Instructivist

Junior's sophomoric regurgitation

2011-11-09T15:57:00.004-06:00

If you want a good chuckle, read this piece by the NYT's A. Revkin.

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/a-students-call-for-a-learning-revolution/

Revkin is enourmously impressed by a junior's sophomoric regurgitation of hoary educationist prescriptions and treats them as breathtaking original thought. Another education writer in the making?

New intelligences discovered

2011-03-25T19:54:00.003-05:00

There is a lot of hand-wringing about what to do about dismal academic performance. This little gem points to a way out.

Multiple Alternatives
Will Fitzhugh

It has been said, with some justice, that if one is to criticize the novel curricular suggestions and philosophical positions of others, there is a duty to offer alternatives. In the case of Multiple Intelligences, what seems to be called for is Multiple Alternatives.

The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, at least as filtered through the curriculum development processes in the most Social of Studies, requires attention to the Mathematical, Bodily/Kinesthetic, Visual/Spatial, Interpersonal, Verbal/Linguistic, Musical/Rhythmic and Intrapersonal Intelligences of Today’s Youth.

It should be remembered in this context, that Professor Gardner of the Harvard School of Education, called these qualities Multiple Intelligences, because, as he has said, if he had called them Talents, he would have attracted much less Attention.

While a truly sophisticated debate about the endless varieties of classroom innovation might not be out of place at what has become of our Schools of Education, it is my view that in the classroom a very different set of talents deserves cultivation.

In keeping with that view, I offer the following suggestions of Alternative Multiple Intelligences whose development should be most likely to contribute to the education of the majority of our students.

Perhaps the most important is Paying Attention Intelligence. Without paying attention, it is truly astounding how much instruction even the average student is capable of ignoring on any given day, and as the word suggests, ignoring is the primrose path to Ignorance.

Memorization Intelligence is seen as old-fashioned, except when it applies to the names of music groups, sports or movie stars, and clothing or soft drink brands. Nevertheless, if students don’t remember anything, that is pretty close to the same thing as their not knowing anything. If a student is asked for the dates of the United States Civil War or the name of the first female Secretary of Labor, and she says, “I don’t remember,” that is the functional equivalent, for all practical purposes, of admitting, “I don’t know.”

Of course there is a storm of debate among professional educators, or rather between professional educators and the rest of the country, over the importance of knowledge as such, with the educators coming down on the side of correct sentiment fueled by general ignorance and propaganda, but let us put that aside for the moment.

If one can accept, at least provisionally, that some knowledge may be useful for some purpose as an outcome of education, then Recognition Intelligence and Recall Intelligence, so useful on tests of knowledge, become central as well.

When it comes to writing, I would argue, in the face of the united opposition from the National Council of Teachers of American English, that Punctuation Intelligence and Spelling Intelligence are also essential.

Another often neglected but vital talent for students is Hard Work Intelligence or Diligence Intelligence. We have so often in recent decades taught students that creativity is far more important than work, and that if they are not the smartest student in the class they should give up trying to do their academic work and fall back on their innate creativity and capacity for having fun instead. A return to emphasis on Hard Work Intelligence, where it has been tried, has led to some astonishing academic results. Jaime Escalante’s success in teaching Calculus at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles is not the only example.

It might be noted in passing that it seems very likely that if Mr. Escalante had spent more time on Bodily/Kinesthetic Intelligence, Intrapersonal Intelligence, and other Gardner Intelligences, his students would have done quite a bit less well on the AP Calculus Test. But then, he was not a Social Studies Teacher.

There are many other neglected Intelligences not supported by Professor Gardner, such as Courtesy Intelligence, Time Management Intelligence, Turning in Homework Intelligence, Papers in on Time Intelligence, Seeking Extra Help Intelligence, Taking Personal Responsibility Intelligence, Asking Questions Intelligence, etc.

In these cases, at least, it seems Tradition still Knows Best...

Is this Science?

2010-03-06T13:30:00.001-06:00

The global warming fraternity portrays itself as embattled but plays rough.

Willis_Eschenbach
Stephen Schneider says "Most of our colleagues don't seem to grasp that we're not in a gentlepersons' debate ..." Stephen, I think your colleagues are well aware of that, viz: James Hansen of NASA wanted trials for climate skeptics, accusing them of high crimes against humanity Robert Kennedy Jr. called climate skeptics traitors Yvo de Boer of the UN called climate skepticism criminally irresponsible David Suzuki called for politicians who ignore climate science to be jailed DeSmogBlog's James Hoggan wants skeptics treated as war criminals (video) Grist called for Nuremberg trials for skeptics Emo-Joe Romm wanted skeptics strangled in their beds A blogger at TPM pondered when it would be acceptable to execute climate deniers Heidi Cullen of The Weather Channel called for skeptical forecasters to be decertified Bernie Sanders compared climate skeptics to Nazi appeasers. So yes, Stephen, we know why this is not a "gentlepersons' debate"

Dunce adviser

2008-06-08T00:34:00.003-05:00

What's going on with education in England?

An education professor is advising the government to drop academic subjects because supposedly they have a middle-class origin and alienate the disadvantaged. Moreover, such education has the nefarious effect of improving one's economic well-being.

Children should no longer be taught traditional subjects at school because they are "middle-class" creations, a Government adviser will claim today.
Professor John White, who contributed to a controversial shake-up of the secondary curriculum, believes lessons should instead cover a series of personal skills.
Pupils would no longer study history, geography and science but learn skills such as energy- saving and civic responsibility through projects and themes.
He will outline his theories at a conference today staged by London's Institute of Education - to which he is affiliated - to mark the 20th anniversary of the national curriculum.
Last night, critics attacked his ideas as "deeply corrosive" and condemned the Government for allowing him to advise on a new curriculum.
Professor White will claim ministers are already "moving in the right direction" towards realising his vision of replacing subjects with a series of personal aims for pupils.
But he says they must go further because traditional subjects were invented by the middle classes and are "mere stepping stones to wealth".

Not everybody is happy with the ed prof's prescriptions:

Tory schools spokesman Nick Gibb said Professor White's view was "deeply corrosive". He added: "In the world we are living in, we need people who are better educated, not more poorly educated, more knowledgeable about the world, not less so.
"This anti-knowledge, anti-subject ideology is deeply damaging to our education system. It is this sort of thinking that has led to the promotion of discredited reading methods, the erosion of three separate sciences and the decline of mathematics skills.
"I just find it astonishing that someone with his extreme views has been allowed to advise the Government on education policy."

Via Joanne Jacobs.

Picture this

2008-04-28T22:22:00.006-05:00

Whole language mother teaches phonics kid how to read.

[Click to enlarge]

As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. In this case, a cartoon is worth a thousand disquisitions.

Hat tip to Language Log which has a good discussion of whole language, the Lysenkoism of reading instruction.

Connecting the dots without the dots

2008-03-02T13:37:00.005-06:00

A reader of Bridging Differences asks:

"Instructivist v constructivist? Can there be some common ground between the two?"

There is common ground by implication if you listen to constructivist rhetoric as in the excerpt below from the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD). For example, both schools of thought believe in asking students probing questions and in pressing them to explain their thinking. It only seems there is a gulf because all too often constructivists give the impression they invented asking students probing questions and pressing them to explain their thinking. For all I know, constructivists also claim they invented the recipe for apple pie.

Among the differences I can see is the role of the teacher. In addition to being an active listener and a coordinator and a manager and a facilitator, instructivists also want teachers to give explicit instruction.

From ASCD:
[What is the teacher's role in the constructivist classroom?
Narrator: A constructivist approach requires more of students—and teachers as well.

In addition to providing information, teachers must probe students' understandings, paying close attention to what they say and think and valuing their points of view. Teachers circulate more, talk more with students, asking them probing questions, pressing them to explain their thinking, encouraging them to draw conclusions.

Jacqueline Grennon Brooks: The teacher has a very proactive role. The teacher has a very intellectually rigorous role. The teacher has the role of being an active listener and a coordinator and a manager and a facilitator all at the same time. Because, while listening to what people are telling him or her, the teacher is formulating a plan of action.]

What is still shrouded in mystery as far as I am concerned is this whole issue of constructing knowledge rather than receiving it from others, e.g. from teachers and textbooks. What are the sources of external input if textbooks and explicit teacher instruction are out? It’s easy to proclaim that students learn best when they gain knowledge through exploration and active learning. But how does that work specifically in the various disciplines? OK, I can explore circles and pi, but how will I learn world history or geography or languages with hands-on materials instead of textbooks? How will I explain my reasoning, if I am not supposed to commit knowledge to memory? And why is reading a book or listening to the teacher and trying to understand the materials not active learning? What is learning if not something committed to memory? Why do constructivists disparagingly characterize a demonstration of learning residing in memory (where else would it reside?) as "regurgitation"?

Again from ASCD:
[The Definition of Constructivism
Constructivism is an approach to teaching based on research about how people learn. Many researchers say that each individual constructs knowledge rather than receiving it from others.

Although people disagree about how to achieve constructive learning, constructive teaching is based on the belief that students learn best when they gain knowledge through exploration and active learning. Hands-on materials are used instead of textbooks, and students are encouraged to think and explain their reasoning instead of memorizing and reciting facts. Education is centered on themes and concepts and the connections between them, rather than isolated information.]

Constructivists rail against committing factual knowledge to memory but are all for making connections. It's like trying to connect the dots without the dots.

Fire rainbow

2008-03-02T12:26:00.001-06:00

A rare event of nature.

No connectedness without discrete skills

2008-02-21T22:28:00.003-06:00

A mathematician once said that math was "a seamless whole" inside her head.

I don't know if this ties in with the idea of a seamless whole, but it has occurred to me that discrete skills are needed first before one can appreciate the connectedness of math. Without these discrete skills, math is more like a seamless black hole.

This became apparent to me again while teaching a group of seventh and eighth graders brought up on EM and currently using CMP who are a tabula rasa when it comes to the simplest bits of math knowledge. They can't do any operations with fractions (e.g. change mixed numbers to improper fractions let alone addition and division), can't divide decimals, don't have knowledge of even rudimentary geometry... One wonders what they have been doing for seven and eight years.

The seventh graders are currently in the CMP stretching and shrinking stage. Their homework consisted of finding the scale factor of two rectangles the width of which goes from 1.5 cm to 3 cm. So the idea was to divide 3 by 1.5 (they can't do it because they can't divide decimals). When I tried to show an alternative way of division using fractions to demonstrate the connectedness of math (seamless whole), I ran into trouble, too. They don't have the discrete skills of seeing 1.5 as 1 1/2, then changing this mixed number to 3/2 and dividing 3 by 3/2 (they absolutely can't divide fractions and moreover don't see 3 as 3/1. It would have been spectacular to make them experience with understanding that the more complicated decimal division problem 3/1.5 virtually solves itself when you divide the respective fractions (3 divided by 3/2). Invert and multiply but they have never heard of reciprocals and how they work. The 3 cancels and 2 is left standing without much ado!

So the upshot is: they use Connected Mathematics but can't see the connectedness of math because they don't have discrete skills (skills they could have learned through drill and kill but haven't). So to them, math is a seamless black hole from which not even light can escape.

Explicit and interactive math teaching

2008-02-21T21:39:00.005-06:00

I came across comments made by Lee Stiff, past president of NCTM on how math used to be taught.

STIFF: Parents are upset because, when they visit classrooms, they see activities that they're not used to. When they were students in school, they probably sat in rows neatly lined up, and the teacher just talked and talked and they used paper and pencil, and that's how they learned their mathematics.

When they see students engaged and talking with one another, when they see teachers allowing students to question and think thoroughly about the mathematics and the relationships, they wonder if the basics are going to be achieved. But the test results show that they are, their students are learning the basics.

It seems to me that keeping this caricature of traditional math teaching alive plays a vital role in perpetuating fuzzy math. By setting up a false dichotomy, the caricature provides the rationale without which the fuzzy project would collapse.

The scenario described by Stiff sounds more like an idee fixe, a hallucination or just a plain lie. What teacher would teach math without encouraging student participation through questions and having students work problems or come to the board?

Recently, I achieved amazing success with a small group of usually refractory and definitely lagging 7th and 8th graders through a combination of direct instruction and the Socratic method. The problem I put on the board was a circle inscribed in a square, one of my favorite mini think problems (an alternative is two circles in a rectangle). The task was to calculate the area not covered by the circle. Only the measure for a side of the square was given. The creative jump was to see that subtracting the circle area from the square area would get to the answer and that the known length of the side of the square would reveal the radius of the circle.

It was amazing to see that with a little bit of prodding and filling knowledge gaps the students actually got the answer with FULL UNDERSTANDING.

SAT brain teaser:

To make an orange dye, 3 parts of red dye are mixed with 2 parts of yellow dye. To make a green dye, 2 parts of blue dye are mixed with 1 part of yellow dye. If equal amounts of green and orange are mixed, what is the proportion of yellow dye in the new mixture?

Lift all boats

2008-02-21T16:15:00.002-06:00

Education Week reports on a new study that shows that smaller classes don't help close the achievement gap.

Class-Size Reduction of Limited Value on Achievement Gap, Study Finds

Reducing class sizes—a popular policy among parents, teachers, and lawmakers—has long been viewed as a way to increase student achievement.
But while shrinking the number of students in a class can lead to higher test scores overall, it might not necessarily reduce the achievement gaps that exist between students in a given classroom, a new study suggests.
Reviewing data from Project STAR—a longitudinal research study on class-size reduction in Tennessee and the most famous experiment on the topic—Spyros Konstantopoulos, an assistant professor of education and social policy at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Ill., said that it’s a “tempting” idea to think that having fewer students assigned to a teacher will reduce the achievement gaps between students.
Instead, he found, “manipulating class size” doesn’t appear to narrow those gaps. In fact, the range from the lowest achievers to the highest achievers—what he calls “variability”—was greater in the smaller classes of 13 to 17 children than it was in larger classes of 22 to 26 students. He came to that conclusion after looking at the performance of all students in the STAR study, as measured by the Stanford Achievement Test.
“In the present study, I found that high achievers benefit more from being in small classes than low achievers,” Mr. Konstantopoulos said in an e-mail. “This indicates that the achievement gap is larger in small classes than in regular-size classes.”
He suggests in the article, which is being published in the March issue of Elementary School Journal, that the higher achievers, perhaps, are better at taking “advantage of the opportunities or teacher practices that take place in small classes.”

It's probably true that high achievers would benefit more from such a setting. But why fret over gaps if both high and low achievers benefit from smaller classes? Just not at the same rate.

Student body reform

2008-02-10T16:22:00.000-06:00

A grand experiment spearheaded and financed by Bill Gates aimed at reforming high schools in Chicago has suffered a setback. In addition to the ongoing high school transformation, Gates' other big idea is to smash high schools into smaller pieces, part of the so-called small-schools movement.

A high school in a tough neighborhood was turned into small schools six years ago. Performance continued to be dismal. Now, the idea is to put the pieces back together again. Oh, and don't forget to fire all the teachers in another merry-go-round.

See this Chicago Tribune article:

Chicago Public Schools to fire hundreds at 8 under-performing schools -- 200 teachers, 7 principals face ax after years of poor performance

Beginning in 2002, Orr was broken up into three small schools -- Vines Preparatory Academy, the Applied Arts Science and Technology Academy, and EXCEL-Orr Academy -- which were supposed to improve performance both through their scale and through curriculum specialties.

[snip]

Under the plan, Orr would be re-created as a single school, a teacher-training academy. It would be operated, along with its feeder elementary schools, by the Academy for Urban School Leadership, the non-profit teacher preparation and school management organization that runs Sherman.

Panacea after panacea has been tried with this school. What hasn't been tried is student body reform.

Biofuels not "green"

2008-02-08T13:47:00.000-06:00

The New York Times reports on scientific studies that show that biofuels are not the vaunted "green" fuel many believed it to be. The findings makes sense. Insatiable demand for fuel will necessarily lead to the destruction of natural habitats when the fuel comes from plants.

UPDATE: concernedctparent called my attention to this great article in National Geographic on the subject.

Navigating ed school

2008-01-30T01:15:00.000-06:00

A reader asked me how I was able to navigate ed school considering the dominance of the constructivist creed and my instructivist views. I tried to voice my criticisms in my papers and discussions without being overly abrasive, and was able to get through the experience. It also helps to pay some lip service to the creed.

I am posting here my teaching philosophy that I wrote at the time. Writing a teaching philosophy was a requirement. The paper is an illustration of my approach. It was a time full of optimism, as yet unmarred by the reality of the classroom. If ed school had concentrated less on theory and more on what's actually going on in an inner city classroom, it could have had some value.

My Teaching Philosophy

My fundamental belief as a prospective teacher is that learning need not be drudgery. As a teacher I would like to inspire my pupils to see learning and the discovery of new things as a joyous activity. Teaching is as much a science as an art. An effective teacher must not only master the subject matter he/she is teaching and be conversant with educational psychology and the latest learning theories, but must also inspire through strength of personality. Having a good sense of humor, a well-modulated voice and some acting ability is a conditio sine qua non for an effective teacher. A good and effective teacher must also teach how to think critically and how to discover connections. Facts in isolation are useless and easily forgotten. They become meaningful when placed in context with the proper background to fit into a framework or a whole.

In my view an effective teacher must choose the best methods and techniques traditional and innovative approaches to teaching have to offer. An effective teacher must be an open-minded hybrid guided by constant reality checks. An enthusiasm for innovative approaches must not displace the ability to learn from experience. An effective teacher must be armed with the analytical skills to make him/her an intelligent consumer of research and practitioner of educational theories. All too often educational theories are misunderstood and become a travesty of the original intent. Some of these misunderstood or misapplied notions, techniques and theories are developmentalism, child-centered education, constructivism and multiple intelligences.

Developmentalism is a romantic view of the child best illustrated in Rousseau's Emile. Rousseau sees the child as natural and good. The child must be shielded from the corrupting influence of the adult world. This view creates a dichotomy between what is "natural" (and therefore good) and the accomplishments of civilization that could include book learning that are regarded as artificial. The child must follow his natural inclinations and discover the world for himself at his own pace. All too often that inclination doesn't materialize and the child falls behind in academic achievement. Closely related to this romantic view of the child is the notion of developmentally appropriate instruction. While sensible on its face, the danger of this notion is that it can easily slide into low expectations. Low expectations are particularly harmful to disadvantaged children and tend to reinforce the status quo and perpetuate the stratification of society. Parents enjoying a high socioeconomic status can always hire a tutor for their offspring if schooling fails.

Constructivism is based on the belief that students learn best when they construct their own knowledge. Students are not passive vessels to be filled but must be active participants to retain and integrate knowledge. This insight derived from memory research is often misunderstood to mean that students should not have external input and be the beneficiaries of knowledge accumulated over thousands of years; that they must reinvent the wheel so to speak. This particular form of constructivism that privileges and finds expression in discovery learning disregards the fact that all learning activity, including listening to expository instruction, is constructivist, i.e. requires active engagement.

Misunderstandings of a similar nature apply to Gardner's multiple intelligences. By labeling skills, abilities, aptitudes and talents "intelligences," Gardner managed to create great excitement among educators who suddenly saw a way to spread the aura and prestige of "intelligence" to hitherto undreamed of areas. Thus hopping around and being a good gossip became forms of intelligence. Moreover, educators felt the need to wrap the many forms of intelligence around a specific educational task like teaching fractions, in order to stimulate each individual intelligence. Cognitive scientists have shown that children learn best when subjects are taught in the content's best modality.

It is important to keep in mind as a teacher that teaching is a great responsibility. It is a responsibility to the pupils, to the parents and to the citizenry that makes enormous financial sacrifices in the form of taxes. All too often, teachers and the educational establishment feel that they have complete license to indulge in wild experimentation with untested and unproven theories that waste the pupils' time, and then feel resentful if they are held accountable. Often these theories are proven failures but are adhered to in quasi-religious fashion. After all, religion is usually impervious to experience and evidence.

It is a responsibility to the pupils since after all they are the primary beneficiaries of education. At the lower levels, education must ensure that the pupils are proficient in reading, writing and arithmetic. These skills are fundamental to enable the pupils to succeed as they continue through elementary and secondary schools and later on through college. Too many entering college students lack basic writing skills and must spend time in remedial education. Even remedial education is often unable to correct deficiencies and ingrained bad habits.

