I'm a 6th grade math teacher with an EM elementary system. I started using Singapore math 5th grade level by myself last year, 2nd nine weeks and the stanines increased dramatically along with number sense scores. So this year I'm doing what Barry did and starting at 3B for measurement and continuing with 4A for my regular kids and 5A with the advanced kids.

I love the program! The kids learn so easily it's amazing!

Also, there is a student with asperger's in the advanced class! Finding ktm was serendipity!

[break]

Math is math. The texts we use are all basically the same. I earned my degree in engineering and loved teaching myself math. I figured I could teach other people to do what I do. After 5 years my [student] scores were good and I was looking for more ways to improve them. I read Liping Ma's book and started looking for "chinese" ways of teaching. The TIMMS results told me that Singapore was the best so finally I ordered Liping Ma's textbook from Houghton Mifflin and then Singapore Math. It didn't look that different. I tried Liping Ma's books on my remedial class and discovered that they couldn't even subtract well. The diagrams looked the same in the Singapore Math books, so I tried them out next.

I do my own thing, try to stay in my room and my kids learn! I do have some helicopter parents :) but after awhile they start to trust me and my kids are learning.

Also, I do try to let my special needs kids do what everyone else does and then find out what accommodations they really require. Most kids can do a lot more than preconceived notions. Nobody fails unless they do nothing. I require nightly homework which causes frustration occasionally, espcecially at the beginning of the year. There are quizzes everyday too.

[break]

I forgot to say... I buy everything myself. I have my own copy machine, laptop computer, software...

So far, no one has questioned my materials. I try to follow the general structure of the county's curriculum.

If your scores are good, no one will bother you.



wow

KTM Guest is one of those miracle teachers who's carrying our kids straight into the future — !

Talk about 21st century skills!

KTM Guest's kids are getting them!

Incredible.




what works versus whatever works

KTM Guest's comment is exactly what I imagine would or could be the best way to run our public schools: create a good, solid set of standardized tests, decide what scores we want students to attain, give this information to schools, then get out of the way and let teachers do the job.

That's what McDonald's did with its animal welfare audit.

They hired Temple (Grandin) to help them put her very simple 10-item animal welfare audit in place at supplier plants and told everyone they had to pass or forget selling to McDonald's.

In 18 months' time, the meatpacking industry had completely transformed its animal handling practices. This is an industry that was rife with abuse; animal welfare activists had been trying to reform the thing for decades. McDonald's & Temple did it in a year and a half. No one thought, going in, that was possible.

But it was.

Temple's audit is a classic "tight-loose" approach, strictly focused on outputs, not inputs. She doesn't tell plants what kind of flooring to install, how the lighting and heating have to work, how much training the employees have to have, etc., etc., etc.

She just tells the plants what has to be happening & not happening to the animals.

The animals can't be falling down; they can't be mooing in distress; they can't be getting whipped; they have to be unconscious before any butchering procedures are carried out.

She also rejects a zero-tolerance approach. Animal welfare activists typically want a requirement that all animals be killed on the first shot. Temple says that's never going to happen in the real world, because in the real world equipment malfunctions and accidents happen. She sets the bar at 95%. Ninety-five percent of the animals must be killed on the first attempt.

Plants that are audited using the 95% requirement end up doing better than plants audited using a 100% requirement. Temple has the data to prove it.




tight-loose for schools?

Last summer Temple and I wrote an op-ed laying out an audit for high schools. I'd read a lot of the research on high school outcomes, and we came up with three criteria:

• percent of students who graduate

• percent of students who go to college and graduate

• percent of students who, if they do not go to college, get and keep jobs that require either further vocational training, or moderate to long-term on the job training (this includes graduates who start their own businesses)
  

These three standards, I'd be willing to bet a decent sum of money, would distinguish good high schools from the mediocre and bad. (You'd have to be adjusted for SES, of course, but that's doable.) Any high school doing a good job educating its students would have high numbers graduating from high school, graduating from college, or finding and keeping good jobs offering on the job training.

We lost interest - maybe I should say confidence - in the op-ed after we finished, so we didn't send it to papers.

I've been wondering ever since whether a "whatever works" approach can be used in public schools.

Obviously, it can; that's what KTM Guest's county is using. In KTM Guest's county as long as teachers are showing results, nobody's telling them they have to use Everyday Math.

However, I've become very pessimistic about the odds that other counties, districts, and states will follow suit. Reforming the meatpacking industry, I've come to see, isn't analogous to reforming American public schools, in spite of the many similarities between children and a herd of never-tamed, mooing, stampeding farm animals. (I'm joking.)

Meatpacking plants were a mess. They were worse than a mess; they were a scandal.

But they weren't ideologically committed to being a mess. Meatpacking plants treated animals badly because it wasn't a priority not to treat animals badly. At least, that's my outsider's perspective. A historian would find a complex and complicated history, I'm sure. However, it's accurate to say that meatpacking plants weren't ideologically committed to beating up the animals.

Once McDonald's told them they had to stop beating up the animals, they figured it out and they figured it out fast. Temple has wonderful stories about plant troublemakers turning into plant troubleshooters practically overnight. One guy started maintaining equipment on an hourly basis, as I recall, so there wouldn't be all kinds of mechanical glitches that terrified the cattle and made them balk. He did this on his own. He was a line worker, a high school graduate & union employee who was a pain in the toochis. Once he had his standard to meet — only so many animals mooing in distress or getting zapped by electric prods — he came up with a new way meet it.

That would happen in public schools if ed school professors, administrators, and all teachers were pragmatists.

But they're not.

Public schools are run by people who are ideologically committed to their practices — people who adamantly do not see their practices as in any way harmful to children.

No Child Left Behind, a law I support, probably makes neoprogressives even more committed to those practices. In The Knowledge Deficit, E.D. Hirsch suggests an interesting sequence:

• neoprogressive educators define reading as a "formal" skill (find the main idea, "inferencing," etc.) rather than an ability that depends on content knowledge (broad vocabulary & general knowledge)

• increased testing drives progressive educators to drill these formal skills for hours every week in order to increase reading comprehension scores

• hours of tedious drill in "inferencing," "clarifying," "questioning the author" etc. lead neoprogressives to conclude that what students really need is more natural — more wholistic — modes of teaching
  

The upshot is that reading comprehension doesn't improve, but neoprogressives don't blame their teaching methods for the failure.

They blame the law.




hedgehogs and foxes

Neoprogressives are hedgehogs. They know one big thing — progressive education — and that one big thing guides every small thing they do. (Foxes know "many things.")

That would be great if the one big thing were correct.

Unfortunately, it's not. Hirsch has a great passage in The Schools We Need:

The history of American education since the 1930s has been the stubborn persistence of illusion in the face of reality. Illusion has not been defeated. But since reality cannot be defeated either, and since it determines what actually happens in the world, the result has been educational decline.

My question is always: why doesn't reality win?

Or, rather, why doesn't reality win at some point? How does an illusion persist for 100 years?

There are a number of answers to that, it seems, but a new one I've stumbled across recently is Philip Tetlock's finding that hedgehogs aren't inclined to admit error. They get more things wrong than foxes do in the first place, and when they are wrong they're the last ones to see it, if they ever do.

...hedgehogs are more likely than foxes to uphold double standards for judging historical counterfactuals. And this double standard indictment is itself double-edged. First, there is the selective openness toward close-call claims. Whereas chapter 4 shows that hedgehogs only opened to close-call arguments that insulated their forecasts from disconfirmation (the "I was almost right" defense), chapter 5 shows that hedgehogs spurn similar indeterminacy arguments that undercut their favorite lessons from history (the "I was not almost wrong" defense). Second, chapter 5 shows that hedgehogs are less likely than foxes to apologize for failing turnabout tests, for applying tougher standards to agreeable than to disagreeable evidence. Their defiant attitude was "I win if the evidence breaks in my direction" but "if the evidence breaks the other way, the methodology must be suspect."

I assume Tetlock would see me as a fox, but I've had plenty of I was almost right moments. Probably more than a few I was not almost wrong moments, too.

Reality is never going to win. Not without a lot of help.







Chapter 1: Quantifying the Unquantifiable

KTM Guest shows how to do it
hedgehogs and foxes



-- CatherineJohnson - 07 Sep 2006

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TheWinnerIs 07 Sep 2006 - 21:18 CatherineJohnson



Old Grouch left this comment on the subject of missing wallets:

Murphy's Law says that as soon as you get the replacement license, the purse will turn up. ;-)

Happened to me once: One of my cats stole my wallet and hid it under the dresser.

You ktm people know everything!

I should have talked to you before I cancelled every single credit card in my possession.

Christopher came home from school with word that my purse has been inside his backpack all day.

long story

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

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JohnDeweyExperiencesStomachFlu 08 Sep 2006 - 13:30 CatherineJohnson



I fear that our friend John Dewey is beginning to show the strain.

He started out gangbusters, enrolling in ed school, acing the Praxis II, landing a reasonable, non-crazed individual as professor of his first ed school class.

That was then.

This semester it's NCTM Time.

[pause - back shortly]


I think this may be my favorite part:

What grabbed my attention was the standard that required that students be able to solve quadratic equations in one variable with a graphing calculator as the primary tool. My feelings about graphing calculators aside, I noted to the others in my group that it said nothing about students learning the quadratic formula, much less its derivation. A woman in my group, in apparent defense of the standard, told me her daughter didn’t have to learn the quadratic formula in Algebra 1. I pointed to that standard and said “You’re looking at the reason why.”

When our turn came to report our findings to the class, I said the Algebra 1 standards were vague and allowed teachers to not teach the quadratic formula. Some others in the room agreed. The teacher—Mr. NCTM—in a thinly veiled, poker-faced support of anything resembling NCTM standards, responded that the standards were in fact, not “prescriptive”. This generated some discussion about giving teachers flexibility and I found myself in a debate with a bright young man who although agreeing that the quadratic formula should be taught was also caught in an unconscious effort to please the teacher. He found himself arguing that the standards were what must be taught “at a minimum”, that the non-prescriptive nature of the standard gave teachers flexibility to go beyond the minimum.

I've come to view language like "not prescriptive" as fighting words.

NCTM is not a libertarian organization. Search its site for the words "to each his own," or "live and let live," or "different strokes for different folks." See what you get.

Bupkis.

Sure you might find "different learning styles" or "differentiated instruction."

You will not find the sentiment that for some folks teaching algebra 1 without using a graphing calculator to solve quadratic equations in one variable might be a good idea, too.

I managed to invent a new term yesterday (at least, I think I invented it): micro-fascism.

I say that tongue in cheek, but in its essence it's true. Organizations like NCTM are authoritarian in nature, design, and ambition. End of story.

ARG Cartoon Animation



edspresso search: Dewey letters

John Dewey at edspresso, part 1
John Dewey at edspresso, part 2
John Dewey at edspresso, part 3
John Dewey has the stomach flu
John Dewey at edspresso Letter #5

John Dewey at ktm
John Dewey at ktm part 2
John Dewey experiences stomach flu
John Dewey writes again

johndewey


-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Sep 2006

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MurphysLaw 08 Sep 2006 - 14:51 CatherineJohnson



Carolyn says:

that's a corollary to Murphy's law; the purse will only turn up after you've cancelled all your credit cards.

Or at least, only after you've cancelled the credit card that you had all your autopayments (gas, water, phone, etc.) linked to.

True.



diary of a mad housewife
Old Grouch calls it
Murphy's Law
Mark Roulo's wisdom for the ages
Susan takes the cure

-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Sep 2006

comments...

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MarkRoulosWisdomForTheAges 08 Sep 2006 - 15:12 CatherineJohnson

I don't think you understand how these things work. Cancelling every single credit card in your possession is how you get the purse back. Waiting doesn't help ... the purse won't turn up until the credit cards are cancelled.

I believe I've demonstrated this proposition to my satisfaction.



diary of a mad housewife
Old Grouch calls it
Murphy's Law
Mark Roulo's wisdom for the ages
Susan takes the cure

-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Sep 2006

comments...

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SusansCure 08 Sep 2006 - 15:23 CatherineJohnson

For a few years I kept losing my purse/wallet right at Christmas time. I decided my ADHD was in high gear during those times. I would either leave it at a store or some weird place or it would fall out in a parking lot. I finally broke the habit when my husband looked at me with that pitifully embarrassed look and said, "Will you be doing this every year?" I haven't done it since.

I wonder if that would work for me.




diary of a mad housewife
Old Grouch calls it
Murphy's Law
Mark Roulo's wisdom for the ages
Susan takes the cure

-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Sep 2006

comments...

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ScholasticAchievementOfHomeSchooledStudents 08 Sep 2006 - 17:26 CatherineJohnson

The grade equivalent score comparisons for home school students and the nation are shown in Figure 2. In grades one through four, the median ITBS/TAP composite scaled scores for home school students are a full grade above that of their public/private school peers. The gap starts to widen in grade five. By the time home school students reach grade 8, their median scores are almost 4 grade equivalents above their public/private school peers.

source:
Scholastic Achievement and Demographic Characteristics of Home School Students in 1998
Education Policy Analysis
Volume 7 Number 8
March 23, 1999

Maybe we should forget the ed schools and go hire some homeschooling parents.

-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Sep 2006

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EmailFromTheNewPrincipal 08 Sep 2006 - 17:51 CatherineJohnson



Dear Ms. Johnson,

Thank you for the kind words and for taking the time to correspond with me about your concerns. As a courtesy to the professionals working with Christopher, I strongly encourage you to contact your son’s teachers to make them aware of his needs before I intercede. More often than not I have found it far more productive to work hand in hand with the individuals directly involved with the situation than through a third party. If after doing so you are still unable to come to a meeting of the minds, I would be happy to set up an appointment with you and his teachers to try to rectify the matter.

As always, please feel free to contact me should you have any additional questions. I look forward to meeting you and your husband at our September 14th Open House.

Best wishes,

Joe Witazek
Principal

Dear Mr. Witazek,

You’re certainly right about the third party issue. (Ed is an administrator, by the way. He’d say the same.)

I’m not going to pursue it further unless we see a lot of binder explosions and POINTS OFF.

Christopher is so much more mature this year than last that he may be able to deal with all the extra stuff his new young teachers want him to lug around. Also, he doesn’t want to be different from the other kids (he’s not that mature!)

The larger issue, which is a female staff evaluating boys according to girl standards and strengths—neat handwriting, coloring inside the lines, making uniform-sized Xs on graphs in math class (Ms. Kahl took POINTS OFF for unevenly sized Xs last year without telling the kids she was planning to do so beforehand), falls under your purview.

Irvington Middle School is an institution in which girls sweep the awards and the principal tells parents that “Everyone knows boys do worse than girls in middle school.”

Turning IMS into a school in which boys and low-SES children succeed will take leadership from the top.

You’ve already taken a big step in the right direction as far as we’re concerned. Christopher came home yesterday and said, “I like Mr. Witazek. He told us, ‘We’re going to get the field finished as soon as possible. I want you moving your legs.’”

Fantastic!!

Last year the kids were banned from the field. They spent their lunch breaks milling around outside teachers’ classes and getting yelled at. Christopher gained 26 pounds in the 10 months of the 2005-2006 school year, nearly 3 pounds a month. That’s what stress & a six-hour school day with limited exercise will do to an 11-year old.

Over the summer we whittled 5 pounds back off and are now working on the rest. So we’re thrilled to hear you’re planning to get the kids out on the field & moving around.

Good for you!

Catherine J





spaced repetition

email to the new principal
email from the new principal
new regime
back to school 2006

happy man:
Bitter Single Guy

-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Sep 2006

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NorthStar 08 Sep 2006 - 19:14 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

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HedgehogsAndFoxes 08 Sep 2006 - 19:23 CatherineJohnson



I mentioned earlier that neoprogressive educators are hedgehogs.

Dan Drezner quotes a terrific passage from Louis Menand's review of Philip Tetlock's book:

[In the realm of international affairs] a hedgehog is a person who sees international affairs to be ultimately determined by a single bottom-line force: balance-of-power considerations, or the clash of civilizations, or globalization and the spread of free markets. A hedgehog is the kind of person who holds a great-man theory of history, according to which the Cold War does not end if there is no Ronald Reagan. Or he or she might adhere to the “actor-dispensability thesis,” according to which Soviet Communism was doomed no matter what. Whatever it is, the big idea, and that idea alone, dictates the probable outcome of events. For the hedgehog, therefore, predictions that fail are only “off on timing,” or are “almost right,” derailed by an unforeseeable accident. There are always little swerves in the short run, but the long run irons them out. Foxes, on the other hand, don’t see a single determining explanation in history. They tend, Tetlock says, “to see the world as a shifting mixture of self-fulfilling and self-negating prophecies: self-fulfilling ones in which success breeds success, and failure, failure but only up to a point, and then self-negating prophecies kick in as people recognize that things have gone too far.”

Tetlock did not find, in his sample, any significant correlation between how experts think and what their politics are. His hedgehogs were liberal as well as conservative, and the same with his foxes. (Hedgehogs were, of course, more likely to be extreme politically, whether rightist or leftist.) He also did not find that his foxes scored higher because they were more cautious—that their appreciation of complexity made them less likely to offer firm predictions. Unlike hedgehogs, who actually performed worse in areas in which they specialized, foxes enjoyed a modest benefit from expertise. Hedgehogs routinely over-predicted: twenty per cent of the outcomes that hedgehogs claimed were impossible or nearly impossible came to pass, versus ten per cent for the foxes. More than thirty per cent of the outcomes that hedgehogs thought were sure or near-sure did not, against twenty per cent for foxes.

The upside of being a hedgehog, though, is that when you’re right you can be really and spectacularly right. Great scientists, for example, are often hedgehogs. They value parsimony, the simpler solution over the more complex. In world affairs, parsimony may be a liability—but, even there, there can be traps in the kind of highly integrative thinking that is characteristic of foxes. Elsewhere, Tetlock has published an analysis of the political reasoning of Winston Churchill. Churchill was not a man who let contradictory information interfere with his idées fixes. This led him to make the wrong prediction about Indian independence, which he opposed. But it led him to be right about Hitler. He was never distracted by the contingencies that might combine to make the elimination of Hitler unnecessary.

Our problem is that ed school professors aren't Winston Churchill & Hitler.

Ed school professors are Winston Churchill & India.




hedgehogs

Plato
Dante
Proust
Nietzsche


foxes

Montaigne
Balzac
Goethe
Shakespeare

source:
The Fox and the Hedgehog



Chapter 1: Quantifying the Unquantifiable

KTM Guest shows how to do it
hedgehogs and foxes



-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Sep 2006

comments...

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DownTown 08 Sep 2006 - 21:39 CatherineJohnson




Silverstein Properties via Associated Press

source:
New York Times ($)


On the train last night Ed ran into the dad we know who's working on the Ground Zero buildings.

He had these pictures with him; Ed said they were beautiful and they are. Though I miss the twin towers. If it were up to me, I'd put them back up the same way they were before....

Anyway, Ed and I had been down to the site just last week, and we'd noticed some construction. The dad said the construction we saw is nothing. Starting in mid 2007, he said, and continuing through 2012, there will be 3000 - 5000 workers on site every day.

He said you can already see Korean deli owners pouring into the place, setting up shop, in anticipation of this huge influx of workers to feed. Ed said it's like Schumpeter's creative destruction; the whole place is springing to life now, a year before the action starts.

Of course, it wasn't capitalism that created the destruction. Quite the opposite.

Our acquaintance also said that the city now houses more businesses and workers than it did before 9/11. Also, through some serendipitous chain of events a lot of huge longterm 15- and 20-year leases are set to expire at the time the new buildings are scheduled to be completed.

So everyone expects all the space to be rented from the get-go.

Good.

-- CatherineJohnson - 08 Sep 2006

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SeptemberElevenTwoThousandSix 11 Sep 2006 - 14:39 CatherineJohnson



MSNBC is running all of its live coverage of the day 5 years ago.


-- CatherineJohnson - 11 Sep 2006

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DogPile 11 Sep 2006 - 15:36 CatherineJohnson

I'd never heard of dogpile before today.


-- CatherineJohnson - 11 Sep 2006

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ManWhoSavedGeometry 11 Sep 2006 - 16:31 CatherineJohnson

Donald Coxeter peers into a giant kaleidoscope (right). (Eden Robbins Photo at left)

...geometry was, for much of the 20th century, a discipline very much in jeopardy. It was deemed by a generation of mathematicians to be old-fashioned, a fine recreation for idling away a lazy afternoon, but in essence little more than a trivial tinkering with toys. Modern mathematics was all about prickly algebraic symbols and undulating equations-impenetrable hieroglyphs with no diagrams, no shapes.

The task of fending off these attacks fell to H.S.M. ``Donald" Coxeter, the greatest classical geometer of the last century. Through his lifelong work as geometry's apostle, Coxeter, who died in 2003 at 96 (prematurely by his measure-his lifelong vegetarianism guaranteed he should live to 100, he figured), became known by his followers around the world as ``the man who saved geometry" in a mathematical era characterized by all things algebraic, abstract, and austere.

Fifty years ago this summer, Coxeter was summoned by the Mathematical Association of America on a roving lecture tour through the United States. He traveled as far north as Fairbanks, Alaska, as far west as Stanford, Calif., and east to New York City, speaking with a missionary's zeal to schoolteachers and any other willing listeners.

