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TeachYourKidsToWrite 10 Jan 2006 - 13:37 CatherineJohnson

This sounds just great:

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

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

I may have to order a copy.

Especially since it has EXERCISES.

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

BestGrammarBook 15 May 2006 - 02:07 CatherineJohnson

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

Susan, what book should I order RIGHT THIS MINUTE?

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

I can't take it.

He's ELEVEN.

And he doesn't know subject & predicate.

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

Sigh.

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

(Does anyone know?)

Can I fit it in with everything else?

GrammarSchool 14 May 2006 - 15:09 CatherineJohnson

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

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

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

Middle school stinks.

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

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

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

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

Christopher is 11.

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

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

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

Rolling off a log.

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

I'm not happy.

update

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

GrammarQuestion 14 May 2006 - 15:10 CatherineJohnson

What is the complete subject of this sentence?

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

Thank you in advance.

DescriptiveNormativeAndCritical 10 Jan 2006 - 13:40 CatherineJohnson

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

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

NortonSampler 10 Jan 2006 - 13:41 CatherineJohnson

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

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

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

Here's the jacket copy:

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

Wow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Susan explains the shift to early writing

Part of the problem is that, like New Math and Whole Language, there is a movement afoot to push what I consider middle school skills down into grade school, all with the assumption that grade school skills will just be learned by osmosis (or shoved onto the middle school teachers...again.) These are your two camps.
In the beginning this new way of teaching writing looks very impressive as little persuasive essays come home and state tests appear to improve. Like math, we didn't learn it that way and so what do we know? I believe this is what you would label teaching Whole to Parts.
The traditional way of learning writing (or math, for that matter) has always been Parts to Whole, starting with building blocks for younger children (handwriting, grammar, sentence structure, punctuation) and then moving to more complicated techniques requiring better critical thinking skills (notetaking, outlining, etc.)that actually match the child's growing opinions and ideas. This strikes me as common sense, but what do I know?
Whether this new way is really better in the long run is still unsure, from everything I've read, yet one can't help notice that something is wrong when college professors complain loudly about students' bad writing skills, and then even request a grammar section on the SATs.

That explains a lot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One other thing.

I never took a writing course.

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

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

So I didn't get near any teachers.

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

People are bizarre.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KUMON reading

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

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

KUMON does.

update: Norton Sampler TOC

This is fantastic:

Introduction

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

1 Description

2 Narrative

3 Example

4 Classification and Division

5 Process Analysis

6 Comparison and Contrast

7 Definition

8 Cause and Effect

9 Argumentation and Persuasion

10 Classic Essays for Further Reading

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

This is the one.

1918 version of Elements of Style online

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

SmartestTractorsAssessmentForm 19 May 2006 - 21:54 CatherineJohnson

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

thank you

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

EngelmannOnRulesForInstallingCurricula 19 May 2006 - 21:55 CatherineJohnson

Ken's done more of the typing!

Thank you!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

on manipulatives

The same problem exists with manipulatives. Kids play with rods that represent different values--based on the length of the rod. Kids can use these rods to perform a variety of "act-outs" that are consistent with complicated math notions, such as the idea that 10x2 equals 5X4, but the kids doing the acting-out are typically not learning the relationship. They're simply making one group of rods the same length as the other group. The great meanings that they're deriving are not in their minds but in the imagination of the educational observer.
Direct work with symbols and notations of math is a far safer method of teaching relationships because symbols are consistent with far fewer misinterpretations than noisy and often time-consuming act-outs. The [NCTM] Standards do not favor pencil-and-paper work, however, because such work implies skills, and the Standards are very ambivalent about skills.
War Against the Schools' Academic Child Abuse, p. 115

on the shelf life of learned material

Typically about 60 school days pass before any topic is revisited. Stated differently, the spiral curriculum is exposure, not teaching. You don't "teach" something and put it back on the shelf for 60 days. It doesn't have a shelf-life of more than a few days. It would be outrageous enough to do that with one topic-- let alone all of them.
...Don't they know that if something is just taught, it will atrophy the fast way if it is not reinforced, kindled, and used? Don't they know that the suggested "revisiting of topics" requires putting stuff that has been recently taught on the shelf where it will shrivel up? Don't they know that the constant "reteaching" and "relearning" of topics that have gone stale from three months of disuse is so inefficient and impratical that it will lead not to "teaching" but to mere exposure? And don't they know that when the "teaching" becomes mere exposure, kids will understandably figure out that they are not expected to learn and that they'll develop adaptive attitudes like, "We're doing this ugly geometry again, but don't worry. It'll soon go away and we won't see it for a long time"?
The Underachieving Curriculum judged the problem with the spiral curriculum is that is lacks both intensity and focus. "Perhaps the greatest irony is that a curricular construct conceived to prevent the postponing of teaching many important subjects on the grounds that they are too difficult has resulted in a treatment of mathematics that has postponed, often indefinitely, the attainment of much substantive content at all."
War Against the Schools' Academic Child Abuse, pp. 108-9

what people know and don't know

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I should know better.

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

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

This is a factoid that needs to get out there.

HelicopterParentsPart3 10 Jan 2006 - 13:43 CatherineJohnson

04wcol.583.jpg

source:
Staying Within the Lines on Homework help

I spent years reading about how women (or blacks) internalized the culture's view of them.

Ed reminded me yesterday that this is called false consciousness.

Parents have false consciousness.

Here's an article, written by a parent, all about the Bad Things Parents Do when their children go to school. The author lives here in Westchester; she's in one of the river towns. Hastings, Dobbs, or Ardsley, can't remember which. That makes her a neighbor.

