Innate Skills

Every time we talk about "digital natives" and "Kids' innate skills with technology", we reinforce the idea that you've either got it or you don't, that if you are over thirty then you can't be good with tech, that if you're under thirty you don't need any training because you're simply imbued with an understanding of all silicon-based circuitry.

Fatuous self-indulgent hokum.

Let me state it for the record: There is no such thing as "Innate Skill" with technology. Kids have had more practice at playing games and chatting via FB, text, or IM, but nothing else. They are, on average, more comfortable holding a device but not better at using it for anything academic or work-related (unless that use includes playing games, or chatting via FB, text, or IM).

We are running counter to the ideas of lifelong learning, laying a downfield block on any need for a student to persist when faced with a computing obstacle. In fact, we are teaching them and they're learning.

We're teaching them to give up instantly.

We have had decades of computer games with puzzles and problems and every single one has a cheat code or "God mode" that is readily found on the Internet … meaning that every student has learned to try a problem for approximately 15 seconds and then Google the shortcut or cheat code.

But we still have to start with the simple problems.

College professors who shout from their Ivory Towers that "If you can Google the answer, you need to ask a better question" are foolish. Those who advocate for direct plagiarism in all things under the premise that "Research skills are important in the modern world" are delusional and flat-out wrong.

The simple and the intermediate questions are already answered somewhere, but we can't give up and jump right to the higher-order connections because the kids have not answered the simple questions yet -- Google is not answering. They don't have the simple understanding they need in order to make the higher-order connections and that critical thinking EduWonks are always going on about.

The simple questions that need to be asked first (formative) are being ignored for rote guessing, but we still have to find a way to ask them anyway.

The intermediate questions that form the bridge between formative and summative and require the mental processing to form long-term memory through understanding are being ignored, but we still have to ask them anyway.

This came up most obviously in my Intro Coding class. I gave some students selected problems from ProjectEuler.net, wanting them to have a serious mathematical question to answer using spreadsheets.

Here is one of the early ones:

By considering the terms in the Fibonacci sequence whose values do not exceed four million, find the sum of the even-valued terms.

Instead of thinking through the issues and working towards an understanding of the tools at hand, they googled the question ("project euler question 2") and worked backwards from the MathBlog entries.

I learned quickly to change the targets and to not advertise the source of the problem. The Archimedes Cattle problem becomes much harder to solve when you don't tell them "Archimedes" or "Cattle" and change the wording from "1000 cattle" to "1500 horses".

If we ever expect them to do anything more complicated, we have no choice.

"What's Your Plan For Making This Happen?"

Originally published here in July 2008. Not much has changed. We're still blindly forging on.

Alexander Russo asks "What's Your Plan For Making This Happen?"

The big problem in education reform right now isn't that there aren't any good ideas out there about what to do to make things better, but that no one has any real idea how to get them moving.

I think he's got it backwards. We have plenty of people willing to "make this happen" on a small scale. That's not difficult. The problem is that no one asks whether the change SHOULD happen. We go merrily on changing things every year, instituting reforms and rejiggering the educational process constantly.

We do "academic teams," "cross-curricular work," "differentiated instruction." We do "literacy across the curriculum" but not "math or science or history or art across the curriculum". We remove art and music to prepare for tests, add art and music to make a more well-rounded individual. We drop Hamlet and MacBeth and Mythology, or we don't. We put kids into cohorts of 20 for every course of their day. We STEP them up from the course they should be in to the course we'd like them in and then we place them in remediation because they need more help.

We've tried integrated math, sequential math, Integrated algebra, SIMMS, Univ. of Chicago vs Saxon. We try changing the order of the courses from "A1, Geom, A2" to "Geom, A1,A2" or "A1,A2,Geom."

Then, there's the grading system behind the report cards. We tried to change to a 1,2,3,4 grading system with rubrics and then found out that our parents hated the idea. They didn't want lengthy rubrics full of lists of standards and individual grades, nor did they like the idea that 1 was the lowest you could get. "If he does nothing, he shouldn't get points for it! Those averages mean nothing now!"

So we changed back.  For a while.
 
We've rewritten the curriculum at least seven times in my experience and done curriculum maps in four different systems.The only thing that seems to change is the logo: now it has "Building Standards-Compliant Systems" as a tagline. (Update: Looking at this now, I notice they've updated the logo to Common Core ... awesome. That will make the maps more relevant for today's learners).