Coxeter lectured about ``the beauteous properties of triangles," about circles and spheres, and about the Platonic solids: the tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, icosahedron, and dodecahedron. According to a recent cosmological hypothesis (and a similar theory put forth by Plato) the dodecahedron is a potential model for the shape of the universe-bound by 12 walls, each the shape of a pentagon.

good grief

I'm reading the article as I post ... and have just come to this section:

But just as Coxeter set out upon his career, classical geometry-with its emphasis on shapes and diagrams-was being supplanted by modern mathematicians' penchant for algebra.

A secret society of the créme de la créme of French mathematicians epitomized the shift in the mathematical zeitgeist of the early 20th century. Writing under the pseudonym Nicolas Bourbakis, the collective set out in the 1930s to rewrite the history of mathematics in one grand mathematical treatise, and perhaps the most distinctive feature of their work was the absence of diagrams.

The Bourbakis espoused mathematical rationality and rigor. They believed the subjective and fallible visual sense was easily led astray, falling victim to impressionistic reasoning. In 1959, at a conference in France addressing the need to overhaul the French education system, Jean Dieudonné, a founding member of the Bourbakis and the group's scribe, infamously proclaimed: ``Down with Euclid! Death to Triangles!"

French perfidy!

Down with Euclid!

Death to Triangles!

oy

Ed says the French really did come up with the line about such-and-such "working in reality but not in theory"....

a geometry gap

Eventually, the Bourbakis way of mathematics pervaded the Western world, reaching even into grade schools with the Sputnik-motivated New Math reforms of the 1960s, which aimed to improve students' performance and to ensure America was not left in the scientific dust by the Soviet Union. Instead of shapes, children studied axioms and set theory.

As a consequence, mathematical and scientific investigation suffered from what Walter Whiteley, a great admirer of Coxeter and director of applied mathematics at York University in Toronto, calls the ``geometry gap." Whiteley's thesis holds that when the areas of the brain that process visual and geometric concepts fall into disuse, the realms of mathematics and science suffer as well.

This is something we've talked about at ktm before, without reaching a conclusion, or even a coherent hypothesis.

Mathematical talent and "spatial ability" are constantly linked in journalistic accounts of research on gender differences in math talent.

And, anecdotally, I've known at least three people — including Carolyn (iirc) — who deliberately studied drawing to improve their math. Moreover, all of the women I know who excel at or simply like math are also either artists or would-be artists. (I'm in the would-be category. I've been fascinated by drawing for my entire life, and have always wanted to learn how to do it. I had begun taking drawing classes when I was sidetracked onto math.)

So I think there's something there. But I don't know.




UPDATE:   John Saxon

John Saxon says that it's not possible to understand fractions, decimals and percent without the aid of diagrams. In fact, he says this in 3 of his books that I know of. Here is his first statement of the principal in Algebra 1:

To solve word problems about percent, it is necessary to be able to visualize the problem. We will begin to work on achieving this visualization by drawing diagrams of percent problems after we work the problems. Learning to draw these diagrams is very important. [emphasis in the original]

I'm Coxetering today!

So Coxeter set out to make the case for the visual geometric approach, using a number of tactics.

On a popular level, he proselytized for the classical geometric treasures he loved, praising their simple beauty and symmetry. The elegance of his talks and essays gained him an avid following around the world, a fan base of professional and amateur geometers alike who became just as passionate about classical geometry as he was.

Coxeter, for example, was muse to artist M.C. Escher, famous for works like ``Ascending and Descending," a seemingly precarious building of stairs winding in an infinite loop. Coxeter and Escher became friends in the 1950s, and the mathematician's work assisted the artist in his quest to convincingly capture the concept of infinity. (Escher was known to say, ``I'm Coxetering today!")

fearful symmetry

But Coxeter did more than just popularize. He also managed to reinvigorate the discipline through his academic research. He injected a modern relevance, allowing classical geometry to transcend its old-fashioned origins and find far-reaching applications in both mathematics and the sciences.

Specifically, Coxeter classified the symmetries of polytopes, which allowed him to translate these geometric entities into algebra, thus building a powerful bridge between algebra and geometry.

Coxeter also invented mathematical tools-now called Coxeter groups, Coxeter numbers, and Coxeter diagrams-which shed new light on symmetry, broadening and deepening its study. His best-selling book, ``Regular Polytopes," became a classic. ``It's like the bible for me. I refer to it all the time," said John Ratcliffe from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, who has one copy at work and another in his study at home for late-night consultations.

Symmetry underpins all mathematics-an equation being an expression of perfect balance.

I will never be a hedgehog

The visual and the algebraic perspectives are in constant flux in the mathematical and scientific disciplines. ``The battle between geometry and algebra is like the battle between the sexes," said Sir Michael Atiyah, honorary professor of mathematics at Edinburgh University. ``It's the kind of problem that never disappears. It'll never be dead, and it will never get solved. The question is, `What is the right balance?"'

``It goes back and forth, and not in an accidental way," said Peter Galison, professor of the history of science and physics at Harvard. ``Pushing hard on the visual methods ends up pushing toward the antivisual. Beliefs swing between an almost theological dogma that images are stepping stones to higher knowledge, or that they are deceptive idols that keep us from higher understanding."

I find that kind of talk to be Rank Hedgehoggery.

i.e., the bad kind of hedgehoggery




legacy

Coxeter's legacy is the powerful push he gave the visual geometric method, and the resulting change in perspective that transformed the way mathematicians and scientists create and investigate. ``Coxeter's perspective and ideas are in the air we breathe," said Ravi Vakil, at Stanford. ``It's not that his ideas are used to solve problems, it's that the fundamental problems grow out of his ideas. He's the soil."

source:
The Man Who Saved Geometry
by Siobhan Roberts Boston Globe
9-10-2006
(registration required)
Siobhan Roberts' Toronto Star article on Coxeter is available online in pdf form.
The King of Infinite Space by Siobhan Roberts








-- CatherineJohnson - 11 Sep 2006

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UsOpen 11 Sep 2006 - 17:31 CatherineJohnson

(AP Photo/Elise Amendola)


Roger Federer won his 3rd U.S. Open title last night, and summer is officially over.

[sob]

Christopher, Ed & I have now seen Federer win all 3 titles. He's won so many titles we may have to start rooting for him. Either that or start setting our clocks by him.

< Federer just won the Open, time to put away the sleeveless t-shirts. >

Andy Roddick is adorable.

In case you were wondering.

Also from the world of Grand Slam tennis, Martina Navratilova should never, ever speak on her own behalf.

If something needs to be said re: Martina Navratilova, Chris Evert should say it.

End of story.

-- CatherineJohnson - 11 Sep 2006

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GeekPressLogicalFallacies 11 Sep 2006 - 17:54 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

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ItsAboutNothing 11 Sep 2006 - 20:04 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

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NewRegime 11 Sep 2006 - 23:46 CatherineJohnson



Christopher came home today reporting that his English teacher says he can use the fabric poly file folder after all.

Also, the field is finished, and the kids are out running around on it during lunch.

This bodes well.



(footnote: I'm pretty sure a lot of parents have been pressing the exercise issue. I'd never raised it before myself, though obviously I should have.)






email to the new principal
email from the new principal
new regime
back to school 2006



-- CatherineJohnson - 11 Sep 2006

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ShangriLaUpdateSeptemberTwelth06 12 Sep 2006 - 13:32 CatherineJohnson



7-14-2006 Friday

Started Jimmy, Christopher & me on the Shangri-La Diet.


9-12-2006 Tuesday

Jimmy has lost 10 pounds, Christopher 5, Catherine —2 & +2.

oh, wait! no. that's not right. Catherine is —2.

Turns out The Daily Plate only tracks 5 or 6 weeks at a time at a time.... so all our July data has been dropped out.

Jimmy's weight loss curve is pretty much straight down; Christopher has been plateaued for a month (apparently we need those 6 hours a day of tennis camp); mine is down, then up then plateaued.

"self-experimentation" notes^*

I lost weight when I switched from ELOO^** to sugar water, then regained plateaued when I switched back to ELOO because sugar water is a pain in the tochus.

Early on Jimmy seemed not to be faring well, so I switched him to sugar water & he began losing steadily. After vacation I got lazy, put him back on ELOO, and he's still losing steadily.

Christopher's going on sugar water today. He's not happy about it, but that's the way it is. Meanwhile one of his chums told him that his mother thinks it's disgusting Christopher has to drink olive oil.

My reputation in the community is growing!

Martine is still offering Christopher junk food behind my back. Yesterday she tried to give him something from Dunkin' Donuts. He managed to say 'no' before she got whatever it was out of the bag and showed it to him. Martine has fattened me up every time I've lost weight (as a welcome side effect from various meds); the instant I start looking skinny she starts going to Dunkin' Donuts & buying oversized blueberry muffins, then presenting them to me as a "gift" mid-afternoon, the very moment I am least likely to resist temptation.

I'm in a black mood.

This time she's busted, regardless of whether that makes her mad at Christopher for "telling."




points off

Ed, Christopher, & I took a goofy test in Why Gender Matters on "how masculine are you?"

One of the items was "I can get people to do what I want them to do, even when they don't want to"

I got zero on that one.




as I was saying ....

Not only is Martine setting Christopher up to gain weight, she's setting him up to lie to Ed & me about what he's eating. How long is he going to be able to resist Dunkin' Donuts? I can't resist the stuff at all when you put it under my nose. Once he starts eating Dunkin' Donuts, he'll start not-telling us about it, or fibbing if we ask.

I already addressed this issue with Ed, who is skinny, and has never once, in his entire adult life, needed to lose so much as an ounce of weight.

Christopher walks home with his thin friends every day, and they stop at the corner deli and buy junk food.

So Ed told Christopher he couldn't buy anything. His friends can buy crap; he can't.

I told Ed, who agreed, that he was setting Christopher up to lie to us. There's no way a kid is going to be able to obey his dad and resist junk food while all his friends are chowing down. It's not just the food; it's the social issue. Under a no-junk-food-after-school rule he'd be the fat boy who has to do what his daddy tells him. That would be his rep.

So the rule is one piece of junk food a day — and get it with your friends, after school, not at lunchtime. And yes, our school sells junk food in the cafeteria. We have a brand-new super-expensive super-fancy high-ceilinged cafeteria chock-ful of crap to eat. oh, and sushi. We have a sushi bar in our school cafeteria. So the kids can eat sushi and brownies for lunch.

I'm pretty sure there's a huge amount of parent pressure about this. At least, I hope there is. Plus we have our state-mandated Wellness Committee looking into things. (federally mandated? pdf file) Changes are being made. But if it were up to me I'd take every bit of food-crap out of the place. No vending machines, no pastries, no potato chips — just get it all the hell out of there. EVERY diet book on the planet tells you NOT TO HAVE CRAP IN YOUR HOUSE. So I miraculously manage to purge most of the CRAP from my own house (except for the stuff squirrelled away in meat drawers and ovens, of course) while my school sets out a luscious array of junk before the kids and then tells them in their state-mandated Health Class to "eat healthy."

Thanks, guys!

Christopher is packing his lunch every day, and taking only enough money to buy one piece of junk food after school, nothing at lunch.

Then he doesn't go to the cafeteria at all during the lunch break. He eats his lunch outside, then runs around on the football field that our new principal seems to have been instrumental in getting opened up to the kids. (THANK YOU)

Of course, in keeping with our family motto, Ed went to the store and bought Christopher some microwaveable soup-in-a-cups on grounds that soup is filling.

Soup is filling, but microwaving a cup of soup means going into the cafeteria.

I feel besieged. (Did I mention I'm in a black mood?)

Cup-a-soup is staying home.


All of this is making me believe the guy Drudge linked to the other day, the climate change researcher who says civilization was not a step up.

Civilisation was a last resort - a means of organising society and food production and distribution, in the face of deteriorating environmental conditions.

Sounds about right to me.




better attitude

I SOOoooooo don't want summer to be over.

In the category of Better Attitude: Jimmy's weight loss is fantastic, and Christopher's is fine. A lot of doctors will tell you not to diet a child at all, but rather to hold his weight steady and let him grow out of it. By that standard, we're doing well.

As for me, in theory I don't "need" to lose weight. But I'm spooked by my mom's struggles with diabetes. Tales of a future foretold and all that. In my case, if no cure for autism is found I'm going to have special needs kids when I'm 90 assuming I'm still alive at 90, which I hope to be. That means I'm going to need superb health in old age, not the struggles my mother confronts. If she had grown autistic children, I don't know whether she'd be able to deal with them at all now.

From what I can tell, very low BMIs are extra-good for preventing diabetes, so I would like a very low BMI, thank you very much.

That reminds me.

I saw a study I think Susan J would be interested in having to do with age & weight.

What was it?

When I remember, I'll post.

more points off

Martine just came in & asked me to search the Good Morning America website for Justin Timberlake's grandmother's blueberry muffin recipe.

I'm doing it, God help me.




update

No luck tracking down Justin Timberlake's grandmother's blueberry cobbler recipe.

I did, however, locate holiday favorite blueberry lemon crumbles.






^* self-experimentation
^** ELOO: extra light olive oil

The Shangri-La Diet at Amazon
Seth Roberts website

Shangri La diet in freakonomics
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
10-4-2006 Dr. Erika's olive oil diet works, too

shangrila


-- CatherineJohnson - 12 Sep 2006

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NctmReformsAgain 12 Sep 2006 - 18:22 CatherineJohnson



In today's Wall Street Journal ($):

Arithmetic Problem
New Report Urges Return to Basics In Teaching Math
Critics of 'Fuzzy' Methods Cheer Educators' Findings;
Drills Without Calculators Taking Cues From Singapore
By JOHN HECHINGER
September 12, 2006; Page A1

The nation's math teachers, on the front lines of a 17-year curriculum war, are getting some new marching orders: Make sure students learn the basics.

In a report to be released today, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, which represents 100,000 educators from prekindergarten through college, will give ammunition to traditionalists who believe schools should focus heavily and early on teaching such fundamentals as multiplication tables and long division.

The council's advice is striking because in 1989 it touched off the so-called math wars by promoting open-ended problem solving over drilling. Back then, it recommended that students as young as those in kindergarten use calculators in class.

Those recommendations horrified many educators, especially college math professors alarmed by a rising tide of freshmen needing remediation. The council's 1989 report influenced textbooks and led to what are commonly called "reform math" programs, which are used in school systems across the country.

The new approach puzzled many parents. For example, to solve a basic division problem, 120 divided by 40, students might cross off groups of circles to "discover" that the answer was three.

Infuriated parents dubbed it "fuzzy math" and launched a countermovement. The council says its earlier views had been widely misunderstood and were never intended to excuse students from learning multiplication tables and other fundamentals.

Nevertheless, the council's new guidelines constitute "a remarkable reversal, and it's about time," says Ralph Raimi, a University of Rochester math professor.

Francis Fennell, the council's president, says the latest guidelines move closer to the curriculum of Asian countries such as Singapore, whose students tend to perform better on international tests.

So maybe it wasn't such a great idea after all for IUFSD to ban my Singapore Math course.



new timeline

According to their report, "Curriculum Focal Points," which is subtitled "A Quest for Coherence," students, by second grade, should "develop quick recall of basic addition facts and related subtraction facts." By fourth grade, the report says, students should be fluent with "multiplication and division facts" and should start working with decimals and fractions. By fifth, they should know the "standard algorithm" for division -- in other words, long division -- and should start adding and subtracting decimals and fractions. By sixth grade, students should be moving on to multiplication and division of fractions and decimals. By seventh and eighth grades, they should use algebra to solve linear equations.

Here's the Singapore sequence.




Lutherans turning into Catholics

A recent study by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a Washington nonprofit group, found that only two dozen states specified that students needed to know the multiplication tables. Many allowed calculators in early grades.

Chester E. Finn Jr., the foundation's president and a former top official at the U.S. Department of Education, blamed the earlier math-council guidelines for state standards that neglect the basics. He described the new advice as a "sea change," saying that "it's a little bit like Lutherans deciding to become Catholics after the Reformation."

Understanding math, rather than parroting answers to poorly understood equations, was the goal of the council's controversial 1989 standards. Those guidelines called on teachers to promote estimation, rather than precise answers. For example, an elementary-school student tackling the problem 4,783 divided by 13 should instead divide 4,800 by 12 to arrive at "about 400," the 1989 report said. The council said this approach would enable children using calculators to "decide whether the correct keys were pressed and whether the calculator result is reasonable."

"The calculator renders obsolete much of the complex pencil-and-paper proficiency traditionally emphasized in mathematics courses," the council said then. In 2000, in another report, the council backed away somewhat from that position.

Still, in response to the earlier recommendations, many school systems required children to describe in writing the reasoning behind their answers. Some parents complained that students ended up writing about math, rather than doing it.

As the debate heated up, concern grew about U.S. students' math competence. In 2003, Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, a test that compares student achievement in many countries, ranked U.S. students just 15th in eighth-grade math skills, behind both Australia and the Slovak Republic. Singapore ranked No. 1, followed by South Korea and Hong Kong. Fueling concern about the quality of elementary and high-school instruction: one in five U.S. college freshmen now need a remedial math course, according to the National Science Board.

low-income students

This is very exciting. The AIR report (pdf file) led me to believe that Singapore Math had been a flop in low-income schools because the student mobility is so high (and see Hirsch on this subject, too):

If school systems adopt the math council's new approach, their classes might resemble those at Garfield Elementary School in Revere, Mass., just north of Boston. Three-quarters of Garfield's students receive free and reduced lunches, and many are the children of recent immigrants from such countries as Brazil, Cambodia and El Salvador.

Three years ago, Garfield started using Singapore Math, a curriculum modeled on that country's official program and now used in about 300 school systems in the U.S. Many school systems and parents regard Singapore Math as an antidote for "reform math" programs that arose from the math council's earlier recommendations.

According to preliminary results, the percentage of Garfield students failing the math portion of the fourth-grade state achievement test last year fell to 7% from 23% in 2005. Those rated advanced or proficient rose to 43% from 40%.

Last week, a fourth-grade class at Garfield opened its lesson with Singapore's "mental math," a 10-minute warm-up requiring students to recall facts and solve computation questions without pencil and paper. "In your heads, take the denominator of the fraction three-quarters, take the next odd number that follows that number. Add to that number, the number of ounces in a cup. What is nine less than that number?" asked teacher Janis Halloran. A sea of hands shot up. (The answer: four.)

Ms. Halloran then moved on to simple pencil-and-paper algebra problems. "The sum of two numbers is 63," one problem reads. "The smaller number is half the bigger number. What is the smaller number? What is the bigger number?" (The answers: 21 and 42.)

In this class, the students didn't use the lettered variables that are so prevalent in standard algebraic equations. Instead, they arrived at answers using Cuisenaire rods, sticks of varying colors and lengths that they manipulate into patterns on the tops of their desks. The children use the rods to learn about the relationship between multiplication and geometry. The goal: a visceral and deep understanding of math concepts.

"It just makes everything easier for you," says fifth-grader Jailene Paz, 10 years old.

Cuisinaire rods for bar models!

That's so cool!




TERC time

The Singapore Math curriculum differs sharply from reform math programs, which often ask students to "discover" on their own the way to perform multiplication and division and other operations, and have come to be known as "constructivist" math.

One reform math program, "Investigations in Number, Data and Space," is used in 800 school systems and has become a lightning rod for critics. TERC, a Cambridge, Mass., nonprofit organization, developed that program, and Pearson Scott Foresman, a unit of Pearson PLC, London, distributes it to schools.

parents don't get it part 1

Ken Mayer, a spokesman for TERC, says many parents have a "misconception" that Investigations doesn't value computation. He says many school systems, such as Boston's, have seen gains in test scores using the program. "Fluency with number facts is critical," he says.

parents don't get it part 2

Polle Zellweger and her husband, Jock Mackinlay, both computer scientists, moved to Bellevue, Wash., from Palo Alto, Calif., two years ago so their two children could attend its highly regarded public schools. She and her husband grew suspicious of the school's Investigations program. This summer, they had both children take a California grade-level achievement test, and both answered only about 70% of the questions correctly. Ms. Zellweger and her husband started tutoring their children an hour a day to catch up.

"It was a really weird feeling," says their daughter, Molly Mackinlay, 15. "I do really well in school. I am getting A-pluses in math classes. Then, I take a math test from a different state, and I'm not able to finish half the questions."

Eric McDowell, who oversees Bellevue's math curriculum, says parents misunderstand Investigations.

If it weren't for the parents, teaching would be a great job.




math wars and war wars

In the Alpine School District in Utah, parent Oak Norton, an accountant, has gathered petitions from 1,000 families to protest the use of Investigations. His complaints began more than two years ago, when he discovered at a parent conference that his oldest child, then in third grade, wasn't being taught the multiplication tables.

Barry Graff, a top Alpine school administrator, says the system has added more traditional computation exercises. Over the next year, Alpine plans to give each school a choice between Investigations or a more conventional approach. Mr. Graff, who says Alpine test scores tend to be at or above state averages, expects critics to keep up the attacks and welcomes the national math council's efforts to provide grade-by-grade guidance on what children should learn.

"Other than the war in Iraq, I don't think there's anything more controversial to bring up than math," he says. "The debate will drive us eventually to be in the right place."

wow

I bet things are hopping over at math-teach & math-learn.

[pause]

hmm

No action thus far.