Basic writing skills include the ability to spell correctly, the use of proper grammar, the use of punctuation marks in a logical fashion and the ability to write coherent sentences. It is also crucial that pupils learn how to identify parts of speech. Many spelling mistakes are due to the inability to distinguish between a verb and a noun, i.e. make up and makeup. Common mistakes like a confusion between "your" and "you're," "its" and "it's" are due to ignorance about basic grammar. Other examples are "there," "their" and "they're." It is shameful that students spend twelve years in school without mastering such a simple task. It would be a tiny part of my teaching philosophy to make sure that these simple tasks are mastered.

Another grave concern of mine is the de-emphasis of history and geography in the curriculum. As a result of curricular reform in the beginning decades of the 20th century spearheaded by such luminaries as Harold O. Rugg, history and geography became subsumed under the nebulous category of social studies. The danger of not specifically naming subject areas such as history and geography in the curriculum is that these subjects might then very well receive only a fragmentary and cursory treatment as evidenced by widespread ignorance in these areas. For example, many high school graduates believe Austria is Australia and are baffled when shown a map and asked to identify countries.

Much can be learned from educational psychology. For example, it has been shown that relevant prior knowledge is indispensable for learning new material (Beck et al., 1991). Often students lack useful background knowledge to understand text that takes this background knowledge for granted. A good teacher must be aware of this lack of background knowledge. Extraordinary insights can be gained from experiences with artificial intelligence and even computer programs designed to translate from one language to another. For example, one AI program started to build a small tower in mid air because it lacked the real-world knowledge of gravity. Computer translation programs cannot grasp textual and extra-textual context to evaluate and interpret the meaning of words to make sound judgments.

In math instruction, educational psychology has shown that a number sense and the concept of the mental number line are an indispensable prerequisite for math learning (Case & Okamoto, 1996). Teachers must be familiar with effective ways employed to correct such deficiencies.

The teaching profession is an exciting field for anyone who enjoys learning and has the capacity to inspire students to experience and share this enjoyment. Education is not only important to economic survival but it also immensely enriching.

Closing the gap

2008-01-27T21:18:00.000-06:00

Two giants of education with differing views, Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch, are having an amicable conversation in search of common ground, and in the process are covering a lot of ground. It's all happening in a blog aptly titled Bridging Differences.

I am not totally convinced that finding common ground is always desirable. Yes, it sounds good. Maybe something positive comes out of it. However, there is the danger of moving away from one's sound position in order to bridge the gap.

The blog is open for comments. I took the opportunity to counter views that seem mistaken to me. Here are my most recent comments:

"The only way to counter the “testing and accountability” movement (which has failed miserably at improving our students’ learning)..."

You are a victim of a common confusion. Testing is the messenger who brings news of the state of learning. All that testing does it tell educationists that they have or have not succeeded in what they are supposed to do.

A thermometer analogy will immediately reveal the fallaciousness of your statement. Visualize an outdoor thermometer that shows the temperature to be five below zero and then imagine someone cursing that the thermometer has failed to raise the temperature to a cozy 75 degrees.

Posted by: instructivist January 27, 2008 9:53 PM

"Kids born to white-collar parents attend schools where—hey—if you can’t answer the lower-order questions, but are successful when answering questions that call for synthesis, comparison, etc., you’re creative and gifted!"

Don't worry about the white-collar parents' kids supposed ability to do synthesis and comparison. They can't synthesize and compare if there is nothing to synthesize and compare. The Bloom levels are inextricably linked. One level can't happen without the preceding level. You need ingredients to bake. You erroneously assume white-collar parents' kids can bake with thin air.

Posted by: instructivist January 27, 2008 10:07 PM

TERC -- Parents rebel

2008-01-24T12:35:00.000-06:00

Another parent group is formed to fight the fuzzy math plague. The fuzzy math program the parents are fighting is TERC (also known as Investigations).

What would it take to send those responsible for introducing these dubious programs packing?

The group's name is Teach Math Right

The pits

2008-01-21T16:13:00.000-06:00

Depressing pictures of the book depository for Detroit schools.

(via Joanne Jacobs)

Gates wrecking ball

2008-01-21T14:03:00.001-06:00

Propelled by Gates millions, Chicago's high schools are being transformed to conform to progressive/constructivist visions to save the disadvantaged. The transformation is a fantasy that will not save the disadvantaged. It will make them even more disadvantaged. The visions being implemented on a wholesale basis rest on misdiagnoses of the reasons for academic failings. The seeds for failure are planted in elementary and middle schools. What is needed is quality education and rigor in the grades preceding high school.

With respect to science education, Catherine Johnson of KTM observed: "I do recall David Klein once telling me that the situation in science is even worse than the situation in math." I am reproducing my response here:

The situation in science is indeed dismal. Here in Chicago, constructivist ways in science called inquiry (FOSS, STC, IES, SALI, IEY) are largely the norm up to eighth grade, especially in failing schools (most of them). The educationist motto seems to be: If poison makes them sick, give them more poison.

You can also tell something is fishy when acronyms proliferate (alphabet soup proliferation). For example, science for 8th grade is IEY which stands for Issues, Evidence and You.

The HUGE SCANDAL in my view is that most high schools here in Chicago are being converted to constructivism (inquiry). It's a Gates idea called high school transformation. Gates dangled millions in front of the mayor and board who immediately jumped. A Gates agent was made executive director of the transformation project. That means academic textbooks go in the garbage and community projects are the new forms of learning science.

This scandal is taking place unnoticed by the local media. It raises the question whether one wealthy individual should be allowed to implement his fantasy and wreck high schools which after all are public entities. Resistance from school administrators and teachers is ignored. The transformation is imposed from above by fiat.

Schools can select from two or three virtually identical inquiry programs the way the politburo used to put up two or three apparatchiks as the only choice in an election. Even that pseudo choice is constrained in some cases. Now I hear that the board abolished earth science as a graduation requirement to accomodate the Gates fantasy. Two of the three pseudo choices don't even have earth science.

I wrote a comment I posted on the district299 blog that deals with Chicago ed issues. I reproduce it here (note what is in store for high school math):

The whole high-school transformation project looks like a stealth operation, really a coup. There is no HST website, no transparency. The HST office is unable to provide information on newly targeted high schools. The only (spotty) information is through the grapevine.

The project pretends to be democratic, but it is a sham. Schools can volunteer the way the Chinese Communists can produce "volunteers" en masse. It's also unclear what the total number of targeted HS is. A CPS document I have talks about three waves of 14, 15 and 20 schools respectively, making it a total of 49 HS. Other sources put the number higher.

Then there is the question of effectiveness. Will the new nostrums really improve academic achievement? Alexander Russo asks the perfect question: "Are things any better at the schools that started doing HST a couple of years ago?" There should already be evidence showing whether the nostrums are working. Why is that evidence or lack of evidence not discussed? It would have been prudent to run pilots before embarking on wholesale, highly questionable transformation. I can only conclude it wasn't done because it would interfere with putting this fantasy in place. Hence the pseudo-democratic stealth operation.

Targeted schools get to choose one of two or three IDSs. IDS stands for Instructional Development System and incorporates six "change levers" (note the nebulous, new-age lingo). IDSs are the heart of the nostrum and are described as the pillars of the core instructional strategy. The actual IDSs are simply progressive/constructivist, mainly NSF-supported, tracts that are trying to do to HS what's been done to elementary and middle schools with disastrous results.

The IDS choices in math are Agile Mind and Cognitive Tutor. In science there are three pseudo-choices: Inquiry to Build Content, Content to Build Inquiry and Meaningful Science through Inquiry. These are vastly stripped of content but they say they make up for this lack of content by motivating students to go deep. The motivation is said to come from touching the lives of students.

Content can take a back seat since according to the "Foundational principles for IDS instruction" the goal is inquiry and engaged learning. Here the "principle" says: "Focus is on problem solving, reasoning, critical thinking. Students seek their own knowledge, formulate arguments. Activities should maximize connection to student lives." How much critical thinking can go on without much to think about is anybody's guess.

My view is that the HST project is another instance of barking up the wrong tree. A lot of the disadvantaged coming from the elementary and middle grades are disastrously ill-prepared for HS. As a middle grades teacher I see these horrific deficiencies all the time. Those concerned with the success of the disadvantaged need to focus on what comes before high school.

Deconstructing constructivism

2008-01-19T15:44:00.000-06:00

Most prospective teachers seeking certification must go through education schools where they get bombarded with the rhetoric of progressive/constructivist education, the dominant ed school ideology. Here is an antidote to this mind-numbing assault written by Martin Kozloff (a/k/a Prof. Plum), an education professor who is in a distinct minority. In his inimitable way, Prof. Plum deconstructs ed school piffle point by point in Fads and Flapdoodle vs. Serious Instruction.

Here a few excerpts:

Fads and Flapdoodle

The nonsense below has for about 100 years been foisted on gullible education students and public schools by the dominant education establishment, run by so-called “progressive” educators in ed schools, state departments of public instruction, curriculum organizations (such as International Reading Association, National Council for Teachers of English), organizations that certify ed schools (National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education), and unions (National Education Association).

No Fads. Serious Instruction.

The tested, true, and effective ideas, below, are the minority position in the field of education, and are advocated by the so-called anti-establishment, which supports traditional forms of instruction guided by scientific research.

If you believe and act on the following tested and valid ideas, you’ll be on the road to Master Teacher; and you’ll be a blessing to your students.

2. “Education theorists---Piaget, Vygotsky, Dewey, Gardner---provide useful information on how to teach.”

2. Education theorists---Piaget, Vygotsky, Dewey, Gardner---provide next to NOTHING useful on how to teach.

Their ideas are vague (it’s not clear what you’re supposed to do), over-generalized (don’t apply to your students), plain wrong, or totally insane.

“What would Dewey do?”

Who cares?

3. “Be guided by the following ideas: child-centered and student-centered, holistic, natural, authentic, learning styles, multiple intelligence, brain-based instruction, developmentally appropriate practices, best practices, etc.”

3. DO NOT be guided by these ideas. These ideas are LOONEY. They’re one step away from psychotic. In any other field they’d be considered fraud.

[See number 2 at the end.]

• There is NO scientific research to support them.
• They will be NO help at all to you.
• These ideas reflect the preferences of education professors---not science, not reality.
• The more you use these terms, the dumber and you get and the less effectively you teach.

b. “Instruction should be holistic. For example, you should teach spelling, reading, and writing at the same time.”

b. The word “holistic” is new-age mind slop. Like “holistic healing.”

• Complex skills DO consist of simpler skill elements. It’s essential that students learn these first.
• You can’t solve math word problems if you don’t know the basic math operations, such as addition and multiplication.
• You can’t write or spell if you can’t read words. So, what should you teach first?

g. “You can’t transmit knowledge. Students must construct knowledge. Therefore, most learning and instruction should be in the form of inquiry and discovery.”

g. “The battles at Lexington and Concord were on April 18, 1775.”

• I believe I just transmitted knowledge.

• Persons who talk about students constructing knowledge have no idea what this even means. Are they mind readers?

• The SANE way to look at learning is this: Teachers present examples and students induce (figure out) the general idea (concept, rule, routine) that is revealed by the examples. Teachers can also TELL students a concept, rule, or routine, and then substantiate this with examples.

• There’s a lot of research showing that students learn MORE and learn faster when the teacher teaches in an explicit and direct way, rather than when students try to discover knowledge.

• What does it even mean---discover knowledge?

“Hey, guys, I discovered reading!!”

• Discovery and inquiry are the worst possible ways to teach essential skills (reading, math) to disadvantaged students.

Constructing misconceptions

2008-01-17T22:50:00.000-06:00

A core tenet of the progressive/constructivist education creed is that students must construct their own knowledge. For this reason, according to the creed, teachers should not impart knowledge or provide explicit instruction. A teacher should merely be a guide on the side instead of a sage on the stage, as the rhyming slogans of the creed have it.

I was recently watching a video called A Private Universe produced by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics two decades ago that casts doubt on the wisdom of the knowledge construction dogma. The video shows students who were asked to explain what causes the seasons and the phases of the moon. From Harvard graduates to bright freshman, the explanations were all wrong. In other words, all these students were laboring under misconceptions.

The lesson here is that constructing one's own knowledge in areas like science has a great potential of leading to false beliefs. Many of these students probably had received explicit instruction from knowledgeable teachers and yet tenaciously persisted in constructing their own false knowledge. The way to correct these misconceptions cannot possibly be more construction of one's own knowledge as mandated by the creed, but teacher-centered ongoing diagnoses of the many misconceptions and heavy doses of explicit instruction with constant student feedback.

Here is how the producers describe the video:

With its famous opening scene at a Harvard graduation, this classic of education research brings into sharp focus the dilemma facing all educators: Why don’t even the brightest students truly grasp basic science concepts? This award-winning program traces the problem through interviews with Harvard graduates and their professors, as well as with a bright ninth-grader who has some confused ideas about the orbits of the planets. Equally useful for education methods classes, teacher workshops, and presentations to the public, A Private Universe is an essential resource for science and methodology teachers.

Edubabble fluency

2008-01-11T15:01:00.000-06:00

When even ed schools like Appalachian State’s ed school are fluent in edubabble, then you know "progressive" education has arrived.

From Teaching Teachers How Not to Teach -- Do our schools of education really do good a job of training teachers?

One sign of that contagion is the mission statements and “conceptual frameworks” of the education schools in the state. Read them and you’ll see that progressive theory controls. At Appalachian State’s Reich School of Education, for instance, the conceptual framework says:

"We believe that theory should guide practice in all aspects of our work. While we use a variety of theoretical perspectives in the preparation of educators, socio-cultural and constructivist perspectives … are central to guiding our teaching and learning. Our core conceptualization of learning and knowing – that learning is a function of the social and cultural contexts in which it occurs (i.e., it is situated) and that knowledge is actively constructed – emerges from the intersection of these two perspectives."

Old new-fangled skills

2008-01-02T16:22:00.000-06:00

An organization dedicated to "infusing 21st century skills into education" commissioned a poll that had the vast majority of voters clamoring for supposedly new-fangled skills:

The national poll was conducted by Public Opinion Strategies and Peter D. Hart Research Associates on behalf of the Partnership for 21stCentury Skills.
Among the other key findings:

• Eighty-eight percent of voters say they believe that schools can and should incorporate 21st century skills such as critical thinking and problem-solving skills, computer and technology skills, and communication and self-direction skills into their curriculum.

I could swear I heard these skills, particularly critical thinking and problem-solving skills, being bandied about for the better part of the 20th century, which led me to believe they are 20th century skills. Apparently, I was in error.

An ode to progressive education.

2008-01-02T14:02:00.001-06:00

Who can compete with all that fun as educators prepare the young for their world? See the kiddies happily dancing into the world of tomorrow. However, how sawing wood and pushing toy trucks around can help you learn math or history is not explained.

Meet Kilpatrick, Bagley (a critic of progressive education) and Dewey himself. I think this video is from the 40s.

Teachers speak out on NCLB

2008-01-02T13:36:00.000-06:00

In this report by John Merrow of PBS, celebrated teachers speak out against NCLB. The criticisms range from unrealistic expectations to the narrowness of tests. The thrust of the opposition to tests seems to be that the students have amazing abilities that are not captured by the tests. So what if students fail to demonstrate minimal proficiency. There are always these ineffable amazing abilities.

I also like one teacher's plaint that instead of asking for right answers we should ask students to think. Yeah, those false dichotomies again that seem to be an educationist staple. Isn't it possible that thinking could lead to the right answers or that asking for correct answers can stimulate thinking? Of course, this question is purely rhetorical.

Click on "Watch this program online now" at the Merrow Report page to see the video clip.

Decentering Earth

2007-12-26T13:59:00.000-06:00

Poor Earth!

First it was knocked out of its central location by Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo et al. Now (relatively speaking) comes a popular text called Astronomy Today (Chaisson) that denies its many, probably unique, splendors.

1.1 Our Place in Space

Of all the scientific insights attained to date, one stands out boldly: Earth is neither central nor special. We inhabit no unique place in the universe. Astronomical research, especially within the past few decades, strongly suggests that we live on what seems to be an ordinary rocky planet called Earth, one of nine known planets orbiting an average star called the Sun, a star near the edge of a huge collection of stars called the Milky Way Galaxy, which is one galaxy among countless billions of others spread throughout the observable universe.

But is this true? Is Earth really just an "ordinary rocky planet"? I can think of a number of things that make Earth special. For one thing, amazing luck places it at a distance from the Sun that makes it habitable. The infamous greenhouse effect makes it hospitable and cozy, thanks primarily to water vapor, by far the most important greenhouse gas.* Earth has vast oceans that moderate temperature fluctuations. Goldilock would approve. It has fresh water. It has an atmosphere, and a benign one to boot. Not the poisonous brew of Venus. It has just the right tilt of its axis, held stable by a moon, that gives us our glorious seasons. I mean, its axis could be lying flat on its back like that of Uranus. And we might have 25 years of darkness, alternating with 25 years of relentless sunshine if Earth were Uranus.

*I avoid boiling water to reduce my water vapor footprint.

Gifted drop dead

2007-12-24T17:11:00.000-06:00

It is shameful that educationists care so little for the needs of gifted students. The egalitarian dogma and the quest for mediocrity are more important than the well-being and the development of the potential of those unfortunate enough to have been born with above-average abilities:

In many Delaware districts, the gifted are left behind
State offers no funding to teach brightest students
They are bored -- so much so that they may not pay attention in class or will act out in frustration.
Some make poor grades, either because they no longer care or because they have spent so many of their younger years unchallenged that when they suddenly face a rigorous course in middle or high school, they don't know how to study.
They are the nation's gifted children, those with abilities beyond other children their age. Too many of their abilities, advocates argue, remain untapped by U.S. schools that don't serve them as they focus instead on lifting low-achieving students to meet the goals of the federal No Child Left Behind law.
Statistically, 20 percent of U.S. school dropouts test in the gifted range, said Jill Adrian, director of family services at the Davidson Institute for Talent Development, a nonprofit founded by philanthropists Bob and Jan Davidson out of a concern that the nation's most gifted and talented children largely are neglected and underserved.

Then there is the loss to the nation from wasted talent.

Starved for money

2007-12-23T15:28:00.000-06:00

If you listen to Kozol of the land of Kozolnistan, schools are starved for money. On the other hand, money can flow quite freely as this extraordinary report in the Washington Post about D.C.'s school practices shows. It relates how a teacher on the verge of retirement founded an institute to promote Lucy Calkins' dubious theories, instantly got $2.9 million from the school system without a contract, and promptly gave herself a salary of $150,000 among other hugely wasteful activities. All out of love for children:

In spring 2005, Ford said, she was looking for ways to remain active in education after her retirement, scheduled for that summer. Ford said she, Kelly and two other women who had worked at Horace Mann decided to create a nonprofit group to spread enthusiasm for literacy training across D.C. schools. They incorporated the institute March 25 that year, and Ford became president and executive director. Her compensation, which started four months later, is listed as $150,000.
"It was a spontaneous initiative by four of us," Ford said. "We saw this as a huge moral obligation."

Calkins is the draw:

After receiving its funding, the Teachers Institute quickly sent a group of assistant superintendents to New York for training. In the years since, it has sent teachers to visit Calkins's programs and brought staff members from the program to visit District schools. It holds three-day training sessions and monthly study meetings for teachers and principals.
The group has purchased thousands of children's books and provided schools with rugs for children to curl up on while reading.

More waste:

In September 2006, Kelly said, the institute rented a warehouse to store a "vast quantity" of excess books, supplies and electronics that the organization had bought with public funds and whose value Kelly estimated at $100,000.

[snip]

An Internal Revenue Service filing shows that, for the year that ended in June, the organization spent more than $1 million on "professional development." Over two years, the institute reported spending $244,000 on computers and software, $357,000 on travel and $1.1 million on printing and publications.
In an initial interview, Ford estimated that the institute had 16 employees. Later, she said the number was actually two, explaining that the rest of her staff members were public school teachers detailed to assist the institute.
When The Washington Post questioned an IRS filing by the institute showing that it had spent $94,000 on the unpaid board of directors, an outside accountant for the group determined the number to be a mistake. The accountant, John T. Squire, said the group will file a corrected report to the IRS.
Ford referred many questions about spending and bookkeeping issues to her outside accountants, saying she prefers to keep her focus on the programs aimed at children. Time spent answering questions about finances, she said, detracts from the push to improve reading and writing.
"It is really hard to be diverted from the mission," Ford said. "The kids in the city are running out of time. I just want to do the work."

