Fill the Pail, then Light the Fire.

"Education is not the filling of a pail, it's the lighting of a fire." So says nearly everyone who runs professional development and teacher training schools, as if anyone could ever think critically about something without any facts to think about.  You can't have a decent conversation about the Civil War unless you have a knowledge of who fought it and why, when and where the battles took place, the rhetoric and speeches from some of the major players and a sense of the history that led up to it. Harper's Ferry touched off the fuse, but WHY? Why was the country ready to light on fire? Was it about slavery or states rights or federalism? Who fought on which side? What's with the Stars and Bars? Which side still traded with England?

If you don't know some of the facts, your opinions and viewpoints are worthless.

It's the same in math. If you can't factor trinomials, then there are scads of things that you can't do much thinking about. If you spend three minutes to do a fraction addition that the rest of the class does in seconds, then your understanding of probability is delayed, if not severely impacted. If you reach for a calculator to add ½ and ⅔, it makes it difficult for you to focus on what you really wanted to accomplish.

Imagine a class of Korean and Japanese kids (like one I had some years ago).  All had limited English skills.  They were always looking up words in the dictionary instead of memorizing, always working out the meaning word by word, and always resisting when we said "Just use English ... We know it's hard but it will pay off."  One day, we finished our math work early and one asked me about a Reading homework (instantly, the rest chimed in).  They were having trouble understanding what was going on.

I read the story quickly, two or three pages, a minute or so. It told of a man who lived in the woods ... his wife disappears ... detectives can't find evidence but they're sure husband killed her ... husband had a tremendous pile of split firewood ... no body in the wood pile, in the house, buried ... they realized it was warm and he didn't need the wood to heat the house ... why so much split wood?  Then a detective says "Aha, to work up an appetite."

None of the students got it.  They were so wrapped up in the definitions of words, in the structure of the sentences, and meaning of sentences that they couldn't put it all together at once and understand the whole. They didn't have enough facts and basic understanding to do any critical thinking. The "can't see the forest for the trees" analogy.

As an experiment, I grabbed a couple of weaker American students, dyslexics and generally slow readers ... they all got it instantly ... "Ewwww." I grabbed some European kids who had more years in country ... they all got it instantly ... "That's gross." The Asian kids were still stymied, even while other kids tried to explain without giving it all away.

Lighting that fire should be your goal, but the facts and knowledge are the only things you have for fuel.

And the original wasn't Yeats, it was Plutarch:

For the mind does not require filling like a bottle, but rather, like wood, it only requires kindling to create in it an impulse to think independently and an ardent desire for the truth. Plutarch , page 259

Not that the Internet has a clue:
UPDATE:
You can vote it up on Joanne Jacobs for least favorite edu-homily.

Learning styles don't exist ... except for the textbook author.

By now, you've all read about the still struggling fad of Learning Styles, perhaps you've watched Dan Willingham's video on the subject:
Learning Styles Don't Exist


What disturbs me is that the textbook authors are buying into this dreck as well.

Larson Algebra 1, 2012 Common Core Edition.

Fallacy of Relevance

Here is some material for an exploration ANYQs. You have to be careful with medical issues because kids misinterpret and will sometimes take this as a criticism of their lifestyle, parents, capitalism, world-view.  They will also assume that I'm out to bash big Pharma (why they care is beyond me).

I start with the first article.

From the tone, it is obvious to someone that OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG

Fake drugs are increasingly being sold on the Internet in a global counterfeit medicines market that has doubled in the last five years to more than $75 million. The medicines, many of which are life-threatening, have even turned up in the legitimate supply chain and found their way into pharmacies, according a review by Dr Graham Jackson and colleagues published in the March issue of the IJCP, the International Journal of Clinical Practice.

Is that a problem? For most kids, that scares the germs right out of them until you line that statement up against this one:

Accounting for 6.5 percent of the total market share, statin drugs are the most widely sold pharmaceutical drugs in history. To date, Forbes Magazine tells us that statins are earning drug companies $26 billion in annual sales. ... Pfizer spends over $3 billion each year to convince us that we need more and more drugs to be healthy.

And that's just for Lipitor, the cholesterol-lowering drug. So, if $26 Billion is only 6.5% of market, that means the market is worth about $400 billion.

