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Learning to love skills-free math

March 28, 2009 By

On Kitchen Table Math, Barry Garelick quotes from a 2006 report on federally funded training in “standards-based” math teaching, which Garelick defines as “how to teach the crap programs that NSF’s Education and Human Resource Division funded (like Everyday Math, Investigations, IMP, CMP, Core Plus, etc).”

The report lauds “changes in teachers’ beliefs” about the need for ability grouping.

“Before IMP, I felt that there were mathematically unreachable students. I felt that students could not go on to more challenging ideas like algebra, statistics, probability, or trig without basic skills. Fortunately, with my IMP training, I have a different feeling about students. I strongly believe in access to mathematics for all. (Teacher, 6–12 mathematics)”

Garelick writes:

Before this teacher started using IMP, he/she felt that basic skills were necessary in order to proceed in mathematics. After IMP, which essentially avoids content whenever possible, he/she saw the light. Yes, wonderful things happen when you pretend that content doesn’t matter, and that higher order thinking skills occur just by giving students “authentic” problems without the bother of all those and boring drills and instruction. They are able to reach for the stars. Unfortunately they do so by standing on a two legged stool.

After many years working in science, Garelick is preparing for a second career as a math teacher.

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Fitness Week: Smokes and snacks

March 27, 2009 By

In What’s Wrong with This Picture? Robert Cox shows the back of a T-shirt distributed by health teachers at New Rochelle High School as part of Fitness Week. There are ads for a cigar lounge, a discount cigarette store and food joints.

Apparently the high school’s idea of fitness is chowing down on buffalo wings, pizza and jerked chicken followed up by a fine cigar. And in these tough financial times, it’s nice to see the school helping our kid’s find a cheap place to pick up a carton of Lucky Strikes at “Smokes 4 Less.”

Eat, smoke and be wary?

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When parents do the homework

March 27, 2009 By

In Illinois, teachers are trying to get parents to stop doing their kids’ homework. But some assignments seem designed for adults. From the Chicago Tribune:

Vernon Hills parent Barb Rosenstock admitted that she once helped her son build a project for a school assignment. In her defense, she said, it was on magnetic electricity.

“It had to light up and be magnetic,” Rosenstock said. “Come on. They’re in 2nd grade.”

Her son wanted to build a hockey game, so Rosenstock helped him affix magnets to the bottoms of figurines and rig a light that illuminated when the puck hit the goal.

They proudly took it to school only to find an even more impressive “parent project” displayed alongside theirs.

“They literally had a walking, talking teddy bear. They had made a circuit chip. A circuit chip! You’re talking about 2nd graders,” Rosenstock recalled with a laugh.

The simple way to get kids to do their own work is to give them assignments that don’t require adult skills.

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Teens fight self-abuse charges

March 27, 2009 By

Threatened with child molesting charges for a bra-clad slumber-party photo of herself that showed up on a cellphone, a high school cheerleader refused to cop a plea. Along with two other girls, she’s filed suit against the overzealous prosecutor.

Marissa Miller and two other Tunkhannock, Pa., high school students say a prosecutor retaliated when they rejected his deal in a case over cellphone photos he called “provocative.”

. . . (The photo) showed Marissa and a friend from the waist up. Both were wearing bras.

(Prosecutor) Skumanick said he considered the photo “provocative” enough to tell Marissa and the friend, Grace Kelly, that if they did not attend a 10-hour class dealing with pornography and sexual violence, he was considering filing a charge of sexual abuse of a minor against both girls. If convicted, they could serve time in prison and would probably have to register as sex offenders.

Seventeen other students took the deal.

Criminalizing adolescent folly is nuts. Is there no sexual violence, abuse of minors or kiddie porn in Tunkhannock?

Meanwhile, in Britain, an 18-year-old boy painted an Iron Age fertility symbol with a 60-foot phallus on the new roof of his parents £1million house, reports the Daily Mail. He was hoping it would show up on Google Earth. No prosecution is planned. Just a new paint job.

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Smart teachers, successful students

March 26, 2009 By

Countries with high-scoring students tend to have high-quality teachers, reports the Christian Science Monitor, looking at Finland and Singapore. In both, teaching is a prestige profession open only to top students.