The kids are running out of time. They desperately need to be saved by Calkins.

Three cheers for Google

2007-11-28T12:16:00.000-06:00

Google is pouring its massive resources into developing alternative energy sources:

SAN FRANCISCO - Google Inc. is expanding into alternative energy in its most ambitious effort yet to ease the environmental strain caused by the company's voracious appetite for power to run its massive computing centers.

As part of a project announced Tuesday, the Internet search leader and its philanthropic arm will pour hundreds of millions of dollars into a quest to lower the cost of producing electricity from renewable energy sources such as wind and the sun.

I wish big-money boy Gates would follow suit and get out of the education business, instead of using his billions as a wrecking ball on high schools.

Right to an audience

2007-11-21T21:40:00.000-06:00

This is rich!

Alfie thinks he has a right to be heard at taxpayer's expense.

Alfie Kohn Settles Suit
By The Associated Press

BOSTON
The state Department of Education acknowledged Monday it violated the free speech rights of a standardized test critic and agreed to pay him $187,000 to settle his lawsuit over being dumped as a speaker at a state-run conference.

Alfie Kohn, a former teacher who lectures widely, was asked to discuss his views on standardized tests, including the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment Systems test, at a 2001 conference on public schooling in the state's western region.

Kohn said state education officials, after learning he planned to focus on his opposition to the MCAS, forced local organizers to cancel his speech after threatening to withdraw $28,000 in state funding. His lawsuit alleged that state officials violated his rights and kept others from hearing his views.

In a statement Monday, the education department acknowledged it had violated Kohn's First Amendment rights [Emphasis added]. In a letter written as part of the settlement, the department said its position "is that vigorous debate about education issues is healthy and welcome."

The suit was filed by the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Kohn, a school principal, a counselor and a parent. In the settlement, Kohn will receive $7,500 and his attorneys will get $179,500, the ACLU said.

This could be a precedent for a new get-rich-quick scheme. Demand an audience at taxpayer's expense. If denied, claim huge damages.

My understanding of the 1st amendment is that the state cannot deny your right to free speech (except for yelling fire in the wrong places, etc.), but you have no right to an audience. This case is a scandal. Shame on the education department for squandering public funds.

Radical transformation of high schools flying under the radar

2007-11-16T21:24:00.000-06:00

Going largely unnoticed by major media, Gates billions are rapidly and radically transforming high schools and turning them into a homogenized monolith reminiscent of the Gleichschaltung of yore. This extraordinary transformation is driven by a nebulous creed called The 3Rs Solution that "education experts" see as a panacea to real, imagined and misdiagnosed problems:

The good news is we know how to fix our broken high schools. We must base them on a brand new set of 3Rs, identified by education experts as the key ingredients of an effective education:

Rigor: all students need the chance to succeed at challenging classes, such as algebra, writing, and chemistry

Relevance: courses and projects must spark student interest and relate clearly to their lives in today’s rapidly changing world

Relationships: all students need adult mentors who know them, look out for them, and push them to achieve

It's unclear what rigor refers to since schools are forced to choose from 2-3 packages heavy on constructivism (inquiry), the antithesis of rigor. Most likely, "rigor" is thrown in because it sounds good. Just like "excellence". Even the crappiest schools sing the praises of "excellence". It's also unclear what is relevant to today's students. Academic content apparently is not.

What is clear is that choice and content are radically reduced. For example here in Chicago (a major target of the Gates assault), the packages high schools are forced to choose do not contain Earth science, a subject an educated person should know something about. Electives are also flying out the window.

Investment to Transform 50 Chicago High Schools to Ensure Students are Prepared for Success

$21 Million Investment by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will Strengthen High School College Prep Curriculum and Instruction

When Gates says jump, our clueless mayor, who is running the schools, asks: How high? An astonishing feat considering the mayor's constitution.

Learning foreign languages early

2007-11-16T21:02:00.000-06:00

With all this globalization, it is remarkable that so few elementary schools teach foreign languages. Everyone knows that a language is best learned when young. A few districts are wising up as this NYT report shows.

English through Latin?

2007-11-15T22:22:00.000-06:00

In a superb post, rightwingprof takes issue with the suggestion by some that Latin should be taught to learn English grammar. RWP offers many powerful arguments, among them the obserbvation that English grammar is very different from Latin grammar. Why sweat through Latin to learn to distinguish between who and whom? The effort doesn't survive a cost-benefit analysis. I particularly like this analogy:

I’m not saying students shouldn’t study Latin — far from it. I am saying that students shouldn’t study Latin in order to learn about English. It’s like taking apart a jet engine in order to learn how to fix your car. Most of what you learn taking apart the jet engine doesn’t help you with your car engine.

So by all means, let's teach the correct usage of who and whom. And for good measure, let's work on combatting the horrendously ignorant use of "I" when "me" is called for, as in "between you and me" (not "I", aarrgh!). But we don't need the whole enchilada of Latin for that. Also, we don't need to study all of Latin in order to learn Latin plurals and know that the singular of bacteria is bacterium and that data is the plural of datum, or learn Greek to know that the singular of criteria is criterion and the singular of phenomena is phenomenon.

Sixth grade Singapore math

2007-10-31T13:00:00.000-05:00

Gotta chew on this one.

Sample questions from Singapore's PSLE examination. This examination is given to sixth graders who leave for secondary school. Apparently secondary school starts after sixth grade in Singapore. I can't imagine giving these types of questions to most sixth graders here. At least not at this point.

Apparently, this kind of proficiency can be achieved with Singapore's cheap math booklets.

It ain't the money, it's the quality of the curriculum and instruction.

No science

2007-10-28T13:05:00.000-05:00

When I read stories like this, Science courses nearly extinct in elementary grades, study finds I begin to wonder whether educationists will ever get their act together. What seems to be missing is the notion that the purpose of schools is to teach a few core subjects at a minimum. Science must definitely be part of that core:

The third-graders looked puzzled when asked what they liked best about science. No answer.
OK, then, next question: "What is science?" a visitor asked the children in a hallway at Bessie Carmichael Elementary School in San Francisco.
"Science is like art," said Manuel, 7, who let that cryptic response hang in the air as he ducked away.
He might have meant that both can open the heart to beauty. Or maybe he was saying that science, like art, is something students don't get much of these days in elementary school.
If it were the latter, a new survey of 923 Bay Area elementary school teachers would agree.
About 80 percent of those teachers said they spent less than an hour each week teaching science, according to researchers from the Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley and from WestEd, an education think tank based in San Francisco.
In contrast, a national study seven years ago found elementary school science instruction averaged more than two hours per week, said Rena Dorph, the lead researcher on the new study.
"It's alarming because it's a very short amount of time per week dedicated to a subject that's considered a core subject in schools," said Dorph, who is director of the Center for Research, Evaluation and Assessment at the Lawrence Hall of Science.
Understanding science helps children learn to think and solve problems while questioning the world around them, Dorph said.
There is also evidence that people who go into scientific fields generally learned to love science as children, she said.
And as a practical matter, colleges require applicants to have taken science in high school.
"And how are you going to understand high school science if you haven't had it before fifth grade?" Dorph asked.

Then there is the inevitable NCLB excuse:

"The demands of No Child Left Behind have made it almost impossible to devote enough time to science," said Melinda Dart, a fourth-grade teacher at Wilson Elementary School in Daly City's Jefferson Elementary District.

I thought NCLB now requires science teaching.

Part of the problem also seems to be poor teacher education:

-- Ten times as many teachers say they feel unprepared to teach science than feel unprepared to teach math or reading.

This points to a fundamental problem with ed schools. Ed schools don't value academic knowledge and thus elementary teacher training consists mostly of moronic activities devoid of academic content. Once upon a time, teacher training institutions (so-called normal schools) were responsible for both academic knowledge and pedagogy. Ed schools went off the deep end when academic knowledge was divorced from pedagogy and pedagogy floating in a vacuum became their only responsibility. Lacking a meaningful purpose, ed schools needed to find ways to kill time. Vapid courses and frantic, mostly trivial activities were the answer.

Herding cats

2007-10-13T11:04:00.000-05:00

Teaching is probably the only profession that is more rewarding and satisfying than herding cats.

Teaching in the inner city

2007-09-13T11:14:00.000-05:00

The Chicago Tribune went into a classroom for a year in an inner-city school to observe first hand the challenges faced by teachers. The result is a gripping three-part series: A TRIBUNE SPECIAL REPORT: THE TOUGHEST ASSIGNMENT

Discussions on teaching the disadvantaged usually focus on teachers and ignore the social ills that afflict the disadvantaged:

A TRIBUNE SPECIAL REPORT: THE TOUGHEST ASSIGNMENT
Part 1: They needed a lifeline and found a teacher
By Stephanie Banchero

Tribune staff reporter

September 1, 2007

At a school where every other reform had failed, Montie Apostolos was the last, best chance for students to succeed.

She had been brought in because she produced impressive gains in reading test scores at her last school. She was tough. Her lessons were rooted in the best research, and she was trained for inner-city schools.

She's an uncompromising, charismatic 56-year-old grandmother with an irresistible life story: She had fought off water cannons, attack dogs and white supremacists to get her own education in the segregated South. Nothing her students faced was going to surprise her.

But on a fall morning last year, at Sherman School of Excellence on Chicago's South Side, Apostolos' steely demeanor met its match.

A baby-faced 8th-grade boy stood at a lectern analyzing a poem. In a squeaky voice, he talked about feeling alone and neglected, like the narrator. And, matter-of-factly, he ticked off events that brought him there.

He had been taken away from his crack-addicted mother. His brother had been shot in the heart and head during a gang fight. His young cousin had died of neglect.

Apostolos suddenly realized what she had to overcome to reach her students. And in a rare unguarded moment, she hurried from the classroom, her eyes brimming with tears.

Apostolos and her class were at the leading edge of a historic experiment at the heart of the No Child Left Behind reforms. Sherman was the first school in Illinois—one a few dozen nationwide—in which the staff was completely overhauled according to federal law.

The perennially underperforming school had been closed in June 2006 after it failed to meet federal testing standards six years in a row. It reopened three months later under the management of Academy for Urban School Leadership, a nonprofit group that trains teachers. The academy ran five Chicago schools last year, and is set to open two more Tuesday.

The new management replaced the teachers with hand-picked, skilled educators such as Apostolos.

The stakes were high. Lawmakers debating the renewal of No Child Left Behind were looking for evidence that strong teaching could rescue schools impervious to other reforms.

As a new school year gets under way, the Tribune is examining the first year of Sherman's turnaround, as seen through the eyes of the teacher and studentsin Room 301.

Evidence from that year suggests that a strong and dedicated teacher, backed by a top-notch principal and high-quality professional development, did make a difference.

But the first year also showed that teaching in a low-income, inner-city school can grind down even the most energetic professional.

Apostolos struggled with the uneven academic progress of 34 students—children such as Kyesha Caver, a smart 13-year-old, far ahead of her classmates; Sarah Stevens, a C student who desperately wanted A's; and DJ, who could not focus because of a troubling secret he kept locked inside until he was arrested at the end of the school year. (The Tribune is not using his full name because it does not publish the names of juveniles charged with crimes.)

Apostolos' time to meet their needs was short. Adding to the pressure, she took on the roles of mother, social worker and counselor. By the end of the school year, she had worn down and she wondered whether she belonged in the classroom.

•••

Five weeks into the school year, Apostolos stood in front of her class shaking her head in disgust.

"I'm not going to tell you again," she said to a boy who had draped his body over his desk. "Get your head off the desk and pay attention."

He kept his head buried between his folded arms, eyes squeezed shut.

"Last chance," Apostolos warned. "Get up and go splash some water on your face to help wake you up, or I am going to give you an F for the day."

The boy dragged himself from the seat and sauntered to the door, drawing laughs with his exaggerated slowness.

As the year got under way, Apostolos was taken aback by the lack of interest she saw in many of her students. One boy was removed from the classroom because Apostolos suspected he was high on marijuana. A girl kept falling asleep; she had been staying up late doing laundry for the family.

A boy disappeared for weeks when he ran away from home. A girl missed two weeks because she was afraid she would get beaten up on the way to school.

Apostolos tried to counsel them, discipline them or just ignore their insolence. But she was not about to let them knock her off course.

"You are going to learn," she told the class as she turned to write on the board, "whether you want to or not."

Broadening learning styles

2007-09-10T12:47:00.000-05:00

Learning styles are needlessly reduced to too few categories. Here, Dr. Kerry Hempenstall explores Freud's seminal contributions to learning styles.

How could educationists have overlooked these important categories for so long?

Revelation

2007-09-10T12:08:00.000-05:00

Scores go up when questions get easier, a Daily News analysis shows. Daily News exam finds math scores up when difficulty rating went down

When test scores rise, politicians crow that schools are getting better, but a Daily News analysis of recent standardized math exams and a News experiment suggest another reason: The questions might be getting easier.

The site has links to New York state 4th grade math tests for different years.

SAT challenge

2007-08-11T13:08:00.001-05:00

Read the following SAT test question, then click on a button to select your answer.

Note: Figure not drawn to scale.

The circle shown above has center O and a radius of length 5. If the area of the shaded region is 20 pi, what is the value of x?

18
36
45
54
72

I like this challenging SAT problem because it demonstrates once again that background knowledge is needed to deploy critical and creative thinking. This should give pause to "critical thinking" advocates who disparage knowledge (known as "content" nowadays).

Here is the reasoning, based on background knowledge, offered by SAT (don't read past this point if you want to solve this problem yourself):

In order to find the value of x, you should first determine the measure of the angle that is located at point O in the right triangle. To determine this angle, you must calculate what fraction of the circle’s area is unshaded. The radius r of the circle is 5 and its area is pi r^2, or 25 pi. The area of the shaded region is 20 pi, so the area of the unshaded region must be 5 pi. Therefore, the fraction of the circle’s area that is unshaded is 5 pi/25 pi, or 1/5. A circle contains a total of 360 degrees of arc, which means that 1/5 of 360 degrees, or 72 degrees, is the measure of the angle at point O in the unshaded region. Since you now know that two of the three angles in the triangle measure 72 degrees and 90 degrees and that the sum of the measures of the three angles is always 180 degrees, the third angle must measure 18 degrees. Therefore, x = 18.

More cold water on "learning styles"

2007-08-11T12:06:00.000-05:00

The learning-styles craze has received another well-deserved drubbing from a leading scientist in England. Let's hope "senses working in unison" will gain the upper hand on non-sensical pigeonholing:

Pupils are instead given questionnaires to discover if they prefer to learn through "visual, auditory or kinaesthetic" (Vak) teaching. Once identified, the teacher will allow a visual child to learn through looking at cartoons, pictures and fast-moving computer programmes. A "kinaesthetic" learner will be allowed to spread their work on the floor, wander round while they are thinking or learn through dance and drama. In some schools, pupils' desks are even labelled to indicate their learning styles.
According to Susan Greenfield, however, the practice is "nonsense" from a neuroscientific point of view: "Humans have evolved to build a picture of the world through our senses working in unison, exploiting the immense interconnectivity that exists in the brain. It is when the senses are activated together - the sound of a voice is synchronisation with the movement of a person's lips - that brain cells fire more strongly than when stimuli are received apart.

Also see the article by cognitive scientist Willingham on teaching in the
subject's best modality.

CA math

2007-07-29T10:18:00.000-05:00

There is no need to keep reinventing the wheel. California math standards look good. Here are California's grade level expectations in math.

Here is a compact version.

Relatively speaking...

2007-07-25T10:59:00.000-05:00

Kids and grownups should have fun marveling at these different sizes.

Multiple approaches

2007-07-23T14:50:00.000-05:00

There usually are multiple approaches to doing things. For example, if you want to increase the pass rate on tests, you could try to make students more proficient. Conversely, you could dumb down tests as described by Marc Epstein in Dumbing Down the Regents in City Journal.

But the 15 document-related questions are ludicrously easy. The documents include some written passages, but are mostly political cartoons and photographs. Several concern the women’s suffrage movement, such as a photograph of a suffragists’ parade showing women carrying various signs containing the word “suffrage.” The exam question asks, “What was a goal of the women shown in these photographs?” Another photo shows a White House picketer with a banner reading, “Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?” The exam asks the student to state “one method being used by women to achieve their goal.” A third document is a reproduction of a Massachusetts Women’s Suffrage Association poster listing “Twelve Reasons Why Women Should Vote.” All of the reasons on the poster begin with the word “because”: “Because laws affect women as much as men,” for example. The Regents question reads: “What were two arguments suffragists used in this 1915 flier in support of their goal?” To get full credit, all the student has to do is copy two of the reasons from the poster! Other photographs show 1960s civil rights sit-ins. One question: “Identify one method used by these civil rights activists to achieve their goals.” Another question asks the student to name one goal of the activists. And so on.

And then there are the adjustments:

Once teachers have marked the exams, they use a chart created by the state to convert the raw score into a final grade. The extraordinary adjustment built into the chart makes it possible to get only 20 of the 50 multiple-choice questions right and pass the Regents. It’s also possible to complete only one of the two essays and pass. The examiners have created a fail-proof test that measures nothing beyond basic reading and writing competence. It wouldn’t be difficult to train a sixth-grade class that can read and write at grade level to pass the test.

Internet to the rescue

2007-07-19T15:38:00.000-05:00

Parents dissatisfied with the fuzzy math plague can go to this site:

http://www.aaastudy.com/grade8.htm

No expensive tutor needed. The program provides endless practice of all major topics with immediate feedback. Good for K-8.

Dumb and dumber

2007-07-13T10:44:00.000-05:00

Some educationists believe that so-called "21th century skills" means dumbing down the curriculum beyond recognition. Such educationist advice is being followed in England. England is introducing a new curriculum radically stripped of content in favor of "life skills." All this is reminiscent of the Cardinal Principles of 1918, the embodiment of the Progressive war against the academic curriculum. Perhaps Marx was on to something when he observed (a paraphrase): History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.

Churchill and Hitler are out. Olaudah is in:

Secondary schools will strip back the traditional curriculum in favour of lessons on debt management, the environment and healthy eating, ministers revealed.

Even Winston Churchill no longer merits a mention after a drastic slimming-down of the syllabus to create more space for "modern" issues.

Along with Hitler, Gandhi, Stalin and Martin Luther King, the former prime minister has been dropped from a list of key figures to be mentioned in history teaching.

This means pupils may no longer hear about his stirring speeches during the Second World War, when he told Parliament that defeating Hitler would be Britain's "finest hour".

The only individuals now named in guidance accompanying the curriculum are anti-slavery campaigners Olaudah Equiano and William Wilberforce.

The omission of Churchill added to a growing row over Labour reforms to secondary education - the most radical since the national curriculum was introduced in 1988.

Critics warned traditional subject disciplines were being stripped of key content and used to promote fashionable causes and poorly-defined "life skills".

They said that while the two World Wars remain on the curriculum as broad topics the failure to specify teaching on Churchill - while naming other individuals - downgraded his importance.

The move was called "madness" by his grandson Nicholas Soames, the Tory MP.

"It is absurd. I expect he wasn't New Labour enough for them," he said.

Tory spokesman on children Michael Gove added: "Winston Churchill is the towering figure of twentieth century British history.

"His fight against fascism was Britain's finest hour. Our national story can't be told without Churchill at the centre."

Schools are also being told to tear up the timetable of eight lessons a day and introduce classes lasting a few minutes - or several hours - by mixing different subjects together.

Five-minute lessons on spelling, French or German could be "drip-fed" throughout the day.

The architect of the new curriculum, Dr Ken Boston, insisted traditional approaches had been "exhausted".

The slimline regime is being introduced amid concerns that teachers do not have enough time to ensure youngsters master the three Rs.

Meet the architect of the new curriculum. Would you buy a used car from this man?

The justification given by this architect of the new curriculum for this stripped-down curriculum is rather puzzling and sounds more like demented babbling:

Dr Boston said the changes were necessary because the rise in education standards throughout the Western world was "slowing down".
"In some countries, it has reached a glass ceiling through which it cannot break," he said.
"The traditional approach to covering the syllabus has been exhausted: it has delivered all it can: it will work no more."

