I hate this class.

So why did you take the class? You spent $3000 of your or your parents' money to enroll in it.  It seems pretty amazingly stupid for you to complain about it now, after 4 months.

Why didn't you

• Check out the course bulletin and choose a different course, one you're interested in?
• Check out the professor and make sure he teaches in a way you like; perhaps choose the one you'd like from the department?
• Rearrange your schedule to avoid this class?
• Choose a major that you give a damn about?
• Do something else?

If it was truly worthless, why did you take it? Why not drop it and take something else? No one is forcing you to get this education and, in fact, you'd probably be better off learning a trade than continuing with this very expensive farce.

The Blood Drive.

Two years ago:

"The GOLM collected 368 pints that first year, and has grown steadily ever since. For three straight years, the GOLM has broken the New England record for a one-day community blood drive. Boston held the record of 772 pints until Rutland collected 856 in 2008 and 1,024 in 2009. In September 2010, Boston collected 1,177 pints to reclaim the New England record, but Rutland took it back in December, with 1,400 pints. Manchester, N.H., broke that record – and the national record – in August 2011, with 1,968 pints – setting the stage for our 2011 goal of topping the nation in blood donation.

Neither 2011 nor 2012 broke the record. This year, however, was the bomb:

Rutland roared into the record books Tuesday with a new national mark for blood collected in a single community in one day — more than 2,300 pints. The previous record was 1,968 pints, held by Manchester, N.H.

The total collected in the Gift of Life Marathon blood drive at five locations in Rutland was finalized at about 10:30 p.m., and the 2,337 pints put Rutland comfortably in the lead for the new national mark.

For a bit of perspective that's in a community of 35,000 in a county with 25,000 more. 2337 out of 60,000 people is an amazingly high percentage when you realize that the Red Cross excludes many people who:

are too young, too lightweight, have iron deficiencies, have medical problems, have been stationed in Irag or Afghanistan (or any number of foreign countries), are gay, have been in prison or done drugs, take medicines legitimately that aren't good for the blood recipient, have had a tattoo in the last 12 months ... page after page of exclusions. 

The list is immense and it narrows down the available pool of donors to the point where Rutland had about 15% of its eligible population donate blood on the same day.

Merry Christmas, indeed.

Should we Offer Access to Online Education?

What benefit do you see to offering students access to free online education tools like Khan Academy? Any drawbacks?
— The Stream (@AJAMStream) December 25, 2013

.@AJAMStream KA equiv to a 1st-year teacher recording their lessons then reusing them each year w/o reflection or modification or feedback.
— Frank Noschese (@fnoschese) December 25, 2013

And this is why KA and other online education options won't ever replace brick and mortar. Students, by and large, simply will not do online education on their own. 

"Offering access"?  How am I "Offering access" when KA is on the Internet? A more appropriate question would be "Even had I wanted to, how can I stop them?"

The brick and mortar schools will be in trouble when the question becomes "How can I take all this stuff I learned online this summer and get credit for it in school?"  Since I have yet to have a student actually learn a lot of math online, I have no fear for my job. They need a teacher to nudge, cajole, question and respond, demand and reply. Sure, there are some who can learn online, but they're not in public schools and, if they are, it's rarely math that they can learn this way.

On the other hand, for me, it's not about WHERE you learn algebra, it's how well. If you transferred into my school and showed us that you had mastered algebra I, we'd put you into algebra II  .... so why would we care if you mastered algebra I through KA or some other over the summer?  The answer is, we don't.  If you show up CLAIMING to have learned it all in summer school, we're skeptical, but that's only because we have seen and worked with an awful lot of students.

It's sort of like Teach for America ... I guess there are SOME people who can learn everything in a six-week summer course, but it sure does seem as though the traditional methods are still better for most.

Obsolete in Education - part One

Four years ago, teachpaperless.blogspot.com predicted some things that were going obsolete. I think she's experiencing some edu-psychosis brought on by wishful thinking. As an intellectual exercise and conceit, I figured I'd give updates and responses.

1. Desks
The 21st century does not fit neatly into rows. Neither should your students. Allow the network-based concepts of flow, collaboration, and dynamism help you rearrange your room for authentic 21st century learning.

