On Relevance

John Spencer has this on relevance.

I despise the notion that urban, low-SES students have to analyze hip hop before they can "get into" poetry. It's not that I'm opposed to hip hop poetry (we do a few Def Jams poems and analyze the occasional rap song), but I disagree with the notion that poetry can only speak truth to coffee shop geeks or grad students in the literature department.

Which is a great point. I would argue that it is either relevant or not; if you feel the need to "make it relevant," you will fail and the lesson will fall flat. Students do not need to be conned by relevance and will resist any imposed relevance.


Sometimes Math is just math. It isn't Real World. It has nothing to do with answering "When am I ever gonna have to use this?"

It's a topic we're exploring, and we can follow it a ways down this path.

Two roads may diverge in the yellow wood, but fortunately we can follow both. In most of high school mathematics, there's no need to choose only that which is "relevant".

In fact, that's probably the worst option available.

Working in Isolation vs Collaboration

from Dangerously Irrelevant:

Joe Bower said:
I would never ask students to complete anything that is worth doing in complete isolation from their peers, parents, books, or the Internet. I’ve worked hard to encourage my students to see collaboration as a critical characteristic of learning.

I would never lock my students in a closet, forcing them to do meaningless work for years and letting them eat only a small bowl of thin porridge each day. That's the way that reductive capitalism works: a sweatshop producing clothing for Walmart, not the education that we desire in this country. 

Joe is, unfortunately, making the same mistake that almost all "Collaboration Uber Alles" proponents make. There are three stages to learning in my view; true collaboration is appropriate and achievable in only one of them.

First, a definition: Collaboration is working with others to do a task and to achieve shared goals. Good enough to begin with.

The First Stage

First Stage Learning.

• The first stage of education is learning the basics, learning the foundation work upon which the understanding can be built. If we are examining A-SSE.2, multiplication of polynomials is required before we can possibly recognize and utilize structure in expressions. You need to have done this first part before being able to recognize that x² - y² is equivalent to (x+y)(x-y). 
• This is strictly solo work in that the student must be doing the learning. The teacher and classmates can explain, describe, tutor, re-explain ... but acquiring this preliminary knowledge is the job of the individual. No one else can master it for him, they can only master it for themselves. 
• Collaboration does not exist at this stage, only parallel learning. Peer coaching is not collaboration, but a "multiple-teacher" scenario. This is where formative assessment is appropriate because we absolutely do NOT want any misunderstandings to be introduced or practiced or internalized — errors must be fixed here before they are ingrained.
• The Internet, their peers, parents, books, are useful in that they are teachers with varying degrees of understanding ranging from competent to utterly and absolutely wrong. The "wrong" can be misguided, such as the videos put up by well-meaning folks who say that the order of operations is "multiply first, then divide", thinking 30 ÷ 2 * 3 equals 5 instead of 45. The "wrong" can also be peers playing a joke, such as the "friend" who says that 26 ÷ 65 equals 2/5 because you can cancel the sixes. Of course, the "wrong" can be malicious or deluded, such as the folks who claim that the Earth is 6000 years old.

Andrew Old:

"If you want to learn how to cooperate effectively with others, then the last place you’d start is in a group of teenagers being made to do school work. This is like saying the best way to learn how to make pork sausages is by being imprisoned in a pig farm with a half-dozen rabbis. Putting together people who are neither experienced at doing something, or particularly inclined to want to do it, is not how you learn to do that something."

The Second Stage 

• The second stage is the time when we take that basic knowledge and develop it, building the deeper understandings that are our goal. Some collaboration happens at this stage, but mostly the individual is exploring, researching, expanding the understandings that are the point of this whole thing.
• Again, the peer-to-peer work that is happening here is less "learning" and more taking turns questioning, extending the idea (does x⁴ - y⁴ behave in a similar fashion?) Where else can we go with this? 
• The Internet, peers, parents, etc., are still not collaboration, but they do contribute to the student's learning. In fact, this is the ideal time for students to see other points of view, watch different explanations and determine the correlations and reconcile the differences. I encourage watching Khan at this point with the question, "What do you think of his explanation?"

At the end of Stage Two is the usual spot for summative assessment, the dreaded chapter test. Why "dreaded"? Because the students have JUST internalized it but rarely are comfortable with it yet. Done properly, though, the chapter test is often the fusion of all of the disparate details, the time when the students have to put everything together. I often hear students say that "Now I understand."

It's also why I allow retakes, because I feel that understanding on a deadline is less important than being able to say at the end of the course "You know Algebra 2".  I suppose this is the essence of Proficiency-Based Learning, but I have never liked re-labeling what we do in order to pretend that we are reforming.

The Third Stage

Re-purposed wrecking ball.

• The third stage of learning is the time when students get comfortable with their understandings, where they extend an idea, test it, and revise it themselves, where they produce a product, something new — to themselves at least, if not to the teacher or the world, but there are certainly cases in which the work was completely new, an invention or discovery.
• This is the only place where collaboration is actually realistic. Since I define "collaboration" as "multiple students working on the same project, contributing to each phase of the work and trusting each other to complete their respective parts", I cannot see collaboration as the time when you are learning the material, but as the time when you take that learning and produce something.

We must discuss Alfie Kohn:

“I want to see what you can do, not what your neighbor can do” is really just code for “I want to see what you can do artificially deprived of the skills and help of the people around you. Rather than seeing how much more you can accomplish in a well-functioning team that’s more authentic like real life.”

If we are discussing education, then I absolutely DO want to know what you can do, what you have learned and internalized. How else am I to re-teach, help, differentiate?

Joe Bower, again:

"In the real world, there simply aren’t that many times you are expected to solve a problem or perform a task in complete isolation – and even if you were, it would be awfully archaic to refuse you the opportunity to reach out for the help you needed to get the task done.

In the RealWorld that I've been a part of, there is not a single company that didn't expect a baseline level of knowledge and understanding. They have no interest in an employee who can't work alone, or who can't do his part of a collaborative task. They don't want someone who needs to consult other resources constantly, in order to do the simplest of tasks. They want to know how good a resource you will be when someone has to ask you for help.

Bottom line:

• Collaboration is students each working from knowledge and understanding to produce something together, sharing the work or parceling out pieces for each to work on simultaneously.
• Collaboration is not a pathway to learning and often is detrimental to the learning process since many students leave the thinking and learning to the quickest in the group ... "He answered so I don't have to think about the question." or "I'll just repeat what she said."
• Collaboration before all of the partners are proficient is counter-productive. If all participants aren't at the proficient point, there will be one who winds up doing most of the work in frustration, worried that her grades will slip because the quality of the product is below her standards.
• Collaboration is not a substitute for teaching.

Thanks for reading. I've got to get back to work.

A Few Random Thoughts about the Time article.

Maybe you've read it.