We integrate technology before most teachers have a clue what they're doing with it. We lessen the need for brains and glorify button-pushing or we improve the educational methodologies by implementing technological pedagogy to teach the 21st century student.

We changed to 4x4 block scheduling, or modified block, or traditional 40, traditional 50, or 5x60s. We have single-sex or not, We try charter schools, magnet schools, engineering only school, KIPP schools.

For what? Are we sure any of it works?

No.

Have we looked at anything before and after each "revolution" to see if anything, in fact, did change? And for the better?

No.

We change everything in education without ever examining the results of the change. The most common "evidence" I have heard as justification is "My students seem to like it better. One kid said to me just this month, 'This is cool.'"

This is the only business that uses case-control as its top sampling method, if it uses any scientific studies at all. That's nuts.

Then the anti-public school activists chime in.

"If schools were free-market, competition-based entities that had to succeed or fail based on their own merits and their effectiveness for their customers, we would quickly zero in on the most effective teaching techniques. We would stick with what is proven, and what works, because whatever doesn't work would quickly be rejected by patrons and customers -- if only choice were an option."

I've talked about "choice" before. Choice is the parents using sketchy information to make dubious choices. The only saving grace is that they are at least invested in the children they're trying to place.

If there anything that the free-market teaches us, it should be that those who are trying to make a profit will lie or stretch the truth whenever they can. When the 13 billion dollar fine for improper practices is less than 1/4th of the money the company set aside to fight the charges, you should realize that the free-market is not the friend to the consumer. As a former private school admin, I can tell you that private schools are no different from Goldman-Sachs, except in size.

Their methods are traditional, not because it's best, but because it doesn't scare away the paying customers. Decisions are made for the benefit of the school, not for the benefit of the students. (Although if the students DO benefit, they'll take every opportunity to remind everyone how wonderful they were to make those "obvious" changes and portray themselves as better than the other private schools. The opinion that public schools were cesspits filled with poor people's stupid children went unsaid, but was understood by all because "Ivy-Covered Academy" was and is a naturally superior traditional school, with traditional values.).

But we're still dancing around the real problem.

Russo goes on

Take any number of interesting proposals -- national standards, weighted student funding, differential pay, community schools, inter-district choice, universal preschool -- and what you'll see are lots of arguments and policy specifics but no real plan for getting any of these things implemented in the real world. (You know, enacted into law. Paid for.)

We're doing research without knowing what we're looking for.

What would be nice is if you could first define the goal. Then define your method of measuring that goal. Finally, see if your changes progress you towards that goal. Then you can make all the changes you want.


Until we actually do some research with appropriate statistical methods, improving education in America will remain guess- and- check.

The problem is, of course, that most of your guesses are wrong and you're not checking. Worse than that, they're not your kids.

Curriculum mapping in standard little boxes

Writing is horizontal ... except in maps.

I was struck by a few things the other day when the Mrs. was putting together her curriculum maps for the year ... her curriculum coordinator was demanding that all teachers use the same template so there wouldn't be any confusion and there wouldn't be multiple formats coming in to her office.

1) Why does the template have boxes labeled by the month?

My math classes are split into chapters/ units that have never corresponded to months all that well. The lengths of the months is different as well because of the random nature of vacations, exams, sporting events. We're in block scheduling so the second semester has a completely different pace than the first. Obviously, some variations are less disruptive than others but the month-by-month format seems to be the format that least well corresponds to the course. English classes don't think month by month either. Nor does pretty much anybody else. Why insist on it?

Then you have the long words that don't fit. Unless you teach math, "Prop ortio nal Reas" isn't that meaningful nor is "Probl ems and Linea."

Adding to the silliness is the repetition, as shown here.  This teacher has broken the course down to the weekly level ... and repeated everything. Enlarge the image above ... by my count he pasted "Linea r Equa tions" 56 times.Why? Because he wasn't allowed to combine table cells.  Legibility is sacrificed and some of the words don't even show up in the cells but we were able to keep the format.

Writing is horizontal. Except here, where six letter words are split with a single "r" on the next line and there's no thought of proper hyphenation. This is crazy.  The formatting should not take higher precedence than the content.

2) Why does the Coordinator assume that the course changes significantly from year to year?