Yup, desks in rows are the first thing on the list ... I suppose the "factory model" bugaboo has to surface immediately because the students don't need any structure or organization, and the teacher is going to be differentiating the hell out of that room anyway. Putting the desks on wheels so the "teacher doesn't know where to stand" will certainly do something. I'm not sure that it'll be something good, though.

2. Language Labs
Foreign language acquisition is only a smartphone away. Get rid of those clunky desktops and monitors and do something fun with that room.

That's right. Siri will solve your translation problems for you. There's no need for you to learn a new language, kids, the disembodied voice will do all your thinking and learning for you, do all your math for you, remember all your Biology facts for you, read your Shakespeare to you and perform your science experiments. 

3. Computers
Ok, so this is a trick answer. More precisely this one should read: 'Our concept of what a computer is'. Because computing is going mobile and over the next decade we're going to see the full fury of individualized computing via handhelds come to the fore. Can't wait.

Computers may be morphing into tablets and smartphones but that doesn't mean the desktop is going away any time soon. The screen size and keyboard comfort will insure that. Those people who change their primary device for a smartphone weren't using their computer for anything other than a communication device anyway. Those people who gravitate to a Kindle or tablet weren't reading on the computer anyway. Those people who needed a computer for content creation will still need the size and convenience anyway.

4. Homework
The 21st century is a 24/7 environment. And the next decade is going to see the traditional temporal boundaries between home and school disappear. And despite whatever Secretary Duncan might say, we don't need kids to 'go to school' more; we need them to 'learn' more. And this will be done 24/7 and on the move (see #3).

This is an utter crock. The human mind can't actively learn for extended periods of time. Homework (or something that replaces it) is a necessary intermediate learning situation in the full learning process: Listen and see, learn, practice, reinforce, twist, re-use, re-formulate and then master. Students won't suddenly develop the self-motivation to do this if it wasn't present already.

Secondly, I see pushback from the 24/7 model in many things. The cellphone gave us instant connection at all times and people are starting to realize that isn't the best idea - more often "the battery must have died" is the excuse given to cover up the desire to be left alone. Even my teenagers are starting to get the exasperated look when Mother calls in the middle of class - I know, I've looked at the number before they answer. Anyone who uses email knows how it can overwhelm any attempt to get things done. Having a set time and place for learning allows the students to focus on that learning and allow the brain to make the connections necessary. (Assuming that students will learn chemistry at the skatepark is so laughable that I must have misread the bullet point.) Once outside of that place, the brain can have time to process while the student relaxes, plays sports, or simply does something enjoyable or works a job.

There's a time and place for everything, you know.

5. The Role of Standardized Tests in College Admissions
The AP Exam is on its last legs. The SAT isn't far behind. Over the next ten years, we will see Digital Portfolios replace test scores as the #1 factor in college admissions.

Those last legs are looking pretty strong. The reality is that more and more kids are being exploited as guinea pigs: experimental schools and pedagogy, block vs traditional schedules, open classroom vs walls, disciplinarian vs laissez-faire systems, integrated math vs alg-geom-alg-trig, homeschooling and unschooling. The details are enormously different.

Those tests, as annoying and predictable as they might be, do give the colleges a baseline context for the rest of the application. Digital portfolios are not catching on as the sole record of achievement simply because there isn't much to show that the student actually created all of that work without help.

6. Differentiated Instruction as the Sign of a Distinguished Teacher
The 21st century is customizable. In ten years, the teacher who hasn't yet figured out how to use tech to personalize learning will be the teacher out of a job. Differentiation won't make you 'distinguished'; it'll just be a natural part of your work.

I could have sworn that the title of the piece was "Things that were going obsolete". I'm assuming that she wants all students to be in differentiated learning, whether it's appropriate or not. The group classroom isn't going away. Some kids like to feel that everything is specialized for them and they don't mind instantly moving forward to the next topic, but I'll counter with the idea that immediate advancement to the next topic may be the reason some kids have so much trouble. Waiting for the other kid to get it, or helping a friend get it, is valuable. Listening to other kids ask the same question is also valuable.