Hazards

2007-07-03T21:49:00.000-05:00

Doing chemical experiments like throwing sodium or potassium into water is not without risks. As a matter of fact, it's very dangerous.

Who would have thought that experimenting with math can also be hazardous? This is what happened when a fellow foolishly divided by zero.

Spreading the blame

2007-06-24T13:18:00.000-05:00

Jumping on teachers for educational shortcomings is a sport in some quarters. In a welcome corrective, Diane Ravitch looks at the role students need to play in the educational enterprise:

When the time comes to talk about solutions, the conversation and the remedies always seem to focus on teachers. The line goes like this: Our students are not learning because our teachers are not smart enough, are lazy, don't care, get paid regardless of their effectiveness, and so on.
So, once again, out come the usual solutions to our nation's education problems: Incentivize teaching. End tenure. Adopt schemes for merit pay, performance pay, bonus pay. Pay teachers according to the test scores of their students. If student test scores go up, their teachers get more money. If student test scores don't go up, their teachers get extra professional development, and if need be, are fired.
After sitting through another day of discussion in which the teacher was identified as the chief cause of our nation's education woes, I felt that something was amiss. It's not as if there is a failure to weed out ineffective teachers — about 40% who enter the profession will leave within their first five years, frustrated by their students' lack of effort, their administrators' heavy hand, unpleasant physical conditions in their workplace, or their own inability to cope with the demands of the classroom.
I have not met all three million of our nation's teachers, but every one that I have met is hardworking, earnest, and deeply committed to their students. All of them talk about parental lack of support for children, about a popular culture that ridicules education and educators, and about the frustrations of trying to awaken a love of learning in children who care more about popular culture, their clothing, and their social life than mastering the wonders of science, history, and mathematics.

Home life has the greatest influence on a child's success or failure in school. It shapes the behavior of the child. It is where values and attitudes are communicated. Home life can be intellectually stimulating or impoverished. Attempts to remedy educational disparities also need to focus on this neglected aspect:

We will continue to misdiagnose our educational needs until we focus on the role of students and their families. If they don't give a hoot about education, if the students are unwilling to pay attention in class and do their homework after school, if they arrive in school with a closed and empty mind, don't blame their teachers.

UPDATE; Judging by most of the responses to my post, the thesis is widely misunderstood. I'm concerned with the environment parents create simply by being, i.e.having or lacking certain attributes. These attributes can be any number of things, e.g. providing a loving and nurturing environment conducive to the healthy emotional development of the child; valuing respect for others and teaching good manners; attaching value to education; providing an intellectually stimulating environment even in incidental ways. Contrast this with dysfunction and psycho- and sociopathology as is so often the case, a pathology that poses nearly insurmountable obstacles to education and perpetuates stratification. The thesis does not concern itself with minutiae like school board relations.

In this respect the thesis seems unremarkable.

Math textbook reviews

2007-06-10T00:17:00.000-05:00

It is quite difficult to navigate around the Mathematically Correct site when looking for specific math textbook reviews. There is no search function. Updating is also sporadic and it is not possible to tell at a glance which entries are new or the date of other entries. Important articles like Barry Garelick's Miracle Math and An A-Maze-ing Approach To Math are not linked (at least I haven't been able to find links).

I did find a page that puts together reviews of second, fifth and seventh grade math textbooks in a handy fashion.

Glencoe/McGraw-Hill Pre-Algebra, an Integrated Transition to Algebra and Geometry comes out on top for seventh grade in these reviews. On the other hand, amazon reviewers panned this textbook. Where is the truth?

I use Scott Foresman/Addison Wesley Middle School Math and am quite happy with it.

Dale Seymour Publications Connected Mathematics Program gets an F from mathematically correct. CMP is a cult item in many districts, including here in Chicago.

It's worth citing the review for fun. I particularly like phrases like these: "If this topic is covered, it is extremely difficult to find." Also this: "Fractions [1.0] This topic is missing or cryptic."

Mathematically Correct Seventh Grade Mathematics Review
Dale Seymour Publications
Connected Mathematics Program
Lappan, Fey, Fitzgerald, Friel and Phillips
Menlo Park

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Introduction

This is part of a series of second, fifth, and seventh grade Mathematics Program Reviews. This review includes a summary of the structure of the program, evaluations of a selected set of content areas, and evaluations of program quality. Ratings in these areas were made on a scale from 1 (poor) to 5 (outstanding). The overall evaluation was made using the traditional system of letter grades. For details of the methods used in this evaluation see Methods for Seventh Grade Program Reviews.

Student Text Structure

This course is composed of 8 "books" of about 70-90 pages each.

Each book is arranged around a mathematical topic

1. Variables and patterns
2. Stretching and shrinking
3. Comparing and scaling
4. Accentuate the negative
5. Moving straight ahead
6. Filling and wrapping
7. What do you expect?
8. Data around us

Content Area Evaluations

Properties, Order of Operations [1.0]

If this topic is covered, it is extremely difficult to find. In any case, the coverage is insufficient.

Exponents, squares, roots [1.0]

This topic is very weak. Positive integers are raised to whole number powers only in the context of prime factorization. The small coverage of scientific notation includes only positive integer exponents and heavily emphasizes the use of calculators. All other topics are completely absent.

Fractions [1.0]

This topic is missing or cryptic.

Decimals [1.0]

None of these topics are presented in this book. Expressing decimals as percents is assumed. Perhaps students were taught to make this conversion on their calculators in an earlier grade.

Percents [1.2]

There is no evidence of development of this topic in this book. At the start of book 3 "percent" is described as one of the "terms developed in previous units." Perhaps so, but if so, the level of development was low. There is certainly no teaching of percent. Some percent problems are intermixed with ratio problems in the various exercises, but there is no instruction on interconverting fractions, decimals and percents. There are almost no word problems on discount, markups, commissions, increase or decrease. Some "scale factors" for similarity are expressed as percents.

Proportions [3.5]

This is an adequate treatment of this topic. Most of the grade 7 topics are covered at some level. It is interesting that although proportions are used relatively often, by the standards of this book, they are not referred to as such as the authors have decided to put "proportion" in the list of nonessential terms at the front of the book.

Expressions and Equations - Simplifying and Solving [1.1]

This book is devoid of algebraic manipulation. The only solving of equations is graphical, and that is limited to problems involving direct variation. It is difficult to see how a student can become prepared for any mathematics-based profession with this little instruction in the key skills leading to algebra.

Expressions and Equations - Writing [2.1]

This book has a heavy emphasis on using proportions to find the lengths of similar parts of similar figures. On the other hand, there is very little practice or instruction in writing equations from a verbal description. The problems related to this topic are stretched over an excessive period of time as students answer endless questions about the situation. Essentially all of these problems are dealt with via tables and then in a graphical context.

Graphing [4.0]

The one advantage of the heavy emphasis that this book places on graphical over analytic solutions is that graphing is covered moderately well. Nearly all topics that should be covered are covered.

Shapes, Objects, Angles, Similarity, Congruence [2.5]

Formulas and derivations, or even "discoveries" of area of two dimensional figures are not given. They may be assumed to have been mastered at an earlier year. Surface area and volume are "discovered" in a long series of construction projects, many of which look doomed to failure. At the end of this formulas that have been discovered are not explicitly stated in the text. The teacher's manual suggests that the appropriate formulae will "come out" in discussion. If the student discovered the wrong formula, or forgot to write it down, good luck, since there is no way to look back and remember a formula.

The exercises on finding volumes of irregular objects using displacement are interesting extensions. On the other hand, much of the teaching is absurd and again abjures analysis for experiment. For example, students spend who-knows-how-much-time filling cylinders and cones with beans to discover, approximately, the relationship between the volume of cylinders and the volume of cones. This is a waste of time and inaccurate. Unfortunately, this could describe many of the activities in this book.

Area, Volume, Perimeter, Distance [1.0]

Essentially none of the grade 7 level topics are covered. They may be assumed from previous years, but one cannot assume that from the presentation.

Program Quality Evaluations

Mathematical Depth [1.7]

There is very little mathematical content in this book. Students leaving this course will have no background in or facility with analytic or pre-algebra skills.

Quality of Presentation [1.4]

This book is completely dedicated to a constructivist philosophy of learning, with heavy emphasis on discovery exercises and rejection of whole class teacher directed instruction. The introduction to Part 1 says "Connected Mathematics was developed with the belief that calculators should be available and that students should decide when to use them." In one of the great understatements, the Guide to the Connected Mathematics Curriculum states, "Students may not do as well on standardized tests assessing computational skills as students in classes that spend" time practicing these skills.

Quality of Student Work [1.5]

Students are busy, but they are not productively busy. Most of their time is directed away from true understanding and useful skills.

Overall Program Evaluation

F
Overall Evaluation [1.7]

This rating is perhaps deceivingly high, as 7 of the 11 topics rate no higher than 1.2. The rating is as high as it is based largely on two high subscores, proportions and graphing. It is impossible to recommend a book with as little content as this and an inefficient, if philosophically attractive, instructional method.

Girl math

2007-05-28T09:58:00.000-05:00

I got a good laugh out of this clip from the Simpsons.

I don't know if it is still being seriously argued in some feminist quarters that it is necessary to take the "male" bias out of math to make math accessible to girls. In my own experience teaching math to middle graders, I find that girls do very well with real math, for the most part better than boys.

In any event, the clip is funny at least as a museum piece.

Hat tip: Mindless Math Mutterings

Costly fantasy

2007-05-26T14:52:00.000-05:00

The NYT reports on the creation of a Creation Museum. In this fantasy version of evolutionary history, prehistoric kids get to mingle and cavort with dinosaur buddies. However, I don't like the look of these dinosaurs. Their legs look like corncobs.

Cowboys

2007-05-26T12:55:00.000-05:00

NYC Educator demonstrates that teaching similes can take unexpected turns.

Fifth grade honors math

2007-05-26T09:33:00.000-05:00

An Illinois school district in the Chicago suburbs reveals its Fifth Grade Honors Mathematics Curriculum.

This is nicely ambitious and to be accomplished with fuzzy math materials. From the first trimester:

Students will use the four phases of problem solving (understand, plan, carry out and look back).

+ Students will represent a problem and its solution by working backwards and by using logic charts.

+ Students will estimate reasonable answers using a variety of strategies including compatible numbers and high and low range.

+ Students will demonstrate an understanding of exponents, square roots, prime numbers and order of operations.

+ Students will demonstrate an understanding of fractions and how they relate to each other and to whole numbers using concrete models, drawings, and mathematical symbols.

+ Students will demonstrate an understanding of the relationship between mixed numbers and improper fractions.

+ Students will add and subtract fractions with like and unlike denominators.

+ Students will add and subtract mixed numbers.

From the second trimester (excerpt):

Students will be able to read, write, compare and order decimals, fractions and percents.
+ Students will be able to compute accurately with fractions and decimals.
+ Students will see the relationship between fractions, decimals, and percents.

[...]

Students will select appropriate computational strategies for solving ratio, proportion, and percent problems.
+ Students will conduct investigations involving rates.
+ Students will solve non-routine problems using a variety of strategies and resources.

There are also very helpful suggestions (including links to math sites) on how parents can get involved:

Work with your child in his/her acquisition of multiplication and division facts up to 12.

· Play games that use strategic skills, such as chess, Rush Hour, Mancala, and Set.

· Discuss real life scenarios where rate, ratios and proportions are used. For example compare similar items in a grocery story for content and price, how much distance can be covered at a certain mph and how many miles per gallon your vehicle yields.

· Mentally estimate sales tax, tips, and percent off in the real world.

· Cook and build with your child including measurement and proportion.

· Use logical reasoning and math skills when planning events such as parties. Include serving side, total amounts, price per person, etc.

I am teaching math to the disadvantaged in the city and can only dream of such proficiency.

Fallacious anti-testing arguments

2007-05-22T20:42:00.000-05:00

Joanne Jacobs quotes Right on the Left Coast: Views From a Conservative Teacher on objections to a driver test. Seen this way, the case made by the anti-testing crowd evaporates into thin air.

I am completely against this new testing regime for the following reasons:

1. It stifles the creativity of drivers.
2. It's not testing the "whole driver".
3. There's plenty that goes into driving that can't be evaluated by a machine.
4. This is just "drill and kill"--why aren't they testing critical thinking skills, which the research shows is more important to driving than merely being able to see?
5. This is a one-size-fits-all, high stakes test.
6. Why should we test, anyway? Testing doesn't make anyone a better driver.

This is all very funny when applied to a driver test. But these are the exact same arguments the anti-testing crowd applies to academic subjetcs.

Soliciting ed guru advice

2007-05-19T08:06:00.000-05:00

I need advice from constructivist ed gurus.

Over and over, I run into this bit of "insight" from constructivists: "Knowledge is constructed by the learner from experience." First, I was beaten over the head with this "insight" in ed school. Now I see it at constructivist sites like this one.

What does it mean? How does it work in practice?

I tried to put it to the test. I decided I want to know something about Tang and Song China. According to constructivists, I need to construct that knowledge from experience. What should I do? I don't have any experience with Tang and Song China. I live now, not in the era of Tang and Song China. Then I hit on a brilliant idea: time travel. I tried cranking up that rusty, old time machine. It didn't work. Now I am trying to construct without experience but with the help of a hat. I am trying to pull the knowledge out of a hat. Ain't working either. I guess I'll just settle for a book and ignore the constructivist piffle.

My conclusion is that either constructivists keep repeating the same nonsense (probably due to a lack of critical thinking ability), or there is something I am not getting. I suspect the former.

Ed guru advice welcome.

On the same site I find this gem:

Radical constructivists do not advocate goals, sequential instruction, aids to learning, or restrictions on content for learners because each learner is unique and educators do not know what the learners need or want to learn.

I've got news for these "educators": In my experience, a lot of "learners" don't know what they need either. As for wanting to learn: Forget it!

"Social justice" assault

2007-05-13T18:39:00.000-05:00

Sol Stern of City Journal wrote a lengthy and troubling report for frontpagemag.com on growing leftist indoctrination in public schools and ed schools under the "social justice" label. (Teaching for “Social Justice” -- The Leftist Assault on America’s Public Schools).

Publicly funded institutions should not be used as a vehicle for someone's political passions.

From the introduction:

Among all the ailments that America’s public schools face, one of
the least known but most menacing is the effort by the radical left
to bully present and prospective teachers into using their classrooms
to indoctrinate students in the anti-American and anti-democratic
ideology that goes under the name of “teaching for social justice.” This movement has already achieved some of its aims, as the proliferation
of social justice themed schools in many of our nation’s school districts shows. The teaching for social justice movement threatens not only the children who are targeted for leftist political brainwashing, but it undermines whatever is left of the common democratic ideal of American public education. If the social justice educators achieve their objectives, more and more parents are bound to lose confidence in the public schools. Without parental support there is no public in public education.

Math myths demystified

2007-05-12T16:36:00.000-05:00

This excellent math myth debunking effort has been out now for two years and is still fresh. A sign that myths don't age easily. Educationists claim that knowledge (which educationists call "information") need not be acquired because it changes so rapidly that it virtually becomes obsolete overnight. Not true as I demonstrated here. Now if only myths would become obsolete as quickly as knowledge supposedly does. Reading myths are also nearly indestructible like viruses.

Humor -- Automation gone wild

2007-05-12T08:13:00.000-05:00

Among the things that bug me endlessly are stupid phone menus that give endless choices (press nine if you want help). The problem is compounded by the introduction of voice recognition. Very often voice recognition has a hearing impediment. Since computers are idiots savants who lack common sense, can't think and lack real-world knowledge and experience, the result is more frustration.

But of course it is cheaper to hire a computer than a real person who often can't think either, despite all the emphasis on "critical thinking."

Automation has also made inroads into an unlikely place: the Catholic Church. To cope with an acute shortage of priests, the Church in Spain is experimenting with the automation of confessionals.

(In Spanish)

I particularly like the part where the confessor punches in "one" twice and the computer reads "eleven".

Bayeux Tapestry animated

2007-05-06T12:00:00.000-05:00

To go to the original site.

Poison from China

2007-05-06T10:06:00.000-05:00

Today's NYT has a huge story on how counterfeiters in China produce poison that ends up in medicine and is killing thousands, especially children.

From China to Panama, a Trail of Poisoned Medicine

The kidneys fail first. Then the central nervous system begins to misfire. Paralysis spreads, making breathing difficult, then often impossible without assistance. In the end, most victims die.
Many of them are children, poisoned at the hands of their unsuspecting parents.
The syrupy poison, diethylene glycol, is an indispensable part of the modern world, an industrial solvent and prime ingredient in some antifreeze.
It is also a killer. And the deaths, if not intentional, are often no accident.
Over the years, the poison has been loaded into all varieties of medicine — cough syrup, fever medication, injectable drugs — a result of counterfeiters who profit by substituting the sweet-tasting solvent for a safe, more expensive syrup, usually glycerin, commonly used in drugs, food, toothpaste and other products.

This makes me sick. Instead of executing people on demand to harvest their organs for transplants, Chinese authorities should concentrate more on clamping down on criminal counterfeiters. It's time to rethink the love affair with supercheap products from China made under horrendous working conditions and the exploitation of labor.

Obscurantism in academia

2007-05-05T07:31:00.000-05:00

In an earlier post called History is knowable, teachable and testable, I called attention to the controversy surrounding the Florida legislature's view that history has a factual basis that can be taught. This seems like an odd controversy. Of course there are verifiable facts. Settlers did come to this country. The Founding Fathers did write certain documents. There was slavery and a Civil War. Lincoln was president and was assassinated and so on. It seems ridiculous to be making this argument.

What seems like a ridiculous argument turns out to be a necessary argument when one immerses oneself in the febrile, lunatic and obscurantist world of postmodernism that holds sway in the academy. In this hallucinatory postmodern world in academia, facts no longer have an independent, objective existence and don't count. Instead, they are produced at will. According to one professor, what counts as an argument is not that it be supported by verifiable facts but that it "coincide with our political convictions and cultural attitudes."

One can get a sense of this abandonment of reason by reading an article on the perversions of Middle East archaeology that appeared in frontpage.com. All this seems esoteric and one has to be something of a masochist to expose oneself to the dreadful postmodern cant, but I think it is relevant because eventually this lunacy will trickle down to pre-collegiate education:

“Postmodernizing” Archaeology at Barnard
By Candace de Russy
FrontPageMagazine.com May 4, 2007
Nadia Abu El-Haj is an assistant professor at Barnard College who deserves more scrutiny from everyone interested in the degenerate methods by which great universities are destroyed.
The greatness of modern, western-style universities – the thing that separates them from all the academies that went before them – is that facts and theories asserted in universities must be supported by verifiable evidence. At the old academies, an appeal to Aristotle, Confucius, or the Bible was enough to support an idea. In the modern university, theories are judged by Occam’s razor, explanatory value, and verifiability of the supporting facts.
El-Haj is a young cultural anthropologist of the purely theoretical school. She has written a book entitled Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, which was sent to me by a group of scholars calling themselves the Va’ad ha-Emet (Hebrew for Truth Committee). These scholars, wary of speaking out publicly against the shoddy and slanderous scholarship in El-Haj’s book for fear of retribution on their respective campuses – which they describe as “vituperative” – appealed to me for assistance in publishing a statement from them (more about which to follow).

In her introduction, El-Haj explains that she works by “rejecting a positivist commitment to scientific method,” writing, instead, within a scholarly tradition of “post structuralism, philosophical critiques of foundationalism, Marxism and critical theory and … in response to specific postcolonial political movements.” And the particular theory that El-Haj puts forward is that the “ancient Israelite origins” of the Jews is a “pure political fabrication” – a machination she proceeds to blame on “Israeli archaeologists” who were called upon to “produce … evidence of ancient Israelite and Jewish presence in the land of Israel, thereby supplying the very foundation, embodied in empirical form, of the modern nation’s origin myth.”

