phase 4 math class is the fact that the girls in Ms. K's class apparently like her very much and think she's a terrific teacher. Other moms have told me this, and Christopher confirmed it just the other night.

"The girls like her," he said.

Meanwhile the boys are sitting around getting docked 20 points because they showed their work the wrong way. (Do the girls know the right way? And if they do, how did they find out?)

Now, just in time for back to school night, Ed Next has an article on teacher gender & learning.




the other achievement gap

Boys and girls start school with the same measured abilities. Then a gap opens up and wides over the years.

The evolution of the gender gaps in achievement as children mature suggests that what occurs in schools and classrooms may play an important role.According to the Department of Education’s Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, when children enter kindergarten, the two genders perform similarly on tests of both reading and mathematics. But a few years later, by the spring of the 3rd grade, boys, on average, outperform girls in math and science, while the girls outperform the boys in reading. Disconcertingly, NAEP results show that for children between the ages of 9 and 13, the gender gaps in science and reading roughly double and the math gap increases by two-thirds. For children between the ages of 13 and 17, there is modest growth in the math and reading gender gaps but a substantial expansion of the gap in science

The gender gaps in achievement as students finish high school are far from trivial. In reading, 17-year-old boys score 31 percent of a standard deviation below 17-year-old girls, a deficit equal to about one grade level. This is nearly half the size of the black-white testscore gap in reading. In science and math, meanwhile, girls of that age score 22 percent and 10 percent of a standard deviation lower, respectively, also a difference worthy of concern.

This is extremely bad news.

I discovered this summer, through various sources I haven't mentioned yet, that reading is what counts. Period. Reading level predicts future success in everything, including, iirc, math-related fields.

For instance, the WordSmart bibliography of research on vocabulary reports Bowker finding that, “Vocabulary level is a useful predictor of academic ability, even for courses like Chemistry that do not emphasize language usage” (p. 16).

I haven't confirmed this independently, but it jibes with everything Hirsch says — and with everything Carolyn, Ed, and his brother Jerry say, too.

Jerry is the treasurer of Bryn Mawr. He said math scores predict nothing. Colleges look at verbal scores to decide what a student's potential is. Michelle Hernandez says the same; when she was an admissions director at Dartmouth she and her colleagues didn't bother with SAT math scores. High math scores were a dime a dozen; the verbal scores were what mattered.

And the book about high school kids with perfect SATs doesn't even mention math! The entire book is about these kids' incredible reading habits and vocabulary knowledge. The author seems to take it for granted that if you have an 800 on verbal it's easy to score an 800 on math.

I had reached the conclusion that math only matters if you don't know any math.

If you can't do math, that's a disaster.

But if you can do math you're not even halfway there. College students and adults learn acquire knew knowledge and comprehension via reading.

I asked Carolyn about this and she agreed. She said that when she's learning math her vocabulary has to be even more precise than it is when she's learning a social science or humanities subject.

I used to think fair was fair. Girls do better in reading; boys do better in math.

But that's wrong. Reading is (nearly) the whole game. A boy who's scoring pretty well on the (easy) NAEP math test and not so well on the (easy) NAEP reading test is in trouble.




middle schoolers

Studies have not focused on young adolescents, the time when students are particularly sensitive to gender differences and when gender gaps in achievement are pronounced. I investigated the effect of a teacher’s gender using the National Education Longitudinal Survey (NELS),which contains data on a nationally representative sample of nearly 25,000 8th graders from 1988. In addition to examining the effect of teacher gender on students’ test-score performance, I examined teacher perceptions of a student’s performance and student perceptions of the subject taught by a particular teacher. I was especially interested in the influence of a teacher’s gender on students’ perceptions, because engagement with an academic subject may be an important precursor to subsequent achievement levels, course selection in high school and college, and also occupational choice. For example, the underrepresentation of women in fields like engineering and computer science may be due to levels of confidence and interest in related subjects in high school.