7. Fear of Wikipedia
Wikipedia is the greatest democratizing force in the world right now. If you are afraid of letting your students peruse it, it's time you get over yourself.

No, Wikipedia has all of the limitations it always had. Crowd-sourcing is only as good as the loudest voices in that crowd.  I would note that the only truly good articles are those written by experts and, for most people, the expert can be defined as "someone who agrees with me". The 19yo kid who happens to be the uber-administrator for a particular page isn't much better than a GeoCities author was.

Copying random paragraphs from Wikipedia is akin to copying the article from the Brittanica, but requiring less of a lazy effort than in the olden days. Teachers don't object to the truth in Wikipedia, they object to the way their students use it.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to all.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all, a Good Night.

Merry Christmas, Earth

45 years ago today:

Thanks, Neil.

Dec 24, 2013. 45th anniversary of @NASA's seminal Earthrise photo. Taken as Apollo 8 orbited the Moon. pic.twitter.com/uKcHIqecHj
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) December 24, 2013

Grades are not poison.

Grades poison anything they touch. For ex., if we grade class participation, kids think less about ideas, more about impressing the tchr
— Alfie Kohn (@alfiekohn) December 23, 2013

Grades are not poison, they're a shortcut.

They're a single number that is shorthand for something.  All of the horrors ascribed to grades are simply problems with the interpretation and implementation.

To answer Alfie Kohn, if you grade something that cannot be graded easily with a tool that is horribly inappropriate for that purpose, why would you expect that it would ever work well? Things that look like participation can be measured, and most such run counter to the stated purpose of the grade.

If the class is supposed to discuss, you can count the times the person made a statement.  "You must comment at least twice on at least two classmates' posts in the forum." You'll also have to account for those who can't or won't speak up in class, or who are incapable of posting in a forum; you'll need to account for many things.

My point is that counting forum posts isn't really measuring what you want to measure, isn't encouraging anything important, and may be counterproductive. That's Alfie Kohn's data point as well, but I refuse to take step two.

Using participation grades to bash ALL grades is a silly Strawman argument.

Grades are useful. They condense a semester's worth of work into one readable nugget. Does the student understand Algebra 1 enough to go on to Algebra 2? You can have a 10 page paper listing all of the things that students should have learned this year, but the mass of data is too much so the reader needs the teacher to distill it into something more concise.

What form that concise summary will take is debatable, but I would maintain that the A-F scale is fine. It's not complete, of course ... it's a summary, but it's what the public has grown accustomed to so the writer and the reader are both using the same notation and communication is assured. Communication is the point.

Rubrics expand the summary but don't add precision or accuracy to it because they are made from the same data the grade was. Changing to a 1-4 scale is no improvement. Any scale that includes levels like "Proficient, Nearly Proficient, Gaining Proficiency, Barely proficient, No Evidence of Intelligent Thought" is akin to changing languages and claiming that French is superior to English because it has accents.

Perhaps the problem is that grades are a form of communication that is being used in too many different ways, many of them problematic, leading us to assume that all uses of grades are false and problematic.

Grading participation

Grades poison anything they touch. For ex., if we grade class participation, kids think less about ideas, more about impressing the tchr
— Alfie Kohn (@alfiekohn) December 23, 2013

It seems to me that anyone who has time to grade participation has got too much time on his hands and should perhaps consider teaching instead? As a followup to that thought, if you aren't implementing some sort of instantaneous computer-based participation measurement tool, how in the holy hell can you possibly grade participation? Won't it be a bit jarring to always be stopping the flow of conversation to be running to the front of the room to make some mark instead of listening to the question and thinking about it?

I remember watching a Edu-guru at a conference explain how he does it. "I keep the list up here on the podium and whenever you say something thoughtful or particularly relevant, I put a mark on the list." Every time he went back to the podium, he lost his train of thought. The only thing I could think of was Dan Willingham's discriptions of experiments on distraction in the lecture hall.

Other teachers use it as a punishment. "They won't let me implement discipline in any other way, so I'll put a daily ten-point grade in place so I can mark them down. Minus 1 for no pencil, minus 5 for no homework, and so on."
Here's a radical thought .... give the normal test at the normal time. "Let's find out how much you understand 'Solving for the Variable - Two Step Equations.' "

If it doesn't turn you on ...