Once Wayne Bishop posts this baby, we'll be in a shooting war.

update: Bishop's got it!

let the fun begin



what Singapore students can do at the end of 7th grade

-- CatherineJohnson - 12 Sep 2006

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MathTrailblazersStudent 13 Sep 2006 - 00:49 CatherineJohnson



from one of our friends:

A friend of mine has a daughter who made A's in 4th and 5th grade Trailblazers. She did not know her times tables, ditto division facts, and her fraction knowledge was very basic to nonexistent.

She did not know that you could divide a fraction.^*

This was the A student. I can't imagine what the C student looks like in this class.

Another friend's gifted kid dropped dramatically in the standardized tests knocking him out of the high math track for middle school. I told her that it was probably math facts and fractions. She found out through an online assessment that, in fact, it was.

If a teacher looks at the good stuff that curriculums like Trailblazers offer, supplementing what is missing, then it is probably alright. But when they follow it to the letter, it appears to me to be a disaster waiting to happen.

^* Math Trailblazers does not teach the division of a fraction by a fraction.


-- CatherineJohnson - 13 Sep 2006

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FirstDayOfSchool 13 Sep 2006 - 16:42 CatherineJohnson



Christian went to his first class in college Monday night!

It's a milestone. He came in last night pumped.

He says the class is dominated by one know-it-all young woman, so he's decided to be the "quiet overachiever." He said he always felt that when he went to college he wanted to be an overachiever.

I told him we applaud overachievement; overachievement is our family philosophy. (That and no common sense-y.) Of course, he already knew that.

Shooing Christian into college is a strange proposition for us, and not just because he's not our son. He's also not our race, and we can't tell how much he is or is not "our culture." (See: how to be multicultural)

His mom has a Bachelor's degree; his aunt has a Masters; his dad, whom he hasn't seen in a number of years, had two years of college. His folks have more education between them than Ed's do; probably more than mine do, too.

So it's not exactly right to think of Christian as hailing from "black culture" in Laurence Steinberg's sense of the term.

On the other hand, he went to Yonkers schools, and when he was in the Mamaroneck school system he was in special ed along with all the other black kids. So if he's not exactly a product of "black culture," he's certainly a product of lousy black school culture.

All of which means Ed and I have been feeling our way. Last spring we decided, all of a sudden, to tell Christian he needed to go to college, and to say that we would pay to get him started. We decided this on the fly, which is how we often decide things (it works for us), and then we told Christian what we'd decided the next week, at dinner.

It was a case of synchronicity, because it turned out his grandmother had sat him down just the week before to tell him he had to get to college.




That was all well and good, but we can't "predict" from such scenes.

Does Christian have the stick-to-it-iveness to get through college?

Does he have the confidence?

The confidence part is huge. I don't think it violates Christian's privacy to say that he is somewhat shy. Somewhat. Maybe "sensitive" is a better word.....actually, come to think of it, he has a personality like Christopher's. Sensitive.

What I've come to see over the past two years is that "sensitive" is a tough row to hoe if you're young, male, 6'4", and black. White people are scared to death of Christian. I can see it when I'm out in public with him. White people take one look at him and blanch.

Here in Irvington teenage clerks simply stare. It's amazing. The other day a whole gang of boy teenyboppers hanging out on the street corner downtown were staring at Christian as we walked by. I'm starting to stare back, but pretty soon I'm going to find myself popping off with lines like, "Didn't your mother teach you not to stare?" I can hear myself now.

Christian says Connecticut is much worse, btw. Connecticut, he says, is the staringest state in the country. For me, this piece of intel sparks two opposing impulses. Number one, stay out of Connecticut. Number two, get in the car with Christian and all 3 kids today and drive to Connecticut! fyi, I like CT, have friends in CT, etc. Just so you know. I mean no offense to Connecticut!

Staring isn't the end of it. I've mentioned the day Christian, Christopher & I went to the city and a woman at one of the food stands in Grand Central refused to serve Christian. She wouldn't look at him or acknowledge his presence in any way, and she kept asking for the orders of people who'd come later or were standing behind him. I was so flummoxed by the whole thing I didn't manage to take her to task; instead I glared, corralled Christian, and stalked away to the Chinese food stand where the cooks had apparently dealt with tall black people before.

The scene was obnoxious & upsetting, but I didn't get the sense that the problem was racism in the old-fashioned Rosa Parks sense of racism. I suspect the problem was that Christian had intimidated the young woman behind the counter simply by being there, standing in one place and towering over everyone else as a person who is 6'4" inevitably does.

Christian's problem is that he can't be invisible. Sensitive people need to warm up to situations, and they need to be invisible or at least out of the spotlight while they're warming up. At least, that's the way I see Christopher, and I think it's true of Christian, too. [update 9-20-2006: Christopher told me last night that, at school, "I'm a quiet kid."]

I know something about this because I've been the focus of public starefests ever since giving birth to autistic children. You want to talk about public spectacles; we are the spotlight family. One time we all went to my friend Debbie's loft in SoHo (she'll shoot me if she finds out I posted this link) and Jimmy was so crazed on the subway that the entire car was staring.

I told Debbie when we got there, "You have to be way beyond the pale to be the center of attention on a New York subway."

Most people loathe being a public spectacle. Even Ed, who is possibly the most self-confident human being on the planet, doesn't like it.

Not me. I don't mind. The reason I don't mind it is that I'm wildly gregarious. I'm so gregarious I'm perfectly comfortable providing viewing pleasure for people traveling from midtown to Tribeca. This is why God selected me to be the mother of two autistic children, not just one like a normal family.

Back on topic: my point is that Christian is a sensitive guy who draws stares everywhere he goes and it's a problem for him.^* The challenge for Ed and me is that we don't know how much of a problem it is, or how to factor it into deciding whether we ought to "push" Christian or not.

We just have no idea what it's like to be him.




fear & loathing at D-Ed Reckoning

A teacher at Ken's website left a comment about student motivation:

The biggest problem in American education is that not enough students make their own education a high enough priority. Every year I see students of various social classes with various ability levels do well because they are willing to try. And every year I see other kids of various ability levels do poorly because they just don't care.

When kids really care, it's amazing how just about any teaching method seems to be successful. But when kids don't give a rip, nothing works.

He's right (see e.g. Martin Seligman) as far as it goes.

Where this comment falls short, however, as Ken points out, is in the assumption that a kid who doesn't give a rip is a kid who doesn't give a rip.

I've come to feel that "doesn't give a rip" shouldn't be your first hypothesis. Your first hypothesis, the hypothesis to rule out before going on to any other hypotheses, should be that you're dealing with a student who has failed one time too many. You're looking at a defense mechanism, not a bad attitude. Or possibly a defense mechanism that's become a bad attitude over the years.

Having seen our own multiple-y advantaged white child develop a case of defensive not-giving-a-rip at the age of 10, we know 13 years of special ed in Westchester has left its mark on Christian.




magic white people redux

I grouse about the "advantaged white kids" meme that underlies the Washington consensus (scroll down) and is enforced by centrist wonks like eduwonk and Fred Hess.

Still, they have a point. There is something about white culture (white culture & Asian culture) that's protective, that gets kids through lousy schools and the occasional bullying teacher in one piece.

It's not just the fact of white skin in a country that continues to have subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) racial fears and doubts. White skin is a big advantage, I think, but if you don't have the confidence and panache to seize the day you're sunk. Somehow middle and upper middle class white culture is (still) giving that confidence and panache to many or perhaps even most of its boys and girls.

How?

I don't know the answer to that, but I have a thought.

We didn't know quite what to make of Christian at first. He was obviously smart, capable, & reliable. He showed up when he was supposed to show up, called if he was going to be late, and worked hard.

But there was a glitch. He was supposed to go to Jimmy's school once a week and work with Jimmy there. That was the plan. But he wasn't doing it. Worse, he was making excuses. He'd call in sick, or be late for his bus, or tell us it was raining and he didn't want to walk up the hill to the school. Then he told us he had to hunt for a real job, and hunting for a real job was going to require his attention on go-to-Jimmy's-school day.

We couldn't figure it out. Why wouldn't he go to Jimmy's school?

Finally Ed did his Ed-thing; Ed managed Christian. Ed is a brilliant manager. I fight with him all the time; he can't begin to manage me. So sometimes I forget how good he is at managing everyone else.

He's a genius.

After Ed spent about 5 minutes talking in his calm way with Christian about why he wasn't going to the school ("have to look for work" - "you have to look for work on Tuesday afternoons?" etc.) and when he would be available to go to the school (this is called not taking no for an answer), they reached an agreement that Christian would begin going to Jimmy's school every week. Which he then did and has done ever since without fail.

Later on I figured out that the problem had almost certainly been the shyness/sensitivity/enormously tall young black man in an all-white school issue. In truth, he was scared.^** Ed had waved away that problem in the space of one simple, calm conversation. Somehow Ed had sparked in Christian the conviction that his current job in life was to go to Jimmy's school once a week.

How did Ed do that?

Today I think that moment may have been a turning point. Christian calls Ed "the best white father I've ever had," and I think that may have been the white father moment.




take me to your fearless leader

I think Cesar Millan and Temple (Grandin) may have something to say about Ed.

Especially Cesar.

Invariably, in all of Cesar's shows, the crazy dog Cesar is called in to "rehabilitate" turns out to be crazy because he needs a fearless leader and he doesn't have one. The reason he doesn't have one is that his human owners are acting like twits. (That's too harsh. They're not always twits.)

He'll walk into a ludicrously out-of-control situation — an obnoxious little frou-frou dog biting the wife up and down her arms & kicking her out of her husband's bed (raised eyebrows from Cesar on that one), or a Great Dane who's eaten his owners' couch — and instantly perceive the simple truth that the human beings are not in charge. The dog is in charge. That's the whole problem, because a dog isn't built to lead a person. A dog is built to follow a person. So the dog is unhappy and scared, and an unhappy scared dog is a crazed nutcase dog.

As soon as the owners figure out how to be the fearless leader, the dog settles down, stops biting, stops kicking people out of their beds, stops eating sofas — and starts smiling.

I've seen it myself.

Back when Surfer was attacking every other dog on the aqueduct, he was somber and tense. Also, he never smiled. I always wondered about that. I'd look at Surfer's soulful face and think, "This dog never smiles." (He's smiling here.)

I didn't know what to make of it.

I fixed that problem by accident when I started using a gundog collar so I could walk both dogs off leash. Surfer was scared of the collar's warning beep (Abby could care less) so he started walking behind my heels where he figured he was safe.

Within a few months of walking behind me instead of in front of me, Surfer stopped attacking other dogs — and he started smiling. Suddenly he was a happy guy.

Surfer needed a fearless leader!

When he was walking in front of me, he thought it was up to him to deal with with all the strange dogs coming our way. And for Surfer, it seems, what with his suspected semi-pit bull brain and all, a strange dog is a bad dog.

Once I was walking out front he figured I was going to deal with all the bad dangerous dogs one encounters on a simple jaunt to Halsey Pond. That's what his doggy brain told him. The fact that I would have a huge amount of trouble dealing with an attacking pit bull no matter what position I occupied in the pack line-up simply doesn't enter into Surfer's calculations.

The rule is:

• front dog / deals with danger dog

• back dog / safe

I think people have the same idea. We definitely have the same doggy brain. (See Paul MacLean & the triune brain.) I think people are probably wired to relax and enjoy the view when they're trotting along behind a fearless leader whom they trust.




what do helicopter parents actually do?

This is what's missing from the helicopter parent meme.

I've mentioned several times that Christopher emerged from last year a happy camper. He is unscathed. Ed and I are majorly scathed, but Christopher doesn't have a scratch.

Ed and I are scathed because after we won the Mrs. Roth battle we lost every other round. It was a debacle. We'd go up against Ms. Kahl and her champion Scott I'm-very-protective-of-my-teachers Fried, or the math chair, or the English teacher, or whomever it was that day, and we'd lose.

For Christopher, parents winning or losing was irrelevant. All that mattered to him was that we were up front fighting the pit bulls. We didn't have to actually win. He was the happy guy back in the middle of the pack.

People complain that helicopter parents "do everything" for their children and fight their battles.

That's not right.

Good helicopter parenting is mostly psychological. We didn't do Christopher's work for him last year; in fact we made him do more work than any other kid in the school. And we didn't fight his battles, e.g.: we didn't know about the scary black kid showdown, and when we found out we didn't do anything.

A good helicopter parent is a pack leader.

The pack leader's job is to walk up front & snarl at errant civil servants.

The pack leader doesn't take away problems.

The pack leader takes away fear.




can moms be pack leader?

Good question.

Christian's mom was pretty ferocious. When Christian tells stories of his own mom going toe to toe with the school he actually calls her a "pit bull."

That's probably why he's in the shape he's in. No drugs, no crime, no injuries, no dropping out and he's got the vocabulary and background knowledge to do college work.

So maybe a mom can pull it off.

But I think kids need their dads.

^* This is the place to insert the old finding that some huge percentage of the public reports being more afraid of public speaking than of dying. The way I always heard it, that was because public speaking involves large numbers of people staring at the speaker. In the wild, from whence we came, stares mean threat.

I have no idea whether this finding is true, by the way.

^** There was nothing to be scared about I want to add; Irvington High School is a very nice place, warm and welcoming. Christian was having a classic doesn't-want-to-go-to-the-party-but-enjoys-it-when-he-gets-there reaction.

christianlearnsmath

-- CatherineJohnson - 13 Sep 2006

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FractionManipulativesAndNumberLinesByDougSundseth 14 Sep 2006 - 12:56 CatherineJohnson



Doug Sundseth created these fraction manipulatives a year ago. They're incredibly useful, so download when you need them and let your friends know, too. (pdf files)

• fraction manipulatives (color)

• fraction manipulatives (color)

• fraction manipulatives (black & white)
  

Doug's manipulatives and number lines are easy to find on Our Favorite Math Supplements for Kids (link in sidebar)

Alternatively, if you search Blog Posts this post should be the first to come up.

Last but not least, I've finally added links to Doug's fraction manipulatives and number lines on the "Book-Style Index" page.

So these things are about as findable as I can make them at the moment. (Apparently I've been inspired by my purchase of a used copy of Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think at the Mercy College bookstore.)



KTM Guest: fraction manipulative website

I'm guessing this is from Suzanne:

Math Playground has an online version of the fractions manipulative. You can change the number of parts, shade in what is needed, and toggle the fraction labels. The link is: Math Playground fraction bars.

Math Playground looks wonderful. Thank you!


Doug's number lines

• blank number lines (pdf file)
  
  
• symmetric number lines (positive numbers, negatives numbers, 0 (pdf file)
  
  
• number lines: all positive numbers (pdf file)
  
  
• number lines: all negative numbers (pdf file)
  
  

These are good, too:

• number lines from Schoolhouse Teach (pdf file)

Links to Doug's number lines are also on these pages:

• number lines on Favorite Supplements page

• fraction manipulatives on Favorite Supplements page
  

Carolyn's lesson on reciprocals

Here is Carolyn's lesson on fraction manipulatives and reciprocals.



Now I need to pull together one post with all the stuff on unit multipliers we've put together over the last year and a half...








archive of posts on math manipulatives

original post about Doug's fraction tiles
original post about Doug's number lines



-- CatherineJohnson - 14 Sep 2006

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PubertyBooks 14 Sep 2006 - 16:51 CatherineJohnson



Christopher wants a book about puberty, boys, girls, sex......

Any suggestions?


-- CatherineJohnson - 14 Sep 2006

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DougSundsethOnRightIsoscelesTriangles 14 Sep 2006 - 17:05 CatherineJohnson



"Why do these triangles come up everywhere?"

An isoceles right triangle is a 45-45-90 triangle, and is a pretty obvious sort of triangle to draw. It's also what you get if you cut a square in half on the diagonal. You can also cut such a triangle in half through its 90 degree interior angle and get a similar triangle (and you can repeat this procedure infinitely). Here the sides have lengths of one, one, and square-root-of-two.

The sine of 30 degrees is 0.5, which is one of those easy-to-remember numbers. And the result is a triangle with side-lengths of one, two, and square-root-of-three.

Both of these are used pretty often in carpentry, in part because they're both easy to construct with a straight-edge and divider.

"In what context?"

Math books. (Oh, as noted, they're used pretty extensively in real life, too, but that's the important answer for a math student.)

"Are there lots of shortest-distance-between-two-points problems?"

They're more used in the context of trigonometry, I'd say, since figuring the distance between two points on a plane is pretty trivial once you know the Pythagorean Theorem.

"Also....do surveyors use right triangles a lot?"

It's the core of classical surveying. The right angle is normally that between the vertical and the horizontal. With that, a known distance (from where you are to where you are measuring), and a measured angle, you can find the height of whatever you are looking at. (Triangles have three sides and three angles. One of the basic theorems in trig states that with any three of those six pieces of information including at least one length, you can find the other three.)



golly

I feel proud of that final question ("do surveyors use right triangles a lot").

I have no idea how surveyors do their work, and I haven't had a full course in geometry this time around. (Geometry is integrated into algebra in Saxon Math.) Plus I've never in my life studied trig.

The fact that it struck me as likely right triangles would be part of surveying is good.

I suspect this is an example of how comprehension and conceptual understanding come about. Often it's a process of things starting to "seem" true or likely-to-be-true; comprehension comes in glimmers and glimpses.

On the other hand, I do wish, often, that math textbooks would include the kind of explanation Doug just wrote. I'm constantly wanting to know where my studies are leading: what do real live mathematicians and engineers do with this stuf?

I don't need - or want at this point - lots of "real world" applications. What I want is a road map.

Saxon does some of this, and what he does do is terrific. But it's not enough. I suspect that Saxon assumes the teacher will provide the road map exactly as Doug has done here, through answering student questions as they arise. If so, he's correct that a textbook writer isn't particularly good at anticipating this kind of question. (Bob Koegel explained this principal to me once. He told me that research had shown that when teachers selected which words autistic children should learn they always selected the wrong ones. The children themselves know better which words they must acquire now — and are ready and capable of acquiring. That insight has never left me.)

All of this reminds me that I should check Mary Dolciani's & Harold Jacobs' books. Both authors are (said to be) strong on cluing students in to where their work is leading.

-- CatherineJohnson - 14 Sep 2006

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BarryGarelickInEdNext 14 Sep 2006 - 17:29 CatherineJohnson



Miracle Math by Barry Garelick — and don't forget An A-Maze-ing Approach to Math, which is the single article I give people to introduce them to constructivism and the math wars. UPDATE 11-9-2006: interesting. The NEA appears to have removed "A Parent's Guide to Helping Your Child with Today's Math" from its website. You can still read the original page here and here (pdf file)

After one read-through, my favorite passage is this one:

Another stumbling block for the Maryland teachers was their concern that the Singapore Math program did not contain “real-world” activities. The term, as used by those who follow the ideas supported by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and education schools for teaching math, generally means a problem for which American students have not received much instruction or preparation. This is intentional, it turns out, because it is believed to be good for students to learn to approach problems for which they have not received explicit preparation. The National Education Association (NEA), for instance, in its online version of “A Parent’s Guide to Helping Your Child with Today’s Math,” gives an example of a “real-world” problem:

A farmer sends his daughter and son out into the barnyard to count the number of chickens and pigs. When they return the son says that he counted 200 legs but the daughter says she counted 70 heads. How many pigs and chickens does the farmer have?

The NEA then suggests that some students may solve the problem using algebra (those who know how to do so, that is), while others might solve it using Guess and Check. Still others may choose to draw pictures to solve it. The NEA admits that some methods might be considered more efficient, but points out that the correct answer can be found using multiple methods and that “by allowing students to think flexibly about numbers,we encourage them to ‘own’ the math forever, instead of ‘borrowing’ until class is over.” That this real-world problem depicts an approach that no sensible person would use in counting pigs and chickens is beside the point. This kind of real-world math is indeed missing from Singapore’s program—apparently, if TIMSS tests mean anything, without much harm. Rather than waste students’ time with inefficient methods for solving problems, Singapore’s texts provide instruction that eliminates trial and error, one of the goals of mathematics. Bar modeling is a powerful pictorial technique that results in one answer, deduced by using mathematical principles that students have learned rather than by employing the haphazard trialand- error method of Guess and Check.

That same page at the NEA site also has this to say:

My child's teacher says that the mathematics curriculum is problem-based. What does that mean?

Teachers are now designing mathematical tasks that ask students to think deeply about math and how that math is part of their real lives. The problems students encounter won't be the two problems at the end of the lesson page that we all remember, but they'll be "real" problems that use math in a "real" way. It may be a problem that takes the children an hour, or perhaps several, to solve. There may be multiple ways to solve the problem.

Several hours to solve one problem.

Right.

And who's going to be keeping these kids on-task for the several hours it takes them to solve one problem? Somehow I don't think it's going to be the teacher.

(If you want to see parents spending the best years of their lives trying to get their kids through a constructivist math curriculum, take a look at the parents TERC Investigations thread at Math Forum. yowza)

I think we should sic the anti-homework forces on these people.




coming attractions

Barry also has a terrific brief explanation of the Singapore bar models that I can't link at the moment, because Ed Next hasn't got its html pages up yet. So we'll have to wait.



That this real-world problem depicts an approach that no sensible person would use in counting pigs and chickens is beside the point. — I love it!


-- CatherineJohnson - 14 Sep 2006

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FardellsNookesAndHides 14 Sep 2006 - 19:48 CatherineJohnson



from the Yahoo Group called Homework Help:

My son and I both came up with different answers to this problem...I am rusty at math but still think that I am right:)

How many fardells are in 8 hides?...
2 fardells = 1 nooke
4 nookes =1 yard
4 yards = 1 hide

This is a medieval Britain story problem. I got 256 fardells as my answer...sure seems like a lot but it's hard to visualize :)

Help!

