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.

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."

Precise speech is critical in math.

Here something just posted on twitter:

My first grader's INSANE Common Core math problem that literally requires 48 steps!

Here's the picture:

 

Now, I know Jack Diddly about teaching kids that young, but I do know this: They're not stupid ... but every kid in the room will read that and struggle a bit on the vocabulary. The font choice will explode the dyslexics' minds (I can barely get "birthday", and "edch" took me a second because the ascender on "a" makes it look too similar to a "d". Yeah, that says "each".)

It's cuetsy and I guess that's okay for first graders.

BUT

When you say "12 classmates", you are directly, explicitly and literally saying that there are 12 other people in the room; Glenda is the 13th student.

Precision in your language is critical. Clear and correct problem statements are essential.  These kids are barely in their comfort zone and you're pitching curveballs and changing it up with high heat?

This is precisely where kids develop their fear of mathematics, where they learn that they don't know how to read it, and where they learn to dread trying word problems because the words don't mean what the kids think they mean.

The teacher doesn't have a clue as to how dangerous this little problem can be.

Kids get confused when they try to understand and keep getting corrected for something that is actually incorrectly stated. Kids get frustrated when you say "at least 10" when you mean "more than 10" and then you don't acknowledge that 10 is valid for one but not the other.

They wind up just getting by and letting the confusion (and the understanding) flow right on past and out the window. Too much of this and we will have lost another generation. It's the fault of this and the next five elementary-level math-phobic teachers.

Thanks for nothing.

Innumeracy in the News again

A town in Illinois got hit by a tornado, causing $3 million in damage.

News clip: A powerful tornado hit Harrisburg, Illinois, killing seven people and caused widespread damage throughout the town. Dean Reynolds reports on how the state will not be receiving nearly $3 million in relief aid from FEMA to help homeowners and renters. On the day that a tornado ripped through Harrisburg, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn surveyed the damage and tried to think ahead. "We have an emergency management agency and I signed a declaration, a state disaster declaration," Quinn said. "And I will ask the feds for assistance. You have to file a good application if you want federal assistance."

They got denied and everyone started screaming how awful it was that FEMA would do such a heinous act. Predictably, someone blamed the President. A couple of talking-heads compared it to Irene and wondered if Vermont's democratic leanings had something to do with it.

Let's compare that Illinois damage to what they pay their school superintendents, shall we? The 100 highest-paid school administrators in Illinois in 2006 (and now, with inflation and the inevitable raises, much more!) had salaries ranging from $205,590 to $380,227. (#1: Catalani Gary T $380,227 CUSD 200 to #17: Wolf Boyce J $256,380 ROCK FALLS TWP HSD 301.)  The total for the top 100: $23,000,000.

That's the cost of ONE salary from each district, six years ago. In 2011, the top two salaries were $402,000 and $411,000. source. Summary: the top 100 (from six years ago) of 1145 district account for 22 million.

AnyQs?

Yeah, I think FEMA had this one right. Illinois can certainly afford it. Governor, shut up.

There used to be three lanes here, two up, one down.
There were five washouts this size in a two mile stretch.

Compare that to Irene in Vermont -- infrastructure damage could cost state $100 million. That's not including citizens' home and property damage. Many of my kids' homes were devastated, farmland ruined and crops destroyed. You can't sell food crop that's been flooded, you know, so the money was paid out all year for seed and fertilizer et. al., and then the only income is declared "spoil". FEMA sort of helped out; 10% - 20% of the cost of the replacement. Of the barn.


Farms were destroyed and crops ruined and whole sections of the state inaccessible due to washouts; farmers and contractors and citizens went out on their own initiative and used their own money and equipment to rebuild roadways, dredge and reconfigure streams and rivers, haul away trees and debris. The state had to come in to check and finish and pave, but a lot of that work was done by volunteers. Everyone helped out. The soccer team went door-to-door instead of to practice, even though school closed because no one could physically get there. Even the road contractors stopped leaning against their truck doors with cups of coffee - major bridges were rebuilt in weeks, roads like the one in the picture were rebuilt in days.

Since we used the schools as a proxy for our state wealth capability calculations: "On average, Vermont’s 60 superintendents earn $105,337 a year." That's all of them. $6 million. source.