A few things jump out at me. Here's a big one:

One research team relied on a "a controversial tool called value-added measures (VAM)" to measure teacher effectiveness, and they "found that replacing a poorly performing teacher with an excellent one could increase students' lifetime earnings by $250,000 per classroom."

That's a pretty big number alright, almost big enough to make you lose sight of the details ... if you're a low grade moron or someone with a axe to grind who doesn't mind being disingenuous.

Lifetime earnings of $250,000 per classroom works out to $10,000 lifetime earnings difference per kid.  Assuming the average person works for about 40 years, that works out to a difference of $250 extra dollars per year, a whopping extra 12.5 cents per hour ... and that's if you replace a poor teacher with an excellent one for all twelve years of schooling.

This is what is known in mathematical and statistical circles as an "insignificant" increase for which we have to use a tool that the Vermont Commissioner of Education (and pretty much everyone else) has said is a "broken measurement system" that "does not work". She went on to say that it would never be used in Vermont because of it's ineffectiveness. "It would be unfair to our students to automatically fire their educators based on technically inadequate tools."

And where, besides a hole in the ground, did that number get pulled from?

Let's not ignore the dubious premise that thousands of "excellent" teachers are just waiting to be hired ... ready and eager to take the place of the losers.


Funny thing is, we're doing pretty well despite the fact that we have been forced to label every single school in the state as "low performing": 

 In 2013, the federal Education Department released a study comparing the performance of US states to the 47 countries that participated in the most recent Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, one of the two large international comparative assessments. Vermont ranked 7th in the world in eighth-grade mathematics and 4th in science. Only Massachusetts, which has a comparable child poverty rate, did better.

So Time magazine interviewed a couple of billionaires about their opinions of public education and teacher tenure. "Shocking!" they said. "You can't fire a bad teacher."

Really?  Have they ever tried? The usual reason that principals can't fire a "bad" teacher is because the principal has no way of knowing which teachers are "bad" teachers - the new evaluation procedures are long on typing every word but very short on actually listening to the teacher teaching the class. If you are focused on typing every word said, then you aren't paying attention and you aren't "taking notes" - the inability to multitask is something I warn my students of constantly. Incidentally, and ironically, so does the principal.

The other reason that most "bad" teachers can't be fired? They're not "bad" teachers. Most of the time a teacher who is labeled "bad" is someone who has spoken up at a faculty meeting, stood up for themselves or others, worked against the desires of the principal.

The truly bad teachers are the ones who don't get noticed because they never improve, who hand out the same worksheets year after year, who don't say anything controversial, who allow students to wallow and get mired in an academic mudpit ... but who somehow get As so their parents don't say anything, who have a degree from a prestigious university but who are universally reviled by their students as lousy teachers, who dutifully fill out the silly paperwork and follow every administrative whim with fervor, never considering the best interests of the students, doing just enough to placate but never enough to teach.

Here's how to get yourself fired in public schools WITHOUT tenure:

• Be gay/lesbian, or any other LGBTQ. (Seen it.)
• Be Experienced in a cost-cutting era. (Big pressure)
• Be Muslim, or Black or Latino or other "minority" who is "uppity" or in some other way "doesn't behave" (actually has an opinion and isn't afraid to say something).
• Get pregnant. (True story)
• Speak up for the Rights of the students/ disagree with admin is any way.
• Actually do something bad or criminal.

Except for the last one of course, that will never be the reason on the form letter. That would be discrimination. Rather, you'll find vague job performance metrics and "documented tardiness issues". You'll find overwhelming but never specified "evidence" of misconduct. You'll find everything but the actual discrimination.

Here are some ways you can get fired from a school WITH tenure:

• Do something bad or criminal.
• Be a bad teacher.

Drilling basic facts pays off.

"Practice makes perfect."

Okay, we do have to differentiate between mindless drill & kill and what really makes kids better at math - focused practice, error correction, and repetition of correct processes.  Just as hacking around on a soccer field doesn't help the team nearly as well as a directed practice, endless pages of addition problems aren't useful in developing math skills.

Do ten at a time until you get them right. Examine the work, identify errors and don't repeat them .... which sounds like what Common Core asks math teachers to do and what math teachers have been doing for a long time.

This all sounds like what you've been doing, unless you have Curriculum coordinators like mine who denigrate practice as "drill and Kill. We should have the kids do critical thinking", as if critical thinking and error analysis were two different things.

"Healthy children start making that switch between counting to what’s called fact retrieval when they’re 8 to 9 years old, when they’re still working on fundamental addition and subtraction. How well kids make that shift to memory-based problem-solving is known to predict their ultimate math achievement. Those who fall behind “are impairing or slowing down their math learning later on,” Mann Koepke said. 

So, those teachers who insist that the kids should have a calculator and an internet connection so they can look it all up are really doing a job on their kids.

It turns out that adults don’t use their memory-crunching hippocampus in the same way. Instead of using a lot of effort, retrieving six plus four equals 10 from long-term storage was almost automatic, Menon said. In other words, over time the brain became increasingly efficient at retrieving facts. Think of it like a bumpy, grassy field, NIH’s Mann Koepke explained. Walk over the same spot enough and a smooth, grass-free path forms, making it easier to get from start to end. If your brain doesn’t have to work as hard on simple math, it has more working memory free to process the teacher’s brand-new lesson on more complex math. source.

So the next time someone says that elementary students should have a calculator, that "you can look that up" and "all we need is to teach them information retrieval skills", remind them that the brain needs to have some basic facts to work with before it can handle more complex tasks.

Currently, the argument point brought up here is the Japanese education system, which has been moving away from drill and practice and turning to the higher-order thinking that reformers here in the States are always going on about.

Remember, however, that a typical Japanese high school teacher does NOT have to do as much of this preparatory drill and skills practice ... because of the ubiquitous "jukus" - after-school academies that nearly every Japanese student attends to make sure that he/she has a shot at higher education.What do the "jukus" do? Drill. Basic skills. Practice, practice, practice. Because it works.

Here's a description of one of these "cram schools":

"This school broadcasts lectures to its 800 satellite schools all over Japan and supports students via telephone, fax and the Internet. Students can take math training menu and other drills on the Internet through a service called Toshin Home Lesson. They can choose from one series of lectures to a whole package."

Americans Aren't Engaged in their Work

On average, some 100 million Americans were employed full-time in 2010-2012 — and 70 million of them either hated their jobs or were simply "checked out," according to a recent Gallup survey of America's workforce.

And edujokers get pissy that all students need to be engaged in their schoolwork ... my answer to all that is "Yeah, Right. They're just as human as everyone else."

The first big problem is that too many students are encouraged to "think outside the box" before they know what's in the box and use their "high-tech tools and knowledge" before they can use low-tech ones, while teachers are ordered to "keep them engaged and make it interesting."

If you really want to "engage" the students, the first thing you need to do is stop trying.

And. Just. Teach. Math.

1. Teach the basics first.
2. Build / scaffold from there.
3. Show the RealWorld problem after the students understand the abridged version. 
4. Don't fall prey to pseudo-context.