LISA JACOBSON runs a tutoring business, Inspirica, in Manhattan, and she has seen parents at their worst, their most enmeshed, their pushiest. Parents who do their children's art projects for them, so the third-grade classroom looks, she said, "like a gallery at MoMA." Parents who tinker with science labs and correct math homework and edit English essays until the child does not recognize more than a comma in an opening sentence.

Gee. It's those Pushy Parents again. The ones I keep hearing about here in Irvington.

I wonder why all those Pushy Parents are spending hours of their lives doing their children's art projects.

Might it be because if they don't do their child's projects the child will be given a large, prominently displayed 'D' for all the world to see, called up to the teacher's desk, asked loudly, 'Are you even trying to do the work?' and sent off to the cafeteria to be taunted by the entire 6th grade class?

I wonder.

Back when my sons were younger, the rule was that they did the "content" and I would help out with the cutting and the coloring. It just didn't seem worth the extra hours they would spend wrestling with scissors and crayons. So after my older son drew his poster for social studies intricately mapping the route from the school to his house, I colored the roads black and the treetops green. And once he had completed his essay for French about the Arc de Triomphe, I took a razor and cobbled a three-dimensional model of that landmark from foam-backed board. (For the record, he lost points for neatness on the map poster I colored, and while his French essay earned an A, my foam representation got only a B.)

Does this passage offer a clue?

A parent-created art project earns a B.

Question.

What grade does a child-created art project earn?

As it happens, I have the answer, since I've just run that experiment.

Here's how it comes out. Other parents stay up all night doing their child's feature story/persuasive essay/major research product. (Seriously. One mother told me she had to pull an all-nighter to get it done. Good for her. She's as furious at Mrs. Roth as I am, btw, and has been hovering on the brink of Going To The Principal for some weeks now.)

Your child writes his own feature story.

Your child receives a bright red D, is berated in front of his classmates, is taunted at recess, spends a week crying at home every night.

Meanwhile you drop work on your Actual Job, the one you need to pay your monster property taxes to support the school, in order to steal time to launch a major offensive against the school you're working so hard to support.

Question.

What was the smart play here?

Stay up all night writing your child's paper and be done with it, or let your child write his own paper, after which all he** breaks loose and you get to spend the next 6 weeks dealing with it. And that's 6 weeks if you're lucky.

On the one hand, I am well positioned to help with their writing. Not to do it for them, but to read what they write and send them back to revise. On the other hand, is that helping or hurting? Can a teacher, however well intentioned, possibly give scores of children the same attention that I can give my own? Am I cheating my boys more by stepping in or standing back? Should the roles of parent and professional ever be mixed?

False consciousness!

The Core Question is not Should the roles of parent and professional ever be mixed?

The Core Question is What is my child learning at school, if anything?

My fifth grader's teacher has specifically asked us not to help," said Jacqueline Ghosen, who also has a fourth grader, and who is more than able to help with math because she teaches business classes at the University at Buffalo School of Management. "Her thought is that if the children are not getting the concept, she is not teaching it well," she said. "But if our child gets it wrong, regardless of whose fault it is, he still gets a lower homework grade. Also, if he is the only one who didn't get the concept, she is not going to reteach it."

That's a problem, alright.

Two words: formative assessment

So every night Ms. Ghosen and her husband spend at least three hours reviewing their sons' math, one equation at a time, telling them how many problems are wrong and sending the children back to find the mistakes themselves.

A big, fat, red 'A' to Ms. Ghosen and her husband for logical reasoning.

If the teacher isn't teaching to mastery, somebody has to.

Who's it going to be?

Other teachers have the opposite request: they want parents to take the reins. Ms. Jacobson recalls a recent parent-teacher conference where she was told "that the only way to keep kids achieving at the high level expected by the school district is to teach at school and then have the kids go home and be drilled and helped and tutored by the parents."

Another big, fat, red 'A' to Ms. Jacobson's teacher for logical reasoning.

This teacher would no doubt thrive in a DI system.

She is not teaching in a DI system.

So she's leveled with the parents. If the school isn't teaching to mastery somebody has to do it.

Unless you have a live-in tutor (that's another story) it's going to be you. Us. The parents.

The real story here, the story that should have been written, is the story of why the schools aren't teaching to mastery.

She's looking at the symptom of school failure.

Not the source.

p.s.

I just spent a couple of seconds looking at that picture.

It's great, isn't it?

Totally undermines the article, something I've seen more than once.

Here we have an anxious child, bewildered by the indecipherable schoolwork he's supposed to complete at home, on his own, with neither competent instruction nor help. The teacher has written some stuff on the board, or the child and a couple of classmates have discovered some stuff in a small group, and now he's supposed to know it.

And here we have a mother glaring at the books her school has sent home—glaring from clear across the room. She's also looking semi-bewildered, but bewildered in a mad way, not a say way.

Wait! she's saying. Is it a 'feature story'? Is it a 'persuasive essay'? Is it a 'major research PRODUCT'?

Plus, she's so ticked off she has apparently acquired the ability to project herself across the room telepathically, double in size, and change colors; she's so ticked off she's turning into THE HULK.

I could send this out as a Christmas picture.

Of course the good news is that parents who possess supernatural powers terrify school administrators.

a personality change, too

Plus the mom was a happy, nice, non-hovering, non-helicopter parent before she got a look at the incomprehensible junk they sent home for her child to do.

I think the TIMES should forget about writing articles, and just have the artists draw the stories.

helicopter parents, part 1
helicopter parents, part 2
helicopter parents, part 3
helicopter parents at the AFT
news from nowhere, part 6 (AP students)
helicopter parents of the word, unite
helicopter parents of the world, unite part 2a (t-shirts)
MiddleWeb says hovering is good

KumonWriting 16 Dec 2005 - 22:07 CatherineJohnson

I've been forgetting to thank Carolyn for our new categories:

Teaching Writing

Homeschooling

Thank you!