Deplorably, in the rarified air of Morningside Heights, some Columbia faculty appear to celebrate this sort of “liberation” of scholarship from any necessity to encounter verifiable facts. For example, Keith Moxey, the Ann Whitney Olin Professor Professor of Art History at Barnard College and one of five members of the committee that will vote on El-Haj’s tenure bid, lauds “The abandonment of an epistemological foundation for … history and the acknowledgment that historical arguments will be evaluated according to how well they coincide with our political convictions and cultural attitudes collapses the traditional distinction between history and theory.” (See Moxey’s The Practice of Theory: Poststructuralism, Cultural Politics, and Art History.) In other words, evidence, verifiability, probability and explanatory power become irrelevant, for what counts is that an argument “coincide with our political convictions.”

Making connections

2007-04-28T23:23:00.000-05:00

In IF You Liked Whole-Word Reading, Open Classrooms & Fuzzy Math
You Will Love Inquiry-Based Science Charles Ormsby makes connections between modern fads dreamed up by ed gurus. What loony idea will come next? Suggestions welcome.

Teaching different achievement levels simultaneously is particularly obnoxious. It violates a basic law of physics that says that a body cannot be in different places at the same time. Consequently, teacher input is fragmented and rendered ineffective. But what are laws of physics to ed gurus who don't believe in a stable body of knowledge and instead conceive of knowledge only as "information" that keeps changing so rapidly that it need not be learned?

Guru advice that there is no need to learn anything because one can always look up the "information" somewhere is also fallacious. A lot of things we might know require extensive struggle to achieve understanding. I teach middle grades math and see daily that achieving an understanding of topics like ratios, proportions, percentages, unit rates, operations with integers, geometry, even ordering fractions, doesn't come easily. It's not a matter of looking it up when needed and grasping it instantly. It requires time and effort. What is true for math is also true for science and other subjects. Imagine trying to "look up" and understand topics in organic chemistry without a laboriously acquired firm grounding in chemistry. Or making sense of all the difficult terms in biology that were never memorized and understood if guru advice is followed.

See this hilarious video and see how handy "looking it up when needed" is.

[Note: There is certainly no dearth of grossly ignorant people. However, this video appears to be rigged by means of selectiveness to promote a biased point of view. The selection of people being interviewed is hardly representative. One could easily do the opposite: Interview a sizable number of people at random and then select only the knowledgeable ones to "prove" that the public is highly sophisticated.]

Here Ormsby:

As if deciding that we shouldn’t teach the magic code was not enough, professional educators decided to re-engineer the learning environment in the classroom. Again, we have thousands of years of experience in the design of learning environments. Past experience underlined the need for mental focus and concentration … a condition that is seriously hampered by distractions. Even parents who are not trained as educators seem to realize that children should turn off the TV and rap music while trying to absorb a history or math lesson.

But our education gurus had a deeper insight than the rest of us mere mortals could possibly appreciate. They figured that if you put classrooms together, without walls between them, the students would benefit from all the noise. It made sense to them, apparently, that understanding algebra or trigonometry would be enhanced by students reciting Shakespeare in the adjacent classroom! What were they thinking?
To make matters worse – is it even possible? – educators decided to give the teachers an extra challenge. Instead of having teachers teach a subject to a set of students who are roughly at the same achievement level in a subject, they decided to force them to teach to multiple levels simultaneously.
In a fourth-grade math class, teachers are required to teach simple addition and multiplication to some students while teaching division to others, and fractions to their most advanced students.
When it comes time for English Language Arts (read’n & write’n), they must simultaneously teach basic reading skills to some while discussing the classics with others.
Of course, they can’t actually do these things simultaneously, so they have to break up the class into more homogeneous groups and then split their time among the groups. Now students who could have had the teacher’s attention for the whole class, can only get it for a portion of the class time.
Brilliant!
Since the teacher splits the class up to make the sub-groups more similar in achievement level, one might ask, “WHY DIDN’T THEY DO THIS IN THE FIRST PLACE?” What were they thinking?

Last week I had occasion to witness a classroom in the inner city run by an admittedly incompetent substitute that was completely thrashed by pupils running wild like atoms flying around in a heated substance. It brought to mind the stark contrast between guru preachings about "inquiry," "discovery," "constructing knowledge and meaning," natural curiosity, and the reality of this classroom.

UPDATE: rightwingprof left a comment pointing out that we have a demonstration here of a student-centered classroom. Student centered indeed!

DOE to parents: Don't mess with the fuzzies

2007-04-21T10:15:00.000-05:00

Occasionally slightly testy but mostly to the point text savvy takes issue with the Department of Education's recommendation that parents become a cog in fuzzy math schemes:

Try to be aware of how your child is being taught math, and don't teach strategies and shortcuts that conflict with the approach the teacher is using. Check in with the teacher and ask what you can do to help. Ask the teacher about online resources that you can use with your child at home.

(Via KTM II)

text savvy observes dryly that parents have a long history of passing on various skills to their offspring:

In case anyone (like the DOE) needs the obvious stated, parents have been successfully passing on low-order and high-order cognitive skills to their offspring long before there were schools, lesson plans, professional development seminars, research grants, or instructional philosophies.

text savvy even alludes to evolutionary roots explaining this parent behavior but is willing to make exceptions for certain tribes in a bow to the phenomenon of bongo-bongoism.

New math language

2007-04-21T09:35:00.000-05:00

In a post called Math for poets, Linda Moran cites the comments from a mother and scientist that illustrate how traditional math terms are being swept away by fuzzy math. Apparently, terms like angles and degrees are too taxing:

In TERC it is
*joining not addition
*separating not subtraction
*bits and pieces and not fractions
*capacity and not volume
*it is what the calculator displays and not decimals.
*it is "landmarks" rather than ALL the numbers in the decimal system.
*it is turns and not angles and degrees.
*it is write a story and not write the equation.
*it is draw pictures and not show a true effective reusable strategy.

Fuzzy math was designed to make math "accessible" to large segments of the population which in the view of the fuzzy math creators were hitherto marginalized by rigorous math instruction. But by taking math out of "math", everybody loses.

Whole language debate

2007-04-09T19:55:00.000-05:00

Who that?
Good debate about whole language vs. phonics at edspresso. Ken De Rosa, a phonics advocate, locks horns with whole language teacher Nancy Creech. Ken likens whole language advocates to the Japanese who were still roaming the jungles for years after the end of WW II, refusing to give up.

I have seen the sad victims of the psycholinguistic guessing game promoted by whole language. Words come out of the mouth of these victims that are nowhere in the sentence. Context clues are important for meaning but not for decoding, perhaps with the exception of words like read and lead. It does take a special zealotry to cling to this failed method.

See Martin Kozloff's A Whole Language Catalogue of the Grotesque for what whole language gurus actually believe. It's like entering a fun house with hideously distorting mirrors.

What I learned in PD today

2007-04-07T13:16:00.001-05:00

From a professional development day inspired by an ASCD presentation by Dr. Jan Jones called Building Millennial Minds: Preparing Today's Students for Tomorrow's World I learned that:

Change is exponential. Gates says technology capacity doubles every nine months. Photonics leads to unimaginable data transmission rates. Semantic Web will be our new global brain.

The world is changing four times faster than schools (Dr. Willard Daggett).* Actually, the doctor is a bit fuzzy with the number. The exact number is 4.2651.

[The vision I have is of a globe spinning so rapidly that it'll throw everyone into space, including educationists].

Kids are immersed in fancy new technology (digital natives).

People will not earn a living, they'll learn a living.

21th century skills redefine core skills. What are those new core skills? Deep conceptual knowledge, critical thinking, creativity and problem-solving, innovation, imagination.

[I am afraid the mindless repetition of the critical thinking mantra will dull the senses and stop all thinking in its track. What's needed is critical thinking about "critical thinking."]

What are the implications for teaching of all this? I quote: "Learning can no longer be full, frontal lecturing or recall of data/facts, content."

[This is a spectacular non sequitur. Doubling technology capacity (whatever that is), faster data transmission rates and kids running around with iPods have no bearing on what content should be learned and how it should be taught. If it isn't dizzying technological change but the call for "deep conceptual knowledge" that necessitates the abandonment of content recall, then there is trouble, too. How is one supposed to have "deep conceptual knowledge" without engagement with content, i.e. assimilating or learning the content? Recall is another way of saying that content has been learned. A conceptualization is an abstraction from facts, a way to bring order to otherwise disparate facts. Conceptual knowledge, deep or otherwise, is impossible without that basis. So once again, educationists are blowing smoke, apparently enamored of the high-falutin' sound of these phrases without applying some critical thinking.]

What takes its place:

Big ideas

21th century learnings [note the plural]

Melding disciplines

Unique connections

Meta-cognitive options

Focusing instruction on relevance (don't fixate on minutiae, high-stakes testing)

Digital age literacies, e.g. health & wellness literacy, visual/performing arts literacy, information literacy, multicultural literacy... [Another example of educationist corruption of a good word that is now rendered meaningless].

So just go ahead, do the critical thinking and creating. No need to know anything.

*The sound of "change" makes educationists delirious. It's as intoxicating as a bottle of vodka. The change that has them in a tizzy and whips them into a frenzy is mostly of a superficial nature, like faster data transmission rates and higher flash card storage capacity, kids adept at playing with new electronic gadgets and so on. From this they draw illogical conclusions about what and how things should be taught.

To calm them down from this frenzy and to rehearse critical thinking skills, I recommend that educationists be required to write a rigorous, lenghty and critical essay before Ed. D.'s are handed out. This essay could be called Change and Continuity. The objective of this essay is to examine what changes are occurring, whether these changes are profound or superficial and what, if any, effect they should have on the academic curriculum.

Educationists should then compare and contrast these changes to what stays the same in the various subject areas, 21th century or not. Educationists could ask themselves a long list of questions pertaining to the various disciplines. For example, do faster data transmission rates and high-capacity flash cards alter the laws of gravity and motion, planetary orbits and atom bonding, or the electromagnetic spectrum and Fraunhofer lines? Do these technological changes impinge on photosynthesis and animal cell structure? Or refraction and the Doppler effect? Do they make 2 + 2 = 4 untrue? Is pi no longer the ratio of circumference to diameter because of dizzying 21th century changes and yet-unheard of electronic gadgets? Did Caesar suddenly not cross the Rubicon because Gates predicts a doubling of technological capacity every nine months?

Requiring educationists to pose and answer these questions could have a sobering effect. But I wouldn't count on it.

So that's what it is!

2007-04-07T12:39:00.000-05:00

Maybe one day I'll pin down what this "constructivism" is. Is it a theory of knowing as some claim? Or is it an approach to teaching as the influential Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development claims:

The Definition of Constructivism

Constructivism is an approach to teaching based on research about how people learn. Many researchers say that each individual constructs knowledge rather than receiving it from others.

Although people disagree about how to achieve constructive learning, constructive teaching is based on the belief that students learn best when they gain knowledge through exploration and active learning. Hands-on materials are used instead of textbooks, and students are encouraged to think and explain their reasoning instead of memorizing and reciting facts. Education is centered on themes and concepts and the connections between them, rather than isolated information.

Source: From The Language of Learning: A Guide to Education Terms, by J. L. McBrien and R. S. Brandt, 1997, Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

So, many researchers say that each individual constructs knowledge rather than receiving it from others. Ain't that grand. How did these researchers figure this out? Did they research how each individual constructs the periodic table, how atoms bond, how the sun produces energy? How individuals construct knowledge about the Renaissance period? Ah, I forgot. Through hands-on materials instead of textbooks.

More intense, instead of longer school day

2007-04-05T10:12:00.000-05:00

The New York Times reports that many states and school districts with failing schools are seeking salvation in a longer school day. Failing Schools See a Solution in Longer Day. Prodigious amounts of money are once again being made available for a solution that is likely to yield negligible results:

FALL RIVER, Mass. — States and school districts nationwide are moving to lengthen the day at struggling schools, spurred by grim test results suggesting that more than 10,000 schools are likely to be declared failing under federal law next year.
In Massachusetts, in the forefront of the movement, Gov. Deval L. Patrick is allocating $6.5 million this year for longer days and can barely keep pace with demand: 84 schools have expressed interest.
Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York has proposed an extended day as one of five options for his state’s troubled schools, part of a $7 billion increase in spending on education over the next four years — apart from the 37 minutes of extra tutoring that children in some city schools already receive four times a week.
And Gov. M. Jodi Rell of Connecticut is proposing to lengthen the day at persistently failing schools as part of a push to raise state spending on education by $1 billion.

[snip]

And of all the steps school districts take to try to improve student achievement, lengthening the day is generally the costliest — an extra $1,300 a student annually here in Massachusetts — and difficult to sustain.

Schools would do better to focus on wasted time during the existing school day rather than lengthening the school day. Schools should work more intensely, instead of longer. Schools should ask themselves: Do we really need all these endless blocks for sustained, silent reading of vapid fiction? Shouldn't we perhaps also be reading some science stories, biographies, history? What about this time-consuming bean-counting project? Do kids really need to be spending a week to count a million mung beans? Another papier-mâché dinosaur?

I propose a different model.

For a fraction of the additional funds the states are willing to dish out, the districts could try a much more effective model: Offering intensive academic support (IAS) to small groups (not more than ten) during regular school hours in failing schools. This support can be offered for math and science, for example, two areas in which the disadvantaged fail spectacularly. It would require hiring a few new teachers with expertise in the respective subject areas per struggling school. These intensive academic support sessions could be held during the prep times of regular classroom teachers.

Such an approach would do wonders to the math and science education of the disadvantaged. Because of large classrooms and frequent disruptions, regular classroom teachers cannot offer the individualized and sustained attention the disadvantaged need to succeed in math and science. Many are so far behind and have such poor work and study habits that only intensive and sustained academic involvement will bring them up to speed.

It can be done.

What to do with disruptive students

2007-04-03T12:24:00.000-05:00

I wrote a deliberately provocative post on the huge problem of disruptive students (Segregate non-students). This has generated a series of very thoughtful exchanges by Diana, NYC Math Teacher and Larry Strauss. The responses add much more complexity and subtlety to this problem than expressed in my prescription. I encourage everyone to read the comments.

I particularly like Larry Strauss' suggestion:

If you are going to remove disruptive students, do so for a positive reason, some form of behavioral intervention; call it a good manners academy and get a well-paid tattooed drill sergeant to conduct it.

How issues are framed and formulated is crucial when seeking solutions.

History is knowable, teachable and testable

2007-04-02T11:08:00.000-05:00

Less than a year ago, the Florida legislature caused a sharp outcry by requiring that the U.S. history taught in the state's schools "shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed" and "shall be viewed as knowable, teachable and testable."

For example, there was this Op-Ed in the NYT that made the case that facts need to be interpreted. The folks at Common Dreams seemed to believe that the sky was falling and the end of "critical thinking" had arrived:

Florida's Fear of History: New Law Undermines Critical Thinking
by Robert Jensen

One way to measure the fears of people in power is by the intensity of their quest for certainty and control over knowledge.

By that standard, the members of the Florida Legislature marked themselves as the folks most terrified of history in the United States when last month they took bold action to become the first state to outlaw historical interpretation in public schools. In other words, Florida has officially replaced the study of history with the imposition of dogma and effectively outlawed critical thinking.

Instead of being terrified of history as the Common Dreamers claim, according to the Tampa Tribune the proponents of the law were simply perturbed by the "widespread lack of knowledge about U.S. government and history." So the Dreamers have it backwards: The lawmakers don't fear history. They want more of it.

I also found talk about meaning and significance in the Florida statute. This does not sound like a ban on critical thinking:

(b) The history, meaning, significance, and effect of the provisions of the Constitution of the United States and amendments thereto, with emphasis on each of the 10 amendments that make up the Bill of Rights and how the constitution provides the structure of our government.

There were also voices that derided such apocalyptic visions:

Construction Deconstructed
Facts and snippy academics.

By Matthew J. Franck
Academics are touchy people — especially when mere mortals presume to speak for themselves on matters where the professors claim expertise. So Cornell historian Mary Beth Norton lashed out, in the Sunday New York Times, against the Florida legislature for daring to make law on a subject squarely within its responsibility — educational standards in history — without apparently consulting the most enlightened members of the history professoriate, like, say, Mary Beth Norton. Oh dear, what trouble those poor legislators bought themselves. I’m sure they’re all slapping their foreheads and saying “Dang! Why didn’t we ask this Norton woman for advice!”

For Norton, the first cardinal sin the legislature could have avoided was its statement, in a revision of Florida education statutes, that “American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed.” Tsk, tsk. “Facts,” Norton says, “mean little or nothing without being interpreted — another word for ‘constructed.’ All historians know that facts never speak for themselves.” Somehow I think people who have made it their work to write laws didn’t need to be told about the importance of interpretation, of facts or anything else. So Norton’s preening and condescension are certainly misplaced here. Her assertion is a half-truth anyway. Facts are what they are. (The Second Continental Congress did vote for independence on July 2, 1776, to use an example of Norton’s. That speaks for itself whether anyone is listening or not.) “Meaning” is another matter, and facts rise and fall in our estimation with the uses we make of them. This much is true too — one might say it’s a fact — and if that’s all Norton wants to claim, she surely has no quarrel with the Florida legislature.

This controversy seems strange at first but becomes clearer when one considers the inroads postmodernism has made into the field of history. Matthew J. Franck continues:

But let’s do a little interpretation ourselves. It seems not to have occurred to Norton that when the Florida legislature decreed that in the state’s schools history shall be treated by teachers “as factual, not as constructed,” it was evidently taking sides in a debate in Norton’s own discipline. (I say “evidently” because I have no inside dope from Tallahassee — only the eyes of a reader of the statute.) As the Australian historian Keith Windschuttle observed a decade ago in The Killing of History, postmodern social theory has been invading the historical profession, reducing “the belief that there are ‘facts’ about history” to the status of “an ideological position” with no privileged status over the competing view that “history is nothing more than a form of literature.” Perhaps Norton, who declares that she “love[s] facts,” hasn’t heard of this crisis in her own discipline. But someone in Florida seems to have heard of it. And that “not as constructed” language in the new state law was surely aimed at such fashions of postmodernism, with the intent of keeping the state’s history teachers from donning those new clothes.

In a review of Keith Windschuttle's book in The New Criterion, Roger Kimball chronicles the strange things that have been happening to the study of history. At bottom, it is an abandonment of the commitment to truth:

One depressing sign of this situation is the absolute horror with which the idea of “objective truth” is regarded in chic academic circles today. Another is the widespread tendency to downgrade facts to matters of opinion—a tendency that follows naturally from the rejection of objective truth. This shows itself in the amazingly prevalent assumption that truth is “relative,” i.e., that the truth of what is said depends crucially upon the interests, prejudices, even the sex or ethnic origin of the speaker rather than—well, than the truth or falsity of what the speaker says. The basic idea is that truth is somehow invented rather than discovered. Typical of this position is the feminist complaint about “male-centered” epistemologies that make false claims to universality (another word that inspires panic) or objectivity.

So I say, let's first get a factual foundation in history. Then interpretation can follow. Interpretation without a factual foundation is just empty palaver.

Critical thinking and creativity watch

2007-03-31T14:25:00.000-05:00

It's been said that if fascism comes, it will come in the name of anti-fascism.

I am reminded of that aperçu every time an educationist, business-type or politician sings the praises of critical thinking, higher-order thinking skills, creativity and innovation.

These are all lofty aspirations. What bothers me is that the advocacy of these worthy goals is frequently accompanied by a disparagement of subject matter knowledge. These advocates seem to believe that these qualities can be taught in a vacuum. It's questionable whether they can be taught at all. More likely they develop incidentally through a struggle with subject matter. They are certainly not free-floating entities without moorings. So to get back to the fascism case, in edland anti-intellectualism comes in the name of "critical thinking" and "creativity".

I found new evidence for this phenomenon in a fight over educational legislation in Colorado as presented by the blog Mount Virtus:

On a party line vote today, the Senate Education Committee passed a bill sponsored by Senator Sue Windels (D-Arvada) to mandate standards on Colorado schools that teach sex education. Three committee members, all Democrats - Windels, Bob Bacon, and Ron Tupa - voted to support the House Bill 1292 mandate six weeks after voting against a mandate setting higher state graduation requirements for math and science (Senate Bill 131), and eight weeks after voting against a requirement that high school graduates have basic competency in English (Senate Bill 73). Suzanne Williams (D-Aurora) was the only committee member to cast votes for all three measures.