Indeed, my results confirm that a teacher’s gender does have large effects on student test performance, teacher perceptions of students, and students’ engagement with academic material. Simply put, girls have better educational outcomes when taught by women and boys are better off when taught by men.These findings persist, even after I account for a variety of other characteristics of students, teachers, and classrooms that may influence student learning. They are especially important for young men when one considers that the percentage of 6th-grade teachers who were female ranged from 58 to 91 percent across four core subjects (math, science, reading, and history).Although these percentages decline in later grades, 83 percent of the English teachers in 8th grade are female, as are more than half of 8th-grade math and science teachers (see Figure 2).

That's good news, seeing as how Christopher, now in 7th grade, has never had a male teacher for any grade or, in middle school, any of his core subjects.

Last year he had his first male teacher ever, for music. This year he has a male teacher in art.

And that's it.




teacher survey data

The teacher survey solicited a variety of information about the teacher’s background, including gender. It also included several questions about how the teacher viewed the behavior and performance of the specific students in the study. I was most interested in the effect of gender on three assessments that appear to be particularly good indicators of academic development.Teachers were asked to simply respond yes or no as to whether the student was frequently disruptive, consistently inattentive, or rarely completed homework.

[snip]

The survey also asked students questions about their engagement with the subject. In particular, students indicated whether they were afraid to ask questions in that subject, looked forward to their class, and saw the subject as useful for their future. NELS also solicited information about each student’s gender as well as a variety of other demographic and socioeconomic characteristics.

NELS is a goldmine of information for those interested in gender dynamics within the classroom. Especially noteworthy is the fact that data are available from the same student in two different subjects taken from two different teachers, which enables us to account for educationally relevant characteristics of students that cannot be ascertained by conventional background characteristics. In other words, these “matched-pairs” data allow us to see how the outcomes of the same student vary with two different teachers. When estimating the effect of a teacher’s gender, I use standard statistical techniques to adjust for the effect of several other teacher and classroom characteristics that may affect student outcomes. For example, I take into account whether the student shares the teacher’s race and ethnicity, because some of my own prior research suggests that the race of a teacher may influence student outcomes (see “The Race Connection,” Education Next, Spring 2004). I also consider the size of the class, the percentage of students in the classroom with limited English proficiency, the number of years a teacher has been working in the profession, and whether the teacher is state-certified in the subject he or she is teaching.What does this valuable set of data reveal about the connections between gender and learning?

the most important findings

For three subject areas—science, social studies, and English— the overall effect of having a woman teacher instead of a man raises the achievement of girls by 4 percent of a standard deviation and lowers the achievement of boys by roughly the same amount, producing an overall gender gap of 8 percent of a standard deviation, no small matter if it can be assumed that this happened over the course of a single year.

[snip]

When a class is headed by a woman, boys are more likely to be seen as disruptive, while girls are less likely to be seen as either disruptive or inattentive. Furthermore, when taught by a man, girls were more likely to report that they did not look forward to a subject, that it was not useful for their future, or that they were afraid to ask questions. This dynamic is strongest in science,where student reports indicate that female science teachers are far more effective in promoting girls’ engagement with this field of study. The estimated effects in the other two subjects pointed in the same direction but were statistically insignificant when examined separately.

Boys also had fewer positive reactions to their academic subject when taught by an opposite-gender teacher. In particular, when taught by a female teacher, boys were significantly more likely to report that they did not look forward to the subject. This effect appears to have been particularly pronounced when the female teacher was in history.

math results fuzzy

The author looked at math scores, too:

My initial analysis showed that both boys and girls suffered if they had a woman teacher.

This turned out to be due to the fact that women math teachers were teaching lower-ability — special ed and the regular track — math classes. So he has no direct data on gender of teacher & math learning.





the years add up

Adverse gender effects have an impact on both boys and girls, but that effect falls more heavily on the male half of the population in middle school, simply because most middleschool teachers are female.My estimates suggest that, if half of the English teachers in 6th, 7th, and 8th grades were male and their effects on learning were additive, the achievement gap in reading would fall by approximately a third by the end of middle school. Similarly, these results suggest that part of boys’ relative propensity to be seen as disruptive in these grades is due to the gender interactions resulting from the preponderance of female teachers.

The Why Chromosome
by Thomas S. Dee
Education Next
Fall 2006

Let's try that calculation making all of a middle school boy's teachers female, shall we?