This will be the first entry under writing.

learning to write with KUMON Reading

I've mentioned that Ben Franklin taught himself to write persuasive essays by reverse engineering other people's persuasive essays.

He'd cut apart the sentences (IIRC), then try to reassemble them in proper sequence.

I've tried this myself. It's much harder than it sounds.

KUMON Reading (which I think is a superb program) does something similar, which I suspect would help any child develop a mature expository writing style.

Here it is:

Rearrange the words to complete the sentences.

1) A rocket is a spacecraft __________________________________.
[ that / space / allows / to / reach/ humans / outer ]

2) __________________________________ ,
the probe is navigated from afar.
[ are / humans / as / aboard / there / no ]

3) The universe is __________________________________ .
[ exist / matter / space / and / all / where ]

4) __________________________________
the scientist boasted.
[ now / we / " / " / have / technology / the / , ]

source:
KUMON Reading worksheet E1 77a (5th grade)

answers:

1) A rocket is a spacecraft that allows humans to reach outer space.

2) As there are no humans aboard, the probe is navigated from afar.

3) The universe is where all space and matter exist.

4) "We now have the technology," the scientist boasted.

This is sophisticated prose, and it's difficult to teach to children, or to students of any age. Left to his own devices, no 5th grader—these are 5th grade worksheets—is going to produce sentences like these.

Doing this exercise forces the child to focus on the 'smallest units' of writing, words and punctuation marks.

It also directs the child's attention to the 'Exactly Right Words,' to see that the difference between the best composition and the next-best is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug (wasn't that the Mark Twain analogy)?

Christopher, for instance, constructed sentence number 4 in this way:

"Now we have the technology," the scientist boasted.

That's perfectly fine. It's grammatically correct; it makes sense.

But it's not as elegant as 'We now have the technology,' and in fact it doesn't work as well with the verb 'boasted.' This is a subtle point. Offhand I can't think of a better way to make it (or of any way to make it at all, as a matter of fact).

The same principle holds with number 3. It would be grammatically correct to write, The universe is where all matter and space exist. But it wouldn't be as good

I would imagine that the only time in school students are taught to pay such close attention to language would be in reading and writing poetry. Not expository prose. (If anyone knows expository writing programs that do teach the subtleties of style, let us know.)

learning to read expository prose

I've often read educators saying that, in 4th grade, children must begin to read for content.

Unfortunately, they haven't been taught to do this. The reading programs of elementary schools are fiction, fiction, and more fiction, along with a personal narrative or two. Children aren't taught to read and interpret expository prose.

Another missing piece.

Andrew to KUMON

I'm starting Andrew in KUMON math today. Mr. Liu saw him in action last week, and told me to bring him at 4.

In preparation, I'm going to spend the rest of the afternoon chanting persistent and patient under my breath.

do narrative reading skills transfer to expository reading?

The Direct Instruction folks say no, which would be my guess:

Narrative reading skills do not readily transfer to expository reading.
Narrative and expository texts have been found to have differential effects upon readers, with narrative being easier to comprehend than expository (Zabrucky & Ratner, 1992.) The ability to comprehend and formulate expository prose is essential for achievement in school (Seidenberg, 1989).

articles, marketing material from EPS, College Board report

Seidenberg, P.L. (1989). Relating text processing research to reading and writing instruction for learning disabled students. Learning Disabilities Focus 5 (1), pp. 4-12.

Zabrucky, K. & Ratner, H.H. (1992). Effects of passage type on comprehension monitoring and recall in good and poor readers. Journal of Reading Behavior 24, pp. 373-391.

Writing Across the Curriculum Series by Patrice Cardiel, Ronda Cole, Mary Kay Hobbs, et. al. By Anna Cimochowski, Ph.D. research supporting the Writing Across the Curriculum Series published by EPS. You may have to Google to find it. This is marketing material, but often these papers are useful.

Report of The College Board National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges, pdf file to download at EPS.

AnimalsInTranslationInDiscoverMagazineBestBooks 10 Jan 2006 - 22:23 CatherineJohnson

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

yay!

Plus the paperback came today.

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

this is cool

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

Animals in Translation is a recommended holiday gift.

Good.

TrustInSchools 10 Jan 2006 - 14:23 CatherineJohnson

Via eduwonk, Schooling America: How the Public Schools Meet the Nation’s Changing Needs by Patricia Albjerg Graham

Publisher's Weekly

"Our elementary, secondary, and higher education sectors are getting better, just not as rapidly or as completely as we would like." This guardedly optimistic assessment of the last century of American education characterizes Graham's erudite consideration of our nation's public schools. As an educator whose 50-year career has taken her from teaching social studies in Dismal Swamp, Virginia, to the deanship of the Harvard faculty of education and the directorship of the National Institute of Education, Graham's ability to speak from direct experience, whether about the tension between theory and practice in curricular reform, the struggle to diversify schools, or the effects of research funding on higher education, makes for a consistently engaging read, even if the topics discussed, on the surface, sound dry. Although her opinions on how America's educational system can improve seep into the writing, these are less central to the book than her lively retelling of developments in the public school system since 1900. Whether or not one shares her commitment to diversity and vision of education's role in shaping society, the historical material here will be of great interest to professional educators, policymakers and parents of school-age children.

This is why I find the public school system opaque.

It strikes me as entirely possible that her thesis is true. I just don't know.

One data point: Ed told me, this morning, that there's no question college students' writing has gotten much better over the 20-odd years he's been reading it at UCLA and NYU.

Interestingly, students can't write an argument. The content of student writing isn't better, in his experience. But the form is dramatically improved. (We're talking an elite group of students, obviously. Still, those are the students I'm specifically concerned about as a mom, so I'm glad to hear it.)