Last week the House Education Committee, chaired by Mike “Give ‘Em Hell” Merrifield, shot down the math and science requirements after hearing support from a Jefferson County teacher, a university president (could have been two if Merrifield hadn’t rescheduled the hearing at the last minute so CU’s Hank Brown couldn’t testify), and a Lockheed engineer. Said Merrifield:

And here is the kicker:

“My contention is by forcing every child into this narrow curriculum, we are not making them more innovative, we are not making them more creative,” the Colorado Springs Democrat said, citing a national report that calls a well-rounded education the “passport to a job in which creativity and innovation are the key to a good life.”

The Witwer plan, Merrifield said, would make students “more regimented and more lock-step (with) less ability to think outside the box.”

(Hat tip to Myrtle Hocklemeier commenting at KTM II.)

The twisted thinking exhibited by this chairman of the House Education Committee (of all things!) frankly leaves me speechless. It's easy to utter a stupidity. It takes considerable effort to describe the nature of a stupidity. For example, would I have to brandish logical notions like denying the antecedent or affirming the consequent to tackle this inanity?

Another juicy example comes via D-EDRECKONING. Highly prolific blogger Ken deRosa cites a Daily Mail article in which some Association of Teachers and Lecturers suffers paroxysms of anti-intellectualism:

Schools should teach children the key skills they need for life - like walking and thinking - not set subjects such as history or French, teachers' leaders have said.

The Association of Teachers and Lecturers called for the National Curriculum to be torn up and the testing system abolished.

The union said teachers in local schools should be able to adapt lessons to fit a new framework focusing on important skills for life, rather than academic subjects.
Martin Johnson, ATL's acting deputy general secretary, said prioritising academic education over other types of knowledge was "totalitarian".

"A curriculum is a selection from the total sum of knowledge, which is exploding," he said.

"For the state to suggest that some knowledge should be privileged over other knowledge is a bit totalitarian in a 21st century environment. We are arguing that knowledge which traditionally has high status should not be privileged over other kinds of knowledge.

Schools should teach children the key skills they need for life - like walking and thinking?

Walking?

Now I am waiting for an educationist to point out breathlessly that walking is an important 21th century skill.

UPDATE:
In the meantime, Rory has left a comment at D-ED RECKONING in which he reviews the massive amount of research confirming the importance of walking:

I am finally glad someone has finally decided to address the walking achievement gap.

Study after study has confirmed that the ability to walk is a critical aspect of employment.

Our new information based society heavily depends on consumption of coffee. A recent study by a leading University determined it is much more economical to provide centralized coffee pots in office environments. Without the ability to "walk" to these coffee pots, employees will soon suffer from coffee withdrawal causing severe detrimental effects on worker productivity.

L.B. Ral from Progressive University cautions against a biased approach to walking instruction though. He notes that different cultures have different styles of walking.

Meanwhile, disabled activists have called the new emphasis on walking instruction discriminatory. They point out that thousands of wheelchair bound people across the country are able to get around quite well without walking. They recommend "walking" classes be replaced with inclusive instruction on "moving".

Segregate non-students

2007-03-29T20:26:00.000-05:00

A New York City teacher writes about the horrendous discipline problems she faces every day:

Most recently, a student threatened a student and a teacher in the same day, yet is still sitting in class. Not even a suspension! Rumor has it that the principal feels we have too many suspensions and is using shady means to cover up that fact. Either our school totally lacks the infrastrucutre to handle unruly students, or there is major corruption going on at the administrative levels. Last semester, there was a fight in my classroom. As per protocol, I called security. The line was busy. One of the two security guards in the building (yes, we only have to for two whole schools) sits on the phone all day, making personal calls. Another time, a teacher called for a student making threats, and the guard told her she simply wasn't coming! In any case, we all know students must feel safe to be able to learn. Students should not feel safer outside the school than within. How can I protect my students when I have no recourse to discpline students effectively? How can I protect my students when I myself don't even feel safe?

[snip]

The one thing I know for sure is that I am totally burned out. Battling disruptive and extremely disrespectful students every single day, being totally taken advantage of in terms of the contract, and walking on eggshells with administrators so as to remain on their "good side" has really been an exhausting experience. As a result, I have lost my belief that I am actually making a difference. The problems that plague NYC schools are so beyond the scope of one person to fix. It is really overwhelming.

There is something fundamentally wrong with a culture that produces so many disrespectful, unruly students. Nevertheless, no matter how bad the school, there are always well-behaved students willing to learn. We owe it to them to create a propitious learning environment. That means we have to get serious about segregating dysfunctional non-students. This is a first step toward achieving quality education. It runs counter to entrenched dogma, but it needs to be done.

How should reading be taught?

2007-03-25T10:20:00.000-05:00

A little gem of an article that appeared in Scientific American called HOW
SHOULD READING BE TAUGHT?

A scientific consensus should be nigh. But then there are those fans of the psychotic guessing game who think that learning how to read is as natural as learning how to speak. A pervasive misconception. See also how whole language hurts the disadvantaged.

Whole language raises the question whether a theory that is largely grounded in crackpottery can be said to be upsetting the scientific consensus. I say it does not.

Boxed-in creativity

2007-03-25T00:13:00.000-05:00

When educationists don't want to impart knowledge (which they don't by definition), they mumble something about "critical thinking" and "creativity".

In the Comments section of Education Week and in response to an article in Education Week, writer SteveH argues persuasively that you cannot think outside the box if you don't know what's inside the box:

Creativity is even more poorly defined, but many toss it out like everyone knows what it means. What is creativity in math? It's something that is only possible when it is built on mastery of a whole lot of basic skills. It is not something learned top-down. You have to know what is inside the box before you can think outside of the box. There is nothing worse in the scientific world than a technical report whose authors do not cite (or even know about) other work in their field.

Here is a problem that I had to solve a number of years ago. Find, as fast as possible, the intersection line segment of two triangles. The triangles are each defined by three [X,Y,Z] points and you have to be able to eliminate triangles that are not close very quickly.

Employers do not want "creative" employees who want to rediscover the wheel. They want employees who know the literature and can look it up. When they have to look it up, they need to know where to go and they need to implicitly know the difference between a dot product and a cross product. They need to know what a box check is; not creatively discover it. Only after reviewing the literature and finding no solution that meets the need, do you begin to get creative. But creativity takes knowledge and mastery of the basics. Real creativity is only possible by standing on the shoulders of those who have gone before you. Creativity is not sheer dumb luck. Knowledge and mastery do not reduce creativity, they enhance it.

With a fine touch for the comical, Education Week encourages readers to comment on the effect of "school reform."

What do you think? Does the current approach to school reform favor the regurgitation of random facts over the development of critical and creative thinking?

It doesn't say which school reform but I am assuming Education Week is referring to NCLB's accountability schemes. If holding educationists accountable for educating kids is likely to result only in a "regurgitation of random facts," then the state of education is in even worse shape than I had previously assumed. The conclusion I reach is that educationists simply don't know how to educate, if holding them accountable for minimal standards results in a regurgitation of random facts. I suggest they vacate the field and leave education to others.

A tale of three math books

2007-03-10T09:03:00.000-06:00

This is a hoot!

Here is an example from the fabulously encyclopedic old Kitchen Table Math of the quality of different textbooks. The first two problems are from Singapore Math and Saxon, respectively. The last "problem" is from the egregious and execrable fuzzy math text Trailblazers. Compare and contrast indeed!

CompareAndContrast
Posted on May 26, 2005 @ 20:05 by CatherineJohnson

problems in three grade 5 textbooks

from the last page of Primary Mathematics 5B (U.S. Edition):

18. A fish tank is 2/5 full after Sara poured 14 gal of water into it. What is the full capacity of the tank in gallons?

final problem in Saxon Homeschool Math 6/5 3rd Edition:

Change each of these base 10 numbers to base 5:
a. 31
b. 51
c. 10
d. 100
e. 38
f. 86

from the last page of Math Trailblazers Grade 5:

4. Write a paragraph comparing two pieces of work in your portfolio that are alike in some way. For example, you can compare two labs or your solutions to two problems you solved. One piece should be new and one should be from the beginning of the year. Use these questions to help you write your paragraph:

Which two pieces did you choose to compare?

How are they alike? How are they different?

Do you see any improvement in the newest piece of work as compared to the older work? Explain.

If you could redo the older piece of work, how would you improve it?

How could you improve the newer piece of work?

With "math" instruction like that, the U.S. is sure going to remain competitive with the rest of the world.

Parents, don't let educationists ruin your child's opportunities in life. Fight the fuzzy math plague!

Educationist misconceptions

2007-03-04T12:50:00.000-06:00

Good discussion at KTM II on constructivism. ("Constructivism attacks the immune system that saves us from silliness")

I even managed to deliver myself of an opinion that then accidentally turned into a brief statement of my teaching philosophy:

I cannot understand for the life of me how construction and discovery can be compatible. If knowledge is just lying around the kitchen table or on the floor to be discovered, then why does it need to be constructed? If it is to be constructed, why does it need to be discovered?

I can understand construction in the banal sense that we must somehow integrate external input (from observations, books, sage on the stage, etc.) into our knowledge apparatus, but the external input must still be there. This type of integration is necessarily always active, contrary to educationist palaver. So-called "constructivists" militate against this external input and disparage textbooks, explicit and expository instruction, etc. [All based on a misconception of constructivism. See below.]

My own favored teaching/learning model is one I dubbed the Optimal Electrode Gap model [spark gap might be better], or OEG model (somehow I feel I must turn this into an acronym. Acronyms lend legitimacy even to screwball ideas. Not that I consider the OEG model to be a screwball idea).

The analogy is taken from physics. When relatively high voltage is applied to electrodes, three things can occur depending on the electrode gap:

a) no sparks fly if the electrodes are too far apart

b) a short-circuit is created if the electrodes touch each other

and c) sparks begin flying if the gap is just right.

This technical bit lends itself beautifully as an analogy and even metaphor for education where it has major implications for teaching and learning. The flying sparks are a metaphor for true learning and understanding. The electrode gap stands for the kind of pupil/teacher interaction. Finding the right gap is at the heart of a teacher's teaching ability and skill.

If a teacher talks above the head of the pupil without connecting with the pupil's prior knowledge, then the gap is set too wide and no sparks fly. If the teacher tells the student (who may not be paying attention as is most often the case) everything without allowing for creative tension and some student struggle, then we have a short-circuit (the electrodes touch each other) and the voltage is for nought.

On the other hand, finding the right gap prevents pupil frustration on the one hand and wasted energy on the other, and can lead to student excitement and enthusiasm, and a real sense of accomplishment. [I presume Vygotsky's zone of proximal development is something along those lines, but note below how educationists manage to turn a good idea into an absurdity].

This is my teaching philosophy in a nutshell. I am not sure how all of this ties in with prevailing theories, but I suspect it incorporates elements from a variety of philosophies.

In the Comments section of the post, Barry Garelick cites a quote that addresses one of the major misconceptions under which educationists are laboring, namely that the constructing pupil needs no external input:

I was referring to a paper by Anderson, Reder and Simon called "Radical Constructivism and Cognitive Psychology" which appeared in a collection published by Brookings Institute in 1998. In the paper, they state:

“A consensus exists within cognitive psychology that people do not record experience passively but interpret new information with the help of prior knowledge and experience. The term “constructivism” is used in this sense in psychology, and we have been appropriately referred to as constructivists (in this sense) by mathematics educators. However, (AND THIS IS A BIG ‘HOWEVER’ FOLKS) denying that information is recorded passively does not imply that students must discover their knowledge by themselves without explicit instruction, as claimed by radical constructivists. In modern cognitive theories, all acquisition of knowledge, whether by instruction or discover, requires active interpretation by the learner. The processing of instruction can be elaborate, its extent growing with the amount of relevant knowledge the learner brings to the task.”

Catherine Johnson of KTM I and KTM II fame contributes a terrific quote that further elaborates on this enormously damaging and widespread educationist misconception:

A common misconception regarding 'constructivist' theories of knowing (that existing knowledge is used to build new knowledge) is that teachers should never tell students anything directly but, instead, should always allow them to construct knowledge for themselves. This perspective confuses a theory of pedagogy (teaching) with a theory of knowing. Constructivists assume that all knowledge is constructed from previous knowledge, irrespective of how one is taught (e.g., Cobb, 1940)--even listening to a lecture involves active attempts to construct new knowledge.

Barry Garelick points out that my spark gap analogy fits in nicely with Vygotsky's ZPD:

Yes, the spark gap analogy is quite good. It fits in with the Vygotsky theory of Zone of Proximal Development or ZPD. You want to teach children in that zone (i.e., the spark gap is not too wide) and provide the scaffolding or guidance to help bridge that gap.

BeckyC cautions that constructivists go off the deep end when it comes to defining the pivotal term "scaffolding". Scaffolds are usually high up next to a building and I am speculating that educationists begin to suffer from a case of vertigo when they are on a scaffold and fall off. How else to explain this educationist fall into the abyss of absurdity?

It's in trying to define what constitutes scaffolding that the constructivist mischief begins again in earnest.

Constructivists deny the possibility of scaffolding by directly instructing or directly telling the child how to bridge the gap between what he knows and what we know he could know next. They allow indirect methods only, and they are even uncomfortable with presuming to know what the child should know next. They wait patiently, and they wait and wait. After all, it's not their child, and the child goes away at the end of the school year.

Let's hope that through repeated exposure one or the other educationist will come to recognize the terrible misconception under which they have been laboring.

More parents fighting fuzzy math

2007-03-02T16:40:00.000-06:00

Another parent group has formed to fight the fuzzy math plague. This time in Plainfield, NY.

Among the complaints:
Kids don't have basic skills.
Homework is unrecognizable.
Oodles spent on tutors.

Hat tip to Linda Moran.

Teaching fractions

2007-03-01T20:04:00.000-06:00

There is more to knowing and teaching fractions than meets the eye. Paper by H. Wu.

1 Definition of a Fraction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2 Equal Division of a Segment by Ruler and Compass . . . . . . 20
3 Equivalent Fractions (Cancellation Law) . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
4 Fraction as Division . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
5 Ordering Fractions (the Cross-Multiplication Algorithm) . . . 38
6 Addition and Subtraction of Fractions . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
7 Multiplication of Fractions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
7.1 Formula for the product, and first consequences . . . . . . . . 64
7.2 The first alternative approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
7.3 The second alternative approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
8 Division of Fractions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
9 Complex Fractions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
10 “Of” and Percent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
11 Ratio, Rates, and the Fundamental Assumption of School
Mathematics (FASM) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
12 Word Problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
13 APPENDIX: Some Remarks on the Teaching of Fractions in
Elementary School . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117

Curtain call for Zig's book

2007-02-27T20:04:00.001-06:00

NEW PLAN: Curtain Call for Earlier Chapters
The original schedule called for each chapter being on Zigsite.com for two weeks without ever returning. Several people have indicated that they did not access the earlier chapters. So there will be something of a curtain call:
DURING THE WEEK OF MONDAY, MARCH 12, ALL CHAPTERS WILL BE ON FOR ONE WEEK, THROUGH SUNDAY MARCH 18. Then, for sure, they will not return.

When disaster strikes

2007-02-26T21:18:00.000-06:00

I tried to make upgrades to this site and was promised by Blogger that my template would be saved. I cannot find the location where it was supposedly saved and now I lost my blogroll and all the other information on the left margin.

Sometimes it is better to leave well enough alone.

Buzzword education

2007-02-25T08:37:00.000-06:00

(Cross-posted at KTM II)

Wikipedia has an interesting entry on buzzwords. Buzzwords may sound impressive but have an unclear meaning. Wikipedia says: "Buzzwords are typically intended to impress one's audience with the pretense of knowledge. For this reason, they are often universal. They typically make sentences difficult to dispute, on account of their cloudy meaning."

Buzzwords should not be confused with jargon. For the most part, jargon has a well-defined technical meaning, at least to the initiated. On the other hand, buzzwords not only obscure meaning, but "can also function to control thought by being intentionally vague." As Wikipedia puts it: "In management, stating organizational goals by using words with unclear meanings prevents anybody from questioning the directions and intentions of these decisions..."

What is true for management is true for education to a high degree. Education presents a veritable cornucopia of buzzwords with vague meanings. They form the feeble corpus of the educationist Thoughtworld that would be a corpse in a more rational world. (Thoughtworld is a term coined by E. D. Hirsch to describe the nebulous educationist thought complex).

Ed schools are a rich generator of educationist fog, blasting prodigious quantities of fog into the air the way Mount Pinatubo might spew massive amounts of ash into the air until the sun is reduced to a faint glow.

And yet, astonishingly and improbably, we are asked to believe that the massive amounts of fog mixed with toxic fumes emitted by ed schools magically stop at the schoolhouse door.

It's been claimed by some, including Washington Post education writer Jay Mathews (see The Ed School Disease, Part Two) commenting on educational historian David F. Labaree's new book, "The Trouble With Ed Schools," that ed schools may be pitiful institutions and the butt of jokes, but there is no need to worry. They are not doing any harm: "Why worry about ed schools if they don't do any harm, or any good?" Mathews avers:

What I said in that column was that I had been in a lot of classrooms and had rarely seen much of this guide on the side stuff. I wasn't saying I was happy about it. We have never given the Deweyites a fair test of their theories, and I know of a few schools that have used child-centered learning to good effect. Labaree's insight is powerful and useful all the same: why worry about ed schools if they don't do any harm, or any good?

The blindness revealed in this statement is astonishing. Could armies of new teachers and educational leaders who go through the rigorous ed school indoctrination process really emerge unscathed? Not very likely.

When attempting to write about the harm done by ed school ideology, it is hard to know where to begin. One could start with relatively minor topics like the preachments about the unimportance of correct spelling and the alleged benefits of invented spelling. One could start with the promotion of disastrous creeds like constructivism that are reflected in curricula and teaching methods, and form the core of ed school ideology.

A perusal of mission and vision statements of schools show how deeply entrenched ed school ideology is in the thinking of educationists who run the schools. Take, for example, Chicago's so-called Renaissance schools. Classrooms need to be heterogeneous, disciplines must be integrated, collaborative groups must engage in peer teaching, math and science must be learned by inquiry and discovery without coherent textbooks and so on. Among my many favorites is the Al Raby school:

Educational Philosphy [sic]
The Al Raby School will embody a constructivist approach to learning. Learning will be an active process; our teachers will use lecture style instruction and worksheets sparingly. All teachers will stress collaborative groups as well as individual initiative, striving to make the classroom a model democratic community where students have choices and responsibilities. Based on a large body of research, we believe that for true comprehension and retention to occur the learning must be relevant, active and reflective.

Many of these new Chicago schools receive money from the Gates Foundation.

It is also wrong for Mathews to presume teacher autonomy. Teachers are not free agents. They must work under the contraints imposed from above. In many schools, this means having to work with fuzzy math textbooks like TERC, Trailblazers, Connected Math, CorePlus, all execrable fuzzy math programs. The CMP teacher manual tells teachers not to provide explicit instruction. Math teachers I've talked to either follow this dictum or are agonizing over it. Often it can mean working with no textbooks at all. Periodically, an ed school-indoctrinated leadership comes in and orders the removal of textbooks and workbooks from classrooms. These are then given away or end up in the trash.

Even if teachers manage to defy ed school indoctrination, the obstacles they face in actual practice are formidable. They face not only institutional constraints (e.g. constructivist materials and approaches mandated from above), but they are also facing a student body that has been conditioned to expect to be entertained and to be resistant to expository instruction.

One of the pernicious effects of ed school ideology is how it produces an indoctrinated cadre for top leadership positions which then has the power to impose constructivist texts and practices on schools, like Chicago's CMSI. This cadre could be anything from superintendents to board members to curriculum and instruction experts to principals and supervisory bodies.

The message from this cadre is that explicit instruction should be minimized or avoided altogether; that worksheets (one of the hands-on activities that make sense) should be avoided like the plague [one reason for the highly restricted photocopying allotment given to teachers here in Chicago]; that textbooks are evil incarnate and prevent teachers from being "creative". On top of everything, overworked and frazzled teachers are expected to reinvent the wheel every day. Since many elementary teachers are not well-educated to begin with (e.g. a pathetic knowledge of history, geography and science), the one source of knowledge (textbooks) that could be a corrective is foreclosed. So you have instances of textbook-free schools. Schools without basals (hated by educationists), history and science textbooks, except for science "inquiry" manuals.