Disengagement is sometimes a lack of confidence, sometimes a bad problem statement, sometimes a emotional one caused by typical teen angst and love, and sometimes the kid just doesn't like you.

I think of a problem as a wall, with the solution being to get to the other side. There are lots of ways to get to the other side and there's lots of "other side" to get to ... it's not one specific place. The "other side" includes the spot within arm's-length but it also has that spot way over there across the next hill. Some kids will accomplish one, others will go further.

If the problem isn't very difficult, the wall isn't very tall. If they need an inspiration, a specific skill, or a bit of knowledge first, then that's a step in the stile. I think teaching is a lot about giving them those steps in the stile.

If you can't get over the wall and you don't seem to have a stile that will help, most students quit. If they think they can get somewhere by trying this approach and that one, they'll continue BUT NOT if those steps don't seem to be getting anything accomplished. That's one place where disengagement happens.

Not even math teachers can stand this one.

If you as teachers fall prey to the pseudo-context, your problems have a pretty picture but the math is so far away from reality that no one could ever possibly care whether or not there's an answer.

You might have a question such as this one at right (loading ramp) that counters any knowledge the student may already have, such as the actual height of loading ramps in this country, or the fact that the slopes of such ramps would be equal regardless of which side you picked. And there are probably some restrictions on that slope for safety reasons.

Although solving for x is a matter of multiplication and then factoring, there's no particular reason for this. It would be better for all involved if this problem were simply stated as algebra, with no picture or "context", just "Solve for x".  There's the second place that disengagement occurs.

PseudoContext is an infection. It festers in the minds of the students. "Why? That's so stupid. Who would ever DO that?" If not excised, it turns gangrenous and can taint everything around it with its stink.


What to do in math class?

Let them feel the accomplishment of mastering the basics first. Small quizzes of 15-20 points that can be retaken until the student is satisfied. Problems are the same each iteration, but the numbers vary.

Continue with the more complicated problems. There will be fewer questions here, with more steps apiece.

Finish with the Real World ... if the RW is appropriate ....  and sometimes it isn't. Sometimes, the next chapter IS the "RealWorld Use".

Some Thoughts for the Real World Problem:

1. If you can't find that Real World question, please don't fake it and put in pseudo-context. Pseudo-context makes everything you've tried to accomplish into "I'm Never Gonna Use this Bullshit and You Can't Convince Me Otherwise."
2. Be sure they can solve it before you give it, and that you've taught the necessary preliminaries.
3. Know what answer you'll accept, but be ready for another.
4. Guide, nudge, and hint broadly. Let them Google.
5. Don't get specific and don't answer the "I wanna be lazy so tell me the answer?" question.
6. Don't force collaboration. 
7. Don't allow Copy-laboration.
8. Be ready to use the entire period for one question. Tell your AP to go pound sand for a while if he objects to the time spent.
9. Shut up and let them work.

Embedded Content and the Foreign Language Paradox

Bumped to the top from August of 2010:


Joanne Jacobs: Kids Don't Know Grammar. Although neither of those quoted (perhaps misquoted) can spell "embedding," their point is good. Embedded curriculum doesn't work.

Less than 10 percent of Robert Archer’s 10th graders know grammar. A 14-year veteran teacher in Spokane, Archer doesn’t blame middle-school teachers. He blames curriculum developers for “imbedding” grammar in the curriculum.

"in my experience, the term “imbedded” is nothing more than educationalese for “not ever specifically taught.” Somehow, this grammar-is-imbedded movement is supposed to help students naturally take in what proper grammar is (i.e., grammar by osmosis). It’s very much a hyper-constructivist approach to education; the students are supposed to “discover” proper grammar on their own as they read good pieces."

He's right. They don't pick up on the proper forms of grammar, nor do they pick up much of anything that isn't specifically presented and what is, doesn't last.

Maybe I'm an old-school fart but it seems to me that if the students really could do this type of learning by assimilation, they would be miles ahead of where they are now. I do SAT prep classes and the grammar skills are terrible -- except for the kids in Spanish or French III or IV.

I call this the "Foreign Language Paradox." When learning English in an English class, grammar and basic forms are not supposed to be explicitly taught. Literature reigns supreme and some limited essay forms are required. Grammar and proper sentence structure are supposedly understood as 5th graders. Then we are all surprised that no one seems to know them.

In any foreign language class on the other hand, noun and verb declensions, grammar and sentence structure are specifically taught; then drill, drill, drill. Every student learns through actual work and walks out with an understanding of the language and a better understanding of English, too. "I never understood the subjunctive mood until Señor told us." "Past, imperfect, pluperfect - wow! Then, a couple of present tenses and more than one future tense? Damn."

It's not just Latin that builds English skills, although Latin does have power in its rigid simplicity and endless lists and mnemonics. It's specifically teaching grammar to students when they are finally sophisticated enough to really understand and appreciate it in all its nuanced glory.

Hello? Is my curriculum coordinator listening?

Apparently not.

Joanne chimed in with her own anecdote:

On Back to School Night, my daughter’s eighth-grade English teacher told parents she was going to go off curriculum for two weeks to teach grammar and punctuation. She got a standing ovation.

It's not just English, but math as well. Bunches of my students go off to the tech center for a one or two year program and then return. They have me for algebra I and then go to forestry or woodworking or something. Invariably, I hear about the embedded math credit. They are then placed in the next class and have no clue about the missed material. What's worse is that they are in my class for the eleventh grade and thus on my roster for the NECAP tests in November. I think of myself as a good teacher, but that's just not fair to either of us.

Bottom line: No matter how smart, no matter how motivated, all kids need some instruction. Unless you are specifically making things clear, you are allowing kids to construct any old thing, and it's usually flawed.

Those Seven Myths of Education

Christodoulou's seven myths:
1 – Facts prevent understanding, 2 – Teacher-led instruction is passive, 3 – The 21st century fundamentally changes everything, 4 – You can always just look it up, 5 – We should teach transferable skills, 6 – Projects and activities are the best way to learn, 7 – Teaching knowledge is indoctrination

She's pretty much nailed it. Here's my take on it.

1 – Facts prevent understanding

Actually, there can be no understanding without facts.

If I don't know that 8*7=56, I can't do much arithmetic without a calculator - and that means I have no understanding. I can't realize when I've punched the wrong value in the calculator or hit the wrong key.

If I don't understand distributive property, I can't do much algebra, and I can't multiply 102 * 57 in my head. Knowing those things means that I can take them a few steps beyond  the simplistic and apply them to much more complex things.

If I lack facts, then I will fall prey to misinformation. I will believe martinlutherking.org because it looks okay and says some things definitively. Facts that I know are my only shield against lies I'm told.

We'll work together. Pull !

2 – Teacher-led instruction is passive, or "Collaboration is the only way because the students will discover their own knowledge and it will be more powerful for them; they'll be engaged and learn more." 