The idea that students are better at writing but no better at thinking is slightly scandalous to me, since I tend to think of form and content as reasonably inseparable.

But if that's what Ed is seeing, I believe him. After all, the reality of good writing expressing bad thinking is what the word 'glib' was invented to express.

Graham's blog is here.

update

During the last century, what we Americans wanted and what we got from our schools shifted through four distinct periods, which I call Assimilation, Adjustment, Access and Achievement. Last week we looked at the period of Assimilation covering the early years of the 20th century. This week I look at the middle years of the twentieth century, including WWII and the post-war years, which I call the Adjustment era. In coming weeks, I will address Access, the period after Brown v. Board of Education until 1983 and, finally, Achievement, the years from 1983 to the present day. The following pictures help illustrate this tale of shifting assignments to America's schools and their reluctance, sometimes wisely, to complete the new assignments as fully and promptly as the public and, later, policy-makers, wished.

It's certainly true that we here at Kitchen Table Math are in the Unhappy Achievement phase of edu-history.

I know I am, anyway.

declinism

Last fall, I think it was, there three different books about the decline and fall of France on the French bestseller list. I remember one was called something like France qui tombe, France that Falls (roughly).

The French call this school of thought declinism.

MrsRothInstructionAndGrading 19 May 2006 - 16:05 CatherineJohnson

Sorry, I know this is repetitive.

I've decided to capture the 'Feature Story' instructions & feedback inside one post, so they show up together in the category thread, and so I can pull a few thoughts together about how to teach writing.

The kids were told they were to write a feature story.

Then they were given 2 handouts in class.

here's one:

here's the other:

And that was it. The kids went off, wrote a Feature Story/Persuasive Essay/Major Research Product, and turned it in. Then they were given a grade.

feedback and grade:

The papers were handed out so that all students saw each others' grades, and Christopher was called to Mrs. Roth's desk to be shamed. "Are you actually trying to do the work?" Mrs. Roth said, with all the class listening.

Notice there are two Ds here; he was first learning he'd flunked two writing assignments at that moment. He is the only child in any of Mrs. Roth's classes to receive a grade of D on both papers, or—I'll wager—on any paper.

Since that day Christopher has been teased and taunted at lunch and recess every day. At night he comes home and cries.

Two days ago one of his closest friends said to him, "Mrs. Roth is a good teacher, you're just stupid."

He's no longer sitting with his friends at lunch, and has joined the table of two students who are struggling academically. One of them is the sole black child in his English class, to whom Mrs. Roth said, recently, "Stop acting stupid." The other is a boy whose parents have had a bitter divorce, and who has been sent for Homework Help.

I like these boys; I'm happy for Christopher to be their friend.

I'm not happy that this new friendship has been caused by a public humiliation of my child. (If I were the parent of either of those boys—and I knew what was happening—I wouldn't be happy, either.)

One more thing.

For the record, Christopher says he turned in a 'work cited page.'

I have no idea what happened to the work cited page. If he says he did it, then he did. It could be buried in his folder, his locker, his notebook.....lord only knows where it is. For all I know, Mrs. Roth could have lost it herself.

If she were concerned with his learning, she'd find out.

how not to teach writing

what is the assignment? In class, the children were told to write a "Feature Story." At some point it became apparent to some of the children, though not to Christopher, that they were to write a "Persuasive Essay." Another mom told me that one girl raised her hand and asked, "Is the Feature Story the same thing as the Persuasive Essay?" She thought maybe they were two different assignments. Mrs. Roth said, "That's a stupid question."^* Apparently "Major Research Product" was also part of the assignment, judging by the feedback Christopher received to justify his grade of D. This is an appalling assignment. If you can't clearly define a writing assignment—if you don't know that Feature Stories, Persuasive Essays, and Major Research Products are 3 different things—you've violated the fundamental tenet of good writing going in. Clear thinking and clear expression start at the top.

reliance on the parent to function as secretary and reserve teacher I failed miserably in my assigned role. Give me a D. No, give me an F. I failed to go through Christopher's stuffed-to-the-gills folder, pull out the assignment sheets, read them myself, then take out my calendar and pencil in an additional nightly battle over writing to accompany my previously scheduled nightly battle over math. Here's how the Feature Story battle would have gone. Christopher would have insisted the assignment was a Feature Story. Brandishing Mrs. Roth's 'tips,' I would have insisted the assignment was also a Persuasive Essay. Christopher would have had some comeback or other, then he would have started yelling, and I would have threatened to Email The Teacher and Find Out What The Assignment Really Is and so on and so on......I did none of this. I let him go off and do the assignment on his own; when he finished I read through & thought it was good. That wasn't my job. My job was to function as Reserve Teacher and Secretary, to manage, revise, and edit Christopher's work, to type it up with headings, subheadings, Word Art and illustrations, & to carry Mrs. Roth through the school year just as I am carrying Christopher's math teacher through the school year. I blew it. (See Susan on being your child's secretary.)

failure to grasp the nature of a 6th grade child Christopher is intensely focused on school. That's always been true, but now he's becoming independent, and he wants me to butt out. He thinks he knows what the teacher said; he doesn't want to hear what I think the teacher said. And he's horrifically anxious about his 9-POCKET SCHOOL FOLDER. He won't let us take any papers out of it because he might need them, so he has no idea what's in there or where it is. His school folder is exactly like George's wallet in the Seinfeld episode about overstuffed wallets, only bigger & he gets graded on doing assignments that are lost inside.