Start teaching those unit multipliers now!



I'm going to see if Christopher can do this.

[pause]

Nope, he couldn't. He got 32. "I did it in my head."

After he got his wrong answer I started him out with unit multipliers by writing:

8 hides X

on the left side of the paper.

Then I asked him what needed to be in the denominator of the next ratio. (Ratio? Rate? What's the proper term?)

He knew it had to be hides, but he couldn't figure out what would be in the numerator.

sigh

About 5 seconds after that he got with the program, wrote out the series of ratios, and said, "Now what do I do, multiply?"

me: "Haven't you written out a string of multiplications?"

Christopher: "Yes."

me: "Then multiply."

He got 256.

That's one thing about distributed practice. It can't be too distributed. I was thinking that about this at the U.S. Open.

Every year for the past 4 or 5 years we've gone to the U.S. Open.

And every year Ed has to explain the entire scoring system in tennis all over again.

One year between exposures to content is too long.



Next year I plan to remember "All," as in "15 All," and "Deuce," as in .... as in I don't know when people say deuce. I've forgotten. I just know that once you say "deuce" the players have to win by two points. At least, I think that's what I remember.

I'm going to remember "all" because "all" means everyone and "all" is a tie. All have the same score.



OK, so basically what I'm going to remember is "All."

Also, I think I'm going to remember that men play 6 sets.

Or maybe 5.

See what I mean?

One year is too long.

-- CatherineJohnson - 14 Sep 2006

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TeacherGenderAndLearning 14 Sep 2006 - 19:57 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

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AdviceForGuys 15 Sep 2006 - 02:21 CarolynJohnston

B just turned 13 the other day, and what a change. He's decided he's going to be more mature, and he's totally sticking to it! It's only been two days, but I'm cautiously optimistic.

I've been giving him some advice and I thought I would spread it around a bit, since apparently it is working for him.

B: I feel like I looked really good today, with my baseball cap on kind of sideways and wearing my pink floyd t-shirt. I'll bet I attracted some girls.

me: well, you can't always tell what will attract girls. Remember, the way to be friends with girls is always to listen to what they say, and always to be nice to them. And every once in a rare while you can tell a girl that she looks like she's lost weight. That always, always gets them, I don't care how tough they are. But you can only say it to one girl, so choose her carefully.

B: I said that to H the other day. (aside: H's the cutest girl in 7th grade).

me: What did she say?

B: She said, "why, thank you."

me: what did I tell you? Works every time.

-- CarolynJohnston - 15 Sep 2006

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BoycottEbay 15 Sep 2006 - 12:49 CatherineJohnson



Instructivist has the story.

If you want to email eBay about their decision (I've done so), go here. The site lists emails:

• gfant@ebay.com (manager)

• meg@ebay.com (CEO)

• amyskeets@ebay.com (manager)

And if you want to see Christians and seculars flaming each other about whether we are or are not now living in a socialist country, go here. [correct answer: we are not living in a socialist country. we do, however, in my opinion, have a public education system that could be picked up and transferred wholesale to a socialist country without revision. see, e.g. Al Shanker.]

Of course, saying that our public school system could be picked up and transferred wholesale to a socialist country without revision is an insult to socialist countries.

-- CatherineJohnson - 15 Sep 2006

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BackToSchoolNight2006 15 Sep 2006 - 14:20 CatherineJohnson



Well.

What to say?

Let me put it this way: I wish I'd had a video camera.

Because instead of a back to school night presentation, we had a back to school night "show." That was the word, "show." Which included a chicken polka, or rather a chicken-imitating, hands-in-armpits wing-flapping, head-bobbing, bottom-waggling chicken dance performed by the principal onstage to polka music. ^*

This was a huge improvement over Principal Fried.



scorecard

• Three of Christopher's 7 teachers used their allotted 10 minutes with parents — the first and last time any of us will lay eyes on them this year — to describe course content.

• Four of Christopher's 7 teachers used their allotted 10 minutes with parents to go over the rules, the rules being: POINTS OFF. Our children will have many, many opportunities to have POINTS OFF over the course of the next 10 months. This is why we pay the big bucks.
  

Ms. Kahl had constructed a large and imposing graphic on the wall of her classroom showing how many of her Phase 4 math sections had turned in all of their homework for all 3 days homework had been assigned. Answer: one class out of four.

Is she correcting homework?

Don't know; don't think so.

Giving the kids the answer key so they can correct their own homework?

Don't know; don't think so. I'll ask Christopher tonight.

But she is constructing 4-foot homework-completion graphics on her classroom wall!

For which I say, Thank you Ms. Kahl!

Thank you, and farewell until next year this time!

We who are about to die salute you.




high point

Ms Coulson, the English teacher (one of the content people; we liked her) beamed a PowerPoint slide on her Smart Board with bullet points listing required organizational paraphernalia.

At the bottom of the slide was a non-bulleted addendum reading:

Due to binder explosions and other issues, alternative forms of organization can be suggested.

My work here is done.



update 9-18-2006

Ms. Kahl is not correcting homework.

Nor is she providing an answer key.

She will explain a problem from the homework "if someone asks a question."

Since boys don't ask questions, we can expect to see a gender gap opening up between the kids who do and the kids who do not understand the problems they missed.

Lisa Urban, the district's legendary middle school math teacher who retired at the end of last year, frequently gave kids the answer key to the problems she had assigned. That's what a good teacher does.








^* 9-18-2006: We missed the first 15 minutes. A friend tells me the principal explained that the reason he was going to do a "show" was, iirc, to help everyone remember what was said. Research shows that normally people remember the beginning & the ending of presentations & nothing in between. The dancing, singing, and school cheers were intended to create peaks that would spike memory.


email to the new principal
email from the new principal
new regime
back to school 2006

-- CatherineJohnson - 15 Sep 2006

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GroovyNewTeaBags 16 Sep 2006 - 12:39 CatherineJohnson



These are very cool.

Garret Lown for The New York Times

CHANGE IS BREWING Harney & Sons’s pyramid-shape pouches hold longer tea leaves.

Look closely at a conventional tea bag in your cupboard or in the paper cup from the local deli. Chances are that instead of leaves it is filled with indistinguishable bits, the detritus left after tea leaves are sifted and graded. The tea industry calls it dust, and the beverage it makes is likely to be rusty-looking and often bitterly tannic. But it no longer has to be, nor is it necessary to brew a whole pot of tea to achieve something better tasting.

source:
Tea's Got a Brand New Bag
By FLORENCE FABRICANT
NEW YORK TIMES
Published: September 13, 200

Dust!

Good grief.

It's always worse than you think.


worsethanyouthink

-- CatherineJohnson - 16 Sep 2006

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IrvingtonSlump 16 Sep 2006 - 21:20 CatherineJohnson



The late Jeanne Chall first alerted the U.S. to our fourth grade slump (pdf file) in the 1960s:

The fourth-grade slump refers to the phenomenon whereby students who have previously fared well on standardized tests of reading experience difficulties when they reach fourth grade.

source:
Reading in Science: Why, What, and How
Annemarie Sullivan Palincsar, Ph.D.
University of Michigan

Usually, when you see references to the fourth grade slump, researchers are talking about disadvantaged students. However, the international TIMSS tests find a similar decline for American students as a whole compared to their peers in other countries.

So I was wondering whether Irvington kids experience a slump.

They do:

The grade 4 2001 students are the same kids tested again in grade 8, 2005. (right?)

Look at the scores for Levels 3 (Meets standards) and 4 (Exceeds standards).

math

In 4th grade (2001) a solid majority of these kids score a 4:

• 3s: 36%

• 4s: 55%

Four years later, in 8th grade (2005), many of these children have dropped to a 3:

• 3s: 45%

• 4s: 33%

English language arts

4th grade (2001):

• 3s: 47%

• 4s: 44%

Four years later we're down to just one quarter of the class, now in eighth grade, exceeding standards:

• 3s: 61%

• 4s: 24%

High-level reading ability strongly predicts success in college: (pdf file)

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 Bachelor’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). and in employment.

These slides were presented at a school board meeting, but I've never heard a single parent, teacher, or administrator mention this sharp drop-off in Irvington scores. Nor have I heard mention of any plan or even desire to make sure that students who are exceeding standards in 4th grade are still exceeding standards in 8th.

It's not in the strategic plan.




how hard are the tests?

New York

Sample ELA tests are here; sample math tests here.

For 8th grade math, page 7 of Book 3 (pdf file) has this word problem:

Tracy's dog eats 8 ounces of dog food every day. How many pounds of dog food will her dog eat in 40 days?

Show your work

Page 11 of the same booklet poses this problem:

Xavier bought a shirt that was on sale for 20% off the original price. He also used a coupon that gave him an additional 15% off the sale price of the shirt. The original price of the shirt was $37. What is the new price of the shirt before tax?

California

Here are two problems drawn from David Klein's Practice Problems for the California Mathematics Standards Grades 1-8:

A chemist has one solution of hydrochloric acid and water that is 25% acid and a second that is 75% acid. How many liters of each should be mixed together to get 250 liters of a solution that is 40% acid?

Molly can deliver the papers on her route in 2 hours. Tom can deliver the same route in 3 hours. How long would it take them to deliver the papers if they worked together?

Singapore

From the placement tests for New Elementary Math 3 (9th grade):

Two mechanics take 4 hours to repair a car. If each of them worked alone, one of them could do the job in 1 hour less time than the other. How long would it take the slower one to complete the job alone? Express your answer to the nearest tenth of an hour.


A tank contains 430 L of water, correct to the nearest liter. The water is completely drained off in 1 h 20 min, correct to the nearest minute. Find the limits between which the average rate of draining in liters per minute must be, correct to 3 significant figures.


Two circles with centers at O and P intersect at A and B. The radius of the smaller circle is 4 cm. AOB = 120º, APO = 60º. Find the area of the shaded portion to the nearest tenth of a cm. Take pi = 3.14.

sin 60º =
cos 60º =
sin 180º = 0
cos 180º = 1

thanks to Ken for tracking down this report


American Educator Table of Contents Spring/Summer 1998
What Do Reading Tests Measure? (American Educator Spring/Summer 1998)
What Reading Does for the Mind (American Educator Spring/Summer 1998)
Jeanne Chall obit
Correlates of modified Stroop tasks, reading ability, and mental ability among college students (abstract)

fourth grade slump
Irvington slump
NY scores slump
battle lines

invention of middle school & EM in Schaumberg
Is middle school bad for kids?
linking hs scores to grade school

Brian Lehrer Show on NYC scores 2005
NY scores 2006

-- CatherineJohnson - 16 Sep 2006

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ShangriLaSeptemberSeventeen2006 17 Sep 2006 - 15:52 CatherineJohnson







Jimmy is melting. 205.5 today. His starting weight, on July 14, was somewhere in the neighborhood of 220 lbs; his height is either 5'10" or 5'11" depending upon whose memory you trust, Ed's (5'11") or mine (5'10").

UPDATE 9-18-2006: I've just realized that we probably have some newcomers because of the Shangri La posts. If you're interested, Jimmy is 19 years old and has autism. He's the young man on the left in this photograph. In that shot he weighed 218 lbs.

Jimmy's nighttime bingeing is gone. We spent years of our lives dealing with a voraciously hungry very autistic young man demanding food at 10 pm every night. It was exhausting, and now it's over. A miracle.

He's had med changes, which is part of it. However, those med changes happened quite some time ago, and while he had lost a few pounds after we took him off Risperdal, he had started taking Depakote for seizures, and Depakote means weight gain. He's also taking Abilify now, which can cause weight gain, although this doesn't seem to be a problem for Jimmy.

In short, his weight loss had stalled when we started Shangri-La's ELOO^* regimen, and he's got a lot going against him.

We haven't been as consistent with the ELOO as I'd like, but we have managed to get one 2 TBSP "dose" of ELOO into Jimmy at least 5 days a week.

What's strange is that we seem to have an accelerating curve. (Is that the correct terminology? And does this look like an accelerating curve? Maybe not. I haven't done the math...his weight loss may be stable across the weeks.)

Accelerating curve or no, I've never heard of an uninterrupted downward curve in weight loss. Ever. Normally, with diets, you're talking plateaus.




Plateauville

Speaking of plateaus, Christopher and I have flatlined. Up a pound, down a pound, up .5 pounds, up .5 pounds again, etc. I am experiencing the trauma of eventlessness.

blech

However, I discovered today, while checking BMIs, that Christopher has in fact crossed the line from "offically overweight" to "at risk of overweight." This means that on Shangri-La he rapidly lost his overweight, then plateaued.

update 9-18-2006: Christopher told us this morning that none of the kids are calling him "fat" this year, and that makes sense to me. By the charts he's still quite heavy, but he's moved out of the category of kids heavy enough to get teased. One more anecdote: last summer, at the very end of day camp, the kids played a game of touch football. Christopher was on the "skins" team, meaning his team took off their shirts to play. That was the first time all summer that nobody called him "fat" when he took off his shirt.

I'm trying to move to the bottom of the BMI category for my own height, so I'm in a different category altogether.^**


To calculate Jimmy's BMI & my own I'm using NHLBI's website.

For Christopher I use the children's BMI calculator at the UCI General Clinical Research Center. UCI has growth charts and a succinct explanation of what the feds consider overweight and "at risk for overweight" to be.



UPDATE 4:36 pm

Ed came back from Costco with a pair of Calvin Klein jeans for Jimmy, waist size 38.

They fit.

Two months ago he was wearing size 42.

UPDATE 9-18-2006

Last night Jimmy was standing around chanting, "I'm not heavy I'm not heavy I'm not heavy."

Sometimes it's scary how much he's taking in.



^* extra light olive oil

^** another fyi for Shangri-La readers: I'm trying to move from a BMI of 21.5 to BMI 20, because of a genetic vulnerability to Type 2 diabetes.



The Shangri-La Diet at Amazon
Seth Roberts website

Shangri La diet in freakonomics
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
10-4-2006 Dr. Erika's olive oil diet works, too

key word: shangrila (one word, no space)
complete shangri-la thread
Catherine/Jimmy/Christopher weight loss thread at fatnews.com

-- CatherineJohnson - 17 Sep 2006

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WeveNeverBeenAtWarWithEastasia 17 Sep 2006 - 18:31 CatherineJohnson



here, or access here if that link doesn't work


money 'graph:

Stanford University math professor James Milgram, who advised the NCTM on the new guidelines, told Education Week that the new guidelines represent "an end to the math wars."

[snip]

I told Cal State L.A. math professor Wayne Bishop that the NCTM was really coming around, but Bishop was skeptical. I chided him. After all, I noted, the guidelines may not call for third-graders to memorize multiplication tables, as California's substantive standards do, but at least they support "quick recall of multiplication facts" in the fourth grade. At least they deal with math now.

Bishop responded, "I would be surprised if behind the scenes they've moved at all." Now I wonder, too. It is not a good sign that, when I cited Milgram's quote about the end of the math wars, NCTM executive director Rubillo responded, "The math wars are just an invention in the last few years of just a couple of people."

Fuzzy Memory on Fuzzy Math
by Debra Saunders

Like possibly those 200 mathematicians & eonomists who wrote the anti-constructivist math letter to Secretary of Education Richard Riley back in 1999, say.


-- CatherineJohnson - 17 Sep 2006

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TheBrainExerciser 18 Sep 2006 - 22:49 CatherineJohnson



So instead of working my way through the entire Saxon oeuvre, I could have just bought myself a Brain Exerciser.

Now they tell me.

-- CatherineJohnson - 18 Sep 2006

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SundemTierneyUnifiedCelebrityTheory 19 Sep 2006 - 16:39 CatherineJohnson



Sometime in my youth, in high school I think, I came up with my first writer idea.

I wanted to write a Dear Abby column with numbers.

The plan was to do a Math Trailblazers-like counting job on social pain.

Basically, my plan was to figure out how long it took to get over things.

How long did it take to get over being dumped?

How long did it take to get over someone dying? (Two years, I figured.)^*

etc.

Then people could write in, tell me what bad thing had just happened to them, and I could write back telling them how long before they felt OK again.^**

At the time, I hadn't (really) heard of probability & statistics — or, rather, I'd heard of statistics and probability, but I had no idea how it worked.

I just knew about counting.




Geek Logik

Today I learn from John Tierney ($) that a fellow named Garth Sundem has actually gone out and done a geek version of my high school kid concept:

I wish no ill to Brangelina, Tom and Katie, or Pamela Anderson and Kid Rock. Like any mortal, I revere the romances on Olympus. I thrilled to hear of Pam’s secret wedding and agonized at reports of Angelina’s reluctance to marry (or is Brad dragging his feet?). When I finished poring over Vanity Fair’s photo spread of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes with their daughter, my only bitter thought was: Why just 22 pages?

But we inquiring minds must be realistic. Remember your crazy joy at past celebrity marriages — Jessica and Nick, Julia and Lyle, Uma and Ethan?

[snip]

[Y]ou were sure this one was for the ages — until the day their publicist put out the statement about an “amicable” decision to pursue “separate lives.” Amicable! How could the couple of the century bear to be apart? You felt deceived, used, discarded. You stared at their photo and thought: I don’t even know you anymore.

I can’t bear any more of these breakups, so I have turned to science to steel my heart. I went to Garth Sundem, the wickedly ingenious author of “Geek Logik,” a new book of mathematical formulas for deciding questions like whether you should sleep with a co-worker, whether you should join a gym or see a therapist, and whether you can wear a Speedo without frightening small children.

Sundem's formula predicting the likelihood that a celebrity marriage will last:

Sundem's odds




     Geek Logik



^* Amazingly enough, two years turned out to be a pretty good estimate. At least, it's a good estimate for me.

^**This would be your Midwest farmer's concept of self-help.


-- CatherineJohnson - 19 Sep 2006

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GarelickExplainsBarModels 19 Sep 2006 - 17:35 CatherineJohnson



Barry Garelick's Miracle Math is finally available online, so I can link to his terrific sidebar on Primary Mathematics' bar models:







This particular problem is so important.

I've mentioned several times that I acquired "procedural algebra" in high school. I could do everything my teacher told me to do, but I had no idea how things worked, or what connected up with what.

In particular, I really had no sense - no "number sense" - of what was happening when I solved two linear equations in two variables. It was easy enough to rewrite one of the variables in terms of the other, but I had no feel for what I was doing.

After I'd drawn a few bar models like the one above, I did.

-- CatherineJohnson - 19 Sep 2006

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AndrewDoesKumon 20 Sep 2006 - 13:08 CatherineJohnson



Email from Andrew's* teacher:

I had him do one of the Kumon sheets. He kept typing that 13+3=416. It looks like he is adding 1+3, writing down a 1 and then adding 3+3.

He's been giving this answer over & over again, so it's not an accident.

He's also having trouble doing his KUMON worksheet problems on other worksheets printed in other fonts and formats. Hyperspecificity strikes again.

Andrew's entered a horrifically obsessive stage focusing on the internet, which he wants Ed to spend hours surfing for images of various PBS & cereal box cartoon figures. It got so bad Ed finally decided to go cold turkey, and for the last 3 days he's refused to go on the computer with Andrew at all.

A couple of nights ago he decided to do something else with Andrew, and Andrew got batty enough that Ed was driven to attempting to do some Singapore Math.

Andrew couldn't do anything!

Ed panicked, so I came in and discovered that, yes, Andrew could still tell us what number comes after 8.

Finally Andrew started doing some math for Ed, so at least we know the Depakote, which he started taking this summer, isn't making him stupid. Depakote can do that. I particularly dislike Depakote, and now I have two kids taking it.

grump


I've ordered a complete set of Primary Mathematics textbooks, Grade 1, for Andrew's teacher.



* For any newbies out there, Andrew is 12 years old and has autism.


-- CatherineJohnson - 20 Sep 2006

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NewsFromNowherePartTwentyTwoYearTwo 20 Sep 2006 - 18:02 CatherineJohnson




So I was sitting here at my desk yesterday afternoon, applying myself to the crumply heap of backpack papers, fliers, announcements, & forms-to-be-filled-out-and-signed that I’ve accumulated in the scant 2 weeks since school began, when the phone rang.

It was Christopher.

He was calling, he said, from “guidance.”

“From the guidance office?”

“Yes.”

“Why are you calling from the guidance office?”

pause

“Because I’ve been bad.”

“Bad?”

silence

“What did you do that was bad?”

“I said the word Jafro in math class.”

“You said Jafro in math class.”

silence

"Is there a grown-up in the room with you?"

“Yes.”

“Put the grown-up on.”

….

grown-up: “This is Ms. Kahl.”

me: “Christopher is Jewish. He has a Jafro. He is allowed to say the word ‘Jafro.’” ^*

Ms. K: “I don’t think it’s an appropriate word for math class.”

me: “And we don’t think you treat our child well, so if you want to go head to head on this, we can.” ^**

Ms. K: silence

me: silence

Ms. K: “Well I guess I can’t tell Christopher not to use the word Jafro in math class.”

me: “OK, good. ‘Bye.”

Ms. K: “’Bye.”


Because anyone stopping by this blooki for the first time is going to read this passage and think crazed nutcase lunatic parent, I’m going to ask faithful readers to bear with me while I repeat the fact that Ms. K is the teacher who elected to punch in the prewritten comment finds subject matter difficult on Christopher’s final report card for the year last spring.