Maybe it varies in some classes, but the essence of the transcript is that we are awarding a credit for Algebra I. For that to mean anything, the Algebra I class needs to have some consistency from section to section and from year to year. If it doesn't, then something is wrong. The "C" in Algebra I means that the student has accomplished a certain amount of algebra with a certain amount of facility and thus can be admitted to Algebra II and placed appropriately.

Or you need to give a grade for "Individualized Mathematics" and be ready to explain it to anyone who needs to know. If you're a single tutor of a single home-schooled kid, then this is the rule. When you are dealing with a few thousand kids, however, each kid's transcript needs to be clear. When you are hiring a math teacher to teach Algebra I, you need to know what that entails.

3) Different formats would complicate things for parents.

This complaint is a weird one to me. Even if I thought a parent would read the curriculum map, certainly not a winning bet, I would expect that the parent would have a harder time with the terms and descriptions than with the organization. Labeling the top of the chart Sept, Oct, Nov gives less information than sections 1, 2, 3 and much less than "Polynomials", "Slopes and Lines", "Linear Functions".

A format that provided greater information is preferred here as well as one that doesn't force weird splits in short words: "Probl ems and Linea"

Remember that the original idea (in Jacobs, Heidi Hayes: Mapping the Big Picture ) was for the teachers to make the map so they could identify missing pieces and make the entire school curriculum into a coordinated whole.

If the course isn't taught month-by-month, why map it that way? The teachers are the audience. The point is to identify gaps ... months do not add to that information. Further, Common Core and other standards purposefully do not specify when a particular topic be addressed or how ... why examine it that way?

4) What kind of confusion could possibly arise - doesn't the curriculum coordinator know enough about the curriculum that she could interpret pretty much any format?

Unfortunately, no. If she is like ours, she only wants you to enter all of this data into an online database that she has paid a lot of money for (and needs to justify the expense). The online database was never designed to accommodate teachers and this is what you get.

But she gets to push a button and the database will scan through and determine whether you've addressed standard F-TF (Functions, Trigonometric Functions).

She couldn't just look herself because she's never taught math and has no idea what we put in the boxes.

5) Why does everything have to fit into one box even when different?

Here's the funniest thing (and we get to use this screaming gem of a program so the word "funniest" is coming through clenched teeth) ... Everything in the month goes in the same box, so you have extra lines put in so you can keep the resources for topic one aligned with the content, skills, and assessment for topic one.  Add a few words to clarify one thing and you have to go back and adjust all the other columns ... which gets all messed up when the font size changes.

Like when a browser is set differently (full-screen vs. windowed) or when you print.

Did I mention that the web form accepts Word formatting, so a copy and paste job from the equally useless Word document you did three years ago) comes with 80KB of unbreakable hidden formatting? Yeah, it does. We spent so much time trying to make it look right, we finally broke down and re-typed every word. And every link to the "Standard" had to drill down through the entire document ...

Nothing changed.
Nothing improved.
No benefit to the students.
No mysterious "missing content" suddenly found.

Just five in-service days wasted changing from a Word document which was a printout from the last web company mapping system, itself a conversion from the excel spreadsheet which was a conversion from a word document which had been in wordperfect format fifteen years ago.

I still have the binder.

Teaching Teachers - A Cautionary Tale

Teaching is a great field to be in. Like every job, there are positives and negatives, trials and tribulations, difficulties and successes. Teaching has its stars and its plodders, champions and minions just like every other business. Find the good ones and try to avoid the bad ones.

I just wish so many teachers weren't so damned frustrating.

The tagline for one particular blog is "Burn The Textbooks, Shred The Worksheets, Teach Math," which is a sentiment I can follow, albeit cautiously. There is certainly nothing sacred about a textbook if you are replacing it with superior material, ideas and learning. Some things seemed childish, as if they were geared towards a young audience, but that's all right. I like to see what elementary students are learning, to get a sense of the state of the art in the lower grades, so I kept looking.

This guy, though, strikes me at first glance as a pretentious moron and I find myself wondering how I got to this one in the first place ... whose blogroll contained him? He seems to always be pitching his lesson plans for sale and that rubs me the wrong way. I can forgive if the quality is there, but then he posts this kind of thing (Learning the Number System with Maps) and you wonder ...

Anyway, I threw his blog into Google reader a week or so ago and I think he just earned his way into the joke folder.

My college students were offered extra credit for producing a hands on math project on one of the following themes. 1) The Real Number System 2) The Commutative, Associative or Distributive Properties

And then I looked at the pictures posted with it.