no apparent instruction According to Christopher, this is the only instruction they got. Two hand-outs, then a grade. I believe him, since other moms of other kids in the class say the same thing. However, even if Mrs. Roth spent every day of the past month teaching the kids how to write a Feature Story/Persuasive Essay/Major Research Product, Christopher didn't learn what she taught, or he wouldn't have gotten 2 Ds on 2 consecutive papers. A grade of D on a completed student paper is a grade of D on the teacher's teaching. Mrs. Roth has done no formative assessment to discover whether her students have taken in what she's been teaching. Nor has she done formative assessment to discover whether the students remember they were given two handouts, know where those handouts are and can locate them, or understand what the 'tips' on the handouts actually mean.

no teaching of process I have mixed feelings about teaching writing-as-process. This has been the dominant approach for decades now, and Ed says he's seen student writing improve dramatically over the past 20 years in form, but not content. I'm not sure why writing-as-process sets off my bad-curriculum sensors; I'll have to figure it out. However, in this case there should have been some kind of teaching-of-process somewhere. This is a pure product approach, with no instruction at all, and no intermediate stages or steps. If this teacher wanted a Major Research Product—an assignment beyond the capacities and knowledge of these 6th grade children—she needed to be taking them through the stages. She didn't.

starting at the top The persuasive essay is the calculus of writing. College kids can't do it; first-year Masters candidates can't do it. Moreover, most college kids and entry-level Masters candidates can't identify the argument implicit in nonfiction texts; most college kids and entry-level Masters candidates have no idea there is an argument implicit in nonfiction texts. This is why I'm interested in the Everything's An Argument text.

I'm thinking about how to teach writing, and remembering how I did teach writing at Iowa, Cal State Long Beach, UC Irvine (where I taught science writing), and Johns Hopkins CTY.

This isn't it.

^* That's a stupid answer.

LogicalFallacyBingoPart2 15 Dec 2005 - 17:30 CatherineJohnson

logic sites

Doug also left links to 2 logic sites:

Nizkor project: logical fallacies

Atheism Web: Logic & Fallacies (ooo, that's Christmasy!)

I used Howard Kahane's Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric: The Use of Reason in Everyday Life to teach freshman rhetoric at Iowa.

The book seems to have expanded by a couple hundred pages since I used it, and the price has gone through the roof.

But I'll bet it's still a terrific book.

Logical Fallacy Bingo

SteveOnWriting 15 Dec 2005 - 20:09 CatherineJohnson

from the helicopter parents Comments thread:

Susan: Writing-wise, developmentally inappropriate to me is when they ask for middle school cognitive skills in grade school, like the ability to extract a main point from a paragraph, or the ability to develop a thesis through an essay before they even know what a sentence is.
Steve: I have noticed that writing skills greatly lag reading skills, as one would expect. When a book report is given, it is for a book at their reading level: 75-150 page chapter books (although he has read all of the Harry Potter books). He is given a two/three page form to follow for writing the report with maybe a page allowed for writing a description of the book.
Even I would have to work at reducing a description of the book down to one or two pages. The times I have worked with my son on these projects (he could never do them himself), it has been a struggle.
In class, they talk a lot about editing (they call it SCOPE) and correcting a rough draft, but not much time on the more difficult task of coming up with the first draft and have it close enough to even begin the SCOPE process. I tell him that it is like reducing a Harry Potter book down to movie length, since we have spent a long time talking about what is in the book versus what is in the movie. He can see that the more you have to reduce, the more difficult it becomes.

Re-reading this, I think Steve has put his finger on what's been bothering me about the Writing As Process juggernaut (which apparently got underway in San Francisco in the....1970s? Ed knows. It was something called the San Francisco Writing Project, or some such). It's been hugely influential.

At Iowa, we didn't teach writing as 'process.'

We used the Norton Anthology and Kahane's book on logic if we chose (I did choose) and the kids turned in one 500-word paper a week. Then we discussed as many of them in class as we could.

We read nonfiction essays in Norton and analyzed the argument, support, structure, and style.

We also had a coherent sequence of assignments, starting with the personal narrative, and working up to the persuasive essay.

This is a terrific way to organize a comp course, because the structure of a personal narrative is 'natural' to most people (though not all). It's organized along a timeline.

Moreoever, even the greenest students could instantly tell which personal narrative worked best, and invariably the best narrative was the narrative with the most detail. Everyone saw this.

Typically, what would happen is that most of the essays would be awful—boring as heck—but one kid would be a natural-born user-of-detail and everyone else would see this.

Because 'detail' is to a personal narrative what 'evidence' is to an expository essay, we had a natural jumping off point.

I'll add that we didn't purposely send them out to write boring personal narratives for the sake of making a point. Before they wrote a personal narrative they read examples of personal narratives in Norton, and we pointed out that the narratives worked, in large part, because of vivid detail.

But they were young, new writers, so just reading a couple of good personal narratives and being told that Detail was the Magic Ingredient wasn't enough.

The contrast between a boring personal narrative without detail and an interesting personal narrative with detail brought the point home.

I'm wondering now whether we should have had a writing-as-process 'strand' (golly I hate that word).....I'm also having trouble remembering whether, in fact, we did have such a strand!

I have a vague memory that a lot of the kids took a two-semester course in Freshman Rhetoric, and that the second course taught them to write & revise a research paper.

I guess I'm thinking, at the moment, that writing-as-process is, as Steve suggests, a later stage.

U.K. writing instruction

This passage bears repeating. I'm going to figure out how to create this exercise for Christopehr:

[Judith] Koren describes how two British women she knows became effective essayists and speakers. “Each week, they’d had homework exercises like this: While preserving every essential point, reduce a 100-word essay to 50 words, then to 20, then to 10. Reduce 500 words to 50, 1,000 words to 100. Week after week, year after year.

source:
we need info on UK writing instruction

key words: San Francisco Bay Area writing project writing as process

BeckyOnHowNotToTeachWriting 10 Jan 2006 - 13:38 CatherineJohnson

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

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

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

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

2. Tell your favorite part.

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

4. Show your favorite illustration from the book.

5. Tell the first sentence of the book.

6. Would you recommend this book to others?

Seem reasonable? Except there is no instruction for:

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

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

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

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

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

And don't forget the poster for your talk!