I recall a very smart kid named Chris who was always first ... with the wrong answers. He would catch on quickly, but he had a way of speaking that other students had learned to trust and so now, they would all have the wrong idea. Once that got in their heads, it was quite difficult to change it.

It's the same thing that happens when Jenny McCarthy opens her mouth about vaccines. Or when a person holds a politically extreme position (left or right, no matter). The idea is fixed. As the teacher, you need to make sure that the right information gets out first.  You need to give them the mental shield against misinformation.

For me, it boils down to this question, "Who should be teaching the kids? Should it be Chris, who is learning this for the first time or me, the teacher, who knows what's going on?"

New teachers take note: The school is paying you $40k+ for a reason ... you have several more years of coursework and understanding.

What are you waiting for?  You don't have to talk for forty minutes straight but you are the recognized keeper of knowledge here; you have studied, written, been tested, researched and spent time at this. Some of what you have learned needs to be transferred.

3 – The 21st century fundamentally changes everything

No, it doesn't. You will be dealing with fundamentally the same kinds of minds that you went to school with. They have the same fears and needs, the same hopes and desires, the same weaknesses and strengths.

Sure, there are more toys in their pockets, but you're probably just as addicted to them. If it messes with your mind or distracts you endlessly, it will have the same effects on the students.

The tools are different now, but the learning is the same, the goals are the same, and the pitfalls are the same.  The kids are hormonal and angsty just like you were, pressured and anxious and worried about college or girls or boys ... or a girl or a boy. When they get out, they'll still need math, science, English, history, Arts, languages.

Just like you did.

4 – You can always just look it up.

You can only look something up if you know that you don't know, and you can't check your source if you know nothing about the topic.


What's wrong with the following story I just made up?

Old man Smith was a curmudgeonly sort but happy, outgoing and pleasant. On this particular day, he had left his warm bed at 5:30 in the morning to mount his harvester and head out to the fields. He had hoped to get all of his haying done by noon but the baler was giving him trouble and the fifth-wheel on the hay wagon went flat. 

Nothing, grammatically. In RealLife, though, you can't bale wet hay or it burns down the barn, you don't use a harvester for haying, there isn't a fifth-wheel on a hay wagon and it isn't a tire so it won't go flat, and "curmudgeonly" is the wrong word in that context. How much did you look up? And what did you look up? And where?

Or did you do just as every student does ... read it and move on, assuming that everything was fine?

If you don't know something, you can't be expected to look up and fix what you don't know is wrong. If you don't know that sin(4°) is positive but sin(4) is negative, how would you know if you got it wrong? What should you look up? Type sin(4) into Google or wolfram and you get

Must be the right answer - the internet said so.

5 – We should teach transferable skills

The skills that I learned in school more than 40 years ago were pretty basic and I transferred them to the new world pretty easily. There's a reason that everyone still requires math, science, English, history, Arts, languages.

Teach skills. Math skills, writing skills, whatever your discipline requires. They'll transfer just fine.

6 – Projects and activities are the best way to learn


If you have no idea what you are doing, how are you supposed to start? How do you get over that hurdle caused by a lack of knowledge?

Start with a transfer from the sage to the students. Then build them up from total noobs to something just a bit better. Now you can have them work on a project but remember the one salient fact ...

Work is different than learning.

Don't expect them to teach themselves and then accomplish some big project. They need you to do your part first.

Not sure that any of this year's graduates
fit this particular mold.

7 – Teaching knowledge is indoctrination

No. Teaching lies is indoctrination. Deliberately teaching misinformation is indoctrination. Forcing your students to spout your political views or parrot your religious teachings is indoctrination.

Critical thinking looks similar to and is often confused with an attack on indoctrination. If they challenge you, then you're doing it right.

Don't confuse acculturation with indoctrination. The kids also need to know how the world works and what is expected of them. It's not evil to explain what kinds of behavior with result in being fired.

Public schools are rarely guilty of the brain-washing they're accused of. Private schools do it constantly but since it matches the expectations of the parents, it's apparently okay.

I enjoyed our little chat. thanks for stopping by.

Surviving The Harry Potter Classroom

It's summer, the time when teachers start to second-guess themselves and their teaching. They read articles and research teaching methods. Let's try CoolMath's Cooperative Learning Article which starts with a StrawMan argument and slides downhill from there. I'm not exaggerating. Here's paragraph 2:

"In the old and traditional classroom, the teacher would say, “I will dictate, and you will listen.  I will repeat, and you will recite. I will test, and you will either pass or fail.  This is how it has always been done.”

Really? Haven't seen many traditional classrooms, have you? Ever been in a New England Private School? Ever seen a public school? Apparently this author has watched Snape.

"I've been teaching math for about 14 years (writing this in summer 2005) at the community college level. But, these methods will all work with middle and high school kids too."

Sure, they'll work just as well because you said so? Because we all know that 19 and 20-year-old college kids in a community college remedial class behave and respond exactly as 12-14 year-olds in honors algebra I?

What are these magical methods? Collaborative Learning, because, according to research, "It is Bandura’s theory that interactive, collaborative projects help build self-efficacy and introduce new patterns of behavior.(Klinger, 1999)"

Well, I feel all better now.

Any hooo, let's introduce "Survivor Algebra." Put your class into Tribes! Have them collaborate! Compete!

Give them mathy names (these are copyrighted, no less): Newtongon, Quotiedor, Numa, Pascalos, Calcula, Fractoanan, Subtracto, Pentanos, Arithmatog, Decimos, Algekor, Quadraticus, and Additron.

They have to work together! Their teammates help them! Everyone is motivated!

Or not.

Students are put into tribes/districts that will last the school year. Everything they do matters to the tribe. Everything that normally happens in the classroom: group work, discussion, problem solving, quizzes, tests, neatness, homework, good questions, good behavior, good attendance, etc is now a chance to win game pieces.

1) We take kids and arbitrarily divide them into groups that will last for the entire course, whether they like it or not. Whether they want to or not.

• Suppose my "teammates" can't learn as quickly as I. I therefore have to "help" them, but I don't want to be the teacher. That is not my role and I shouldn't be forced to do it. I'm in the middle of learning this and I don't quite know it well enough for me to be doing the teacher's job.
•  Suppose my "teammates" aren't motivated and spend a lot of time talking about other things instead of simply getting to work? A 12-yo is not going to be able to influence an unmotivated 14-yo and will not have the "leadership" skills to overcome it.
• Suppose you mix girls and boys together ... the belief is that everyone's the same, right? Will you also require the boys to shut up occasionally or will you let the girls all take a subordinate role if that's what develops? Are you ready to separate by gender? 
• How about racial quotas - every team has to have 1 black kid, 3 white kids, and 1 Asian ... so the Asian kid can balance the black kid? Are you sure you want to open this nasty can of worms?
• Which group gets the special ed kids and who does their work? Kids can tolerate having a para help out but not if it affects a grade or helps another group get more points.