Aside: Pfizer pushes their drugs so hard that it incurred a $2.7 Billion fine for health care fraud (partly the largest criminal fine ever in any case in the US and partly for violations of civil law, the False Claims Act.) Pfizer sales in that same year: $48 billion. Pfizer profits in that same year, after paying that fine: $5.7 Billion. Much of that despite the fact that many other countries force Pfizer to charge far less for their product, but we digress ...

And then you find that the other, "much more acceptable", fake drugs have a fairly strong market as well:

The market for homeopathic and herbal remedies increased 17% from 2005-09 to reach $5.9 billion. As these once considered “alternative” remedies continue to transition into the mainstream, Mintel expects growth to continue at a steady rate, averaging 3.5% growth annually through 2015. This report explores the market for homeopathic and herbal remedies, looking at sales across all channels, as well as consumer usage habits and attitudes towards such remedies. Topics covered in this report include:..

The report seems interesting, but I did not want to pay for that report to find out more details; the price was £2,464.53! "Add to Cart?"  .... um, No.

That's the United States. Now multiply by 5 (maybe?) to get the Global ... $400 Billion for the US * 5 = $2 trillion.

75 million in (possibly) fake vs 2 trillion. Which means that fake-fakes are 0.00375% of the market. I'd interpret that as something to be improved but pretty damned good.Acceptable fakes (homeopathics), on the other hand are 0.295% of the market, nearly 80 times as big a problem.

Kinda makes that $75 million fade into insignificance, doesn't it?

Meditation: Just Another Revolution/Fad

I'll leave it to you to figure out which:

How Meditation Transformed a School
Just five years ago, Visitacion Valley Middle School in San Francisco was notorious for high truancy rates and disciplinary and safety issues. Since then, the number of suspensions has been cut in half and the truancy rate has dropped 61%.

Just like that, POOOF! It's either SBG, or Peer Mediation, or Cooperative Learning, or moveable chairs, or a new building, or Literacy Across the Curriculum, or wellness day, or Parent-School Partnership, or unschooling, or pre-K for all, or free lunch,

and now ... meditation.

If only it were so simple.

College debt Post Hoc fallacy

Joanne Jacobs asks: Is fear of debt worse than debt itself? College students who borrow are more likely to go full-time and complete degrees.

Is it the going into debt that causes the degree completion, or is it that those who feel confident of their ability to finish are more likely to incur some debt to do so?

Should I go into debt to ensure that I finish?

Fencepost Error

The whole thing is fun to listen to, but pay attention at about the 2:05 mark.


For a guy who complains about journalists and their math skills, he made a real lulu himself:
2000 pres, 2002 congressional ... 2004 presidential is truly 4 years from first to last. His oh so smarmy "2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 equals five years" is a classic "fencepost error" - it's not five years from 11/2000 to 11/2004, it's four.
11/2000 to 11/2001
11/2001 to 11/2002
11/2002 to 11/2003
11/2003 to 11/2004

That's one, two, three, four.

"And when you try to cover complicated issues, odds are you're going to make a mess of it."

So true.

No Bells - part one

David Wees feels that School Bells Interfere With Learning. I beg to differ.

"I hate being interrupted ..." and "The clock itself isn't evil, but the way we use it in schools has serious ramifications on how our students learn."

I hate being interrupted, too, but this has little to do with the bells and a lot to do with the location of the clock and the habits of the teacher. No matter how long the class is, whether you have a 4x4 block system or 7x50min or 8x40min, 1hr per day, or 2hrs per day, each class needs to end sometime. If the teacher can see the clock, it shouldn't take him by surprise.

Mrs. Curmudgeon's school is considering the switch back to bells every period. For years they had no bells between classes, just at the beginning and end of the day. There were the problems you might expect: groups of kids milling in the hall chatting, kids who show up 10 minutes late because the other teacher didn't notice the time or just wanted to keep going. The bathroom is a favorite excuse.

Students aren't going through the day in lockstep with all of their classmates and we must keep to a schedule so that everyone's time and preparation can be utilized most effectively. One freshman may take Honors Algebra2, Spanish 3 and H.English but the other takes CP English, CPAlgebra1 and Spanish1. The only course they have in common might be a Freshman History. You really can't expect every other teacher to make adjustments to fit that teacher's teaching whim of the day.