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

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

Yes, yes, and yes.

I find writing books incredibly hard.

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

The hard part is the researching and thinking.

IndependentGeorgeOnWriting 19 May 2006 - 16:04 CatherineJohnson

responding to posts by Becky C and Steve:

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

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

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

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

formulate and sustain a coherent argument

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It worked for him.

terrific Comments thread

ExpressiveWriting 21 Dec 2005 - 18:06 CatherineJohnson

Ken tracked down this Direct Instruction writing curriculum from SRA. They have some interesting lessons posted online, and the Scope and Sequence categories are helpful.

He also rounded up two studies of the series:

Using the Expressive Writing Program to Improve the Writing Skills of High School Students with Learning Disabilities

Teaching Expressive Writing to Students with Learning Disabilities: A Research Synthesis

update: Smartest Tractor's pick

Step up to Writing from SOPRIS WEST. Here's the Program Overview (pdf file)

Glancing through the Program Overview, I found the stoplight graphic I've posted below.

I like it.

I'm a fan of visual teaching in general; visuals stay with us in some way words don't seem to.

By way of support, I'll re-tell my sister-in-law anecdote.

My sister-in-law is a federal prosecutor in Philadelphia. One day we were talking about 'learning styles,' which I don't particularly believe in, but since everyone else does I don't automatically launch into a cognitive science lecture every time the subject comes up.

So we were talking about learning styles, and I said something about visual learning styles, and my sister-in-law said, "Everyone has a visual learning style."

"That's the first thing they tell you about presenting evidence to juries. If you want the jury to remember what you've said, you have to give them a visual."

I believe that.

Step Up To Writing gives kids a visual for writing that looks like it can probably be applied both to paragraphs and to entire essays. That makes sense; a paragraph can be thought of as a mini-essay.

I also very much like the stoplight metaphor. Writing should have rhythm; some parts should be fast, some slow, some in-between. That's a subtle concept to teach, and regardless of whether you try to teach rhythm explicitly, the stoplight image will be making the point.

My only problem, just on this cursory inspection, it that I find the final greenlight confusing.

I'm not used to thinking of a green light as meaning go back, and since the green light seems to take the writer to the essay's conclusion, I find 'green' for 'conclude' confusing.

However, that doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem. The conclusion in an action film is typically faster-paced than the rest of the film, and this can be true of an essay.....I think a student can probably survive the semi-breakdown of the analogy at this point.

I'll be looking forward to hearing how this program works for Smartest Tractor whose students are, IIRC, in 8th grade.

compare and contrast

'Graphic organizers' are huge these days, as far as I can tell. Everyone's using them.

If I were teaching a class of middle school kids how to write, I'd go with stoplights.

ThereAreOrAreNotShortcutsChooseOne 10 Jan 2006 - 16:13 CatherineJohnson

This is funny.

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

Title: There Are No Shortcuts.

IfTheStudentHasntLearned 23 Dec 2005 - 22:16 CatherineJohnson

revision

From Catherine:

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

No more thoughtless (and unintended) teacher-bashing.

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

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

Time for a course correction.

From Carolyn:

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

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

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

DanOnWritingProcess 22 Dec 2005 - 20:39 CatherineJohnson

Most of my writing involved creating technical white papers, proposals to customers, or presentations of experimental research. You usually begin with an introduction and end with a conclusion/summary. Beyond that, there often wasn’t much of a template. I would generally begin writing by typing key ideas into the word processor with lots of white space in between. These were generally sentence fragments. Sometimes, though, an elegant phrase would occur to me, so I might type in a few whole sentences. Only in the roughest sense would this be considered an outline. Some of these fragments would become section headings; others would end up as list items in bullet lists. As I went along, I would just keep putting more meat on the bones. Also, as things took shape, I would continually re-arrange the order of things. Sometimes you lay out the plan first, then highlight the key nuggets therein. Other times, you lead with your value proposition, then lay out the plan that delivers it. You don’t necessarily know which will work better right off the bat.
I was never formally taught to do things this way. As I said, I make no claim that it is a particularly good way to write. It seems to work for me, though—most of the time. I think the exception is interesting. A few years back, I took a standardized certification test. One section was an essay. I had to write it with pencil and paper in a test booklet. I found this very difficult. I am very reliant on word processing software, and the flexibility it gives me to easily re-arrange, insert, and delete redundancy once I detect it. The standardized test essay forced me to write linearly, from beginning to end. This seems to me to be a very artificial constraint. It makes me skeptical of standardized tests of writing.

It never occurred to me that word processors might affect the way people write.

I became a writer before anyone had personal computers. I used to write longhand, in pencil, and I had an 'embedding scheme,' where I'd put a zillion different phrasing options inside one sentence, in brackets. That way, when I went back & re-read, I could cross out the ones I didn't like.

It looked like this, only in messy handwriting:

I [became / was / wanted to be] a [writer / start writing] before I had a [computer / word processor / before personal computers were invented] ....... etc.

On first read-through I'd do as much crossing out as I could, which was never enough; then I might change the crossings-out on the 3rd read-through, or I might add in some new options-in-brackets, and so it went. I could fill up an entire sheet of paper with just one sentence and its multiple choices.

As I was reading Dan's post, it struck me that I was trying to do word processing without a word processor.

I find the kind of writing that (I think) Dan is doing extremely difficult.

In fact, I find it agonizing, not to put too fine a point on it.