1.	2.	3.
4.	5.

As projects by college students, they are poorly thought out and suffice only as examples of their own math illiteracy. As extra credit, I'd consider them as negative value work in that I'd actually reduce grades for trying to pass this off as worthy of a child's time. If these people are supposed to become teachers, I shudder at the implications for their prospective schools. Do they truly know so little? Is this their best work or merely a toss-off handout meant to glean a couple of points from a gullible and not-too-attentive professor? Does the professor not know the problems?

Now, I understand that I may have misunderstood the purpose of the assignment and that these students may have intentionally written incorrect examples, confusing or obfuscated instructions, or created Venn diagrams and graphic organizers that intentionally make incorrect mathematical points.

Nothing in the post or in the pictures above, however, makes that clear or explains why such dreck is worthy of extra credit, a concept with which I rarely agree.

On its face, extra credit is a silly idea.  Doing something unrelated to fractions in order to improve a grade on fractions seems antithetical to the idea of a grade being a numerical representation of a student's understanding and knowledge. Show me later that you understand this work better than you did the first time and I'll increase your grade on it. Doing something like washing teachers' cars for extra credit is outright bribery -- ethically, it's equivalent to accepting cash.

If anyone reading this is a teacher prospect and is wondering what I find so problematic about the above images, let me be clear that I am making these comments without knowing any more than the post and the images.

1. The butterfly graphic organizer bothers me. Before creating this, the teacher must be clear in his mind exactly what color, shape, represents what type of number and know the definitions of each. If a rational number, $\sqrt{100}$ is placed in a green region as are the irrationals like $\sqrt{19}$, students will assume that irrationality is exclusively determined by a square root. Does the teacher candidate not realize that 10 is rational.  Secondly, if there are no irrationals without radicals, will the viewer understand the nature of π or φ? If the teacher does not know himself ...

By my count, 5 of the greens are rational but I may not have found them all. Finding them would make a good lesson but it's one that seems to have been lost on the constructor.

2. This one is just odd. The instructions are unclear: "Do not feed the alligators unless the #'s are the greatest."  Why superlative rather than comparative? Why state this as "Do Not ... Unless"? Are there too many other options to list?

How about "The alligator eats the larger number"?   Maybe "The point is small and the other end is large so it points to the smaller number"?

I have no idea what "Order Property" means or why "Food" is listed on strips.  Where are we going with that? Is the top list greater than the smaller list? Is every element of the first list being compared to those in the second list or is it intended to mean that place in the list matters? If this is truly a lesson for children, then we have to assume that the children are having trouble with the concept - this does nothing to simplify it.

3. First, the picture is of the associative property.

Second, the story is ridiculous and has nothing to do with either mathematical property.

Third, a child who is reading something written in this font style should be focused on the idea of the property without bothering with the name of it.

Fourth, stop pretending that a child wrote this.

4. A nice idea, but flawed in the execution.  Start with the map of the world.  Irrational numbers are Australia and rational numbers are the USA ... that's pretty goddam funny and possibly backwards, but who's making a GOP joke? Me, actually. What's the rest of the world?  If it's not rational, it's irrational by definition. To make this work, the USA would be rational and the rest of the world irrational and I can't stop giggling at that either.

The USA is divided up in a better fashion in that there are vastly more non-integral rational numbers than integers but I doubt that the designer knows that.

The Virginia split? Apparently the whole numbers are just Frederick County meaning the rest of the state is negative integers. Seems unbalanced somehow since, other than zero, there are equally many positive as negative integers, but that's a nitpick.

Speaking of zero, if the Town of Winchester is the Natural numbers and Frederick is the Whole numbers, then what does that say about the rest of the county? Yup, it's the zero.

I know, I know. Area shouldn't matter in a graphic organizer but when you use a visual that explicitly has such a meaning then the reader will make the wrong inferences based on those meanings.

5. What can I say? 75% of the examples are wrong and 75% is less than 100% but that's no reassurance either because 100% wrong is a lesser problem than 75% wrong because the former is a misunderstanding of the notation and easily solved, but the latter shows both a misunderstanding and a mistake based on that misunderstanding.

2 is less than 1? No shit.