"I am always getting interrupted by the bell" and "It just never seems long enough" are not reasons to get rid of bells. "Kids are always late" is not one either. I've taught classes that were 40, 45, 50, 60, 80 and 90 minutes long; seminars and workshops lasting from 15 minutes to 6 hours. They always have definite schedules.

The only way to allow for extended time is to have large time gaps between classes, a la college scheduling. Even in this scenario, few classes are ever extended. You have an hour, so you plan for an hour. Extensions are done during "office hours" or during that time after class when the student catches the teacher and asks a question.

It wouldn't be a proper 21st century school reform piece if it didn't mention the dreaded "factory-model" analogy and dream wistfully about flexibility and "learning opportunities," so here goes:

Clocks are part of the systems world of a school but they have come to rule our life world. We have let ourselves become subject to fixed schedules, daily routine, and the drudgery of a factory-like system. I'm not saying that we can do without the clocks, but maybe we need to find ways for our system to be more flexible, to allow the learning to extend when necessary, and even send off kids early for another opportunity to learn, when their lesson with us is done.

So my group of 15 can't all begin at once because you are keeping 12 of them for a necessary extended learning opportunity? "Necessary" to whom? Will you send them to me when I have my AP calculus kids in their own "extended learning opportunity"?

If any student can be late at any time by merely invoking the "I didn't know what time it was", then what kind of message are we sending about responsibility? When your kids can deliberately steer you into a digression so they can be "legitimately" late to their next class, what societal good are we accomplishing? If promptness no longer matters, then few students will ever be prompt and the school will deteriorate.  You'll accomplish less than you do now and eventually go back.

Maybe we could do the 21st century skills, uber-techno-geek thing and program every student's iPhone, iPad, netbook ... to sound an alarm to signal the end of periods.

Cheating starts with The Administration

From the NYTimes

One day next month every student at Loyola Law School Los Angeles will awake to a higher grade point average. But it’s not because they are all working harder.
The school is retroactively inflating its grades, tacking on 0.333 to every grade recorded in the last few years. The goal is to make its students look more attractive in a competitive job market.

No. The goal is to make the school look more attractive. The student benefit is secondary.

Colleges have been playing this game for years: paying students to retake the SAT to raise the USNews rankings, gaming the enrollments to increase "diversity", fiddling with grading to improve student "satisfaction", and now they're out and out lying about GPA calculated from the inflated grades of watered down courses presented by professors who have lessened their requirements and overlooked more.

Changed to pass/fail so the pressure is reduced but "This new grading system also makes it harder for employers to distinguish the wheat from the chaff, which means more students can get a shot at a competitive interview." Total bullshit.

and we wonder why the students feel entitled?

Fallacy of Relevance - Ad misericondium

When arguing a point, attempting to get out of a traffic ticket or scraping together a passing grade, an appeal to pity can sometimes be effective. Other times you just look stupid.

Case in point, a Yemeni man is held in Guantanamo Bay and the Obama administration won't release him. He might have had a chance but the Christmas day bomber-moron tried to remove himself from the gene pool and take others with him.

"So a Nigerian man tries to set off a bomb on an American plane, and they punish my brother for this?" says Hila's sister, who did want to be identified.

An excellent point, even if she does forget to mention that the Nigerian trained in Yemen. (BTW, the 'I don't want to be identified' part is pretty funny if they mention she's his sister - sign of things to come?) Now the appeal to pity:

"His mother died, his father died, his two sons died, and now his uncle has died," Hila's sister says. "Do they want us to all be dead before they bring him back home again?"

It's a fallacy of relevance because the death of the relatives has nothing to do with the reasons for jail. Still, it can be effective unless you take this fallacy so far. Too much detail tends to ruin the weepy feeling and harden the listener. "Crash!" goes your argument:

"She says the family has endured enough trouble already. Last year, Hila's two young sons died when a grenade they were playing with exploded."

If your two young kids played with a live hand grenade and killed themselves, you're a terrorist. Dude, your unidentified sister is making this too easy.

Source: npr.org.