After my childish little rant yesterday about kids and the multiplication tables playing hard-to-get, Sue left a comment on the post:

If it doesn't turn you on, why would you focus on it? I just read The Book of Learning and Forgetting, by Frank Smith. He makes a sharp distinction between memorizing and learning. I think knowing those multiplication facts is vital to doing lots of interesting mathematical work, but students will only know them if they felt engaged by the ideas at some point. 

If it hadn't been written by SueVH, I'd have been tempted to toss it into the Idiot Pile and shrug my shoulders muttering "What the ... " under my breath.  Sue's right, of course, but I shudder at what a parent or new teacher or student might take away from this.

Here's the problem.  Statements like "If it doesn't turn you on, why would you focus on it?" and "students will only know them if they felt engaged by the ideas" can lead to a dangerous impasse in the classroom.

Students in elementary school, more than at any other level, are influenced by the attitudes of their teachers. They can be convinced or even be taught (or manipulated, or brainwashed, if you want to be cynical and stupid) that math is fun and easy. They can memorize so many things at this age - they're memorizing words, symbols, mores and morals, culture, ethics (to the point they can understand them) - they're a mental sponge. They will absorb everything just because someone said so.

If the teacher takes the approach that the students need to be engaged before they can learn math, then she has lost another generation because she doesn't get turned on my math, won't focus on it, and will teach the children that it's not for their pretty little selves. Her biases and fears and trials and troubles with math become their biases and fears and trial and troubles.

If we are constantly offering the excuse of "They're not engaged" as a reason to blame the teacher instead of the students, why should anyone wonder at the poor results we get?

Motivation is the responsibility of the student.

What we have here is a Failure to Communicate.

Education is an awesome thing. What kills it for me is Educrats and Professional Development. Only in Education is it considered a good idea to run a meetings with the following rules.

Did I say "rules"? Silly me, "rules" is such a simple word. What we need here is a more imposing word, one that will make us sound intelligent and wise. You could say we need jargon, but jargon is used in other fields to take a complex idea and substitute one word to represent it, to simplify speech by "chunking" a lot of information into a small package. In education, jargon is used in the opposite way - to confuse and impress through sheer bluster.

I give you "Protocol".

Specifically, there are "protocols" in place for our next little gathering:

There are over hundred different protocols developed in the field for educators, all of which assure us that we will collaborate better, with deeper understanding. "Deeper" is an important word nowadays - we want to eliminate the "mile wide and inch deep" education that we've been apparently delivering all this time. We're changing to deeper teaching. And don't forget collaboration.

We'll have a scribe who writes all this on a piece of chart paper that will never see the light of day, and probably won't survive the clean-up at the end of the session. But we collaborated and we found the essence of the text.

Of course, sharing a single sentence, phrase and word is hardly a collaboration and it sure as hell ain't a discussion, so I'm not quite sure how I'm going to be able to refrain from my usual snarky commentary. It's essentially going to be a long day.

Isn't it odd ...

Educational expert's view of themselves.

The mantra from the Powers that Be in Education, those educational experts who have never been teachers, is that students are supposed to be given multiple chances at assessing their skills and knowledge, multiple ways to show mastery of a subject, repeated formative assessments and multiple chances at summative assessments.

We are to use the word "assessment" because it has the connotation of measurement without judgement, of placement on a scale with no mark of "failure", unlike "test" and "quiz", which both have such connotations.

Many systems have rules about marking a 50% when students do 0% of the work, or requiring that teachers use nothing less than a 60 in the gradebook so that kids can't "fail".

"Social promotion", education's version of "too big to fail", pushes students beyond their Peter Principle limits, beyond their level of incompetence.

"All team members must have equal playing time" rules create the same situation on the field.

Isn't it odd that the Powers That Be feel that schools can be tested and can fail based solely on the results of students who can't?

Multiplication tables

So how is it that a kid can make it all the way to the ninth grade and still not have memorized the table? It's on the wall of every elementary classroom - how can you possibly not learn it?