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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