Only the top third of secondary-school graduates in Singapore can apply for teacher training. The National Institute of Education winnows that field down more and pays a living stipend while they learn to teach. Each year, teachers take an additional 100 hours of paid professional development. And they spend substantial time outside the classroom to plan with colleagues.

Singapore’s teachers earn as much as scientists and engineers.

Other successful education nations may: mentor new teachers; give teachers time to collaborate with colleagues and design lessons, work within a national curriculum and invest in improving teachers’ skills.

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Carnival of Homeschooling

March 26, 2009 By

HomeSchoolBuzz is hosting the spring edition of the Carnival of Homeschooling.

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Boys and girls together in Alabama

March 26, 2009 By

Unwilling to fight the ACLU, Mobile County, Alabama schools have agreed to end mandatory single-sex classes. According to the civil liberties group, the sex segregation included a ban on boys and girls talking in the hallways or at lunch.

. . . at Hankins Middle School this year, teachers had been instructed to treat boys and girls differently. At a teacher training, teachers were informed that boys should be taught about “heroic behavior” but that girls should learn “good character.” Teachers were told that male hormone levels directly relate to success at “traditional male tasks” but that when stress levels rise in an adolescent girl’s brain, “other things shut down.”

A story in the Mobile Press-Register reported that a language arts exercise for sixth grade girls involved asking the girls to use as many descriptive words as possible to describe their dream wedding cake, while the boys were asked to brainstorm action verbs used in sports.

According to Mark Jones, whose son Jacob attends Hankins Middle School, the school principal told him that the changes at Hankins were necessary because boys’ and girls’ brains are so different that they needed different curriculums.

If true, that’s sounds awfully extreme. I wonder if the crackpot “Crockus” is involved.

While the Press-Register bemoans the loss of the single-sex program, the solution seems simple: Let parents choose single-sex or coed classes for their children and study the results.

Update: Education Gadfly flags a report on how to do single-sex education effectively.

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Carnival of Education

March 25, 2009 By

The pirate princess is hosting this week’s YARR-nival of Education at Epic Adventures Are Often Uncomfortable.

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It’s the skills, stupid

March 25, 2009 By

Standards-based report cards tell students how well they’ve mastered specific academic skills, such as “decoding strategies” or “number sense and operations,” reports the New York Times.

Students aren’t compared against each other; they get no extra credit for doing homework or turning in special projects. It’s all about whether they’ve mastered the skills.

In Pelham, the second-grade report card includes 39 separate skill scores — 10 each in math and language arts, 2 each in science and social studies, and a total of 15 in art, music, physical education, technology and “learning behaviors” — engagement, respect, responsibility, organization. The report card itself is one page, but it comes with a 14-page guide explaining the different skills and the scoring.

Dennis Lauro, Pelham’s superintendent, said that standards-based report cards helped students chart their own courses for improvement; as part of the process, they each develop individual goals, which are discussed with teachers and parents, and assemble portfolios of work.

Some parents complain that the system is confusing: Schools typically use numbers rather than letter grades and there’s a lot more on the report card. Others want their children to get credit for hard work, even if it isn’t reflected in mastery of skills.

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Teachers seek cellphone camera ban

March 25, 2009 By

Connecticut teachers want a law to ban cameras from classrooms, reports U.S. News. They’re worried about students using their cellphones to record teachers’ worst moments — or to record routine moments and edit them in nasty ways.

Union leaders say imposing limits on the use of cameras and other recording devices in school might be necessary to prevent damaging videos and pictures from ending up on Facebook and YouTube.

The Hartford Courant reports that there are thousands of these videos online. One pokes fun at a Connecticut high school physics teacher who is shown “flailing his arms, short-hopping across the classroom, then pushing against the wall” in an attempt to demonstrate how molecules move. The problem is that the surreptitiously shot video doesn’t carry the teacher’s explanation of the principles, only the sound of instrumental music.

. . . Legal experts argue that teachers have a limited expectation of privacy in the classroom.

I’m not sure what I think about the proposed law.

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