Forget the "Feeding Instructions." Could someone please explain what "Please put food of the lower number into its mouth" is supposed to mean, because my English skills are lacking and my mathematical side seems to remember it the other way around. The only correct problem listed, 5 < 6, along with the improper instructions, gives me the distinct impression that the last example was actually a double negative.

Oh well, the South won the Civil War, too.
God Bless Virginia.

PD Follies - part four, New and Improved.

Professional Development Follies - part four.

Professional Development is one of those things that light up the stress meters in almost every teacher I've ever known. Bill Ferriter talks about it. So does Mr. Teachbad. Darren needed Google Translate to interpret the Educationese. What's my excuse? I have many things that trigger me and get my back up. the latest is the

Cha-, cha-, cha-, Change

Everything you are doing is wrong.  Change is the only criteria for success.  A few months ago, the states were all ranked.  Vermont got some pretty good scores all around and excelled when dealing with poor kids.  The only score we didn't do well on was "Innovation and Change." That earned us a D+.

It apparently didn't occur to anyone that if we were doing well and it "ain't broke," we might not consider fixing it.  No matter.  The ranking was not for guided change or change towards an ideal or improvement in any way. In fact, damaging the students and lowering our scores by implementing some change would have increased our ranking.

But enough of the silly think tank. We're ready to get improved.

So we have Challenges for Change, which replaced High Schools on the Move.  HSOTM replaced another failed initiative, and that one replaced another, and so on, and so on.

We had the Vermont Frameworks for Educations, then the Vermont Standards, then the Grade Expectations (but that sounded too Dickensian) so it was modified to Grade Level Expectations. Do all that work and "Happy New Year!" ... Change it all to Common Core.

You've got Best Practices, Master Teachers, Mentors and Peer Coaching, Videotape, Scribes, Verbatim, Class Flow, Curriculum mapping (versions: paper, Word, Excel, HTML, three different online companies), Literacy Across the Curriculum, Literacy Labs, Cross curricular.

Then states started really spending money: technology.  "Laptops for All will kickstart your students" until it won't, computers in every classroom (just 1 or 2 for 25 students), a computer lab, a mobile lab, another laptop program, (Hey! It works in Maine! ... except that it didn't actually do anything positive academically.) Shiny new version of the Office suite every 3 years whether you like it or not, SmartBoards and DVDs and TVs and cable/T1/Fiber Internet, Student Information Systems that tie together thousands of students into one big, unwieldy and ultimately useless mess. But it's all in one place!

21st Century Skills will change the World, unless you believe "Singapore Math Drills will Save the World." "The Chinese will Take Over the World". "India will Outsource our Education!"  Did You Know? "The rest of the world is Coming!"  Which is all well and good until you read that the Chinese people hate their education system (Kristoff, NYT) and want to emulate the American one.

Every one of those NEW! ideas requires time for teacher training and every one starts off during an inservice or professional development seminar. Hours are spent, dragging reluctant teachers through them. We're moving forward! Onward! Upward!

Enough hype and hot air to start an Infomercial Network.

Enough "New!" ideas that you could write a book ... as an object lesson on failed initiatives. The real problem is that most of those great new ideas aren't all that great and they aren't new at all.

I'm no Luddite.What I hate is repeating what has already been done.  I want to stand on the shoulders of giants, take what's been done and go from there. I'm sick of reinventing the wheel.  I do not want to be condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Don't put me in a PD and tell me the wonders of an open classroom design.  I'll just get steamed because I've heard this nonsense before.  I can show you a school 20 miles away that was built on this principle and the entire school hates it.  The cubical farm concept - bleah - but my Highly Ineffective Principal actually threw that one at us last year. Another school a few miles in the other direction built open classrooms 35 years ago and still has the permanently installed floor-to-ceiling temporary walls.

The more it was stressed that we were a "High School on the Move," the more stressed I got. With every new and improved "Best Practice," I wondered why no one, apparently, had never thought of this obviously brilliant idea before ... and then after maybe two seconds of thought, realized that it was pretty much what everybody tended to do anyway.


Every time I have to re-enter the curriculum into a new mapping "tool," I feel like screaming.

Every time the curriculum coordinator tells me that practice is "Drill and Kill" while telling me I need to spend time with test prep but that our students don't have high enough scores, I need to watch a Bruce Lee movie.

Every time the school tries a small "School within a School" without actually setting some kind of measurement to see if it worked, I want to go in my room and hide.

Show me improvement, not just change.

I hate professional development.