2) Group grades:

• A teacher basing a student's grade in any way on the work ethic and understanding (or lack thereof) of any other student is immoral and wrong. Except for Hogwarts.
• A student's transcript should be based solely on what that student knows or can do or has accomplished.
• Group work is useful and valuable when you are doing work but most of the time, students are not doing "work" ... they are learning.This is an important distinction.

3) Group dynamics will also get into the mix. Watch Survivor and follow the changes team members undergo while being with their teams. Check out Big Brother and see the same thing.

There's a reason why the Hogwarts students are divided into houses. For those who didn't realize, Slytherin values ambition, cunning and resourcefulness, a little cold and calculating, maybe a touch immoral; Gryffindor values bravery, daring, nerve, and chivalry; Hufflepuff values hard work, patience, loyalty, and fair play rather than a particular aptitude in its members; and Ravenclaw values intelligence, knowledge, and wit. Rowling wanted everyone to know who the bad guys were.

If you force students into a group, the students will take on the qualities of that group, usually the qualities of the most outgoing or loudest member. Success by the group becomes the success of the individual. Likewise failure. Rivalries will begin to dominate. Differences will be exaggerated: Ohio fans hate Michigan fans for no apparent reason ... the same thing will happen here.

Any special treatment given to one group will antagonize the rest, even if the reward was "earned". Punish one member for being sloppy and you'll set them against each other. Any reward that was earned unfairly ("They have Jason. He knows everything.") will ensure that everyone hates the smart kids ...

... and the banner at the front of the room will remind them every day 

exactly who those smart kids are.

Remember the arm-band experiment? Yeah.

4) Everything they do will be known to their classmates, good or bad. Every grade, every assignment, every assessment. Besides being a breach of privacy, it will lay pressure on those who handle it least well and it will generate the kind of bullying and peer pressure that we should never allow. A weak student is an anchor every single day to other students that he otherwise enjoys working with - he'll know and they'll know it.

5) Everything is scored. From neatness to "good questions", discussion to behavior, everything is measured, whether the child has control over it or not.

• Homework is practice and should not be graded. 
• If you want the good students to be asking all the questions, score the behavior. They'll be happy to scrounge points from you this way. 
• "Problem-solving"? You won't see the entire group solving anything - the smart kids will make sure they're first and right.

Every point will count and they'll make sure that you give them every one. So will their parents. God help you if you put the future valedictorian with anyone who will lower his score.

You've changed the emphasis from learning to scoring points. Points indicate what you value. Do you value understanding math or writing neatly, knowledge or copied homework, math ability or teamwork, promptness and a pencil or being able to calmly consider a new problem in a thoughtful way?

Why should math class be a horserace anyway? Must we have a winner and a bunch of losers?



So here's the bottom line.

1. Have the occasional competition, but don't make it the point of the class.
2. Don't make any student responsible for another.
3. Don't tie grades to group work.
4. Don't score anything that's not important. 
5. Don't divide the group against itself.

Technology is programmed but Teaching isn't. Can't Fix That.

Dan Meyer mentions Pattern Matching In Khan Academy, quoting Stephanie H. Chang, one of Khan Academy's software engineers:

I observed how some students made progress in exercises without necessarily demonstrating understanding of the underlying concepts. The practice of “pattern matching” is something that Ben Eater and Sal had mentioned on several occasions, but seeing some of it happening firsthand made a deeper impression on me.

I find these kinds of errors showing up often on the gray, blurry line between teaching and computing/programming.

Those who teach don’t necessarily understand programming so they tend to not be able to specify what works in a classroom and the processes or habits that the software is meant to address.

Those who program have never taught so they don’t know how to write the code that solves the problem because they fundamentally don’t understand the problem - or more problematically, don't understand the math they are "teaching" well enough to actually teach it. (That wisc-online tutorial about radians is still there 10 years on, still unchanged, still displaying the same problems I talked about in 2008.)

Unfortunately, those who have done both to a sufficient level aren’t writing the programs that most of us need.  Sometimes, the incompetence is on both sides, but ...

You see this in:
-- grading programs that ignore the ways teachers operate and get in the way instead of making life truly easier ... I just need to enter grades and I don't need a "Wizard" to do it. Why do I have to put this number here and why can't I delete it later?  Why does the thing insist on showing the entire gradebook at all times - I'd like to allow a sub or a student aide to enter attendance. Why does the program not allow me to copy and paste the progress report into an email? Why do I have to use a "wizard" to enter a note to student?

-- Moodle courses that purport to teach but contain things like this gem from a graduate-credit bearing course being "taught" by our "curriculum coordinator":

Google Apps Tutorial:
Watch this online tutorial introduction for Google Apps. (Hints: your screen may not be large enough, so scroll down to see the next button. Playback controls are near the bottom of the page in the center--a very small tab above the line.) Some things on this tutorial will look a little different. Don't let that throw you.
http://services.google.com/apps/resources/overviews/welcome/topicWelcome/index.html

That's it.  That's the sum total of her "teaching". "Follow this link and learn from it".  Must be nice to earn that much money doing so little.

Isosceles has a new definition in SKOOL.

--- software that doesn’t work or fails in bizarre ways ... did you know that Greece is an island? or that a 45-45-90 triangle can have sides 252-325-403? SKOOL says it does and anything named SKOOL.com must be correct, right?  It came with the SmartBoard, so it must be Smart.

 --- Tools and software that include limitations and drawbacks unnecessarily. One of the most puzzling is TI-SmartView, which allows the teacher to project on a IWB a very realistic, working version of the TI-84. The simulation has been deliberately slowed down to mimic the time that the actual calculator takes to graph a complicated function ... WTF? ... I have a quad-core machine and it takes seconds to do this graph? As a result, I use the thing only to show the students key locations and methods -  it's too damned slow and cumbersome ... I use things like Graph 4.4 instead -- better graphics, higher resolution, more colors, faster interface, free. Anyway ...

“I observed how some students made progress in exercises without necessarily demonstrating understanding of the underlying concepts.”

Yeah, like the people who made and those who take the at wisc-online tutorial about radians.

We’ve come a long way but not nearly far enough to allow the replacement of teachers; like one other of Dan Meyer's commenters, I see the best use of Khan as taking the rote memorization out of the hands of the teacher-in-class (though Flash Cards is the Number ONE “really cool idea” promoted by the parents I talk to, especially the home-schoolers).

Let them practice outside of class and bring basic skills to automaticity so that we can do some real work together in our limited time together.

The Daily Schedule again

The bastard.

Let's ask some rhetorical questions about the nature of school ... and jump to an amazingly random solution. Actually, I'll let someone else do it.

Shawn Cornally thinks we should get rid of class schedules and let the kids figure it all out. After achieving some success with SBG and assuming that he's got all the answers, Cornally takes the mental leap: maybe the reason kids are cheating, lying, "clamoring for meaningless grades and inflated As" is because the school day is scheduled. Throw in "herd mentality" and "cryptically planned lesson", ask a bunch of rhetorical questions masquerading as reasonable thoughts, and suddenly you've got a blog post.