He is now, officially – Comment Bank Official! – a child who is not good at math. We're talking about a child who earned an overall grade of B- in the single most difficult math course offered by the district prior to AP calculus — most difficult and worst taught to boot. jeez, I wonder if any of the kids in regular-track math find subject matter difficult, and, if so, whether any of them has finds subject matter difficult stamped on his Permanent Record? I'm guessing the answers are, respectively, "yes" and "no"; I'm also guessing I'll never know the answer, seeing as how we have no policy of grade transparency or consistency here in Irvington. Quite the opposite, in fact. All of Christopher's future teachers will be able to read this assessment; when he is considered for Regents science in the spring Ms. K’s astute judgment of Christopher’s innate, genetic abilities in the subject of mathematics will enter in.

Teachers who read her comment will be affected, like it or not. That’s how these things work (see, e.g. the Rosenthal effect).

Ed says “finds subject matter difficult” was payback.

We opposed Ms. K’s tenture; she opposed our child. An eye for an eye.

Well, an eye for an eye doesn’t cut it. Ms. K was wrong to select finds subject matter difficult from the school’s Comment Bank, and the school is wrong to include finds subject matter difficult on the Comment Bank Menu.

Number one, Ms. K is not an educational psychologist; she is not qualified to ascertain whether Christopher does or does not find subject matter difficult.

Number two, Ms. K has had ample feedback from other parents to the effect that their children, too, find subject matter difficult when subject matter is taught by Ms. K. (At least four children in her 7th grade class are currently being tutored. One child gave up the ghost altogether over the summer. His parents pulled him from the class because they don't want to spend another year dealing with Ms. K. UPDATE 10-24-2006: A second child left the class two weeks ago, and another is on the cusp. These are just the children I know about; there may be others.)

Number three, Ms. K, before concluding that Christopher finds subject matter difficult has, at a bare minimum, a moral and professional obligation to consult her colleagues in the district. Did Mrs. Panitz feel Christopher finds subject matter difficult when Christopher was in her class? (answer: no) Did Mrs. Woeckener feel Christopher finds subject matter difficult when he moved to her Phase 4 class in the middle of the year, having missed everything she’d taught prior? (answer: again, no)

Number four, report cards are intended for students to read. Finds subject matter difficult is precisely the kind of global, essentialist criticism that knocks children off course.



I’ve been stewing about this all summer, and planning to take it up with the new principal.

Ms. K just moved up the timeline.



finds subject matter difficult not

The heck of it is that in fact Christopher doesn’t seem to be finding subject matter difficult these days. This started at the end of 6th grade. All of a sudden, he was getting math. Of course, Ms. K wouldn’t necessarily have known this seeing as how her tests by then were completely off the wall.

This summer he taught himself the first 11 lessons in Saxon Algebra ½ and got scores of 90% or more on every problem set. It was easy. He’s still teaching himself Saxon most nights now, on top of doing his work for Ms. K.

But here’s the amazing thing.

We haven’t been helping Christopher with Ms. K’s homework this year at all. No reteaching. We haven’t even been going over the answers, though I intend to start. Ms. K does not correct homework, and only sporadically supplies correct answers; nor does she ask students to re-do problems they missed.

So it's up to us.

Ms. K gave a pop quiz last week and Christopher got a 91.




character ed for thee but not for me

Back on topic: Ms. K appears to have decided that her contribution to IUFSD’s integrated character education program will be to police racial and ethnic language.

Christopher’s sojourn in guidance is the second incident in as many weeks. Last week Ms. K told one of Christopher’s friends that the remark he had just made was “racist” or "inappropriate" or some such. He was to see her after class.

He’s another sensitive kid, and he came home upset, embarrassed, ashamed, swearing his mom to secrecy, etc. All bad stuff.

What that child seems to have said was, “Asians are smart at math.” He appears to have said this because he misunderstood her when she referred to her "Aces Chart."

He seems — stress on the “seems” because by now the story has gone through so many iterations who knows what happened — he seems to have misunderstood Ms. K when she was telling the class about her “Aces Chart,” which she apparently plans to keep posted on her classroom wall. (Aces chart / Asians are smart at math.) I assume she’s going to list the names of kids who don’t find subject matter difficult. Those kids will go on the chart.

I assume, but I don’t know, because Ms. K is amazingly difficult to follow. A dad told me that on back to school night he didn’t have a clue what she was talking about when she went over her POINTS OFF system for grading homework. This dad is a high-powered lawyer type, though soft-spoken, and he said, in his mild way, “And I thought to myself, I ought to be able to understand what she’s saying.”

You’d think.

So Christopher’s friend apparently thought she was saying “Asians,” not "Aces," and chimed in with “Asians are smart at math.”

Which was racist or inappropriate or God only knows what.


Irvington is now an all-character-education-all-the-time district.

The fall calendar carries a character ed slogan on each and every page.

This first brush with Character Ed as implemented by Ms. K confirms our worst fear, which is that Character Ed will give young, childless, female middle school teachers one more weapon to wield against the boys — and, of course, against any girls who happen to catch their eye, as well.

Ed said this morning, “Character education will allow them to punish the kids even more than they did before and feel good about it.”

I say we dump character education and go back to fostering self esteem.^***

^* Christopher is not Jewish. Christopher is a Methodist. Nevertheless, his father is Jewish and they both have Jafros. It's conceivable Ed has been calling his hair a Jafro since before Ms. K was born.

^** I was possibly at least as stunned to hear these words come out of my mouth as Ms. K was.

^*** Of course, I'd just as soon we have neither in study skills class.


Teacher Comments on Report Cards by Amy Brualdi
Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, 6(5).
Retrieved September 20, 2006

finds subject matter difficult

What Works Clearinghouse assessment character ed
Character Ed at the DOE

a brief history of character education
a first grade teacher focuses on moral decline
zero tolerance for zero tolerance
self esteem vs character ed
constructivist character ed
Michael Josephson, father of character education in U.S.

character ed in "study skills" class
character ed & shaming
Irvington character education wall calendar
Facing History and Ourselves



-- CatherineJohnson - 20 Sep 2006

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FindsSubjectMatterDifficult 21 Sep 2006 - 13:51 CatherineJohnson



So Christopher came home yesterday with word that he'd gotten an 88 on his first math test.

He beat the two resident math brains in the class, the kids who always get 100s or thereabouts, and he beat them with no help from home.

So far this year: zero help with homework, zero checking of homework, zero perusing of edline. Parental units didn't know math test was happening.^*

Christopher had no help from home, and he beat the math brains.

By one point, which is probably a tie statistically speaking, but still.

The 88 comes on the heels of his 91 on the first math pop quiz.

Living well is the best revenge.

addendum

Christopher also reports that Ms. Kahl is refusing to call on him. He had his hand up throughout the lesson, but no dice. Class size: maybe 17, 18 kids.

She stopped calling on him the moment he said "Jafro." Or Jewfro.

What's that line from The Godfather?

You're dead to me? ^**

That appears to be Ms. Kahl's approach to Christopher.

That's not gonna work.




UPDATE 9-22-2006: This situation either has or has not changed as of yesterday's class.




^* Christopher didn't know the math test was happening, either. He forgot. Someone reminded him at school so he managed to study before 9th period. Becoming an organized human being is a lifelong undertaking as far as I can tell.

^** Zoolander? .... nope, Godfather Part III

news from nowhere part 22: Jafros, Jewfros, & other



-- CatherineJohnson - 21 Sep 2006

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LatticeMultiplicationInChicagoTribune 21 Sep 2006 - 15:47 CatherineJohnson








This graphic accompanies an article Susan S linked to: Latest `new math' idea gets back to the basics.

I'm not crazy about the opening, though it could be worse:

On one side sit fundamentalists, who prefer old-fashioned drilling and a focus on the basics. On the other side are the so-called "new math" proponents, who care more about understanding the concepts than performing the calculations.

The idea that "basics" and "comprehension" are two separate things, as opposed to two stages of the same thing, never goes well for those of us who've read some cognitive science.

This passage is very helpful, however:

One Downstate high school math teacher stood up Wednesday after [NCTM Executive Director] Fennell's presentation and complained that the widespread use of "new math" and a reliance on calculators has resulted in his students not knowing how to perform advanced math skills.

The man declined to give his name, saying he feared reprisal.

"I've seen abandonment of quick recall and that means kids arrive in my class and I have to backtrack and teach them the basics," he told his fellow teachers. "I hope [this document] addresses that and convinces more people to go back to the old way of doing things."

I love it that you've got the NCTM telling everyone there isn't any math war at the same time you've got high school math teachers standing up at NCTM conventions & saying they fear reprisals.

Nope, no math war here. Just a friendly reprisal or two.

-- CatherineJohnson - 21 Sep 2006

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AfterSchoolReportFromLynn 21 Sep 2006 - 21:49 CatherineJohnson



Fantastic news from Lynn Guzelow:

We just got our state CMT scores back -- advanced band in 4th grade math! 107 correct out of 110 problems. Yes, I know they will attribute it to EM, but we'll all know the truth, won't we?

Congratulations, Lynn! To both of you guys!


Lynn's news reminded me that I'd been meaning to post Barry Garelick's comment:

I like Saxon AND Singapore. I like Singapore's presentation of concepts better and their problems are more complex, but I like Saxon's repetitive problems to make sure kids are getting the skills. I will mix Singapore with Saxon in the upcoming year.

Speaking of Singapore, a 6th grader I was tutoring this past year (with Singapore Math) got a perfect score in the Virginia math SOL. She had been getting average scores in math until this year. Nota Bene: The school she's in uses EM. When I started tutoring her, I started at the 4th grade SM book with fractions thinking it would be review. She had had the stuff before, but it was like it was brand new. The wonders of the spiral.

The downside of all this of course is that her perfect score will serve as "evidence" to the Fairfax County Council of Dolts, (aka School Board) that EM is working. You can't win for losing some time. Still, I'm happy for my student.

Which brings me to Linda Moran's recent post (I think instructivist may have left the link):

I'm no longer quick to recommend that parents help with math instruction at home, unless they have a love for understanding-based math and a strong commitment to a possibly steep learning curve. Math teaching isn't easy. The public schools, in taking such extreme about-faces as TERC math, are the first ones to admit this. That's why they're flailing about right now. It will take some time for good math instruction to settle down somewhere in the middle of the two extremes.

Linda Moran, as it turns out, is a certified math teacher who took quite a lot of math in college, which means she knows more about math than I do.

So I'm a little hesitant to disagree.

At the moment, I'm feeling exactly the opposite about parents teaching math after school. It's certainly true that I had and have a strong commitment to a possibly steep learning curve, and a love for understanding-based math, but looking back... teaching Christopher math hasn't been that hard. It's been so not-hard that he is now teaching himself, at age 12.

Caroyn always talks about Saxon providing support for the teacher, and she's right. John Saxon's books can pick a parent up bodily and carry her through. (That's why they're called "Homeschool Editions" no doubt.) When you have two superb curricula like Saxon & Singapore to choose from, I think you're in a strong position to make up for the deficits in a school curriculum.

Or am I wrong about this?

Linda Moran is right about the time & energy I've put into this project; it's been huge. But that's me. I go overboard. I like going overboard! I don't think a parent has to develop a magnificent obsession to teach Singapore or Saxon after school.

Not sure, though.




afterschooling procedural math

I'm also now completely convinced that Carolyn (and John Saxon) are right: teach the procedural knowledge first & attend to the conceptual knowledge as the procedural gels. I'm convinced of this because I've experienced this staged process in my own learning & understanding many times now. Very often I will master a procedure before I understand it.

This isn't an artifact of using Saxon Math. Usually John Saxon gives you the explanation going in, complete with connections to previously learned material, as you begin to learn the procedure. I just don't grasp the explanation at that point. Then, later on, I find that I am grasping it, or starting to.

Conceptual understanding sneaks up on me while I'm doing procedures.

What this tells me is that it's perfectly valid for a parent who does not have a love for understanding-based math to focus on teaching math procedures and leave it at that. There are all kinds of terrific resources for doing this - workbooks mainly - including Glencoe's terrific Parent-Student Study Guides, which are available free online.

I just don't see any reason for a parent who for some reason does not wish to relearn all of the core K-12 math curriculum (difficult as that is to imagine) to conclude that she should therefore leave her childrens' math education up to the school.

I especially don't see any reason to leave things up to the school in the wake of our visit to the edu-attorney, but more on that later.

Glencoe Parent Student Study Guide Pre-Algebra
Glencoe Parent-Student Study Guide Algebra 1

your mother whips you

-- CatherineJohnson - 21 Sep 2006

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YourMotherWhipsYou 22 Sep 2006 - 12:12 CatherineJohnson



As Christopher was zipping through the math problems in his cooperative learning group yesterday, the kid across the way said, "Chris, you're a genius. Your mother makes you do extra work or she whips you."

My reputation is growing apace.




after school reports from Lynn & Barry

-- CatherineJohnson - 22 Sep 2006

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SeventhGrade 22 Sep 2006 - 13:02 CatherineJohnson



For any of you out there who have kids just going into 6th grade - especially 6th grade inside a middle school rather than a grade school or an "elemiddle" (K-8) - one message:

Hang in there.

Christopher is a different person this year. Radically more mature, solid, focused......He's even keel. The hair trigger don't touch my stuff reactivity is gone.

We see this change every day, but we didn't know how visible the "new Christopher" would be at school.

At this point, I think it's probably right to say that he's perceived differently at school, too — and mostly in a good way, the Jewfro contretemps notwithstanding. Last year the kids were routinely calling Christopher "fat" and "stupid." Especially stupid. (He's still hearing he was too stupid to stay in Mrs. Roth's class. These kids have long memories.)

I didn't worry about namecalling per se last year, because it was obvious Christopher was giving as good as he got in that arena. ("Anorexic midget" anyone?) ^*

But I did worry that Christopher, according to his reports, was not seen as being "one of the smart kids." Christopher's perception, which I'm inclined to trust, was: "Everyone thinks I'm dumb."

I told him, "You don't need to worry about other kids thinking you're smart. You need to be smart. You need to do your work and learn stuff." He took that in, but still. He was struggling, and he clearly felt bad about being seen as not smart.

This morning's story ("You're a genius, your mother whips you") perked us all up. The fact that a kid called Christopher a "genius" — a kid in math class, no less — tells me things have changed.^**

I hope so, anyway.

But even if nothing's changed, even if his chums all still think he's stupid ("fat" is definitively gone thanks to Shangri-La), he's so much stronger and more mature that it's not going to matter as much as it did last year. Christopher is starting to develop an independent sense of himself.

It's wonderful to see.




moral of the story

Afterschooling works in more ways than we realize.

I started afterschooling to reteach math, accelerate Christopher's math track, teach spelling & vocabulary — in short, I started afterschooling to teach content.

But our two years of afterschooling have, at this point, produced other gains, too.

Here's what I think I'm seeing:

• afterschooling has helped Christopher become an independent student who, yes, takes responsibility for his own learning - at age 12

• afterschooling has protected Christopher from the worst of middle school mishegoss; I said early on, watching my neighbor and her son go through what they went through with Phase 4 math, that I was going to have to "take ownership of math." Ed and I ended up "taking ownership" of everything. If Christopher is taught badly or graded arbitrarily by teachers at school he isn't knocked off track. We are in charge of telling him whether he is or is not doing a good job at school no matter how many "finds subject matter difficults" teachers punch into his report. In the not too distant future he will absorb this attitude from us, and he will begin to assess himself, and to persist in the face of teachers who tell him he doesn't have the right stuff.

• afterschooling may be affecting his relationship with peers positively. I'm going to be watching this.
  

At this point my feeling is that we all need to stick to our guns.

For us, afterschooling during 6th grade was bloody he**.

We managed to do just the bare minimum, which was endless reactive teaching of math, a crash course and study program in the run-up to the state math test, and our beloved Megawords. ^***

That was enough to keep our hand in. This year Christopher is working through Saxon Algebra 1/2, Megawords 4, Vocabulary Workshop Level A, and Steps to Good Grammar. And he's doing these books with minimal protest.

Good.

^* I have told him he is not to use those words under any circumstances whatsoever, and he says he doesn't. But boys in groups are like dogs in groups, a whole other species (how about that for an anti-boy sentiment?). So I don't entirely trust him on this.

^** The genius business was a joke, but it was a joke in response to Christopher knowing easily how to do all the problems they'd just been taught in class. Believe you me, there were no jokes being inspired by the sight of Christopher easily knowing how to do all the problems they'd just been taught in class this time last year. Or any other time last year. I'm just hoping this keeps up.

^*** On back to school night I discovered that Christopher spells the word "Spanish" "Spainish." Seriously. It wasn't a mistake. I asked him the next day, "How do you spell 'Spanish'?" and he said "S-P-A-I-N-I-S-H." Then I asked him again and he did it again. Then we went two rounds of me saying, "That would be pronounced spayn-ish, how do you spell span-ish" with Christopher still telling me span-ish would be spelled spayne-ish. Christopher's spelling is a work in progress. Thank God for Megawords. Megawords is the only reason he's even in the ballpark on spelling. Which he is.

-- CatherineJohnson - 22 Sep 2006

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IrvingtonSlumpPart2 22 Sep 2006 - 18:33 CatherineJohnson



Headline in the TIMES today: N.Y. English Scores Drop Sharply in 6th Grade.

There's a link inside the story that allows you to see the pass/fail scores for every county and district in the state. The news in Irvington is the same lousy news everywhere: our 8th graders do worse than our 4th graders on the tests — which, as we've seen, aren't hard. Tests available in pdf form here: 2006 English Language Arts Grade 3-8 Tests

UPDATE: wrong. The 8th grade math test isn't hard; the 8th grade ELA test is hard. My eyes are crossing, looking at zillions of numbers arrayed across many separate documents - where is Edward Tufte when we need him? However, as far as I can tell at the moment, students in most or all Group 17 schools show a drop in 4s on the 8th grade ELA test. Our assistant superintendent for curriculum characterizes the test as "unnecessarily difficult" - his words - which isn't something I want to hear from the number 2 person in the district. I don't see where a sentiment like "Our kids hose the test because it's too hard" merits a 6-figure salary. Nevertheless, I've taken a quick look at the test, and it does look hard.

The difference between me and the assistant superintendent for curriculum is:

a) nobody pays me $200,000-250,000 a year (est.) plus benefits plus pension to say the test is hard

b) my husband and I will set a goal of teaching Christopher enough subject matter content knowledge and writing skill to achieve a 4



pass rates (combined scores of 3 "meets standards" and 4 "exceeds standards")

3rd grade: 92% pass
4th grade: 96% pass
5th grade: 92% pass
6th grade: 95% pass
7th grade: 90% pass
8th grade: 78% pass

And of course the real decline is masked by this data, which aggregates 3s and 4s. Affluent Irvington kids start out higher than low-SES kids and have farther to fall before they hit the 2s.

A friend of ours back in Hollywood used to say, "Everyone goes broke at his own level."

It's true.

Irvington kids — too many of them — go broke at their own level. They start out high, then decline to the middle.

The same class of children in which 44% of students scored a 4 on the ELA in 4th grade (2001) was down to just 22% scoring 4 in 8th (2005).

No one is talking about it.

UPDATE 9-29-2006: correction. The Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum, salary circa $200,000 per year, perhaps more (est), is talking about it. The grade 8 test is "unnecessarily difficult." Our scores on the grade 8 test don't matter because everyone passes the Regents exam in grade 11. As asst. supt. puts it, "In the 11th grade they're back."

I get fliers home in the backpack every day. Safety, wellness, character ed. Field trips to Stone Barns. Teachers out of the classroom all day long to be trained for the field trip to Stone Barns. Etc.

Not a word about raising achievement levels, or educating our kids to compete in a global economy, or increasing student enrollment in Regents and Honors courses.

If the subject of state test scores should happen to arise, the operative statement is, "I don't like No Child Left Behind." That's an automatic applause line because everyone hates the tests.^* Speaking of which, it's a safe bet the lions share of Irvington's non-disabled kids scoring 2s and 1s on the ELA are low-SES. A couple of weeks ago I ran into a friend of mine at Halsey Pond who has a child in high-end special ed. "High-end" meaning they're nothing like my two; these are kids who "read" normal to the naked eye.

When I asked her whether she knew how our low-SES kids are doing she said, "They're all in special ed. With my son."

A parent can find charts about Irvington's low-SES kids on edline if he looks. It's not a secret. But it's not an issue, either.

When it comes to student achievement we're on radio silence.




what's happening in Dobbs Ferry?

Meanwhile the real shocker for me was: what's going on in Dobbs Ferry?

Dobbs Ferry is next door to us; we live closer to the Dobbs Ferry middle school than to our own. I'd been feeling martyred on that very point, because a few years back the Dobbs Ferry Middle School brought in an International Baccalaureate program.

I stopped feeling martyred when I discovered that the IB program has been fully constructivized at the lower levels. See here, here, here, and here.

The story on how IB came to Dobbs Ferry, and I have no way of knowing how true this is, is that in the 1990s Dobbs hired a superintendent who brought in open classrooms to the middle school and a sweeping commitment to neoprogressive education across the district. That's the word on the street.

The worst disaster was the middle school. People began pulling their kids out & sending them to private school; parents looking for houses in Westchester chose to buy in other towns. Housing prices dropped and have yet to recover.