While we're at it, let's make all of the middle school boy's teachers young, inexperienced, childless females.

Like the teachers in Christopher's middle school, say.




Michelle Hernandez on SAT verbal vs. math

I believe that if you can read and write well, the rest wil follow. Those who are gifted in math but who are weak readers and writers will ultimately stand a lesser chance of acceptance at top colleges (unless they apply to very technologically oriented colleges such as Cal Tech and MIT), since it is far more typical to see a strong math/science student than to see a standout humanities student.

[snip]

Only .9 percent [of test-takers prior to the 1995 recentering] scored between 700 and 750 on the old verbal, so in total, a paltry 1 percent of all test takers scored over 700 on the verbal, whereas a whopping 75 percent of test takeres scored below 500. In the math section, only 4.2 percent of the population scored over 700.

[snip]

The ability to read well will ultimately have a bigger impact on most college students than the ability to do SAT I math very well, especially since the level of SAT math is not particularly high.

source:
A is for Admission

from D-Ed Reckoning

Research shows that the leading predictor that a student will drop out of college is the need for remedial reading. While 58 percent of students who take no remedial education courses earn a BachelorÂ’s degree within eight years, only 17 percent of students who enroll in a remedial reading course receive a BA or BS within the same time period (NCES, 2004a).

today's factoid

David Boulton: We were interviewing Lesley Morrow, the Past-President of the International Reading Association, and she made a statement which flabbergasted me. She said this was a fact: that there are some states that determine how many prison cells to build based on reading scores.

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Yes. Again, the predictability of reading for life success is so strong, that if you look at the proportion of middle schoolers who are not at the basic level, who are really behind in reading, it is a very strong predictor of problems with the law and the need for jails down the line.

Literacy for societies, literacy for states, literacy for individuals is a powerful determinate of success. The opposite of success is failure and clearly, being in jail is a sign of failure.

People who don’t read well have trouble earning a living. It becomes attractive to, in some cases the only alternative in terms of gaining funds, to violate the law and steal, to do things that get you in trouble. Few options in some cases other than to pursue that life. Of course reading opens doors.

Children of the Code
interview with Grover Whitehurst, Director of the Institude of Education Sciences.

Apparently really great math scores don't keep you out of jail.

-- CatherineJohnson - 14 Sep 2006

---

SometimesItsBetterThanYouThink 28 Oct 2006 - 02:09 CatherineJohnson




I promised myself last year that I would start going to school board meetings.

So last night I did.

The meeting was quite frustrating, but there was one terrific surprise: Irvington sixth graders — Christopher's class — earned the top scores in the county on the ELA test.

• 38.8% scored a '4,' which the Asst Superintendent characterized as "mastery."

• 63.9% scored a '3.' (If memory serves, the state uses the term "meets standards" for 3s.

• 5.4% scored a 2 and 0% scored a 1.
  

questions

This means Christopher is surrounded by high-scoring, competitive kids who are setting the pace for him, as he is setting the pace for them. Good.

(The fact that our standards are lower than California's, Indiana's, Massachusetts' and those of every industrialized country on the planet is another story, of course.)

Still, the strong scores of Christopher's 6th grade class raise a couple of issues.

Grade deflation, for one. I came to believe last year that the reality here in Irvington is the exact opposite of the grade inflation meme. The reality here, and in other affluent suburban middle schools I'm hearing about, is grade deflation. I don't have the patience to belabor the point; suffice it to say that I've heard from other parents here that their children, like Christopher, experienced harsh grading last year, harsh grading unleavened by feedback that would help them improve their work.

Grading like this, for instance:

Those are two grades, two Ds, assigned to two different papers & written on the bottom of one. No other comments, just a curt "Are you trying to do the work at all?" addressed to Christopher in front of the class as he stood by her desk to receive the verdict(s).

(What was that we were saying about a caring community?)

More than one middle school parent has watched his child's confidence wilt and his interest in a subject he once loved dissolve. A child will take no for an answer if that's all he hears. So will most adults.

Our sample size is small, of course, but there was a moment at the transition to 7th grade meeting that struck Ed and me as significant.