I'll start with grades. Read more of Cornally's work (ThinkThankThunk -Dealing with the fear of being a boring teacher) and you see that he has a much better argument for SBG as a cure for grade-grubbing and for improving learning. I personally think it's more about how you grade and interact with your students than what form the grades take, but that's not what we're dealing with here.

Here we're discussing whether the daily schedule itself is the cause.

Now, I've been around a long time and I've attended and taught at both public and private, small and large, 8x40minute or 4x90 minute, strict or relaxed (not quite Ode to Billy Jack  but close) and I've dealt with students from all walks of academic life from hippy home-schooled and unschooled to public schools to the private-schooled ultra-rich.

The schedule isn't the problem and it's not what causes angsty students. I've seen too many schools in which this no-schedule proposal has been tried and has badly failed the students in the long run.

"How can we expect them to connect Hemingway, vectors, pottery, cells, and ancient Greece every day? It’s a disjointed nightmare—to which you might say, "deal with it, that’s school." But what I see in my students is that "dealing with it" results in a lot of material crammed for a test and then forgotten."

"They need to see that you can't always get the right answers from the back of a book. How many times were you allowed to mess up a chemistry lab in high school? Most likely you were graded on how well you reproduced a set of instructions the first time you tried it. That’s not how anyone really learns. Students need to know that things go wrong, and they need to be comfortable—dare I say happy—with failing and retrying."

Interesting strawman argument. Fallacious, but interesting. How can he expect me to connect having a schedule with test cramming? What causal link exists here? Further, the balancing of "learning to follow instructions" and "allowing students to mess up" has what possible link other than coincidental with the fact that you have those students for 90 minutes a day?

Cornally then asks a few questions that I'd like to answer:

What if we removed the passive course-to-course drudgery of the school day? What if there was no schedule? What if students were left with a list of coyly worded benchmarks targeted at creating quality humans, and we just waited to see what they could do? What if teachers were seen as mentors for projects designed to help students meet those benchmarks? What if the students initiated these projects and the teachers spent their time recording TED-style talks that would serve as inspiration and help students generate benchmark-related ideas?

What if, indeed. Well, the school would quickly grind to a halt for one thing. What reformers forget is that students, by and large, are not focused on education in the way education "experts" are. What works for a small subset of the population will not work for the greater portion. Additionally, if you let the students choose from too big a list, you'll give them too many choices and they mentally freeze, doing nothing. Students need structure. Not a prison but not a free-for-all either. Where you draw the lines depends on their age/maturity level.

I've made my choice for today.

"Passive course-to-course drudgery" is his interpretation.  As a math teacher, I would love to focus on one thing for an entire day, but few of my students will nor is it optimal as the basis for learning new things.

"A change of work is the best rest."

Students  have other interests, too; math is important and interesting and satisfying (and therefore fun) but not in large doses. If you eliminate the different courses, you and they will quickly run out of energy.

Leaving a list of "coyly worded benchmarks targeted at creating quality humans" would insult any students who thought about it, irritate the hell out of the rest. Students are smart enough to know when they are being patronized. They'll rebel out of irritation.

What if students "initiated these projects and ... teachers were seen as mentors ... serve as inspiration and help students generate ideas"? This pie-in-the-sky mental diarrhea is the worst of the bunch. First, only a few will initiate anything. The rest won't or will tag along hanging to the coat-tails of others at best, or actively sabotage at worst. Students, by definition, are at the stage in their lives where they are making some good choices and many bad ones. It's why they can't drink, smoke, drive without an adult, rent, get married, have sex with a thirty-year-old, join the military.  Some things they can do only with parental permission or supervision. So many forbidden or limited things ... why? Because they are not adults yet, partially because their parents and society doesn't want to let go yet. If a teacher wants to let the students decide everything, then he needs to switch out of public schools and into a private school that specifically allows for it and whose parents specifically asked (and paid) for it .. and even then, there are limits and limitations on what that education really accomplishes.

TED - Inspirational and Truthy
Not Always at the Same Time.

My favorite, though, is "What if the teachers spent their time recording TED-style talks that would serve as inspiration and help students generate benchmark-related ideas?" I love it. First, most teachers are paid to teach. Separating me from the classroom and putting me in a Khan Academy closet to make videos isn't going to make me a TED-quality superstar, isn't going to make the parents, administration or the school board particularly happy, and isn't going to do much for my students. Second, the average teacher is, well, average; hardly inspiring and certainly doesn't have all that much to say beyond the next chapter in the book.  Third, what happens the next year when those videos are already finished? Do I get to sit back and let the previous year's videos do the inspiring while I drink coffee and read omg.com?

Most important, the whole "online video will solve the educational crisis and restore Peace, Love, Justice, and the American Way by inspiring students to do everything we want them to do instead of by forcing them" ignores the obstinate fact that students only tolerate online education when a real class isn't available ... and making a bunch of videos to replace your lectures isn't really all that interesting to your students. If that were the best way to go, YouTube would have already taught them everything they needed by age 13. There are thousands of better videos than mine out there. Thousands are better than Cornally's, too.

Instead, I will go back to my classroom tomorrow, where my students are slated for yet another period of biology. Once a day for 90 days—evidently that’s the prescription for understanding biology. How can we possibly know that’s enough for them to learn biology or any other subject? I’ll be trying a few experiments aimed at giving my students the curriculum and the freedom to generate projects that are asynchronous but productive.

And that, frankly, is what Cornally should do. He should go back to class and do his best. He should avoid giving meaningless, boring assignments to students, refuse to give credit for "organizing her binder in government class", make it possible for them to get inspired by a TED-style video or participate in a blended classroom. By all means, he should use whatever grading system makes the most sense for him, build his course along "authentic" projects (as opposed to what so many of us apparently do ... "fake" or "imitation" projects) and promote project-based learning if that works for him.

How do we know that's enough for them to learn Biology? I've talked about that. (In response to another Cornally post, no less.) The simple answer is that the course filled the time available rather than the other way around. When the science teachers in a neighboring school found they couldn't teach enough of what they thought Physical Science should be, they simply made two courses out of it. At another friend's school, the math department found that they didn't have time for everything they wanted in Pre-Calculus, they separated trig out to a half-credit course.

But as long as we keep the current way classes are scheduled, we will continue claiming that we just don’t have time for learning.

You can claim that.  I certainly won't.

I would have enjoyed writing for this man.

I hated English in school until I had Mr. Clark in 12th grade. He had a passion for the subject but also a pragmatic side. We read Thoreau and Shakespeare but also Frost and Bronowski. Every Thursday, we'd enter the classroom ready to write with a topic already on the board; we had forty minutes to write 1.5 - 2 pages. The papers were graded for content and style as most English papers were but then they were put through the wringer: every grammatical mistake brought the mark down a letter grade. That's when I learned to write and when I learned to appreciate good writing.