That last part I know is true, because friends of ours bought a house just a year or so ago and reported that the same house in Dobbs is less expensive than in Irvington.

Finally the neoprogressive superintendent moved on and a new superintendent brought in the IB program.

Which is a radical constructivist program.

Meet the new boss.

So what does the Dobbs decline look like?

3rd grade 85% pass
4th grade 84% pass
5th grade 87% pass
6th grade 78% pass
7th grade 70% pass
8th grade 70% pass


UPDATE 9-29-2006 On second look, Dobbs may have a more pronounced decline in scores, but they seem consistently to outscore Irvington students.

District Performance for Dobbs Ferry Union Free School District (pdf file)

versus

District Performance for Irvington Union Free School District (pdf file)

[pause for further pdf-file perusing]

good grief

Hastings (pdf file) is beating the stuffing out of us.

ELA scores of 4, grade 8, Hastings-on-Hudson
March 2002:   Irvington: 31%     Hastings: 52%   
January 2003: Irvington: 8%      Hastings: 34%  
January 2004: Irvington: 32%    Hastings: 50%
January 2005: Irvington: 24%    Hastings: 42%  
 

the future

I think it's fair to say that our new administration can be characterized as radical constructivist in approach and philosophy:

The District’s 3 year Strategic Plan, approved by the Board of Education in Spring 2005, is in its first year of implementation this year. Ongoing progress towards the attainment of the five districtwide goals is continually monitored by key individuals and/or committees.

the 5 goals:

Goal I - The biggest task of this committee .... has been to identify a K-12 ELA curriculum and/or approach to be implemented in 2006-07. In recent meetings, a decision was made to begin with a focus on the K-12 writing program next year.

This will involve bringing in the constructivist professional development company A.U.S.S.I.E., an expensive vendor that has been a source of controversy in New York City. (see the AUSSIE folks here)

It will not involve improving students' content knowledge, which as in so many areas turns out to be the essential ingredient in good writing. To write well students need broad content knowledge. More on this later.

Goal II - This committee ... developed and administered a survey this year for teachers to report their understanding and comfort levels in the use of data analysis, differentiated instruction, and portfolio implementation, three areas of focus in the District’s Strategic Plan.

Goal III – Since the 2004-05 school year, a K-12 committee comprised of PPS staff and administration from all buildings have been meeting to develop character education principles as well as a common language and expectations districtwide. This year, with PTSA funding, the No Put Downs program, introduced at Main Street School in 2004-05 was expanded to include Dows Lane School. Through IEF funding, secondary character education programs are also in place.

Among Goal 3’s objectives is community outreach. To this end, one of our District’s new and exciting initiatives this year has been related to wellness. A broad-based committee has been working hard to assess our strengths and “opportunities for improvement” vis-à-vis the eight modules in the CDC’s School Health Indices. In a report that was recently presented to the Board, we have much of which to be proud. As expected, however, there is always more that can be done. The committee’s next step is to develop a clearly articulated, comprehensive Action Plan that delineates next steps as well as implementation and evaluation details.

Goal IV – Committee chairpersons ... co-chair quarterly District Technology Committee (DTC) meetings and oversee the implementation of the 3 year Technology Plan, approved by the Board in 2005....purchase 110 new computers.... At the March 21, 2006 Technology Expo, staff and students demonstrated current uses of technology throughout the District. New cutting edge technologies that may be considered in the future were also featured by vendors. A request for legislative monies to purchase and install up to 25 new Smart Boards....

Goal V – ....updated 5 year Capital Plan was approved by the Board of Education....

source:
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
2006-07 BUDGET
IRVINGTON U.F.S.D.

And that's it, the 5-year plan. Writing, data warehousing/differentiated instruction/portfolio assessment, character education, technology, & buildings.

Content knowledge is absent; student achievement isn't mentioned.

The hallmarks of neoprogressivism are:

• a belief in naturalism — and the importance of educating the "whole child" (character, health, wellness etc.)

• a belief in form and process — technology, AUSSIE, Smart Boards — over content and substance
  

That's us.

My question is: ten years from now, will our scores look like Dobbs'? UPDATE 9-29-2006 answer: no (see above)



^* Ed ran into a friend of ours last year who told him everyone in his neighborhood was upset with the district. Half of them were upset because the district was teaching to the test; the other half were upset because the scores aren't great. He himself was swinging back and forth between the two and couldn't make up his mind.



fourth grade slump
Irvington slump
NY scores slump
battle lines

invention of middle school & EM in Schaumberg
Is middle school bad for kids?
linking hs scores to grade school

Brian Lehrer Show on NYC scores 2005
NY scores 2006

strategicplan


-- CatherineJohnson - 22 Sep 2006

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BattleLines 22 Sep 2006 - 21:28 CatherineJohnson



Midway through today's TIMES report on the state's fourth grade slump:

E. D. Hirsch Jr., the author of a recent book, “The Knowledge Deficit,” said students do not learn enough vocabulary and content knowledge at younger ages.

Daniel P. Keating, director of the Center for Human Growth and Development at the University of Michigan, said schools should prepare students earlier for the more abstract and sophisticated reasoning required in middle school.

“Perhaps the early preparation is not anticipating that shift to having those higher demands,” he said, adding that tests for younger children do not measure those skills. “All of a sudden we’re looking for the kinds of skills that just haven’t been assessed earlier.”

Note: one of these men is a developmental psychologist "whose research focuses on integrating knowledge about biodevelopmental processes, population patterns in developmental health, and social factors affecting individual and population development."

The other is a college professor who has spent a lifetime researching education, creating a superb core curriculum for K-6 students, and researching and writing new content in his own field of research.

The psychologist doesn't know anything about education or curriculum and is giving his best guess.

The curriculum specialist is stating the consensus view of cognitive scientists who've been researching this subject and publishing their results in refereed journals for many years.

Guess which man is winning the argument.


Irvington slump
NY scores slump
battle lines



-- CatherineJohnson - 22 Sep 2006

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ReadTheBook 23 Sep 2006 - 22:48 CatherineJohnson



Christopher and I were talking Friday about how great his year is going so far, what a difference from last year this time.

The subject of math came up and I said, "Just learn as much as you can in class; then you'll have to teach yourself the rest. Or if that doesn't work you can ask me or Daddy."

Christopher said, "When she doesn't teach something in class, I read about it in the book."

I love kids.

With kids, everything is new.

I read about it in the book!

He said this as if this were a brand new idea, an idea he'd come up with himself.

Which, come to think of it, he pretty much had.

-- CatherineJohnson - 23 Sep 2006

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RoshHashanah2006 23 Sep 2006 - 23:36 CatherineJohnson

Christopher went to Temple today with his friends.

Then tomorrow morning we go to church.

So we've got our bases covered.



-- CatherineJohnson - 23 Sep 2006

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StereotypeThreat 25 Sep 2006 - 12:45 CatherineJohnson



Jerry Becker^* posted this Pew Research Center press release on "stereotype threat" at Math Forum over the weekend.

I'm posting it in full because, having experienced a near-fatal case of stereotype threat myself when I appeared on a game show called Sale of the Century, I've seen stereotype threat in action.

Sitting in the contestant bleachers that day, waiting to see whether I would be tagged to go on camera, I was in a state of near panic. I was so frightened by the prospect of having to go on camera and compete against two other people on national television that I wanted to flee the studio, and the only reason I didn't flee the studio was that I was too terrified to do even that. Deer in the headlights.

Years later, when I was doing the research for Animals in Translation I learned that "freezing" is one of our four built-in responses to threat, the other three being fight, flight, and — this one took me by surprise — appeasement.

I made this discovery post 9/11, post-Afghanistan, and pre-Iraq, and it knocked me out.

Appeasement isn't just a Neville Chamberlain thing? I thought.

Appeasement is a mammal thing?^*

Who knew?



stereotype threat on Sale of the Century

Not long into my terror-stricken wait there in Burbank, the show producer tagged me to take my seat between two other contestants, both of them men.

Men!

The studio lights were blinding; there was what seemed like an immense studio audience staring at us from the dark; and I was now to compete against two men.

These are the words that sprang into my mind: "I can't compete against men."

Seriously.

I can't compete against men.

I'd gone to Wellesley & Dartmouth — Dartmouth! plenty of highly competitive men at Dartmouth! — I'd earned a Ph.D.; I'd taught huge lecture courses at UCLA, the back rows of which were filled with very large football players. None of these things had been a problem.

Put me on a game show and all of a sudden I can't compete with big, scary men.

It was mortifying.

It was also infuriating. Here I was, this feminist career-woman Ms. Magazine reader with big plans for her life, and my only thought while waiting to appear on a game show is "I can't compete against men." I was a joke.

I was so disgusted with myself that I managed to take my seat and play the game.

But just barely. It's a miracle I could remember any game show-type factoids at all. And although I could remember game show-type factoids, my reactions were slow. I was a mess.




stereotype threat on Sale of the Century part 2

So there I was, flanked by two guys, caught in the headlights with my lizard brain in charge.

The guy to my left was white.

The guy to my right was black.

Before the game began, the white guy acted gentlemanly towards me and probaby a bit nervous, too. (Hard to remember now.) He didn't seem panicked out of his mind (although I probably didn't, either), and he was playing faster & better than I was.

lesson: You can be in the game, or you can be in your head. Pick one.

I don't know whether the white guy was experiencing any kind of stereotype threat, mostly because I'm not sure how codes of gentlemanly behavior relate to a direct public competition with a woman. Is it "OK" for a man to defeat a woman in a televised game show?

I don't know! But whatever he may have been feeling, he was playing a lot better than I was.

Lucky for me, when it came to knowledge of game show trivia I blew him out of the water. So I beat him fair and square, even in my petrified state.

The black guy was a different story.

He knew all the answers; he knew way more than I did. If you'd sat the 3 of us down in a quiet room somewhere and given us the same questions we had on the show, he would have won handily.

But he was panicked, too. He was sitting next to a young white woman whose fiancee was watching from the audience. (Ed and I were to be married three days later and, as I recall, they'd announced this fact at the start of the show.) From where I sat, which was 6 inches away, it looked as if he simply could not defeat me, not in the spotlight like that, not with an audience watching.

I can't tell you exactly how I knew this, but I did. Some of it has to do with stories my folks told me of having visited the deep south during Jim Crow, the way the young black man from the restaurant chased them down the street to give them back the baby bottle they'd left behind, the way he'd had to run towards them and avert his eyes at the same time.

In the game he was making all kinds of errors, though I no longer remember examples. He obviously knew the answers to all the questions — I could tell because I was sitting next to him and I think he may actually have said the right answers under his breath — but he kept screwing up.

Things didn't get better as the game wore on. The most painful moment arrived fairly late, I think, when it was again his turn to choose one of the celebrity photos on the game board. There were maybe 9 or 12 photos of celebrities with questions concealed behind them, and contestants picked a celebrity, then tried to answer whatever question came up.

The black guy looked at the board and chose Mr. Smith. The orangutan from the Clint Eastwood movies.

It was excruciating. He was the only black person in the building, and he chose the only nonhuman primate on the game board. He may have winced as he did it, and he let out a little self-deprecating laugh. It was almost as if he couldn't stop himself.

If I'm remembering correctly, and I think I am, that was the question that gave me the game. Behind Mr. Smith: "Who is Norman Lear's producing partner?" Answer: Bud Yorkin

Everyone, including the show's host, was pretty stunned that I knew Bud Yorkin was Norman Lear's producing partner. Every once in awhile having a Ph.D. in film studies comes in handy.

Stereotype threat had nothing to do with the black guy losing that question.

But it had everything to do with choosing Mr. Smith.




object lesson

That day has stayed with me.

I learned:

• stereotype threat — the term hadn't been invented yet — is a force to reckon with

• the amount of sheer energy, anger, and force of conviction it takes to overcome a paralyzing case of stereotype threat isn't something everyone's going to possess

• even if you do possess it, stereotype threat is still a handicap — you're going to have to be way better than the other guy to win

• racism, sexism, antisemitism and all the rest aren't only things other people do to you. They are things you do to yourself.
  

The concept of stereotype threat falls under the heading of being your own worst enemy. Nobody in that studio was telling me, "You can't compete against men." Just the reverse; the show was built on a boy-girl-boy-girl contestant seating arrangement.

Nobody in the studio was telling the black guy, "You can't compete against white people & you especially can't compete against white women." Again, just the reverse.

A good game show isn't built on people sitting down in the contestant seats and freaking out about whatever racial, sexual, or ethnic category they happen to occupy. A good game show is built on people sitting down in the contestant seats and actually playing the game.

The black guy should have won. He didn't win because he self-destructed.



Everything that happened after that is a blank right up to the point where I won a third day's game in a row (they film 5 shows per day) and retired with my winnings. At that point I'd racked up a cash prize of $9,000 in traveller's cheques, a couple of pieces of furniture, and a set of Italian dishes.

The producer tried to talk me into staying on. She said the audience wanted me to keep playing, and Ed told me afterwards that I'd developed a fan base in the bleachers. My friend Cassandra, who'd gone to the audition with me, said, "It was amazing watching you revert to pure Midwestern Farm Girl on TV." So I figure my audience was basically ladies from the Midwest visiting Los Angeles on vacation.

I would have liked to stay — after the first game I'd gotten into the swing of things — but I said no. Sale was a high-stakes game; you had to gamble all your winnings with each new show, and if you lost you lost everything. The grand prize of $100,000 was a good 5 or 6 games away, my husband-to-be was an assistant professor, I was a brand-new baby free lance writer. Nine thousand dollars, at that stage of the game (also at this stage of the game) was a huge sum of money.

So I retired and we went to Nieman Marcus and bought Ed a hundred-dollar white dress shirt to wear to our wedding.

Today is our 23rd anniversary.



how to fix a roaring case of stereotype threat

Years later, when I first read about Claude Steele's work on stereotype threat in blacks,^** my reaction was Been there, done that. I know stereotype threat exists, and I know that it can be bizarrely powerful.

So this study is very good news:

Women Can't Do Math...Or Can They?

by Richard Morin
Pew Research Center
August 31, 2006

Strange but true: Women score much lower on math tests if they are first asked unrelated questions about gender issues. The phenomenon is known as "stereotype threat" -- a kind of performance anxiety discovered in 1995 when psychologists found that black students at Stanford University did significantly worse on intelligence tests if they were first asked to identify their race on the test form.

Since then, dozens of other experiments have confirmed that subtly cuing women, minorities and other stigmatized groups to think subconsciously about their gender or race causes them do poorly in areas where the general stereotype suggests they are weak.

University of Texas psychologist Matthew S. McGlone wondered if there wasn't another side of the story. What if you prompted people to think about their strengths rather than their stereotypical weaknesses -- would that be enough to improve performance in areas where they weren't supposed to do well?

In a novel set of experiments, McGlone, working with Joshua Aronson of New York University, found that the answer is yes. "The idea that something is immutable due to some biological factor can be trumped," McGlone said.

Their ingenious study involved 90 undergraduate students, half men and half women, at Lafayette College, where McGlone taught. To hide the purpose of their experiments, they told the students they were going to be asked some questions as part of a study of living conditions on the Lafayette campus.

The questionnaire was composed of two parts. All the students answered one common set of general questions about campus life. In the second section, researchers varied the questions to prime these students to think in slightly different ways.

A third of the students were asked whether they lived in a single-sex or co-ed dorm. McGlone wanted to subtly trigger "thoughts about their experiences as a gendered person on campus." Previous studies found that even this seemingly benign question would unconsciously activate male and female stereotypes, McGlone said.

Another group answered questions about why they chose to attend a private liberal arts college. The goal was nudge these young women and men into thinking how smart and accomplished they were.

"We were activating their snob schema," McGlone chuckled.

The control group was asked to write about their experience living in the northeastern United States.

Then the researchers engaged in a bit of scholarly deception. After the students finished the questionnaire, McGlone asked them for a favor. "'I have a friend doing this study across the hall. Could you help us out?'" he asked. The students agreed, went to another classroom, and took Vandenberg Mental Rotation Test, a standard test of visual-spatial ability.

The items on this test consist of two-dimensional depictions of three-dimensional objects presented at various angles. Test-takers are asked to pick out the identical objects from dissimilar ones.

Studies have repeatedly found that men are far better than women at mentally rotating objects, a skill linked to math ability. [ed.: I am still waiting for someone to tell me how rotating objects mentally is linked to math ability. It's not that I don't believe these folks, though I'm beginning to wonder. It's that I just don't get it.] The gender differences on this test are the biggest gender differences yet found on any of the various mental aptitudes that psychologists say comprise "intelligence," McGlone and Aronson write in an article summarizing their results in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology.

Then McGlone looked to see if cuing people to think about their gender, their status as college students at prestigious private school or their experiences living in the northeast had any effect on their performance on the rotation test.

It did. Among those in the control group, the tests produced a familiar result: The men did 15 to 20 percent better on the Vandenberg test than the women. And among those who had been subtly cued to think about their gender, the gap was even wider-guys did "25 percent to 30 percent better than the women."

But the surprise came among those who were primed to think about their status as students at an exclusive private college. The gender gap closed dramatically as women's performance improved while men's did not change. "There was no significant difference between men and women," McGlone reported.

The results suggest that stereotype threat can be counteracted, at least in part, by cuing people about other aspects of their lives. "With a pretty simple manipulation we could significantly reduce this gap," he said. "There might be things that make all of these biological factors go away."

This is so bizarrely simple it seems unbelievable at first pass. I'm enough of a Freudian to wonder how exactly you surmount a lifetime of fully assimilated wrong messages in 2 minutes of snob schema activation.

But as I think about it, I can see where it might make sense by analogy to dog psychology — to animal psychology as a whole, in fact.

The interesting thing about dogs is that a dog can be a follower or a leader, depending on the cirumstances. Any dog can be a follower or a leader; it's on the menu. A pit bull or a Rottweiler, two of the most dominant breeds on earth, are both perfectly happy trotting along behind whichever dog bested them in the contest for alpha.

All normal animals, as I understand Jaak Panksepp's work, have all animal emotions and built-in behaviors available to them to some degree. You can even trigger the "killing bite" used by predators like dogs and cats in a prey animal like a mouse or a rat.

Here's another data point:

All social animals have dominance hierarchies.

We are built to live inside of dominance hierarchies. The strong horse and all that jazz....

I'm wondering how much of "stereotype threat" is actually "dominance hierarchy."

To the extent that stereotype threat is actually dominance hierarchy, it makes sense to me that dealing with children and adults who've been put through the public school wringer may be simpler than it seems. All you need to do is activate the snob schema everybody already possesses in some form or another.

Move them off follower dog to alpha dog for the duration of math class.




snob schema praise, anyone?

I think that's what I did with most or even all of the kids in my Singapore Math class.

I told them, in a tone of ringing conviction, that they were "math brains." (I told their parents, too.) Two years later, these kids still think they're good at math, and they're holding their own in the accelerated track.

People say not to give effusive, global praise. Here's Willingham:

Most researchers take it as self-evident that the praise will not have much impact if the student perceives that it is not truthful—the student will simply dismiss it (Henderlong and Lepper, 2002). There has not been extensive research on when students perceive praise to be insincere, but it has been suggested (e.g., O’Leary and O’Leary, 1977) that very global, effusive praise (“You are the smartest boy ever!”) carries a higher risk of disbelief than specific praise (“You did very well on that set of problems”). There also may be times that the praise may be demonstrably untrue to the student, such as praising a student for her hard work when she knows quite well that she didn’t work hard.

I'm sure it's true that dishonest praise doesn't work.

But my praise wasn't dishonest.

It was effusive, it was global, and I meant every word.

I think it worked.


conclusion: we need more travelling salesmen teaching school.

Affective Neuroscience
by Jaak Panksepp

^* A thank you to Barry Garelick for supplying the link.


^* I don't think it's just a mammal thing; I think it's univeresal thoughout the animal world. Not sure about insects, but I wouldn't be surprised to find it there, too.

^** I should add that I'm fairly certain stereotype threat doesn't make the "IQ gap" go away. (not fact-checked)

-- CatherineJohnson - 25 Sep 2006

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AnOrdinarySchool 25 Sep 2006 - 22:32 CatherineJohnson



Great news!

Harry, of Chase me ladies, I'm in the cavalry, has a friend who teaches school and writes a blog:

My friend Chalk has a new book out:

"He is an ordinary teacher in an ordinary British school... a school where the kids get drunk, beat up the teachers and take drugs - when they can be bothered to turn up... Chalk confiscates porn, booze and trainers..."

We owe a great debt of gratitude to Britain's teachers. If it weren't for them we'd all be speaking German. And French. And Latin. And be able to do sums.

I once met an Austrian woman who worked in a British school. The poor creature had a nervous breakdown after a couple of months, just as I predicted. "Zey behave like devils," she said.

Judging from Mr. Chalk's posts, the Brits appear to be approximately 10 years behind us. They are still in their self-esteem phase:

I was once advised by my Head of Department to use a different ink colour than red to mark the kids' books, as it was 'less confrontational'

This sums up our problems far more neatly than I could ever manage.

We have forgotten that as teachers that we are supposed to be in charge, rather than the pupils. Making lessons entertaining has become more important than making them sit still and listen. Punishing badly behaved pupils has been made more and more difficult, as available sanctions have diminished and those higher up the school (and in the Local Education Authority) become less and less willing to back up teachers who try to enforce those that we have left.

'The Tail Wags The Dog' ie the pupils control the school.