One dad raised his hand (we parents always have to raise our hands & speak only when called upon), and asked Principal Fried what his overall impression was of this sixth grade class.

I suppose you could ask such a question for any number of reasons, but it struck both of us as a veiled request for reassurance. I say this because of the strikingly negative conversations about Christopher that I had with school personnel throughout last year. Most memorable was the one with the math chair who, when I said, "Christopher has to learn math for college," responded by saying, "He has to learn math to graduate from high school."

She said this as if graduation from high school were in some doubt, as if even thinking about math in college was an egregious case of parental overreaching.

It was bizarre. She'd never met Christopher, he was earning Bs in the accelerated math class, a fact she'd pointed out to me earlier in the exchange, he'd had 4s on every state math test — and she's talking about whether he'll have what it takes to eke out a pass in Algebra 1? UPDATE 10-28-2006: He was earning Bs in an accelerated math class whose teacher had been instructed to "hold down the number of As." Maybe when I finally study statistics I'll learn how to "partial out" a formal policy of grade deflation.

That's the way it was last year.

Back to ELA: the English teachers were handing out Cs and Ds like dyed eggs on Easter.

And now we learn that our kids have the highest ELA scores in the county.

There's something wrong here.

When your child is doing his best given only minimal instruction in writing and his ELA scores are amongst the highest in the county, he shouldn't be getting Cs and Ds on his papers — and he certainly shouldn't be given "flat" Cs and flat Ds with no hope of improving in the future.

Under these circumstances — low grades and high scores — the school's refusal to provide students and parents with samples of 'A,' 'B,' 'C,' & 'D' student work is a red flag.



what's different about this class?

UPDATE 9-29-2006 Mind fog. What's different about this class is that they had two hours of ELA instruction a day, every day, day in and day out.

We owe this decision to last year's principal Scott Fried and, I assume, to his Assistant Principal Raina Kor.

I'm grateful to them.

What I don't know at this point:

• would this class have been first in the county the year before, when they had the normal 1 hour of ELA instruction?

• was the extra hour of ELA instruction the cause of their high scores?

I assume that it was, but It will be interesting to see how this year's 6th graders score.

The other question is: why the sixth grade?

Assuming their scores this year aren't a fluke, which I have no way of gauging, what was different for these kids?

I would bet the ranch it's not the teachers — not in 6th grade ELA, unless the English teachers for the A team (the kids were divided into two teams with different schedules) were fantastically good, which is possible. I have no way of gauging that, either.

If our district were open to input from parents, I would ask the administration to investigate the amount of afterschooling and tutoring going on in Christopher's class.

Everyone I know — almost all of them parents of 6th grade (now 7th grade) children — is engaged in substantial afterschooling, teaching, reteaching, and private tutoring.

Parents in every other grade are reteaching and hiring tutors, too, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that our cohort is doing more of it.

Two reasons.

First, this is the class with the family who has had a college professor tutoring their kids for years now. This is an open secret; everyone knows about it. Simply knowing that your child is in a class with a kid who's being taught at home by a college professor has a galvanizing effect.

At least, it did for me.

Second, Christopher & me.

Irvington is a tiny little district, and Irvington Middle School is a tiny little school. Everyone knows I've been afterschooling Christopher for two years now — or, if they don't, their kids probably do, because Christopher tells the kids at school.

I proselytize afterschooling every chance I get, and the idea could have jumped to other parents beyond my immediate circle of friends.

I say this because while I haven't been able to change much that the school does, I've had the experience of sitting in a meeting and suddenly hearing another parent, sometimes a parent I've never even met, say something that I know had to have originated with me.

I've been working on my understanding of education for two years now, and I've become fairly good at tapping into the pro-content/pro-mastery thoughts most parents already have but haven't put into words.

Point is, the current 7th grade class has amongst its parents a vocal afterschooling mother who also happens to be a professional writer.

If we took a survey, would we find that the parents of Christopher's friends have done more supplementing of their kids' education than parents in other classes?

It's possible.


grade deflation in Irvington
no grade inflation in the suberbs
Spanish teacher grades a project
teachers versus superintendents

article: deflation at BU, inflation at the Ivies



-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Sep 2006

---

TerrificElaAssignment 23 Oct 2006 - 20:44 CatherineJohnson




Christopher just told me about a wonderful assignment his ELA teacher gave the class.