No, agonizing isn't the word. I don't have a word.^*

It's the same kind of writing you have to do for a book proposal, where you have two purposes:

a) write well about your subject
b) sell your subject

I'm just, today, putting a reasonably close-to-final draft of Temple's & my new book proposal in the mail to her. The whole thing has been driving me crazy for months.

First of all, it took forever to figure out what our central idea is. I think it only came to me last month, finally. Up 'til then, the central idea was: Write a sequel to Animals in Translation.

Figuring out a central idea is hard enough, but when you're writing a book proposal, not a book, having a central idea is just the beginning.

You can't just have a central idea, you have to have what Hollywood types used to call a 'high concept.' (They may still call it that, I don't know.)

Turning a central idea into a high concept is he**.

^* Yes, I do have a word. I have a whole phrase. Our friend Rachel used this phrase to describe her first encounter with, yes, a word processor, the original KayPro II.

She said, 'Well you know how it is trying to learn to word process. You spend a week in an agitated state."

That's book proposal writing, except it's not a week. It's months.

WritingQuirks 27 Dec 2005 - 17:03 CatherineJohnson

Announcing an unofficial poll of writing quirks.

Here's what we've got so far:

Here's Carolyn's version:

Carolyn used an open source thing called VYM (visualize your mind) for diagramming. I used Inspiration, which is the adult version of Kidspiration.

Rapid Problem Solving with Post-It Notes

I'm seriously considering dumping the fancy-schmancy graphical organizer and going to a bulletin board, index cards, and push-pins.

Or else Post-It Notes.

ReadingDiagnosticAtKumon 10 Jan 2006 - 14:47 CarolynJohnston

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SteveOnTeachingWritingPart2 10 Jan 2006 - 14:00 CatherineJohnson

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

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

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

SusanOnPartsAndWholes 11 Jan 2006 - 16:04 CatherineJohnson

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

Part of the problem is that, like New Math and Whole Language, there is a movement afoot to push what I consider middle school skills down into grade school, all with the assumption that grade school skills will just be learned by osmosis (or shoved onto the middle school teachers...again.) These are your two camps.
In the beginning this new way of teaching writing [beginning in Kindergarten] looks very impressive as little persuasive essays come home and state tests appear to improve. Like math, we didn't learn it that way and so what do we know? I believe this is what you would label teaching Whole to Parts.
The traditional way of learning writing (or math, for that matter) has always been Parts to Whole, starting with building blocks for younger children (handwriting, grammar, sentence structure, punctuation) and then moving to more complicated techniques requiring better critical thinking skills (notetaking, outlining, etc.) that actually match the child's growing opinions and ideas. This strikes me as common sense, but what do I know?
Whether this new way is really better in the long run is still unsure, from everything I've read, yet one can't help notice that something is wrong when college professors complain loudly about students' bad writing skills, and then even request a grammar section on the SATs.

key words: parts to whole whole to parts two camps

SentenceCombining 18 Jan 2006 - 16:43 CatherineJohnson

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

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

Grammar teaching and writing skills: the research evidence
Richard Hudson (dick@ling.ucl.ac.uk)
Dept of Phonetics and Linguistics, UCL, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT

Does a training in 'formal grammar' improve a child's ability to write? At one time it was taken for granted that the answer was yes, so children were taught grammatical analysis as part of the effort to improve their writing. However when educational researchers sought evidence for the expected effects, the results were negative; for example, one of the classic experiments concluded: "It seems safe to infer that the study of English grammar had a negligible or even harmful effect upon the correctness of children's writing in the early part of the five secondary schools." (Harris 1962) A number of studies in the 60s and 70s have since been accepted as 'classic' support for the view that grammar teaching does nothing for children's writing. By the late 60s the dominant view in both the UK and the USA, and possibly throughout the English-speaking world, was that "most children cannot learn grammar and ... even to those who can it is of little value." (Thompson 1969) No doubt this view fitted the spirit of the times both in English teaching (where grammar was seen as a shackle on children's imagination) and in linguistics (where Chomsky was arguing that grammatical competence develops 'naturally' according to an innate programme, so teaching is simply irrelevant).
Since then much has changed in both the UK and the USA, and the pendulum seems to be on the return swing. It would be naive to think that the pendulum is driven by academic research - indeed, there has been very little research on grammar and writing since the flurry in the 60s and 70s; rather it reflects very general attitude changes in education and more generally throughout society. However the result is that there is now much more enthusiasm in some educational circles for the idea that conscious grammar (resulting from formal teaching) could have the useful benefit of improving writing.....
What, then, does the published research really say about the effects of grammar teaching?
[snip]
Grammar teaching could be surreptitious, as it were, with a clear underlying theory of grammar but minimal use of grammatical terminology. This is in fact how a lot of grammar teaching has been done; and in particular there is a well-recognised activity called 'sentence combining' which seems to be widely used in the USA. There is some evidence, apparently good, that this kind of activity benefits children's writing (Abrahamson 1977; Barton 1997; Hillocks 1986; Mellon 1969; O'Hare 1973), and in some studies it turned out that this kind of grammar teaching produced better results than more traditional teaching of grammatical analysis. For example, " Hillocks surveys the many studies of the effects of sentence combining, and finds them overwhelmingly POSITIVE at all levels (grade 2 to adult). 60% show significant gains in syntactic maturity; 30% non-significant gains; 10% no gains." (Weaver 1996, reporting Hillocks (1986)).
Why should these exercises be so much more successful than traditional analysis? It seems reasonable to assume that it is at least in part because they are exercises in the production of language, and specifically in the production of written language, so they feed much more directly into the child's growing repertoire of productive skills than exercises in grammatical analysis do. In short, they are more closely integrated into the teaching of writing, so the skills acquired in isolation are more likely to transfer directly into a usable skill. However this conclusion does not necessarily rule out the possibility of transfer from grammatical analysis under the right conditions.