Taking a course like this one, however, taught by a teacher like this one, would have been glorious.

This assignment is reprinted from Kurt Vonnegut: Letters , edited by Dan Wakefield, out now from Delacorte Press.

---

FORM OF FICTION TERM PAPER ASSIGNMENT

November 30, 1965

Beloved:

This course began as Form and Theory of Fiction, became Form of Fiction, then Form and Texture of Fiction, then Surface Criticism, or How to Talk out of the Corner of Your Mouth Like a Real Tough Pro. It will probably be Animal Husbandry 108 by the time Black February rolls around. As was said to me years ago by a dear, dear friend, “Keep your hat on. We may end up miles from here.”

As for your term papers, I should like them to be both cynical and religious. I want you to adore the Universe, to be easily delighted, but to be prompt as well with impatience with those artists who offend your own deep notions of what the Universe is or should be. “This above all ...”

I invite you to read the fifteen tales in Masters of the Modern Short Story (W. Havighurst, editor, 1955, Harcourt, Brace, $14.95 in paperback). Read them for pleasure and satisfaction, beginning each as though, only seven minutes before, you had swallowed two ounces of very good booze. “Except ye be as little children ...”

Then reproduce on a single sheet of clean, white paper the table of contents of the book, omitting the page numbers, and substituting for each number a grade from A to F. The grades should be childishly selfish and impudent measures of your own joy or lack of it. I don’t care what grades you give. I do insist that you like some stories better than others.

Proceed next to the hallucination that you are a minor but useful editor on a good literary magazine not connected with a university. Take three stories that please you most and three that please you least, six in all, and pretend that they have been offered for publication. Write a report on each to be submitted to a wise, respected, witty and world-weary superior.

Do not do so as an academic critic, nor as a person drunk on art, nor as a barbarian in the literary market place. Do so as a sensitive person who has a few practical hunches about how stories can succeed or fail. Praise or damn as you please, but do so rather flatly, pragmatically, with cunning attention to annoying or gratifying details. Be yourself. Be unique. Be a good editor. The Universe needs more good editors, God knows.

Since there are eighty of you, and since I do not wish to go blind or kill somebody, about twenty pages from each of you should do neatly. Do not bubble. Do not spin your wheels. Use words I know.

poloniøus

Rasing the Standards for teachers

When are we ever going to have to use that
in elementary school?
You won't even make it that far.

Came across this bit from the Boston Globe, two years ago:

Aspiring teachers fall short on math - Nearly 75 percent fail revamped section of state licensing test."Not all our students are receiving a strong math education." -- Mitchell Chester, Commissioner of elementary and secondary education. By James Vaznis, Globe Staff, May 19, 2009

So, I ask again ... why do we allow people to teach math at any level if they can't pass a high school math test as an adult?

Here's another question, just to annoy the crap out of you as you consider that your child's prospective teacher had trouble with this:

Yeah, it's pseudocontext, contrived, silly, but jeez-louise people, it's easy.

OOOOOH, fractions. Scary.

Education Gap - Money Gap

A bunch of people are pointing to this graph and coming to lots of conclusions.

Who makes it to the top of the income pile?  The motivated and intelligent people who are willing to work hard, able to sacrifice for a goal, and able to defer instant gratification for a long-term benefit. (and lottery winners.)

Who makes it to the top of the education pile, achieving a high school and then a college diploma by any means possible? The motivated and intelligent people who are willing to work hard, able to sacrifice for a goal, and able to defer instant gratification for a long-term benefit. (and spoiled rich kids)

What kind of kids are motivated and intelligent people who are willing to work hard, able to sacrifice for a goal, and able to defer instant gratification for a long-term benefit? They are usually kids imitating their parents' qualities of being motivated and intelligent people who are willing to work hard, able to sacrifice for a goal, and able to defer instant gratification for a long-term benefit. The Income Gap is really an Education Gap which is really a Motivation and Work-Ethic Gap.

I don't see the motivation, work-ethic, and intelligence gap going away any time soon.

The chart below shows that as people's income rise, so too does the likelihood that they have a college degree or higher. By contrast, those with the lowest incomes are most likely to have a high school education or less. Just 8% of those at the lowest income level have a college degree while 78% of those earning $250,000 or more have a college degree or advanced degree. At the other end of the income scale, 69% of low-income people have a high school degree or less, while just 9% of those earning over $250,000 have just a high school degree.

Why Two Years of Algebra? Why ten months?

Shawn Cornally asks in this post, "Who decided that it takes an equal amount of time to teach every subject?"

No one decided.

What happened was that the time involved was "decided" upon by each school on its own and each one gradually came to the same conclusions: The summer months were too damned hot in NYC and all points south of Boston - since that was where the decision-makers were, that was the decision. Time off for major holidays and the occasional week or two here and there - Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter - and the rest is school.

Sorry to all you "It's all based on the agrarian calender" believers - it's obvious you were never on a farm. The summer months are busy (the definition of farmer is 'a busy man') but nowhere near as busy as other times of the year.  Planting and harvest are kinda important, and that's May and October. The winter months have their own flow - it's not like farmers are sedentary during all but the 10 weeks of summer break!

The class time has varied from 40 minutes to 1.5 hours, yet everyone who thinks about it usually comes to the same conclusion: "If I have to choose, it's 50 minutes, all year. That seems the best compromise for all the students." Since the classes are all mixed up, you have to find a compromise.

Once the times were decided, the courses expanded or split to fit the available hours. If a school tried a new initiative, the courses all shifted to fit. Books were written to fit the prevailing choice with a couple extra chapters of overlap so they could sell them to more people. Teachers who finished something early would add a topic or expand a earlier one. Teachers who went over made some resolution to move faster. Look at the way AP is 1 month shorter than the rest of the school yet somehow those teachers make 2x the work fit.

Then the time became flexible and the courses changed again, slightly. A chapter was added to the math class, another Shakespeare play was included.  It was decided that 1 year was too little for all the Great Ideas of Algebra, so let's do 2, etc.

When block scheduling became all the rage, the total hours were kept constant and the material shifted to fit the new format. If the course syllabus changed radically, the new would always be compared to the old because the old needed to be fundamentally similarity to the new.

Shift, change and adapt --- Evolution, baby.

Additionally, the expectations of a particular course become centered around the transcript, i.e, does a grade of "A" in a course labeled "CP Physics" taught by a guy named Cornally in the Midwest using SBG mean what I think it means and include what I think it should include?  Do I schedule this kid for a remedial physics class before allowing him to matriculate or do I throw him right in and let him become a Physics major at my Uni?  Do I hire him based on this report or not?

Given all that, it's surprisingly consistent from student to student. Match up the "A" students in CP Physics from 80 different schools and they'll be amazingly similar and their abilities and knowledge pretty damned predictable.

Awards for all?