It's a format for analyzing a work of fiction. You could probably call it a graphic organizer, since I gather she may have given the kids a chart with each category listed inside a box or window. (I haven't seen it; Christopher told me about it.)

Here it is:

---

somebody —

wanted —

but —

and so —

---

She has them create a plotline, too.

I think this assignment is brilliant. It's so brilliant I'm having trouble finding language to describe it.

These four lines perfectly distill and communicate what a work of fiction actually is. It's the ultimate example of Temple (Grandin's) "finding the basic principle," Aristotelian theory boiled down to just 5 words.

I've never seen children work with it, of course, but I'd be stunned if it didn't teach them a profound and lifelong lesson about narrative works of art.^*

The fact that Christopher brought it up in the car and remembered the entire thing is evidence of its effectiveness, I think. (She gave them an acronym: "SWB and so.")

I have no idea whether his teacher, Ms. Coulson, created it herself. If she did, she's a genius. If she didn't, she's still a genius for choosing this assignment out of the thousands of assignments available to English teachers.

I didn't have time to write it short

That is a standard line amongst writers. Whenever you overwrite, you say, "I didn't have time to write it short."

Writing short is difficult, time-consuming, and downright perplexing. This core truth of the writing life, combined with what little I know of British writing instruction, makes me continue to think that in writing instruction a great deal of attention should be paid to the writing of summaries.

[Judith] Koren describes how two British women she knows became effective essayists and speakers. “Each week, they’d had homework exercises like this: While preserving every essential point, reduce a 100-word essay to 50 words, then to 20, then to 10. Reduce 500 words to 50, 1,000 words to 100. Week after week, year after year.

source:
The American Enterprise

"Boiling it down" — "finding the basic principle" — is what creative nonfiction writing is about. It's what creative nonfiction thinking is about.

Whoever created SWB and so did a brilliant job of it for the teaching of narrative fiction to middle schoolers.

summarizing assignment from Karen A
annotated student writing models from Glencoe

^* Since we have some new readers, I'll mention that I have a Ph.D. in "Film Studies." I spent years studying narrative fiction; this is a realm in which I have some genuine expertise, as opposed to the journalistic knowledge I normally draw upon writing ktm.


-- CatherineJohnson - 22 Oct 2006

---

IsThisaJoke 06 Nov 2006 - 15:30 CatherineJohnson




Is this a Japanese instructional workout video?

really?

-- CatherineJohnson - 26 Oct 2006

---

JustCommas 07 Nov 2006 - 13:55 CatherineJohnson




email to Christopher's English teacher

Hi Tracy--

Christopher told us last night he likes to write!

We were thrilled. He’s really enjoying your class (he’s enjoying almost all of his classes – no negative comparison implied!)

We noticed two problems with his rough draft:

• few transition words between sentences

• not much sense of how to use commas

I thought I’d mention a book I found last year when I was researching writing instruction:

Just Commas: 9 Basic Rules to Master Comma Usage
by Diane Lutovich & Janis Fisher Chan

Lutovich and Chan teach business people how to write, so their books are direct and to the point. Just Commas is much simpler than any commercial textbook I’ve seen, with no “page splatter.”

(Page splatter: gratuitous color photographs of kids and their pets/friends/classmates/skateboards etc. scattered all over the pages, clashing font styles, “think and discuss” pull-outs, etc.)

Just Commas is only 85 pages long, with huge amounts of white space. It’s not quite as succinct as the SWB and then assignment, but it’s close.

Even though I’ve been a professional writer for years, I’m sometimes confused about where commas do and do not go. Just leafing through the book I learned something new. When I get to it, I’ll have Christopher read Just Commas and do all the examples.

So it might be a good book for your library or class --

Catherine J.



“The comma . . . Has not one but many tasks to do, which differ greatly in importance.”
THE KING’S ENGLISH, 1930
(from Just Commas)

school textbooks: bad
self-teaching books for grown-ups: good

Some of you will remember that I spent a full week last school year scouring Amazon for decent writing textbooks.