Part of this hatred for textbooks is the belief -- a component of ed school ideology -- that "information" (this is how educationists view knowledge) is exploding like supernovae, and what is true today is hopelessly obsolete tomorrow. Another reason is plain educationist disdain for facts. It interferes with "critical thinking" and "creativity" and stunts the mind.

One can see the hand of ed school ideology everywhere in school. At least I see it everywhere. I see it when DEAR (Drop Everything and Read insipid, vacuous and vapid fiction) is the first thing on the agenda in the morning when students are most receptive for more substantial stuff. This reading then takes place silently for an hour without teacher feedback. I see it in block scheduling to provide ample opportunity for time-wasting activities. I see it in contrived interdisciplinary instruction and in coloring and more coloring. I see the hand of ed school ideology indirectly when new elementary teacher candidates are released from the citadels of anti-intellectualism with scant knowledge of math, science, history, geography, grammar and languages, and subsequently validated by laughable state "content" tests.

The list goes on and on. I haven't even adressed ed school staples like learning styles, multiple intelligences, developmentally appropriate injunctions that often slide into low expectations, project and activities mania, heterogeneous grouping, expanding horizons, the travesty form of Bloom's taxonomy, and the disdain for factual knowledge. Moreover, once out of ed school, teachers continue to be assaulted with ed school ideology in the form of professional development requirements.

Dimensional analysis

2007-02-24T15:21:00.000-06:00

A reader of this site signing as Anonymous has left this fantastic comment modeled on Vern Williams' 4 3/8 dimension:

One morning as I was walking my kids up to school, the sidewalk ended and we fell into the Sevenths dimension and I actually believed the following:

All my child will ever need to know about sevenths is that they are a little bit bigger than eighths, and a little bit smaller than sixths.

It is not my job to teach my child.

It is my job to support my child's learning.

My child should never be bored in class.

My child isn't just wandering around his classroom chatting with classmates, he's a kinesthetic learner with high verbal intelligence.

Children don't mindlessly copy from each other in small groups; they richly create meaning in conversation with their peers.

My child will discover efficient mathematical algorithms on his own in a way that makes sense to him.

Learning by rote is bad.

If my child hasn't memorized his basic addition facts in first grade, he'll have another chance in second grade.

If my child hasn't memorized his basic addition facts in second grade, he'll have another chance in third grade.

I should drill my child on his basic addition facts at home in order to support the conceptual learning that takes place at school.

If my child hasn't memorized his multiplication facts in third grade, he'll have another chance in fourth grade.

If my child hasn't memorized his multiplication facts in fourth grade, he'll have another chance in fifth grade.

I should drill my child on his multiplication facts at home in order to support the conceptual learning that takes place at school.

I should be more active in the PTA.

I should buy more gift wrap.

I should go to a school board meeting and see real decisions being made.

I should feel guilty questioning the curriculum even if I have a college degree in the field of interest.

A 25 year-old teacher is a licensed professional who is fully qualified to teach my child.

Children should write about math a lot.

Teachers will lovingly read everything my child writes because, as teachers, they look forward to creating an authentic portfolio that assesses my child's true mathematical learnings across thematic units.

My child's teacher will be so proud of him when he graduates from high school that we should planning on buying her a ticket for the commencement ceremony so she can sit with us.

I finally woke up in a cold sweat from this nightmare and asked myself, does anyone actually believe those things? The answer is a resounding yes. Every parent of every kindergartener I have ever met, myself included.

Fever and recycling

2007-02-23T20:58:00.000-06:00

Global warming hysteria is causing kids to freak out:

Global warming concerns are keeping children awake at night
Half of young children are anxious about the effects of global warming, often losing sleep because of their concern, according to a new report today.

A survey of 1,150 youngsters aged between seven and 11 found that one in four blamed politicians for the problems of climate change.

And then there is this line that had me rolling in the aisles and prompted me to post this story:

Most of those polled understood the benefits of recycling, although one in 10 thought the issue was linked to riding a bike.

Elsewhere I read that GW will cause fever in half the child population. I grew up in the subtropics where it was really hot and don't remember having had an unsual share of fevered days.

This site called live science has different views on GW. I has links to related topics that seem like a good source for teachers who want to have kids do research projects.

Math research hoax

2007-02-17T12:54:00.000-06:00

Fuzzy math enthusiasts and curanderos like to point to alleged "research shows" to help peddle their wares.

Let the colonel explain.

Excerpts from a stunning report from the National Research Council posted on KTM II show that there is no there there.

Among other things, the committee finds that:

The corpus of evaluation studies as a whole across the 19 programs studied does not permit one to determine the effectiveness of individual programs with high degree of certainty, due to the restricted number of studies for any particular curriculum, limitations in the array of methods used, and the uneven quality of the studies.

As a bonus, there is a list of rogue fuzzy math programs, most of them financed with tax dollars through the EHR directorate of the National Science Foundation:

Elementary School:
• Everyday Mathematics (EM), Grades K-6 (SRA/McGraw-Hill)
• Investigations in Number, Data and Space, Grades K-6 (Scott Foresman) [ed.: also called "TERC"]
• Math Trailblazers, Grades K-6 (Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company)

Middle School:
• Connected Mathematics Project (CMP), Grades 6-8 (Prentice Hall)
• Mathematics in Context (MiC), Grades 5-8 (Holt, Rinehart and Winston)
• MathScape: Seeing and Thinking Mathematically, Grades 6-8 (Glencoe/McGraw-Hill)
• MathThematics (STEM), Grades 6-8 (McDougal Littell)
• Middle School Mathematics Through Applications Project (MMAP) Pathways to Algebra and Geometry, Grades 6-8 (currently unpublished)

High School:
• Contemporary Mathematics in Context (Core-Plus), Grades 9-12 (Glencoe/McGraw-Hill)
• Interactive Mathematics Program (IMP), Grades 9-12 (Key Curriculum Press)
• MATH Connections: A Secondary Mathematics Core Curriculum, Grades 9-12 (IT’S ABOUT TIME, Inc.)
• Mathematics: Modeling Our World (MMOW/ARISE), Grades 9-12 (W.H. Freeman and Company)
• Systemic Initiative for Montana Mathematics and Science (SIMMS) Integrated Mathematics, Grades 9-12 (Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company)

This list can help parents spot the offending and immensely damaging voodoo math programs in their schools so they can raise hell.

The long story of gold

2007-02-17T09:35:00.000-06:00

Cross-posted at KTM II

Gold is a rare, odd-numbered atom with 79 protons. Common atoms have an even number of protons.

Here is something for science buffs. Where did gold come from?

Robert Krulwich of NPR asks this question apropos Valentine's Day and receives a long answer.

Ever since taking earth science courses in college I have been fascinated by the fusion processes in distant stars that produce different elements. This gold story explains why gold is so rare, as rare as a good education.

Fuzzy math cartoon

2007-02-13T15:59:00.000-06:00

UPDATE: In the latest, Steve advises Bill on where to find designers for Bill's latest project. Get them from the discovery schools Bill supports. Good advice for a competitor. If Bill takes the advice, I recommend shorting MSFT.

Check out this fantastic cartoon series at Weapons of Math Destruction. It's all about the ravages of fuzzy math.

I like the one where Einstein goes on a discovery journey and discovers the Pythagorean Theorem. Yeah, keep reinventing the wheel. That should be the motto of the fuzzies.

A better mousetrap

2007-02-10T16:31:00.000-06:00

In the latest issue of Education Next, Diane Ravitch reviews a book on the sad story of how Open Court died the death of a thousand cuts:

Henderson tries to persuade the reader that the books should have been congenial to whole-language teachers because of their superior literature selections and should have been embraced by progressive educators because they blended the best of both approaches, including workshop activities, so-called reciprocal teaching (where the teacher and the students take turns as teacher), and other practices that were embraced by progressives. He never adequately explains why progressives did not see the obvious virtues of the Open Court readers (my guess is that any reader that paid any attention to explicit phonics was doomed in the eyes of progressives, at that period in history).

Henderson even buys the canard that the Caruses’ efforts to promote “high culture” were doomed by mass enrollments, as though it were an obvious truth that the children of the poor could never appreciate classic fairy tales and myths, a rather questionable assumption. Even so, Let’s Kill Dick & Jane is a fascinating and rather depressing read, explicating for all the world to see how an ambitious textbook series with rich content and beautiful illustrations died the death of a thousand cuts, administered by ideologues, bureaucrats, and the dumbed-down culture of American education.

Ultimately, the life and death of the original Open Court readers demonstrate that American education is a challenging environment for the industry that supplies its needs. Ralph Waldo Emerson said that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. Blouke and Marianne Carus learned that this is not true, that the market is shaped more by fads and ideology than by evidence about what works best for children.

Free book on Project Follow-Through

2007-01-28T09:57:00.000-06:00

UPDATE II: Don't miss Chapter 4. It really goes away as promised.

UPDATE I: Chapter 3 of Zig's saga is now available for downloading.

You've got only one more week to download the first chapter of Siegfried Engelmann's opus The Outrage of Project Follow Through: 5 Million Failed Kids Later for free. Project Follow-Through was the nation's most extensive, ambitious and costly study of what works in education ever conducted. Its findings did not sit well with the educational establishment's pet notions and beliefs, and the establishment did its best to either ignore or disparage the study.

Helpful hint on downloading: When the text appears in the Adobe Reader, go to the top left and find Save a Copy. Click and the file will download to the designated folder.

Sometimes I wish PDF files had never been invented.

From Zig's site:

Schedule for Chapters of Zig's Latest Book

The Outrage of Project Follow Through:
5 Million Failed Kids Later

Here's the plan: Every week for the next seven weeks, starting January 22, I will post one chapter of the trade book I have written, The Outrage of Project Follow Through: 5 Million Failed kids Later. Each chapter will remain on Zigsite.com for two weeks. Once it's off, it's off and will not return. There are seven chapters

Chapter 1: Before Project Follow Through (January 22) click for print friendly version
Chapter 2: Project Follow Through Begins (January 29)
Chapter 3: Follow Through Continues (February 5)
Chapter 4: During Follow Through (February 12)
Chapter 5: Follow Through Evaluation (February 19)
Chapter 6: Follow Through Aftermath (February 26)
Chapter 7: The New Millennium (March 5)

You may download chapters, but understand that the material is copyrighted by me and is not to be distributed or published without consent. I still have some hopes of getting it published, but so far I've petitioned 5 literary agents, and none was interested in even reading the book. I'm going to keep trying to find a major publisher that will take the work and publicize it, but in the meantime I figured I'd put out the material for those who are interested. All chapters except the one on evaluation are at least 80 pages.

Prologue to Zig's Latest Book
The book is not designed for educators but for the general public. The events start in 1964, when I got my first job in education (at the Institute for Research on Exceptional Children at the University of Illinois) and proceed from there to the present through a series of first-person vignettes and episodes that present the human side of what we did and why we did it. I think it delivers a powerful message.

Many episodes are dramatic—at least they were when we experienced them. I believe they show that we knew what we were talking about because we'd done more than theorize or observe through the sterile literature. We were completely involved in working with teachers, kids, and schools for more than 20 years in different manifestations of Follow Through. The book also provides short tours of work we've done with various types of learners, from the autistic, those with traumatic brain damage, and the deaf, to preschoolers, at-risk high school students, and the gifted.

The theme of the book is that urban school districts, as they are currently configured, can't possibly work because their structure, logic, and philosophy are anti-scientific. Overall, the book will probably sadden you, but hopefully, it will provide an interesting journey and won't discourage you.

UPDATE: Chapter Two is now available. It won't stay on for long.

Here are the opening lines of Chapter Two:

Project Follow Through Begins

Devious Logic of the 1960s
Project Follow Through, a creation of the ‘60s, was the largest
educational experiment ever conducted, the most responsive effort ever
designed to find out what works well and how to serve at-risk children
effectively. Yet, Follow Through is not recognized as a landmark study or a
source of revelation about how to educate children of poverty effectively. It
remains a secret, both to the public and to the educational community. In
fact, its results have never been used to fashion even one urban school
district, and the project has been all but erased from what serves as the
current idiom of the “history of compensatory education.”

Test your math knowledge

2007-01-21T13:08:00.000-06:00

The Fordham Foundation's The State of State Standards 2006 has given California's math standards a top rating. (CA shares an A with MA and IN).

Here you can test your math knowledge with Practice Problems for the California Mathematics Standards Grades 1-8

An example from 7th grade:

A jacket is on sale for 70% of the original price. If the discount saves $45, what was the original price of the jacket? What is the sale price?

Let's see...

Here is an example from fourth grade:

What is the length of the line segment joining the points
(6, -4) and (21, -4)?

So the kids are already expected to know early algebra at that grade level? Pretty amazing!

Fuzzy math video

2007-01-20T15:21:00.000-06:00

Parents who are bewildered by the kind of math their children are exposed to in school should watch this video. A parent who is also an atmospheric scientist demonstrates how multiplication and division problems are done with this new-fangled math. Incredibly confusing stuff for a kid, done to avoid standard algorithms.

This link of the video called Math Education: An Inconvenient Truth takes you to the YouTube site. The video has sparked a lively discussion at YouTube that includes a few defenders of fuzzy math. This is an example:

Kids will "learn math" if they are given an opportunity to discover. Kids want to explore things. If you tell them that this is the way to do it, you have (for many, but not all) squelched their creative energy. They are reduced to just finding the answer. Kids want to understand the language of math. In the standard division algorithm, we use the term "goes in to". What does that mean to a kid just beginning to learn the concept of division? What is a "remainder"?

This is what I don't understand. If kids are so eager to discover, why are they not discovering on their own outside school? If this were true, nearly every child would be math proficient.

Ed school nuttiness

2007-01-14T13:12:00.000-06:00

One of the major travesties in education are the education schools. One of my recommendations for a new and improved NCLB law would be to declare an education major a disqualification for teaching. Prospective elementary teachers should be required to major in an academic subject. Education courses can be tagged on if they meet a set of criteria to be determined.

This radical solution I am proposing received a new impetus when I was looking around other education weblogs and came across this post at Right Wing Nation. The good prof unearthed samples of course offerings at an ed school in Indiana that are geared more to political indoctration in a particular ideology than to turning out effective, knowledgeable teachers. Theses examples could be replicated countless times at other ed schools.

Here is what ed majors can choose from:

E 305 Infusion of Technology (3 cr.) B One of the goals for the Democracy, Diversity, and Social Justice Program is to infuse the study, use, and teaching about technology throughout the entire program. Rather than being a tool that preservice teachers learn about, technology will be studied as a subject and a means to expand research opportunities, stimulate and enhance models of inquiry, and broaden teaching abilities.

What on earth does technology have to do with Democracy, Diversity, and Social Justice?

E 320 Envisioning, Exploring, and Creating Our Social Worlds Through Multiple Literacies in the Elementary School (9 cr.) B This interdisciplinary course explores the social studies as ways of knowing about our world; the language arts and language learning theory; aesthetics and the arts; and the multiple roles of the teacher as facilitator of learning, social researcher, and curriculum creator. A field experience is included.

Here we have another example of the corruption of language. Literacy is now literacies and can mean anything under the sky. How about concentrating on turning out fluent readers and writers who can put together coherent, articulate and error-free sentences and paragraphs?

E 322 Diversity and Social Justice I (3 cr.) B Students will develop curricula for social studies, language arts, aesthetics, and the arts that responds to multicultural and disability concerns. Curriculum planning and teaching strategies will attend to issues of student diversity in home and community contexts and school settings.

E 326 Diversity and Social Justice II (3 cr.) Students will develop curriculum for mathematics and science that responds to multicultural and disability concerns. Curriculum planning and teaching strategies will attend to issues of student diversity in home and community contexts and school settings.

In all this responding to multicultural and disability concerns the concern for what these students should know is lost. Are these multiculturals really from another planet that makes them unsuitable for a core, agreed-upon curriculum good for non-multiculturals?

E 324 Teaching Mathematics and Science for All Students (9 cr.) This course prepares prospective elementary school teachers to teach mathematics and science in an integrated, discovery-based environment. A major goal of this course is to promote student familiarity with the conceptual understanding and skills necessary for teaching in a manner that promotes the inclusion of all pupils. Constructivism, the History and Philosophy of Science, and Technology and Society comprise three strands that further the aim of democratic teaching as applied to mathematics and science.

I'll bet the "democratic" discovery-based environment excludes a lot of students who need special attention and explicit instruction.

David Klein video

2007-01-13T20:15:00.000-06:00

I had great fun watching a video of David Klein and James Milgram speaking at an event hosted by Where's the Math?

As a bonus you get to see Ma and Pa Kettle doing innovative division and multiplication. I guess the Kettles discovered their own algorithm and could become poster boys and girls for the fuzzies.

Perversity in Chicago

2007-01-06T10:02:00.000-06:00

Like so many big cities, Chicago has a huge number of underperforming schools who get placed on a probation list, thanks to NCLB. What is the school board's answer to ailing schools? Administer a massive dose of poison!

In what can only seem to be head-shaking perversity, the board forces something called the Chicago Math and Science Initiative on ailing schools, enforced by its network of so-called Area Instructional Offices.

As can be seen from the instructional materials used by CMSI, it's all of the worst fuzzy type:

Purpose: To promote instructional coherence across K-8 mathematics classrooms by recommending and supporting specific research- and inquiry-based instructional materials.

Description: The mathematics instructional materials designated for grades K-8 in the Chicago Public Schools are:

Primary Grades Mathematics: Math Trailblazers and Everyday Mathematics

Middle Grades Mathematics: Connected Mathematics and Math Thematics

This information can be used as a resource by other elementary schools that seek to align their use of instructional materials with that supported by CMSI.

Students who desperately need structure, coherence, instruction and solid foundational knowledge are fed this fuzzy crap, guaranteed to perpetuate failure.

The science component is of a similar vein. All "inquiry" and discovery and no foundational knowledge.

Bad advice

2006-12-16T15:50:00.001-06:00

Over at edspresso there is a fascinating series of articles written by an ed student using the pseudonym John Dewey. In one of the installments, the student quotes from the textbook the class is using:

A case in point is the textbook we are reading in my math teaching methods class. The textbook is "Teaching Mathematics in Secondary and Middle School" by James S. Cangelosi. Excerpt from Chapter 4:

"Because mathematics is widely misunderstood to be a linear sequence of skills to be mastered one at a time in a fixed order, some people think teaching mathematics is a matter of following a prescribed curriculum guide or mathematics textbook. ... “

This statement makes me shudder. Math is brutally cumulative and a linear sequence of skills is often necessary. For example, how can you reduce fractions without having learned division? Leave it to ed schools to mistrain teachers in such an egregious fashion. One can only hope math continues to be "widely misunderstood."

Long division

2006-12-11T11:07:00.000-06:00

If you listen in on the math wars, you'll notice that long division is one of the more divisive issues in this war. It's hard to comprehend why fuzzy math zealots are so opposed to teaching long division and making such a fuss. For example, NCTM in its so-called standards calls for "decreased attention" to long division. I've taught long division and the kids caught on quickly.

In a paper called The Role of Long Division in the K-12 Curriculum that should be must-reading for educationists, David Klein and R. James Milgram show that long division is a crucial skill necessary to understand more advanced math concepts:

Abstract
We discuss the role of long division in the K - 12 mathematics curriculum. We begin by reviewing the reasons that most math educators today depreciate the topic and other topics in the curriculum that derive from it, such as polynomial long division or polynomial factorization. Later we show that this view is simply wrong mathematically. The role of long division is not just to divide one rational number by another, but the algorithm itself contains the initial exposure of topics which become crucial in the core
applications of mathematics in our society today. Following the introduction, we discuss methods for teaching long division in such a way that the underlying concepts can be understood by students. We then provide more details about the ways in which these concepts develop in later mathematics course, and why they are so important.

After reading this, the mysteries of real numbers and the conversion of fractions to decimals will become much clearer. Isn't conceptual understanding what the fuzzies purport to be after? So why are they opposing a tool that leads to a conceptual understanding of major math topics?

UPDATE: Reader Katie has left an incredible link to an actual conversation between a phone customer and a number of customer reps (supervisors) that sounds more like an Abbott and Costello routine. It's about telling the difference between dollars and cents expressed in decimal form. The reps never get it and instead rely on a calculator without realizing what they are doing. This should give pause to NCTM and fellow fuzzies and their enthusiasm for calculators.