Oh I've just remembered- in the red ink example above she'd actually just finished telling me off for using the word (in our department meeting) 'kids' rather than 'Learners' or 'Students'

Yes, that sounds dreadful. Perfectly sensible teachers being browbeaten by clueless superiors about ink color and word choice.

blech

Reading Mr. Chalk's post, I would be incensed if I didn't know that what comes next, after self-esteem has run its course, is zero tolerance and full-time, around-the-clock, fully integrated character education.

Zero tolerance and full-time, around-the-clock, fully integrated character education really bi**.

It's almost getting to the point where.....can I say this?

It's almost getting to the point where I don't want the schools to improve any more.

I don't want them to implement new programs, or integrate curricula, or choose meaningful outcomes.

I don't want them to review curricula, and I don't want them to select and implement curricula.^* I especially don't want them to review, select, and implement character curricula.

I'm downcast.


I am going to eat dinner, force Christopher to organize his desktop file, and develop a better attitude.





Graphite Desktop File

^* I'm joking.



What Works Clearinghouse assessment character ed
Character Ed at the DOE

a brief history of character education
a first grade teacher focuses on moral decline
zero tolerance for zero tolerance
self esteem vs character ed
constructivist character ed
Michael Josephson, father of character education in U.S.

character ed in "study skills" class
character ed & shaming
Irvington character education wall calendar
Facing History and Ourselves

-- CatherineJohnson - 25 Sep 2006

comments...

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CharacterEducationWallCalendar 25 Sep 2006 - 23:56 CatherineJohnson



Our school calendars are different this year.

In years gone by the calendar listed events.

This year the calendar also lists events, but additionally it displays, on each and every page, a core principle of character education.

It's kind of like a PowerPoint presentation grafted onto a wall calendar.

In fact, as I think about it, it almost certainly is a PowerPoint presentation grafted onto a wall calendar.

I don't like PowerPoint.


The pages look like this:





That one's from the month of November.


Here's the whole thing:

August 2006:
The District’s Character Education Programs are:
“No Put Downs” K-5
“Social Decision Making – Problem Solving” 6-8
“Peer Leadership & ADL – World of Difference 9-12

September 2006:
The Irvington School District is committed to the principles of character education. These are listed on each of the following pages.

October 2006:
Character education promotes core ethical values as the basis of good character.

November 2006:
“Character” must be comprehensively defined to include thinking, feeling and behavior.

[ed.: thought crimes?]

December 2006:
Effective character education requires an intentional, proactive and comprehensive approach that promotes the core values in all phases of school life.

January 2007:
The school must be a caring community.

[ed.: room for improvement here]

February 2007:
To develop character, students need opportunities for moral action.

[ed: So can we look forward to increased opportunities for our kids to tell on their friends and neighbors?]

March 2007:
Effective character education includes a meaningful and challenging academic curriculum that respects all learners and helps them succeed.

[ed.: more room for improvement]

April 2007:
Character education should strive to develop students’ intrinsic motivation.

[ed.: not going to happen]

May 2007:
The school staff must become a learning and moral community in which we all share responsibility for character education and attempt to adhere to the same core values that guide the education of students.

[ed.: ditto]

June 2007:
Character education requires moral leadership from both staff and students.

[ed.: I would like to see less moral leadership from the math department]

July 2007:
The School must recruit parents and community members as full partners in the character-building effort.

[how about no]

August 2007:
Evaluation of character education should assess the character of the school, the school staff’s functioning as character educators, and the extent to which students manifest good character.



That's not all.

Also listed, in the month of September, is "Eat Dinner with Your Family Night." The President of the School Board has sent reminders around:

Did you know that eating dinner frequently with your children reduces their risk of substance abuse? Monday, September 25, is National “Eat Dinner with Your Child Night”, which will be observed for the first time in Irvington. Research finds that the more often children eat dinner with their families, the less likely they are to smoke, drink or use drugs. The conversations that go hand-in-hand with dinner will help you learn more about your children's lives and better understand the challenges they face. Family Day — A Day to Eat Dinner with Your Children is a national effort to promote family dinners as an effective way to reduce substance abuse among children and teens. For more information about Family Day, visit www.casafamilyday.org . (Please disregard the calendar entry for the same event on Friday, September 29).

The research in question is an annual survey sponsored by Nick at Nite and TV Land and conducted by CASA (pdf file) finding that kids who eat X number of dinners per week with their families are "less likely to smoke, drink or use drugs." It is not peer-reviewed, and, by its own admission, doesn't tell us much:

Through 11 surveys conducted over 12 years, CASA has been surveying public opinion on substance abuse, seeking answers to the question: “Why do some teenagers drink, smoke and use illegal substances while others do not?”

This survey continues an analysis aimed at revealing factors that contribute to teens’ risk of smoking, drinking and using drugs. Some of these factors--including their family dynamics, their parents’ involvement in their lives, their friends’ substance use, and their school and neighborhood environments--tend to cluster, such that teens with problems in one area of their life often have problems in others as well. Nevertheless, by identifying individual risk factors, we seek to help parents (and other adults who influence teens) better identify those who are most vulnerable to substance abuse, and develop strategies to diminish their risk.

Although this survey includes some questions on substance use, it is not intended to be an epidemiological study of substance abuse. For measurements of the actual prevalence of drug and other substance usage there are other sources of data, including the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services), the Monitoring the Future Study (conducted at the University of Michigan and funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health), and the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (sponsored by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services). This survey was conducted by telephone in the United States. The 1,297 teens (ages 12 to 17) who responded were among a randomly selected nationally representative frame. Despite assurances of confidentiality, we assume that some teenage respondents will be reluctant to admit illegal activities over the telephone to someone unknown to them. Therefore, this survey--like any telephone survey asking respondents to self-report proscribed behaviors--presents conservative estimates of the extent of the use of illegal drugs, the consumption of tobacco products and alcohol by teenagers, and other negative behaviors, and over-reports positive behaviors. The parental permission requirement may also contribute to under-reporting.

etc.

This man is an expert in "Life-span human development, character education." Apparently he gets up in the morning, eats breakfast, showers, and shaves, then goes to work where he is paid to develop expertise in life-span human development and character education.

It's always worse than you think.







What Works Clearinghouse assessment character ed
Character Ed at the DOE

a brief history of character education
a first grade teacher focuses on moral decline
zero tolerance for zero tolerance
self esteem vs character ed
constructivist character ed
Michael Josephson, father of character education in U.S.

character ed in "study skills" class
character ed & shaming
Irvington character education wall calendar
Facing History and Ourselves

-- CatherineJohnson - 25 Sep 2006

comments...

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EverythingYouAlwaysWantedToKnowAboutCharacterEducation 26 Sep 2006 - 00:49 CatherineJohnson



right here

also here



character ed Q & A

Who needs character education?

Thomas Lickona: Kids need character building, regardless of where they live—inner city, suburbs, rural settings—the problems really exist everywhere. Rising youth violence, increasing disrespect for authority, increasing dishonesty, sexual promiscuity, drug abuse, illiteracy, lack of knowledge of things as basic as the golden rule—these problems really cut across all segments of society. The development of good character is really part of every child's birthright. Parents and schools and communities have an obligation to meet that need of children.


Shouldn't parents be solely responsible for teaching their children values?

Teacher: There are a lot of children who really aren't reared in environments where certain virtues are stressed. There are some children, for example, who don't even believe that honesty really is important; in other words, they think that if they steal something, or whatever, that it really isn't such an issue. So I believe, yes, that teachers and administrators and parents are all in this together, and we all need to stress these virtues.

We are not in this together.

Character education is yet another reform that has been decided upon by educators and imposed by fiat.

There is no "together," and there is no "partnering."

There is instead a generalizing to advantaged children of the problems educators see as universally true of advantaged children: "these problems really cut across all segments of society." Parents who "don't care" about education, "don't discipline" their children, "don't model moral behavior," etc.

Crime, drug use, illiteracy: these are the taken-for-granted attributes most educators — and most of the public — routinely attribute to The Poor.

Now they're attributing them to the non-poor.

-- CatherineJohnson - 26 Sep 2006

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HowCharacterEducationHelpsStudentsGrow 26 Sep 2006 - 01:08 CatherineJohnson

First graders need character education as much as they need to learn to read and count.

by Gloria Rambow Singh

I sat in my kitchen, stunned by what I had just heard on the evening news: A young girl in a neighboring city had been sexually molested by other children under the age of 10. News reports about children and teens violently hurting one another, committing crimes, and sometimes taking lives made me wonder about what might have influenced them to act as they had. I began to consider the impact that I have on the moral development of the lst graders in my classroom. Could I do more to influence how they treated others?

I have always taught my students such concepts as honesty and respect, but usually in response to something negative that has already happened. I wanted to foster their desire to develop positive character traits before I had to deal with negative behavior. Although I believe that families provide the foundation for character development, I also agree with Thomas Lickona that "schools cannot be ethical bystanders at a time when our society is in deep moral trouble" (1991, p. 5). More than 90 percent of respondents to a 1993 poll agreed that schools should be involved in teaching such values as courage, caring, acceptance, and honesty (Elam, Lowell, & Gallup, 1993). Although I knew that my efforts could not cure all the ills of the world, I decided to try to make a difference in my little corner. My two challenges were to find time for character education and to create a program that worked.

Finding Time

After considering my students' needs, my weekly schedule, the standard 1st grade curriculum areas, and the ideas in An Integrated Approach to Character Education (Rusnak, 1998), I realized that I could integrate character education into what I was already teaching.

source:
Educational Leadership
October 2001 | Volume 59 | Number 2
What Should We Teach? Pages 46-49

I say we develop state testing for character education.

If schools are so all-fired eager to provide integrated character education, fine. Let's see how we're doing.

Start with a baseline.

How many thieves, rapists, murderers, and all-around sociopaths are our schools turning out now?

And how far can they bring those numbers down through successful implementation of Character Counts!?

Let's put our money where our mouth is.







What Works Clearinghouse assessment character ed
Character Ed at the DOE

a brief history of character education
a first grade teacher focuses on moral decline
zero tolerance for zero tolerance
self esteem vs character ed
constructivist character ed
Michael Josephson, father of character education in U.S.

character ed in "study skills" class
character ed & shaming
Irvington character education wall calendar
Facing History and Ourselves

-- CatherineJohnson - 26 Sep 2006

comments...

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ConstructivistCharacterEd 26 Sep 2006 - 14:46 CatherineJohnson



from
Moral Classroom, Moral Children: Creating a Constructivist Atmosphere in Early Education
by Rheta DeVries & Betty Zan
Studies in Moral Development and Education:

[C]onsider the following interaction between Peige Fuller (T) and a 4-year-old who has been in her class just a few days.

C: (Cries)

T: So, are these tears because something is upsetting you? What makes you sad?

C: I want my mommy.

T: Right. Did something in our classroom happen that made you very sad?

C: (Nods)

T: What happened?

C: I just want my mommy.

T: You just want your mommy? I see that you got your paper towel. Would you like to eat some snack?

C: (Shakes head)

T: No, okay. You know what you could do that would be a big help to us would be for you to have a seat here and help us to clean up some Legos. That would be a very big help. (She holds C in her lap while they pick Legos from the floor and put them in a container.)

(Later, C is still crying.)

T: (Stoops down to C's level, hold his hands in hers, and looks into his eyes.)

C, I have to tell you this. You are making a choice to be very, very, very sad. If you would like to stop crying, that would be okay. We would know that you miss your mommy. But if you stop crying, you can make a choice to meet some new friends and play some fun stuff.

C: (Crying) But I miss my mommy.

T: She will pick you up this afternoon, but she can't pick you up now.

If I were C's mum, and I got wind that this kind of thing was going on in class, I would have to make a choice to find another program.





What Works Clearinghouse assessment character ed
Character Ed at the DOE

a brief history of character education
a first grade teacher focuses on moral decline
zero tolerance for zero tolerance
self esteem vs character ed
constructivist character ed
Michael Josephson, father of character education in U.S.

character ed in "study skills" class
character ed & shaming
Irvington character education wall calendar
Facing History and Ourselves



-- CatherineJohnson - 26 Sep 2006

comments...

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KnowYourEnemy 26 Sep 2006 - 19:06 CatherineJohnson



I've been trying to cess out how exacty we came to have character education.

I think parents tend to connect it to Columbine (I know I did). But that's wrong. In fact, character education "took wing" in 1992, 7 years prior to the Columbine shootings of 1999.

Character ed tracks back to one person (the Great Man theory of history!), "ethicist" Michael Josephson. I've taken a look at some of his commentaries and the few I've seen are fine by me, as far as they go.

Michael Josephson and his Commentaries aren't the problem.

The problem is that we seem to be dealing with an unholy alliance of busybodies on the right with busybodies on the left.

Worse yet, something like 90% of the public "favors the teaching of core values." At least, they did back in 1994.

I give up.



PBS is hawking Michael Josephson's video.

Fatherhood changed everything for Michael Josephson, founder of the Josephson Institute for the Advancement of Ethics. He taught law school for 20 years and ran a successful business, but as he watched his son grow up, he began to think less about the letter of the law and more about the spirit of it. In this program with Bill Moyers, Josephson discusses the lack of ethical standards in our society and the philosophy of self-interest.

Yes, I think we can all agree on the glaring lack of ethical standards in our society.

All you have to do is have a kid, read the newspapers, and voila: lack of moral standards.

Why did none of us see this before?

And why do people like sociologists, anthropologists, economists, and historians to name a few act like it's so darn hard to know what's going on now and how what's going on now differs from what was going on before?

When it's all so obvious to you and Bill Moyers?



So....Michael Josephson. The Josephson Institute. Another edu-entrepreneur.

Michael Josephson is to character what the NCTM is to math, and can be said to be an "ethicist" in much the same way Skip Fennell can be said to be a "mathematician."

But Michael Josephson and his ideas are now fully integrated into each and every hour of my child's school day.





What Works Clearinghouse assessment character ed
Character Ed at the DOE
interview w/Michael Josephson

a brief history of character education
a first grade teacher focuses on moral decline
zero tolerance for zero tolerance
self esteem vs character ed
constructivist character ed
Michael Josephson, father of character education in U.S.

character ed in "study skills" class
character ed & shaming
Irvington character education wall calendar
Facing History and Ourselves

-- CatherineJohnson - 26 Sep 2006

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AndNowForSomethingCompletelyDifferentPart2 27 Sep 2006 - 13:10 CatherineJohnson



Last week I stumbled across a news report entitled, Pessimistic Germans Losing Faith in Democracy.

Then this morning I stubbed my toe on this music video, which it seems was a hit in Germany over the summer.

I'm trying not to make too much of this.



Meanwhile, I'm torn between a sense of alarm and the fact that....

....I like the song.

Also the suits.






thanks to: the misspent life



-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Sep 2006

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EmailToTheGuidanceCounselor 27 Sep 2006 - 16:23 CatherineJohnson



Hi Griffin —

I’m wondering when we’ll see our kids’ ELA scores.

They’ve been reported in the papers & the school board has heard a report — are we parents going to see our kids’ scores sometime soon?

Thanks!

Catherine J.



Mrs. Johnson,
As of yet, we have not received the ELA scores. I just checked with Mr. Witazek and he said as soon as we receive the scores we will send them out shortly thereafter. If you need anything else, please let me know.
Griffin Murray




That really takes the cake.

I've grown incredibly tired of higher-ups.

Governments; bureaucracies; pundits; wonks. The lot of them. (I don't mean it about the wonks. Where would we be without wonks?)

I want:

• an online norm-referenced standardized test with cross-comparisons to all counties in my state, all states in my country, and all countries on my planet that I can choose or choose not to give to my child each year to ascertain whether he is or is not making one year's progress in one year's time, and which indicates clearly to me whether his year of progress is equivalent to a year of progress elsewhere

• immediate online scoring of said test

• immediate provision of any and all cross-comparisons I may choose to make

• quality assurance that test items have been carefully constructed & field-tested

• a set of cross-correlational statistics showing how this test relates to the classics such as the ITBS (or - here's a thought - the online test could actually be an ITBS)

• a set of cross-correlational statistics showing how scores on this test predict or do not predict future scores on the SAT, ACT, etc.

• BONUS: a set of guidelines as to what a student with my child's scores should be studying now

In short, I would like my child's test scores to be used first and foremost by me and my child.

Not by the state.

Not by the district.

Not by the school board.

Children first.

-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Sep 2006

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TextbookEvaluator 27 Sep 2006 - 17:37 CatherineJohnson



Mark from Textbook Evaluator left this comment on the subject of restricted textbook sales:

On the one hand, textbook publishers want us to use textbooks. But they are not so sure they want them in the hands of the "wrong" people, including those (like me) who make a living evaluating textbooks based on rigorous criteria.

I have a devil of a time getting my hands on books, sometimes. You'd think they contained the mysteries of teh Universe. So sometimes I resort to subterfuge. Cheating the system does nothing to improve my karma, but it does help me make a living (and provide some useful information to educators).

I'd never come across his blog & I'm constantly looking for advice, reviews, and guidance. So I'm going to be reading.

-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Sep 2006

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SometimesItsBetterThanYouThink 27 Sep 2006 - 17:59 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

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OurBestStudents 28 Sep 2006 - 20:26 CatherineJohnson






Over a year ago I began wondering whether the universal belief that we have good schools for affluent kids and lousy schools for disadvantaged kids was actually true. One of Jenny D's posts had got me thinking:

...schools serve rich white kids well. They do. Best example is TIMMS data. The highest scoring kids in the U.S. score as well as the highest scoring kids anywhere in the world. [ed.: see below] Our best and brightest are as good as the best and brightest anywhere. We are indeed producing scholars. They tend to be white and affluent, according to the statistics. They go to public and private schools.

[ed.: This is an exaggeration. The only U.S. students who score on par with the rest of the world's math students are those who take AP Calculus, which is 5% of the population.]

I no longer believe this for a number of reasons, the most significant being the fact that SAT verbal scores declined in the 1970s and never recovered. Once I learned that verbal scores are the center of the universe, that settled it.




Ticket to Nowhere
by Paul E. Peterson


Tuesday night's school board meeting raised a version of the rich school/poor school question, namely: how do our middle school students compare to middle-school students in other countries?

Does France have a middle-school slump?

I don't know. I don't think so, but I don't know.

Do our kids, rich and poor, have a middle grades slump because it's natural to have a middle school slump?

Or do they have a middle school slump because our middle schools are inferior to middle schools elsewhere?

Middle school performance has lagged so consistently -- in wealthy suburbs and poor cities, in New York and around the nation -- that many educators, policy experts and even parents just shrug. The middle grades have long been viewed as the Bermuda Triangle of education. A common explanation is that there is simply no cure for puberty.

4th-Grade Successes to 8th-Grade Disappointments: Tests' Meaning Questioned ($)
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
Published: May 26, 2005

Certainly this familiar chart implies that if 11 to 13-year olds in other countries do stumble in the middle grades, they don't come to a full stop the way our kids seem to:

source:
The Seeds of Growth
by Eric Hanushek

at the school board meeting

At the Board meeting we learned that:

• Irvington 4th graders (in 2005-2006) ranked 4th in the state, out of 40, on the ELA

• Irvington 8th graders (in 2005-2006) ranked 14th in the state, out of 40

• 43% of Irvington fourth graders in 2001-2002 scored a 4; 42% scored a 3, 13% scored a 2%; 1% scored 1
  UPDATE: in fact, this figure — the figure for school year 2001-02 — was not presented to us at the Board meeting.
  I had to look it up.

• 16.7% of the 8th graders in 2005-2006 scored a 4; 61.1% scored a 3; 22.2% scored 2s & 1s

Those last two figures are for the same class of kids. 43% get 4s when they're in 4th grade; 4 years later, in 8th, we're down to 16.7% scoring 4.

This was easily explained away by our Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum, Ralph Napolitano:

• a couple of ELA teachers took sudden leaves, so lots of last year's 8th graders were taught by substitutes

• 18 new students moved into the district, 14 of whom were "receiving services" (mostly 504C or "building support"), and dragged our scores down (total class size: approximately150)

• you really can't compare one year's kids to any other year's kids anyway because "the scaling might be different" (not a direct quote, unfortunately, but close)

There were no dissenters from this view (from all 3 of these views, I should say), although a couple of board members did ask questions which, if the point had been pressed, could have been probing. No probing occurred, however.

Under questioning, Ralph's presentation of self was masterful. When a Board member asked whether other districts include high-end special needs kids in their stats he lowered his voice a bit, assumed an intimate and confiding tone that cast a spell on the room, and said, "Well, you know, I think these days [meaningful look] they'd probably be in some serious trouble if they didn't include their special needs students in their data. But they didn't always..." and he trailed off.

The effect of this was to divert the room from a possible consideration of whether 14 kids receiving services can cause a 50% decline in 4s^* to a general recognition of the virtue displayed by our Irvington administrators, who can be counted upon to tell the truth when other lesser school districts are fudging their numbers. Or used to fudge their numbers, as the case may be.

The question of how many 504C students moved into districts that didn't experience a 50% decline didn't come up.

We moved on.

All of the Board members had read newspaper accounts of the middle school slump. That fact alone earns the framers of NCLB my eternal gratitude. Until this moment, neither journalists nor parents nor parent school board members had any idea that U.S. kids experience a steady decline in scores after 4th or 5th grade. Journalists, if not parents, knew that 8th graders score worse than 4th graders, but they'd never looked at scores showing a steady year-by-year drop. Seeing it that way makes it seem worse, somehow, more inexorable and "systemic":

Meanwhile I am struck by one thing—the (unintended?) result of the federal mandate under No Child Left Behind to test students in every grade, three through eight.