My conclusion: there are no decent writing textbooks.

After a day or two I learned that the only books to consider are books written for adults who want to learn a new skill or improve a skill they learned poorly in school - or, possibly, books and websites written for ESL learners.

Commercial textbooks intended for public schools are page-splattered, edu-blah-blah extravaganzas. They cost and arm and a leg, and don't appear to teach anyone how to write. Or punctuate. Or put your participles some place where they don't dangle.

They're appalling.



     


      Lutovich's & Chan's grammar test for grownups



Write It Well Lutovich & Chan's website
Grammar for Grownups by Lutovich & Chan

Don't dangle your participles in public (Language Log)
Jack Lynch Guide to Grammarand Style
the participle
common faults in Sentence structure
plural nouns with singular subjects

Getting an A on an English Paper (under construction)

grammar book recommendations
NYC Educator

Rules for Writers (not)



-- CatherineJohnson - 07 Nov 2006

---

NationalInstituteForLiteracy 09 Dec 2006 - 01:57 CatherineJohnson




Is this what I think it is?

Is this a federal agency directing parents to a homeschooling website for help assessing their children's reading level?


and....


If it is....then why?

Is there a particular reason why our federal government can't provide parents with help assessing their children's reading level?

-- CatherineJohnson - 02 Dec 2006

---

HowChildrenRead 04 Dec 2006 - 21:20 CatherineJohnson




Now that we have across-the-board decline growth in Christopher's scores in just one year's time, I'm trying to figure out how panicked I need to be about his future.

The "challenge" here in Irvington is that we have a spiral curriculum in math and ELA classes that assign novels two years below grade level. This results in predictable not-great achievement by the end of middle school, at which point we throw the kids into ferocious competition and tracking for accelerated and Honors classes.

Only the children who "belong" in Honors and/or accelerated courses gain admission, and the admissions process is grueling. Students have to write essays; parents have to sign letters saying they know their kids are applying to Honors and giving their OK.

No effort is made to recruit students into the Honors track.

Ever.

The goal is to make cuts. Figure out who doesn't "belong."

I've been hearing that word for many, many years here in Irvington.

belong

Last year an Irvington administrator told me that "Irvington is the most heavily tracked district I've ever seen."

Direct quote.

So that's the dilemma.

We're paying $20,000 a year in property taxes for Darwinian gatekeeping.

Plan A has to be figuring out whether there is or is not a decent Catholic boys' school somewhere in Westchester County. At this point I think even Ed would be on board for packing Christopher off to the Jesuits for the next few years.

(He's come a long way, baby.)

Christian claims there's a good one in White Plains, so I'll look into it.


[pause]


wow

They have a parents Crusader Club at Stepinac High School.

That could be good.


[pause]


whoa

Their graduates are going to good schools. (Click on "Admissions"; then Click on "Graduates.")

So....I guess the next step is to check out tuition.

Good Lord.

$6,650

We could do it.


[pause]


hmmm....

Their SAT scores are "above average."

No further info.

That's a bad sign.



Alright, enough of that.^*

As I was saying, I'm trying to figure out how panicked to be what to do now.

Over the weekend, this seemed to mean cruising reading comprehension websites.....

I don't even know what got me going on that, but there you are.

oh!

I remember.

Elaine McEwan's book Raising Reading Achievement in Middle and High Schools: Five Simple-to-Follow Strategies arrived with depressing news: just having your kids read books doesn't seem to be enough.

I haven't finished reading that chapter, but Elaine said she was depressed by the research on this, so naturally I became depressed, too. Being sick in bed with the flu helped.

Elaine (apparently we're on a first name basis, Elaine & me) thinks students have to be "held accountable" for their reading - i.e. they have to do something, such as writing a summary, to show they not only read a book or two, they understood what they read. And they have to read more complicated books this year than they did last year and the year before.

That made sense, but what's a more complicated book?

How complicated are the books C. is reading now?

And how do I find out?

This question led to lots of cruising of readability websites & white papers.....


[pause]


San Diego Quick Assessment (pdf file)

The San Diego Quick Assessment is a dandy tool, I think.