Joanne Jacobs has a piece about a parent complaining that only some kids were recognized for their performance on state testing. I actually agree with the parent on this one.

This, he said, was unfair to students who traditionally score lower on standardized tests and might not reach proficiency no matter how hard they try — mainstreamed special education students, for example.

Some kids will never reach proficiency. It's just a fact of life. If you make your standards low enough for all, then the achievement is meaningless and all of the kids know it and blow you off.The better response, for me, is to simply thank everyone publicly, en masse, and announce the barbeque for all. Then, reward or thank the good students separately.

Really, the "Always Praise in Public" rule isn't always your best course of action. I am against, for example, the tactic of an academic assembly during the first two periods of the day for which every class trudges down to the gym and sits by class.

"Everyone is sure to be a winner
with these fun 4" trophies."

What happens next is the whole point and is also the most excruciating part: the Guidance counselor, feeling all very important because she gets to "honor" the "good" students and bask in the reflected glory, reads the names of the high honor roll (20 kids), honor roll (140 kids), and merit (15 kids). She asks them to stand while this endless list is being read. Do you know how long it takes to read 175 names?

A little subtraction shows that there's maybe 30 kids in that grade who couldn't manage to get anything ... administration is proud that they didn't publicly shame any of them by saying their names. Except that they are still sitting down while everyone around them is standing up. Is it any wonder that they feel like shit? Most memorable student quote about the assembly (in informal geometry afterward): "Here are all the smart people in the school and none of them are YOU."

Back to the fun. Guidance has them sit ... and does the 11th grade. And repeats for the 10th. And the 9th. Can't have anyone left out, can we? An hour and something later, you've managed to humiliate as many people as possible, so you send the school back to class. "Don't make any comments to the Dweeb in the hallway, now."


Maybe the proper response is to not require everyone to recognize them. Give them their own awards night and invite them and their parents to come or not, as they choose.  You know, like the sports awards night, where the non-athletic can avoid having to sit through endless coaches' attempts at public speaking.

God knows there is nothing worse than a coach with limited vocabulary and no experience speaking to a crowd who's attempting to appear smart, clever, witty and interesting ... for each of his 54 football players, naming and praising the "spectacular work ethic" of every member of the 1-6 team, including the kids who lost eligibility for drinking and fighting.


It was also interesting that the rest of the fall teams had much better seasons, one winning a state championship, but the football team spent the most time congratulating itself.  But I digress ...

Maybe the takeaway from all this is simple:  The people who attend an awards night should be the ones who were there to watch the achievement itself.  Anyone else is excused. Those who wish to attend can do so.  I'd much rather have an awards night with the rest of my team and the spectators who were at the games. Everyone else feels like "Johnny come lately" hangers-on.  The same is true for academic awards:

If you weren't there when we did it, why would you want to be there to celebrate it?

If you can answer that question, then you can come to the ceremony and we'll all have a blast. If you can't, then you shouldn't be required to be there and we probably would feel uncomfortable if you did show up.

Psychologists say NO to Learning Styles

I'll have to read the rest of this NYTimes article carefully, but this paragraph stood out:

Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are “visual learners” and others are auditory; some are “left-brain” students, others “right-brain.” In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. “The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,” the researchers concluded.

Hallelujah. Striking and disturbing, indeed.

Forcing Teachers to Read: Useful or just a Time-Suck?

Scott Macleod, over at Dangerously Irrelevant, wonders if we should require teachers to read the RSS newspaper: Should we require school employees to have RSS readers? He and his reader community created lists of rss feeds:grade-level and subject-specific blogs.

I'm great up to this point. Most of these blogs (I haven't read them all so can't say about all) are good people with good experience writing well and intelligently. But then Dr. Macleod goes a little off the end when he thinks about the next step ...

1. Should we require school employees to have loaded RSS readers (with a concurrent expectation that they spend time checking them and reading in them)?
2. How would the lives of the educators in your school organization be different if they regularly spent time with their loaded RSS readers?
3. How would the lives of preservice educators (i.e., student teachers) be different if they regularly spent time with their loaded RSS readers?
4. Can we figure out how to give educators professional development / licensure renewal credit for time spent with RSS readers, interacting with other educators in social media channels, etc.? We seem to be able to do so for face-to-face training, discussion groups, school book clubs, and so on ...

Thoughts on any of this? Got your own questions you’d like to add to my list?

No,
Not by much,
To brainwash them some more - haven't they already read these blogs as part of their classes?
and YAY! Another meaningless credit for meaningless professional development!
 Then there's time and viewpoint.

Time? I get to school at about 7:15. I start the computer, which takes maybe 15 minutes to complete, and then load a firefox folder of bookmarks - the things I do everyday like check my and the school's calendar for games or meetings, read email (I only do it once at the beginning and once at the end of the day) update the SAT problem of the day, open the gradebook. I am checking that all my first classes are ready - emergency copying, bookmarking the text. I check my school mail box on another floor. I get my caffeine. Classes start. During my prep period, I prep. During my classes I teach. After school I help students, go to a game or go home. When do you suppose I should spend an hour on my school computer reading an RSS feed? How pissed off would the taxpayers of my community be if they knew that I spent that time surfing the internet every day?

Viewpoint? All the blogs listed are definitely opinionated. The viewpoints are not ones that I agree with all the time. I don't care to have my principal, who knows little about teaching and basically nothing about math and less about educational technology, decide what things I must read daily. I would hate to see what he would require I read -  he already photocopies pointless articles (FYI) and forwards joke emails. The upshot is that so much of his correspondence is junk that it lessens the importance of the rest of it.
 Suppose I read Right on the Left Coast, which is not on the list, but not Dy/dan, which is?  What if my blog were required reading instead of this Macleod's?  Or Theo, or Moonbattery, or Breitbart or Malkin?

Overload.  The list for math has 31 blogs on it.  If you overload people with this much new educational thought and trivia during a time when they can't process it, you will lose much more than you possibly gain. "Even though it could yield great results" - but it won't.

I see it far more likely that any time allocated will be spent with BostonHerald's Red Sox feed than on head-in-the-sky education dreamers who can save the world instantly if you only do .... this.  Does anyone really think that updating a facebook profile is a good use of a teacher's time?

Macleod seems to have plenty of time during the day to read, relax and tend to his presence on the web (he lists a Blog, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, Twine, Delicious, Digg, Gmail, Skype, coComment, Technorati, Wikipedia), but I have other interests, i.e., teaching. I have precious little time to browse during the day and I don't care to waste it reading Macleod's recount of some conference he went to.

In the evening, which is when I do my reading, I can read and consider, answer and comment -- but certainly not under my principal's eye. Of course, that's also when I tend to my own life, virtual and otherwise. I volunteer my programming time and server space for a bunch of websites, maintain this blog and my own, keep track of my own facebook account (which the students do NOT have access to) -- have a life, such as it is.

I might even grade papers or (GASP!) watch a game.