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

5 reasons:

it makes sense

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

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

KUMON Reading uses sentence combining

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

We need a Bayesian Rating Scale

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

Here's a possibility:

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

6.5

I'm not feeling a lot of doubt here.

I love this

back to Hudson:

In conclusion, the idea that grammar teaching improves children's writing skills is much better supported by the available research than is commonly supposed. However there is no denying the need for more research in this area, so we finish with quotations (from Walmsley 1984) by two of the twentieth century's most distinguished psychologists who have taken an interest in this question.
Robert Thouless (1969:211):
"If a small part of the research effort that has been put into demonstrating the uselessness of grammar ... had been distributed over a wider field, more might be known about how skill in the use of English can best be developed."
John Carroll (1958:324):
"I am reasonably sure that unless the student gets a feeling for sentence patterning ... his own sentence patterns will show many obvious defects. Research on the effectiveness of teaching English grammar in improving English composition has been mainly negative, but until this research has been repeated with improved methods of teaching English grammar, I will remain unconvinced that grammar is useless in this respect."

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

From the back of the book:

With the first edition of his book, Don Killgallon changed the way thousands of high school English teachers and their students look at language, literature, and writing by focusing on the sentence. In this revised edition, Killgallon presents the same proven methodology but offers all-new writing exercises designed specifically for the middle school student.
Unlike traditional grammar books that emphasize the parsing of sentences, this worktext asks students to imitate the sentence styles of professional writers, making the sentence composition process an enjoyable and challenging one. Killgallon teaches subliminally, nontechnically--the ways real writers compose their sentences, the ways students subsequently intuit within their own writing.
Designed to produce sentence maturity and variety, the worktext offers extensive practice in four sentence-manipulating techniques: sentence unscrambling, sentence imitating, sentence combining, and sentence expanding. All of the activities are based on model sentences written by widely respected authors. They are designed to teach students structures they should but seldom use. The rationale is that imitation and practice are as valuable in gaining competence and confidence in written language production as they are in oral language production.
Since the practices have proven successful for the great majority of students who have used them in all kinds of schools, it's demonstrably true that Sentence Composing can work anywhere--in any school, with any student.

I believe it.

Kilgallon has written books for all grade levels.

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

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

Bayesianprobability

-- CatherineJohnson - 17 Jan 2006

TheGreatZucchini 31 Jan 2006 - 18:17 CatherineJohnson

The Peekaboo Paradox by Gene Weingarten, a WAPO Magazine story about The Great Zucchini, who is a children's entertainer in Washington D.C.

It's an incredible work. I've logged it under 'Teaching Writing' because this essay will be anthologized in every Composition Textbook on the market, or ought to be.

I cried at the end:

Maybe he's Peter Pan. He's even got some magic dust, until he loses it.
"If Eric ever grows up," Jane Knaus had told me, "his career might be over."
We are in the Great Falls home of Melanie and Denny Sisson, where eight children and their parents are gathering for a show. A few minutes earlier, Eric had asked me to pull my car up to the side of another one, so we were hidden from the house while he finished a cigarette.
The Sissons jokingly call their house a "bowling alley," because of the open space. It's more than 6,000 square feet of atria, solaria and balustrade, a beautiful home that is a testament to Denny's successful business as a landscape architect, which is itself a testament to the opulence of Great Falls real estate. It all dovetails nicely.
Things don't always work out so perfectly, though, even in Great Falls. The birthday girl is the Sissons' 5-year-old, Phoebe, and her guests are mostly kids from her special-needs class. Like Phoebe, these are children with developmental disabilities of varying degrees. They're a handful and a half.
A former elementary school teacher, Melanie chose Eric after seeing him perform elsewhere. She concluded he is "a true artist" who could entertain a roomful of kids equally well "in Great Falls or in the Sudan."
Eric didn't know these were going to be mostly kids with special needs, but it becomes apparent right away. They're beautiful children, and seem plenty smart, but they're all over the floor, with nanosecond attention spans. One mother with tired eyes and a wary bearing hovers at her son's elbow the whole time.
The show starts, and within seconds, Eric's got them. Instinctively, he's streamlining his act, making his gags last half as long as usual. He takes a drink of water, calling it, in a goofy, sonorous voice, "WA-WA." For some reason, this sends the kids into hysterics, so he repeats it. Hysterics, again. He does it a third time, and now they're doubled over, gasping for air. Eric looks out at the parents, shrugs, winks and says, "I'll just keep doin' this all afternoon, okay?" The parents laugh, maybe for the first time in a while.
For 35 minutes, Eric handles the crowd, improvising deftly as he goes. When one boy walks up excitedly and slugs him in the leg, he takes no notice. When another grabs a prop, Eric turns it into a joke. When he is done, he has actually worked up a sweat. Some parents applaud.
A little girl in pink walks right up to him -- she's not from the special-needs class, just an ordinary little girl with a special need of her own, right now -- and extends a forefinger, straight up in the air. It's puzzling. Eric meets her eyes. Something indefinable passes between them, something only they understand, and Eric reaches out, seizes that little finger in his big fist, and gives it a shake. The girl breaks into a grin. Then she hugs the most fabulous person she's ever known in her whole life, the Great Zucchini

WAPO reader responses

-- CatherineJohnson - 30 Jan 2006

NoGradeInflationInTheSuburbs 16 Sep 2006 - 21:07 CatherineJohnson

I say we get rid of middle schools altogether.

Ed just called.

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

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

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

The grade?

C-

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

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

Ed gets a B-

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

Ed worked closely with him on it.

He didn't write it

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