I gave it to Christopher and discovered that his "reading for pleasure" level is grade 6; his "instructional" level is grade 7. I suspect he's going to come out higher than that on the ITBS, but the San Diego was helpful. The two words Christopher couldn't read both belong to science vocabulary, which I think is probably good:^** "relativity" (grade 6) and "capillary" (grade 7).

If you're going to use it with your own child, use this link.



So I cruised the readability stuff....and got out my book on summarizing and finally committed to reading the whole thing....and in brief, semi-lucid waking moments I was trying to figure out how, exactly, I'm going to make sure Christopher reads progressively more challenging material AND is "held accountable," by me, for his progressively more challenging reading, I came across the following passage:

Studies show that children often select books both above and below their current reading level, and this is a good thing. Children can often understand large sections of books that are "too hard" because of their interest in and knowledge of the topic,2 and "easy" books often provide valuable background in a new genre that encourages subsequent reading and makes it more comprehensible (Carter, 2000). Left on their own, children engage in a "back and forth movement" between easy and hard books, reading both below and above their current reading levels (Fresch, 1995). In addition, children gradually read books that are more challenging, without the use of reading levels (Krashen, 2001a). The back and forth movement is actually a sine wave that gradually moves upward.

Stenner appears to agree. in one Metametrics brochure ("The 3 Rs': Using the Lexile Framework"), it states that "one strategy that works well is to have students read an easier text on the same subject in order to provide some background knowledge and vocabulary" (p. 3). And Stenner, Burdick, Sanford and Burdick (2001) advise that "the Lexile Framework should never be the only factor considered when selecting a book" (p. 49).

source:
The Lexile Framework: The Controversy Continues

This is one of those dilemmas where I don't have time to figure it all out; I'm going to have to rely on Bayesian priors and, furthermore, I am going to have to assume that I have some Bayesian priors worth listening to.

The one Bayesian prior I have to hope is gold in the bank is me: as far as I can tell, I owe my own recentered Verbal 790 not to anything my schools did, but to the fact that I was a bookworm. (Do people even use the term "bookworm" any more? Do bookworms still exist?) I read all the time, from age 5 on. I read whatever I wanted to read, and what I wanted to read was fiction. I read fiction & only fiction up until high school when I started reading the Great Works of authors like A.S. Neill, John Holt, and Eldridge Cleaver.

So....I'm going to do what my mother did.

Keep Christopher well-stocked in the best books I can find, buy him anything he's remotely interested in reading, and hope for the best.



I may also try to bribe the school into giving him an assigned reading list filled with books at his actual reading level.

The difference between Christopher and me is PlayStation and pro wrestling.

If the school told Christopher he had to read X number of books this year, he'd read X number of books.

Unfortunately, the school's reading plan for 7th graders appears to consist of....two books?

Three?

Well, maybe it's four. Maybe they read one book a quarter.

I don't know.

Parents never know!

I think Ed and I are going to figure out a whole new plan....

Meanwhile I continue to feel that Vocabulary Workshop is an excellent work-around for non-bookworm boy-type kids.

Elaine McEwan website

^* The quest for rescue-by-parochial-school has begun early this year.

^** "good" because I suspect that science vocabulary is the least important language Christopher needs at this point and even down the line....and because Christopher has had two quite good science teachers so far in middle school. I think he's getting what he needs there - or getting as much as he can.


-- CatherineJohnson - 04 Dec 2006

---

ReadingLevel 12 Dec 2006 - 18:27 CatherineJohnson




I found 3 resources for assessing the difficulty of a book or article yesterday:

• Dale-Chall Readability Index (pdf file) (used in conjunction with Dale-Chall Word List (pdf file)
  

• QUEST book list

• Lexile Book Search (use in conjunction with Lexile FAQ) (I think Mark Roulo put me onto Lexile, but have lost the note I remember having made about it...)
  

And here is Hoagie's Gifted Education Page on readability tests.

When it comes to figuring out your child's reading level, I found the San Diego Quick Assessment helpful. I'll let you know how well it jibes with Christopher's ITBS scores.

Scholastic on the San Diego (pdf file)



-- CatherineJohnson - 04 Dec 2006

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