What is absolutely hilarious is that at the end the rep (supervisor) declares that the difference between the customer's correct math and the rep's fuzzy math is a matter of opinion.

More here.

Scores and class size

2006-11-27T16:50:00.000-06:00

The Chicago Sun-Times reports the astonishing news that some of the highest-scoring Chicago public schools also have the largest class sizes:

Small, medium or large. What class size would you choose for your child? Today, in the second of two parts -- what may seem counterintuitive: Some of the best test scores are being racked up by Chicago schools with some of the largest primary class sizes.

If you're looking for a high-scoring Chicago public school, be prepared to accept larger class sizes in the early grades, just when some experts say smaller classes count the most.

The 25 highest-scoring schools in CPS average roughly seven more kids in their primary classrooms than the 25 highest-scoring suburban schools, or about 27 kids vs. 20, a Chicago Sun-Times analysis of state public school data indicates.

That's seven more kids in a CPS room just as children are learning everything from how to read to how to sit quietly at a desk and do classwork. Compared with the statewide primary average, it's roughly six more kids.

At top Chicago public schools, K-3 classrooms with at least 30 students aren't unusual. Meanwhile, many kids in top suburban schools enjoy the intimacy -- and efficiency -- of 16, 18 or 19 kids in a class.

Rising scores in some Chicago neighborhood schools -- among the system's most affluent -- have brought a rising tide of students, jamming classes to the point where some parents want relief. Even some of the city's most popular magnet schools have 30-plus classes, often because of the extra teacher bigger classes bring.

At first glance, the results at Edgebrook School, on the Far Northwest Side, seem to stand common sense on its head.

In 2004-2005, Edgebrook's sole first-grade room held a whopping 40 students. That year, the school posted the highest test score among the city's neighborhood schools, yet it had the largest primary class sizes in the six-county area. At least two of its tested grades that year -- third and eighth -- held 30 or more students.

At first glance this would seem to give ammunition to those who contend that class size doesn't matter. However, it would be a mistake to generalize from the cases reported above. The crucial element that allows large class sizes is the quality of the student body. Edgebrook School is a case in point. The school is located in an affluent area and peopled by students enjoying a high socio-economic status. This success could not be replicated in large classrooms filled with the disadvanted, many of whom suffer from behavior disorders. Such students need more intensive teacher attention.

Via Joanne Jacobs.

Reading instruction breakthrough

2006-11-20T14:15:00.000-06:00

The Chicago Tribune has a report on innovative reading instruction methods. I expect reading scores to be boosted significantly as a result.

In Leah Coffey's kindergarten class, learning to read means breaking a sweat and getting your hands dirty.

One morning last week, Coffey put in a CD with infectious drumbeats and pupils repeated the names of different instruments. "T-T-T-Tambourine," they sang as they danced and smacked invisible tambourines.

Later, Coffey and four pupils dipped their hands into a can of clay. First, they molded the letter T. They then flattened the clay into discs.

"T-T-T-Tambourine," they said and tapped the clay tambourines against their hands.

Westcott Elementary School, 409 W. 80th St. on the South Side, has joined 17 other Chicago public schools in implementing a curriculum from Reading in Motion, a Chicago agency that uses music, drama and dance to teach reading.

Coffey is sold on the concept. "I think that every lesson should be put to music," she said.

Reading in Motion is one of several organizations supported by Chicago Tribune Holiday Giving, a campaign of Chicago Tribune Charities, a McCormick Tribune Foundation fund.

The way I learned to read way back then was so incidental that I can't even remember how it was done.

Glue guns shoot down real studying

2006-11-18T10:29:00.000-06:00

Time-consuming and often pointless projects are not only devouring students' time but also rob parents of whatever free time they have. Acquiring substantive subject matter knowledge must inevitably take a back seat.

Ken DeRosa has found a mother's plea that calls for an end to this educationist extravaganza:

It can wreck marriages and destroy family life, and it's more burdensome than travel soccer, football practice, or the Boy Scouts: It's the school project.

Ask a bunch of mothers how they spent their week, and they will tell you that they built the Parthenon with sugar cubes, the Pyramids from milk cartons, and Mount Olympus using Cocoa Puffs.

Consider a recent Sunday evening at my house. The kids had gone to bed, and Mom and Dad were relaxing in the living room. But suddenly, a voice cried out from upstairs.

"Mom, I forgot I need to bring a hot glue gun to school tomorrow for a project. We are making African masks in social studies. And, oh yeah, Mom, I also need pipe cleaners, a box of sugar cubes, and some wooden spoons - you know, the kind they use with those little ice cream cups."

Half-dressed, I hopped into my minivan and searched for a hardware store open late on a Sunday. Thank goodness for the 24-hour Walgreens, where aisles are filled with construction paper, glue sticks, and pipe cleaners - but, alas, no hot glue guns.

Please, oh please, dear curriculum developers, give us parents a break: Ban all make-work projects. Parents have jobs, too, you know. We do our children's homework. We serve on school boards, coach basketball, and volunteer with the Boy Scouts. Now you want us to be creative?!

The project method was widely acclaimed by progressive educationists upon its publication by William H. Kilpatrick in 1918. It has become a mainstay in education thanks to a convergence of educationist fads, tenets and theories. Illinoisloop has one of the best explanations of this mania that I have ever seen:

• Constructivism:
The pervasive education religion of "constructivism" holds that a child learns best through active "doing". To some extent, this is of course true. However, the Achilles heel of constructivism is that this is a painfully plodding and tedious way of learning, while forcing a drastic reduction (dumbing down) of the content of a course. While an active project may often be a good technique for making a difficult concept clear, it is often used when a simple direct method would be just as effective and far more efficient.
• Groups:
The pressure for "collaborative learning" or "cooperative learning" is frequently met with more projects and activities.
• Interdisciplinary curriculum:
Teachers are under pressure to find "thematic" or "interdisciplinary" links between subjects. There is nothing inherently wrong with that -- the Core Knowledge Sequence used in the Core Knowledge schools is carefully constructed to encourage learning in this way. But without a rigorous, well-reasoned curriculum like the CK Sequence, the result too often is time-wasting art or writing projects linking vague language arts goals with minimal content points.
• Multiple Intelligences:
The fevered success of another fad, Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences (click for much more info on that), pressures teachers into coming up with separate projects for each of this theory's supposed categories. So, we have one project to appeal to "kinesthetic" children, another project for the "intrapersonal" learners, we sing a song for the "musical" learners, and so on. Of course, since the MI mindset offers no method to identify or quantify these supposed differences, the bottom line is lots and lots of projects for all the children in the class.
• Anti-Fact Mentality:
Starting in ed school and throughout their careers in most schools, teachers are subjected to a barrage of rhetoric about the dangers of teaching facts. They are told not to teach "mere facts" to be "regurgitated." Learning of specific content knowledge is called "low level" and nothing more than "memorization." What used to be called "learning" is now disparaged as "brain-stuffing". A teacher is to be "a guide on the side" rather than "a sage on the stage." This drumbeat from the ed schools and education orthodoxy is pervasive and relentless, and teachers are drilled incessantly (ironic, isn't it?) that direct teaching is to be avoided. So, if the teacher isn't teaching, what are the kids likely to be doing? Yup, more projects.
• Anti-Fact Assessments:
If facts are bad, then testing whether children know facts is even worse -- or so teachers are told. Thus, chapter tests and other quantitative measures of learning are deemphasized in favor of so-called "authentic" assessment, in which we look at a whole "portfolio" of a child's "work" which largely consists of (ta da!) projects.
• "Authentic" Skills:
If the purpose of a school is not to build knowledge, then what is a school for? The progressivists have a ready answer for that: to learn supposed "skills." They argue that since knowledge is always increasing, it is hopeless to try to teach very much at all (using a twisted logic that defies comprehension). What kids need, they say, is to learn how to look things up. Well, guess what? Projects give them an "opportunity" to look things up instead of being taught.
• Innovation:
School administrators suppose themselves to be seen as "creative" or "innovative." We often read of a school calling itself "innovative" or a teacher said to be "creative" ort "imaginative." Those are fine attributes, but not when they take the place of words like "effective" or "knowledgeable." One teacher might be extraordinarily effective and captivating in teaching children a rich, detailed and memorable introduction to American history, while another teacher gains more recognition from parents and maybe the local newspaper not by teaching much of anything but by staging a marathon dress-up pageant, puppet show or enormous craft project.
• Finding a Use for Computers:
Projects provide a convenient raison d'etre for the expensive computers that schools have been buying in bulk.
• Smaller Class Sizes:
For all of the above reasons, the teaching industry is obsessive about urging more dubious classroom projects. But when class sizes are large, it's extremely difficult to manage the hubbub of activity and to try to keep a semblance or order. But as class sizes shrink, it becomes ever more practical for a teacher to assign more and more projects.

On that same page, Illinoisloop has many links to important articles dealing with this project mania.

Memorization need not be rote

2006-11-14T13:47:00.000-06:00

One of the most puzzling elements of the progressive/constructivist ed creed is its hostility to knowledge. One would assume that the acquisition of knowledge should be a major component of the educational enterprise. How can one explain such a hostility to knowledge by people who purport to be "educators"?

Part of the answer can be found in these observations by Claudia Winkler in a piece called The Difference Between Thinking and Knowing. It's a confusion that equates committing knowledge to memory with rote memorization. Since mindless memorization is bad, and apparently educationists preclude the possibility of thoughtful memorization, nothing should be committed to memory. The result, in Winkler's felicitous phrase, is that ignorance is dressed up as superior thoughtfulness:

But not all memorization is learning by rote. To commit something to memory isn't necessarily to learn it "without understanding or thought." As anyone knows who's tried it, retaining facts is much easier when you see how they fit into a larger picture that makes sense.

Yet in a subtle bit of linguistic sleight of hand, the pejorative term "rote memorization" is commonly used as synonymous with memorization tout court. It's almost always contrasted with comprehension and critical thinking--as if knowing things and thinking about things were mutually exclusive.

Thus, to cite an altogether commonplace example, an article praising a new schoolbook on local history, in the Queens edition of Newsday, notes, "Activities in the booklet draw on an array of skills, stressing thinking and analysis over rote memorization of facts."

One can't help wondering what it is the children are to analyze--what exactly they are to think about--if their starting point is not to be a command of the specifics recounted in the book.

This conflation of mindless, blab-school, learning-by-rote with the necessary, if sometimes painful, committing of information to memory has a sordid effect: to dress up ignorance as superior thoughtfulness. Implicitly, it disparages the intake of knowledge--once the very essence of classroom learning--as an activity fit only for drones.

Memory is a precious gift. The educationist war against memory seems utterly perverse.

Hat tip: Illinoisloop

Great comment added by Quincy:

Winkler is right, but I wish she had pressed further along her line of thought. What needs to be broken is the concept that for the recall of information to be thoughtful, it must be effortful. When constructivist educators look at kids who have cold mastery of their math facts, they assume the quick, easy response must be some sort of Pavlovian conditioning, not "genuine" learning. In fact, it is learning of the most important kind--that which, through its thoroughness, frees up the mind to think about more advanced things.

I attribute this flaw in constructivist thinking to their continual focus on external process. If the kids LOOK like they're being thoughtful, then they're being thoughtful. More often than not, though, the kids look thoughtful because they're trying hard to understand something they weren't sufficiently taught.

In maintaining this illusion of thoughtfulness, the constructivists are actually denying kids the wonderfully frenetic rush that comes when ideas that have been percolating through the layers of accumulated knowledge come to the surface. In doing so, they deny the fact that each of us, because of our own life experiences, our own personalities, our own desires, will spin the same piece of information different ways in this process.

In sticking to the idea that memorization is bad, the constructivists are denying their students the chance to create, the chance to innovate, and the chance to contribute their thoughts to the wealth of human knowledge. Remember, these are the same people who crow oh so often about diversity. Yet they, with their backwards mentality towards learning, are destroying the most important type of diversity for the human race to achieve--diversity of thought. Whether this is intentional or simple carelessness I do not know, but it is damning for them none the less.

This WSJ item on the blessings and curse of memory caught my eye: http://www.opinionjournal.com/weekend/fivebest/?id=110009912

Unforgettable

A Nobel-winning neurologist's favorite books on memory.

BY ERIC KANDEL Saturday, April 7, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

1. "Ficciones" by Jorge Luis Borges (Grove, 1962).
Memory is the scaffold that holds our mental life together. One of its most remarkable characteristics is that it has no restraints on time and place. Memory allows you to sit in your living room while your mind wanders back to childhood, recalling a special event that pleased or pained you. This time-travel ability, often sparked by a sensory experience that opens the floodgates of memory, is central to much great fiction. It is described in the most detail in Marcel Proust's million-word classic, "Remembrance of Things Past," in which a madeleine dipped in tea famously prompts an onrush of images from the protagonist's childhood. But one of the most fascinating descriptions of memory in fiction can be found in Jorge Luis Borges's seminal short-story collection, "Ficciones," first published in 1945 in Spanish. Borges, who knew for much of his life that he was slowly going blind from a hereditary disease, had a deep sense of the central and sometimes paradoxical role of memory in human existence. This sense informs much of "Ficciones" but particularly the story "Funes, the Memorious," which concerns a man who suffers a modest head injury after falling off a horse and, as a result, cannot forget anything he has ever experienced, waking or dreaming. But his brain is filled only with detail, crowding out universal principles. He can't create because his head is filled with garbage! We know that an excessively weak memory is a handicap, but, as Borges shows, having too good a memory can be a handicap as well--the capacity to forget is a blessing.

Did it, or didn't it?

2006-11-14T00:35:00.000-06:00

The media keeps reporting that NCTM saw the light and now wants real math to be taught, and NCTM keeps denying it. The latest instance is this NYT report:

Across the nation, the reconsideration of what should be taught and how has been accelerated by a report in September by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the nation’s leading group of math teachers.

It was a report from this same group in 1989 that influenced a generation of teachers to let children explore their own solutions to problems, write and draw pictures about math, and use tools like the calculator at the same time they learn algorithms.

But this fall, the group changed course, recommending a tighter focus on basic math skills and an end to “mile wide, inch deep” state standards that force schools to teach dozens of math topics in each grade. In fourth grade, for example, the report recommends that the curriculum should center on the “quick recall” of multiplication and division, the area of two-dimensional shapes and an understanding of decimals.

Maybe if told for the umpteenth time that it did, NCTM will come to believe that it did.

For those interested in a lot of conceptual math there is a series of teacher training videos funded by the Annenberg project. (Simple registration required). You won't get computational fluency and procedural knowledge out of them but they can certainly stretch your mind. Nevertheless, these conceptual exercises ultimately meant for pupils shouldn't displace computational fluency and procedural knowledge. They also can make simple procedures extraordinarily complicated. This is the impression I got when watching Video 8. Rational Numbers and Proportional Reasoning in which operations with fractions are modeled with Cuisenaire rods. It left me confused. If I were a child, I would conclude that operations with fractions are enormously complicated and intimidating. I would develop a phobia toward fractions and wait for the spiral to come around in a year or two.

MI circus

2006-11-11T15:39:00.000-06:00

Recently, I had occasion to watch Howard Gardner's multiple intelligence theory in action. The theory took the form of a questionnaire to be given to students. Instruction is to be geared to the "intelligences" of each student as uncovered by the questionnaire. The questions were culled from a book called So Each May Learn: Integrating Learning Styles and Multiple Intelligences.

According to the latest count there are eight intelligences, though more are rumored to come. I was most curious about the bodily-kinesthetic and naturalist "intelligences". What questions would be asked to determine if a student fits these categories? Now I know the asnwer. A student has a naturalist intelligence if he gives a high rating to the following questions (a sample only):

I like being outside whenever possible. [Who woldn't prefer the outdoors to a stuffy classroom?]

I am good at forecasting changes in natural phenomena (e.g. rain and the coming of seasons). [Gee, I can predict the seasons. Less so snow and rain]

I like hiking and camping. [Don't most kids?]

I feel comfortable and confident outdoors. [So do I, but not when grizzly bears or rattlesnakes are around]

Here are a few bodily-kinesthetic questions:

I often talk with my hands. [In some countries like Italy and Argentina it's part of the culture]

If I can't move around, I get bored. [Who wants to sit around all day?]

I need to manipulate things with my hands to know how they work. [Who doesn't?]

Now I am waiting for the results to come in and for the instructional implications that will flow from them. Classes might have to be held in the wild. Wouldn't that be something.

As Gardner ponders new intelligences, it might serve the learning enterprise much better to adopt the intelligences discovered by Will Fitzhugh and posted at Right on the Left Coast:

In keeping with that view, I offer the following suggestions of Alternative Multiple Intelligences whose development should be most likely to contribute to the education of the majority of our students. Perhaps the most important is Paying Attention Intelligence. Without paying attention, it is truly astounding how much instruction even the average student is capable of ignoring on any given day, and as the word suggests, ignoring is the primrose path to Ignorance. Memorization Intelligence is seen as old fashioned, except when it applies to the names of music groups, sports or movie stars, and clothing or soft drink brands. Nevertheless, if students don’t remember anything, that is pretty close to the same thing as their not knowing anything. If a student is asked for the dates of the United States Civil War or the name of the first female Secretary of Labor, and she says, “I don’t remember,” that is the functional equivalent, for all practical purposes, of admitting, “I don’t know.”

Of course there is a storm of debate among professional educators, or rather between professional educators and the rest of the country, over the importance of knowledge as such, with the educators coming down on the side of correct sentiment fueled by general ignorance and propaganda, but let us put that aside for the moment. If one can accept, at least provisionally, that some knowledge may be useful for some purpose as an outcome of education, then Recognition Intelligence and Recall Intelligence, so useful on tests of knowledge, become central as well. When it comes to writing, I would argue, in the face of the united opposition from the National Council of Teachers of American English, that Punctuation Intelligence and Spelling Intelligence are also essential.

Another often neglected but vital talent for students is Hard Work Intelligence or Diligence Intelligence. We have so often in recent decades taught students that creativity is far more important than work, and that if they are not the smartest student in the class they should give up trying to do their academic work and fall back on their innate creativity and capacity for having fun instead...

There are many other neglected Intelligences not supported by Professor Gardner, such as Courtesy Intelligence, Time Management Intelligence, Turning in Homework Intelligence, Papers in on Time Intelligence, Seeking Extra Help Intelligence, Taking Personal Responsibility Intelligence, Asking Questions Intelligence, etc. In these cases, at least, it seems Tradition still Knows Best...

Daniel T. Willingham critically analyses MI claims here:

What would you think if your child came home from school and reported that the language-arts lesson of the day included using twigs and leaves to spell words? The typical parent might react with curiosity tinged with suspicion: Is working with twigs and leaves supposed to help my child learn to spell? Yes, according to Thomas Armstrong, author of Multiple Intelligences in the Classroom, especially if your child is high in “naturalist” intelligence—one of eight distinct intelligences that Harvard University scholar Howard Gardner claims to have identified. However, if your child possesses a high degree of what Gardner terms “bodily-kinesthetic” intelligence, Armstrong suggests associating movement with spelling. For example, a teacher might try to connect sitting with consonants and standing with vowels.

It's astonishing how semantic legerdemain can whip educationists into a frenzy. Hardly anyone would have noticed if Gardner had described preferences, abilities, aptitudes and talents instead of labeling these characteristics "intelligences". Much nonsense would have been avoided.

Nasal intelligence

2006-11-10T16:26:00.000-06:00

Nasal learners fight for their rights.

COLUMBUS, OH--Backed by olfactory-education experts, parents of nasal learners are demanding that U.S. public schools provide odor-based curricula for their academically struggling children.

"Despite the proliferation of countless scholastic tests intended to identify children with special needs, the challenges facing nasal learners continue to be ignored," said Delia Weber, president of Parents Of Nasal Learners, at the group's annual conference. "Every day, I witness firsthand my son Austin's struggle to succeed in a school environment that recognizes the needs of visual, auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic learners but not him."

Weber said she was at her "wit's end" trying to understand why her son was floundering in school when, in May 1997, another parent referred her to the Nasal Learning Research Institute in Columbus. Tested for odor-based information-acquisition aptitude, Austin scored in the 99th percentile.

A nasal learner struggles with an odorless textbook.

[From The Onion]