The decline in performance as students age just leaps off the page. No matter whether the school is in a wealthy suburban community or an urban neighborhood full of transients and immigrants, the trend is the same. The only difference is how drastic the drop.

Ever since the state began standardized testing, districts have been struggling to come up with ways to stop the decline in performance from fourth grade to eighth grade. Heck, everyone’s struggled to figure out WHY there’s a decline.

One year, Education Commissioner Richard Mills played the blame game, urging parents to rise up against the middle schools which were clearly failing to do their jobs adequately. He has stopped being so pointed. But he still rails against the decline.

“The problem is literacy in the middle grades,” Mills said in a press release this morning. “These results demand improvement in curriculum, instruction, and professional development.”

So how come sixth, seventh and eighth-graders are struggling with literacy in middle school, yet the region’s high schoolers manage to pass the English Regents exam in much higher proportions? Take a look at any district’s Regent results in our interactive database.

Is there that much remediation going on in high school? Are the tests the problem? Are the kids just refusing to work hard in middle school?

Inquiring minds want to know.

This passage comes to us from "the education team at The Journal News," which has started a new education blog.

The reason the steady decline in scores leaps off the page, btw, is that the state Department of Education put out press releases saying so.

So we turned to the question of a middle school slump in Irvington.

It seems to be the consensus view of the administration and the Board (the Board president, at least) that there isn't one. Irvington students do fine until 8th grade, when they experience a sudden drop.

I wasn't following the presentation as closely as I could have by then; Ralph may have cited consistently high TONYSS scores in Grades 5, 6, & 7 over the years, although I didn't hear him if he did.

The TONYSS situation is a big mess anyway as far as I'm concerned. The TONYSS (Test of New York State Standards) is a privately created and marketed test NY schools used to administer in off-years (grades 5, 6, & 7). We parents were never given any comparison data whatsoever; the scales weren't explained; no sample questions were available, etc. The TONYSS are a complete mystery to me and everyone I know.

So even if he did cite off-year TONYSS scores, it wouldn't have cleared anything up for me.

The 8th grade test, Ralph said, was for some reason "more difficult" than any of the other tests & thus tells us nothing of value about our schools or our kids. We know this because, as he said, "Look at the Regents [exit] scores. They're very high. Everyone goes down in 8th grade. In 11th grade they're back." That last is a direct quote. “In 11th grade they’re back.”

"I can attest to that," the board president said, breaking in. His kids' scores had gone down in the 8th grade and then bounced back in the 11th. It is a universal phenomenon; it happens to everyone.

"The 8th grade test is unnecessarily difficult," Ralph agreed.

And that was that.

When the audience was finally allowed to ask questions one parent said, "Shouldn't the state be looking at itself? Shouldn't the state be asking itself why it's giving kids a test this difficult that isn't in line with the other tests?"

Ralph was mild and forebearing. He had nothing bad to say about the state, or the tests, or the 504C kids who moved into the district and depressed our scores. It was left to the audience to work up a case of indignation against the state and its outlier test. Which I suppose we did.



the bounce

Ralph being the fellow who told the PTSA president that "parents" were complaining about my Singapore math class as he closed it down, I think I'll just go ahead and say that a great deal of his presentation strikes me as nonsense on stilts.

Especially the bit about the bouncing scores.

Scores do not bounce.

Reading scores in particular do not bounce.

The Regents' test, which determines whether a student does or does not earn a diploma, is not comparable to the 8th grade test, which prior to NCLB determined nothing.

It is extremely difficult politically to impose tough exit exams, as Ed learned when he worked on exit exams in history/social studies in CA. When large numbers of 17 year olds are denied a high school diploma because they failed an exit exam, there’s an uproar.

When large numbers of 13 year olds hose the 8th grade test there isn't.

That's the difference.

Here is Chester Finn on cut scores in exit exams:

As if the official passing score of 55 on the state's Regents exams were not low enough, the Buffalo News reported this week that students needed to answer just 33 percent of the questions correctly to achieve that score on the Regents exam in biology, and 45 percent of the questions in math.

[snip]

Should a state be ashamed of setting a passing score this low? Not necessarily, so long as the assessment is good and the "cut score" isn't going to remain low forever. Developing a tough test but setting the initial passing bar low can be a shrewd reform strategy, provided the bar is then continually raised. A state that has high expectations for students spelled out in rigorous academic standards--and solid tests aligned with these standards--has taken important steps toward standards-based reform. Yet--regrettably but realistically--many of today's students are not prepared to meet high standards. This leaves states with three tough options: 1) flunk lots of students, 2) offer easy tests that most students can pass, or 3) offer challenging tests but set cut scores low at the outset, then ratchet them up. Option three may be the most likely to lead to improved instruction. New York claims that next year the cut score goes up to 65. Some doubt that this will actually happen. Watch this space.

source: Gadfly 2001

That was 5 years ago, and the cut scores have not moved:

When the New York State Board of Regents voted last week to delay holding all students to higher standards for at least two more years, they portrayed it as a simple ''mid-course correction'' that was to be expected.

[snip]

An independent panel examining the state's Math A exam in June, which 63 percent of the students failed, concluded that the test itself was badly flawed. They said that if the state uses ''make or break'' tests, then it must spend the money to get them right. In the same vein, the panel found that Albany officials had raised standards but never made the curriculum clear or invested enough in training teachers.

[snip]

On the surface, the idea of guaranteeing that all students receive the same high-quality education is attractive.

Many states have embraced the standards-based approach that New York is using, which calls for statewide learning goals and statewide testing.

The federal No Child Left Behind Act, passed in 2001, gave further momentum to the movement, with annual testing and penalties and remedies for schools and children that failed to meet standards.

But as much of the country is carried along by this movement, there are growing concerns that the pendulum has swung too far.

Robert L. Linn, a University of Colorado professor and co-director of the Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing, who has served as an adviser to New York's Department of Education, expressed some of the mixed reactions to the standards approach when he said: ''Nobody can argue against No Child Left Behind, because how can you say that you should leave some children behind? But it is also nuts to say that it is possible to bring everybody to the same level. You can say that your goal is to have everyone run a mile in under five minutes, but do you really believe that it can be accomplished? I don't.'' [ed.: please. Running a mile in under five minutes ≠ passing algebra 1]

[snip]

New York used to issue different diplomas for students at different levels. Only the top students, who took the toughest Regents exams, got the prestigious Regents diploma. It was not until 1996 that the Regents made the exams a condition of high school graduation for everyone.

Scaling Back Changes On Regents Standards ($) By KAREN W. ARENSON
Published: October 14, 2003

Apparently it's possible to earn scores of 1 to 4 on the Regents exams these days, just as students do on the annual tests, though you'd never know it drilling down into the DOE website.

Irvington students earn a heck of a lot of 4s on Regents English:

• Regents ELA 2003: 79% of Irvington test-takers earned a 4

• Regents ELA 2004: 66% earned a 4

• Regents ELA 2005: 71% earned a 4

• Regents ELA 2006: 70% earned a 4
  

How did our lower grades do last year on the annual NCLB tests?

• Grade 3 percent earning a 4 on annual ELA exam: 18.4%

• Grade 4 percent earning a 4 on annual ELA exam: 32.3%

• Grade 5 percent earning a 4 on annual ELA exam: 26.3%

• Grade 6 percent earning a 4 on annual ELA exam: 38.8%

• Grade 7 percent earning a 4 on annual ELA exam: 29.7%

• Grade 8 percent earning a 4 on annual ELA exam: 16.7%

That's some bounce.

Ralph assured us that we could count on all of our students continuing to do very, very well on Regents ELA.

I wonder why that is.




does everybody bounce?

Not necessarily.

Assuming I’m reading the charts right, in 2 of the last 3 years Hastings-on-Hudson (pdf file), 2 towns over from us, saw its 8th grade scores go up from what they'd been in 4th grade.

Back in 4th grade, both of those classes had lower scores than Irvington children. In 8th grade their scores were higher — on the same “unnecessarily difficult” test our assistant superintendent seems to feel is too much for Irvington children to manage.

Hastings didn't come up at the meeting.




RAND on middle school

So I was Googling up a storm today, trying to find a direct comparison of the Regents' exams, on which our students do so well, to the annual NCLB exams, on which they do much less well. I came up empty, but I did find this passage in a famous RAND study of middle schools:

In sum, the international comparisons do not convey a favorable picture of the achievement of U.S. middle school age students. Although many of the other OECD countries may not have the disparity between the haves and have-nots or the same levels of racial or ethnic diversity as the United States, these factors alone cannot account for the standing of U.S. students. That 4th graders perform well on TIMSS but 8th graders do not suggests that economic conditions cannot explain differences in the relative performance levels for these two grades (Suter, 2000). Analyzing TIMSS results, Schmidt, Jakwerth, and McKnight (1998) found that the variability in student achievement levels in the United States is comparable to that in other countries. Furthermore, tabulations presented by Richard Houang (cited in Suter, 2000) showed that, even if all students belonging to ethnic or racial minorities are excluded, white U.S. students still rank in the lowest one-third of all countries at the end of secondary school. Thus, we cannot attribute the low relative rank of U.S students to the performance of specific racial or ethnic groups. However, differences between certain demographic groups should not be ignored; in later sections of this chapter, we therefore attempt to describe such group differences within the United States more fully.

source: Focus on the Wonder Years: Challenges Facing the American Middle School:
Challenges Facing the American Middle School
Jaana Juvonen
Vi-Nhuan Le
Tessa Kaganoff
Catherine Augustine
Louay Constant
p. 32-34

Our public schools do not serve rich white kids well.

In fact, I've begun to wonder whether some of our affluent suburban schools are giving students less "value-added" per year than inner city schools.

CHAPTER 3: Achievement of Advanced Students



-- CatherineJohnson - 28 Sep 2006

comments...

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RegentsMathA2005 29 Sep 2006 - 15:52 CatherineJohnson



letter to the editor of the NY Times: ($)

The School Year Ends, but Not the Debate
Published: June 21, 2005

To the Editor: As a New York City public school math teacher who is experienced in both performance-based assessment and in Regents testing, I want to make a point about your June 17 editorial ''Educational Standards Under Assault.''

The Math A exam, which is the graduation standard, consists of 30 multiple-choice questions and 9 short-answer questions. In January, a student who answered 14 of the multiple-choice questions correctly and left the short-answer sections completely blank would have fulfilled the graduation requirement. Now, in June, only 13 of the 30 multiple-choice answers needed to be answered correctly to pass the exam.

These are the ''rigorous new tests'' to which you refer; this is the ''progress that New York has made.''

What appears to be progress is nothing more than a passing standard that is lowered each time the test is offered. Performance-based assessment does not threaten our education standards; it sets the bar far higher.

Gabriel DeAngelis
Bronx, June 17, 2005

In an of itself, a "cut score" of 13 of 30 isn't a crime (although cut scores should be publicized), as Chester Finn explained in 2001:

Should a state be ashamed of setting a passing score this low? Not necessarily, so long as the assessment is good and the "cut score" isn't going to remain low forever. Developing a tough test but setting the initial passing bar low can be a shrewd reform strategy, provided the bar is then continually raised. A state that has high expectations for students spelled out in rigorous academic standards--and solid tests aligned with these standards--has taken important steps toward standards-based reform. Yet--regrettably but realistically--many of today's students are not prepared to meet high standards. This leaves states with three tough options: 1) flunk lots of students, 2) offer easy tests that most students can pass, or 3) offer challenging tests but set cut scores low at the outset, then ratchet them up. Option three may be the most likely to lead to improved instruction. New York claims that next year the cut score goes up to 65. Some doubt that this will actually happen. Watch this space.

source: Gadfly 2001

It is extremely difficult to raise student achievement by creating a high-stakes exit exam that flunks huge numbers of often disadvantaged students. In fact, it's pretty much impossible. (I've mentioned that Ed learned this in CA. The high-quality history/social studies test he helped create didn't even make it into the schools.)

But of course creating a strong test with low cut scores only works if you keep raising the cut scores.

Apparently we're lowering them instead.

I'd like to know what's going on with Regents ELA.


To Dream the Impossible Dream: Four Approaches to National Standards and Tests for America's Schools
by Chester E. Finn (pdf file)



-- CatherineJohnson - 29 Sep 2006

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OurBestStudentsPart2 29 Sep 2006 - 18:43 CatherineJohnson

from the National Center for Education Statistics:

KEY POINTS:

The performance of U.S. physics and advanced mathematics students was among the lowest of the 16 countries that administered the physics and advanced mathematics assessments.

In all five content areas of physics and in all three content areas of advanced mathematics, U.S. physics and advanced mathematics students' performance was among the lowest of the TIMSS nations.

In both physics and advanced mathematics, males outperformed females in the United States. This was true for 4 of the 5 content areas in physics and for all 3 of the content areas in advanced mathematics.

More countries outperformed the United States in physics than in advanced mathematics. This differs from results for mathematics and science general knowledge, where more countries outperformed the United States in mathematics than in science.


How Do Our Twelfth Graders With Advanced Mathematics Instruction Compare To Advanced Mathematics Students In Other Countries?

The performance of U.S. twelfth-grade advanced mathematics students was among the lowest of the 16 TIMSS nations who administered the assessment to a comparable population of their advanced mathematics students and below the international average. Figure 9 shows that 11 nations outperformed the United States, while U.S. scores were not significantly different from those of 4 other nations. No countries scored below the United States on the assessment of advanced mathematics.

U.S. advanced mathematics students included those who had completed or were completing pre-calculus, calculus, calculus and analytic geometry, or Advanced Placement calculus, repre-senting about 14 percent of the school-completing age cohort in the United States. If we compared only those U.S. students who had taken or were taking calculus or Advanced Placement calculus against all the advanced mathematics students in other countries, how did our calculus students perform?

How Do U.S. Twelfth Graders With Calculus Or Advanced Placement Calculus Compare To All Advanced Mathematics Students In Other Countries?

U.S. twelfth graders with calculus or Advanced Placement calculus instruction represented about 7 percent of the U.S. age cohort. These students did perform better in the assessment than the larger U.S. group that also included students whose highest course was pre-calculus.

Advanced mathematics students in 6 countries (France, the Russian Federation, Switzerland, Denmark, Cyprus, and Lithuania) outperformed calculus and AP calculus students in the U.S. Figure 10 shows that the performance of U.S. twelfth graders with calculus or Advanced Placement calculus instruction was not significantly different from the international average and 7 of the 16 TIMSS nations that administered the assessment to their advanced mathematics students. Our scores were significantly higher than those of two other nations (Germany and Austria).

The performance of U.S. twelfth graders with Advanced Placement calculus instruction, who represent about 5 percent of the U.S. age cohort was significantly higher than the performance of advanced mathematics students in 5 other countries. Figure 11 shows that one nation (France) outperformed the United States, while our scores were not significantly different from 9 other countries and the international average. Thus, the most advanced mathematics students in the United States, about 5 percent of the total age cohort, performed similarly to 10 to 20 percent of the age cohort in most of the other countries.

CHAPTER 3: Achievement of Advanced Students

Ed's going to love finding out that France is the only country that can beat AP calculus students.


Moving right along....ah-hah!

We have a gender gap! Precisely the outcome fuzzy math was invented to prevent:

Is There A Gender Gap In Advanced Mathematics At The Twelfth Grade?

In the United States, twelfth-grade males outperformed twelfth-grade females in advanced mathematics. The United States was one of the 11 TIMSS nations in which a gender gap existed. No significant gender gap existed in the other 5 countries. For the United States and 7 other countries, there was a significant gender gap existing in all 3 advanced mathematics content areas. (See Tables A5.8 and A5.9 in Appendix 5.) [emphasis in the original]

Classic.

It really is striking the way a disciplined focus on subject matter, learning, and excellence will lead to actual social justice, as opposed to no social justice accompanied by a great deal of blather on the subject (pdf file).


women & minorities learn differently


-- CatherineJohnson - 29 Sep 2006

comments...

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TheSpinDoctors 30 Sep 2006 - 22:20 CatherineJohnson



Well, well, well. What do you know?

The fabulous reading scores that sent Mayor Bloomberg sailing back into office were a one-shot deal.

Something told me that was going to happen.

Last year, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein announced the results of the state and city reading tests in a press conference at a Bronx elementary school, Public School 33. In this ancient building they announced that a great miracle had taken place. While scores rose in every elementary school grade citywide, nowhere did they rise more than in this virtually all-minority school, where nearly every child is so poor that he qualifies for free lunch.

This was an event of significance, taking place as the campaign for Mr. Bloomberg's re-election was heating up. The announcement of the "historic gains" in reading scores was so powerful, that for all intents and purposes, it removed education as an issue that could be pursued by the mayor's Democratic opponents.

P.S. 33's remarkable scores last year became the symbol of the success of the mayor's Children First initiative. The percentage of children reading at grade level in the third grade rose by 13.9%, to 47.9% from 34%; in the fifth grade rose by 30.5%, to 85% from 54.5%, and in the fourth grade rose by an astounding 46.7%, to 83.4% from 36.7%.

It is unlikely that the mayor or Mr. Klein will return to P.S. 33 this year. That is because this school has now become a symbol of the reality of Children First, not really reform but rather a massive, unprecedented public relations effort with no real achievement behind it.

Virtually all the gains of the previous year at P.S. 33 have been wiped out, according to the latest test scores released this past week. While third-grade scores in the school rose by a respectable 4.8%, the results in the fourth and fifth grades were disastrous. Nearly 36% fewer fourth-grade students passed this year than last, while in fifth grade the pass rate plummeted to 41.9% from 85%. So much for miracles.

[snip]

If one examines results from the last testing prior to the establishment of the mayor's Children First program, the exams taken in the spring of 2003, P.S. 33 children performed better than they did this year. In 2003, over all three grades, 50.5% of children were on grade level, a figure that has now declined to 47.1%.

Beginning with the first testing after the institution of the mayor and chancellor's [ constructivist ] program in reading in 2004, scores have increased citywide by 6.4%. Since the current testing program began in 1999, about 25% more children are reading at grade level, most of the increases coming during what we're told was the "old, failed system."

middle school slump strikes again

The short-term improvement is welcome, but prospective employers and institutions of higher learning are not interested in fourth-grade scores.

[snip]

A pattern of improved scores in the elementary grades and declining performance in the middle grades cuts across all schools, public, private, parochial and even charter schools.While the overall results are better in schools where children come from privileged backgrounds, the decline is still evident.The results released last week in New York state gave this well-known trend new emphasis as this was the first time the state administered tests in each of grades three through eight.

The Knowledge Deficit

What is it about American schools that is breeding this culture of decline and failure? I agree with the noted educational theorist E.D. Hirsch Jr., who points to the removal of content learning from our nation's schools, beginning in the earliest grades. It is one thing to be able to decode simple reading passages, such as those on fourth-grade tests that speak of general things like making friends and playing in the park. By eighth grade, these passages are more complex, requiring contextual knowledge to be fully understood.

New York City public schools, like most in America, have removed structured textbook learning in history, geography, science, music, and art in favor of large "literacy" blocs, where the reading of fiction greatly predominates. Learning is achieved in small groups working on "projects," rather than as a whole class under the direction of a teacher.

[snip]

That is why history will not remember Mayor Bloomberg as the "Education Mayor." Rather he and Chancellor Klein will be recalled as the ultimate public relations spin doctors, trying and ultimately failing to camouflage yet another decade of educational failure.

The Spin Doctors ($)
By ANDREW WOLF
September 29, 2006
New York Sun

Neoprogressive educators believe that reading and writing are skills, or, alternatively, tools.

To the neoprogressive way of thinking, reading tools and writing tools are like a hammer. You can hit anything with a hammer, a nail, a board, your thumb. Take your pick.

The tool theory of reading and writing, which I've always believed, too, turns out to be completely wrong.

Reading is nothing like a hammer.

Decoding, maybe. Decoding letters on the page might be like a hammer.

But reading a book or an article and understanding it is nothing like a hammer.

Ditto for writing.

Professional writers turn out to be "obsessive" readers, and their obsessive reading turns out to be about amassing huge bodies of domain knowledge in the subjects about which they write.^*

I didn't know!

I thought writing was prose style, structure, clarity, and the occasional paradigm tweaking, didn't-see-it-coming analogy.

I was wrong. Good writing is all of those things, but when you look at what professionals writers actually do you see that they spend many waking hours acquiring more content or rehearsing and reworking the old content they already had.

Professional writers are a lot like Cliff Claven.

They know stuff.



Still mulling what this means for writing instruction.

Suffice it to say, however, that tossing subject matter classes like social studies and science overboard to spend many hours drilling disadvantaged children in reading strategies is a very bad idea.

The Knowledge Deficit

Brian Lehrer Show on NYC scores 2005
stupid mayor trick
Thank you, whole language
guess and check reading
stupid mayor trick part 3: the good news
The Spin Doctors reading scores 2006
City's Fourth-grade Test Scores Rise More Than the State Average 2005

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

invention of middle school & EM in Schaumberg
Is middle school bad for kids?
linking hs scores to grade school

fourth grade slump
Irvington slump
NY scores slump
battle lines

^* "Professional Writing Expertise" by Ronald T. Kellogg
in Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance

-- CatherineJohnson - 30 Sep 2006

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