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I have enjoyed this guest-blogging

May 27, 2011 By

Several things come to an end for me today. First, if I finish reading through my manuscript, I will send it to the publisher; otherwise I will send it on Sunday or Monday. Second, this is my last day in New Haven; I move back to Brooklyn tomorrow. Third, this is the end of my enjoyable guest-blogging stint (all the more enjoyable because Michael was co-guest-blogging and Joanne was pitching in).

Thanks to Joanne for inviting me to guest-blog again, to Michael for blogging too, and to readers for your thoughtful, interesting, and instructive comments.

Filed Under: Education

What is this teacher stress study about?

May 27, 2011 By

I was a bit puzzled when I read the GothamSchools “remainder”: “Researchers in Houston are asking whether students can give teachers post-traumatic stress.” Post-traumatic stress? Is the study investigating whether teachers have bouts of depression, nightmares, etc. after they have stopped teaching?

I followed the link to the Edweek blog by Sarah Sparks, which bears the headline, “Can a Class of 7th Graders Give Teachers Post-traumatic Stress?” But the article itself made it seem as though this were a study of teacher stress, not post-traumatic stress. (Sometimes the headlines are written by someone other than the blog’s author.)

In diligent Internet-research style, I followed the Edweek link to the description of the study itself. There was no mention of post-traumatic stress at all, only stress.

So, what is this study about?

The study, to be conducted by researchers at the University of Houston, consists, at least in part, of a “prospective multi-method, multi-time scale investigation of the proposed mediational chain (i.e., stressors lead to teacher stress response which lead to teacher work and health stress outcomes which lead to teacher effectiveness which lead to student behavioral and academic outcomes).” It will follow 160 seventh- and eighth-grade math, science, or social studies teachers over three years.

The information gathered and analyzed during this project may be used “to guide future development of interventions to mitigate teacher stress and consequently improve teacher effectiveness and student behavior and learning.”

It’s pretty well known that teaching middle school is highly challenging, if not stressful from a medical perspective. (Granted, this depends a great deal on the school.) Moreover, it’s well known that certain kinds or levels of stress can affect the health. (A degree of stress can be a good thing.) So, what will the study uncover that is not well known or obvious? It seems that the researchers are most interested in the possible link between teacher stress and student outcomes (behavior and performance).

Because, you see, if teacher stress were bringing student performance down, then of course something would have to be done about that, and funds might appear. If teacher stress were not showing adverse effects on student performance, then it would be harder to convince funders and policymakers that any sort of intervention was needed.

My suspicion is that the findings will be mixed. Sometimes the teachers with the brightest outer face are the ones with the most stress. They may be delivering wonderful lessons and bringing their students to great heights–but they put intense pressure on themselves not to show their fatigue and bad moods in the classroom. Until they up and quit, they may seem to be doing fine.

Other teachers may let off a lot of steam in the classroom. They may seem to be under more stress than the others, but a medical test might show otherwise.

What if the study could not demonstrate a link between teacher stress and student outcomes? Or what if it correlated positively with student achievement? Or what if it were impossible to separate correlation from causation?

Stress (beyond a certain point) is a serious enough problem that it should be tackled for its own sake. A link between teacher stress and student outcomes may exist, but my guess is that it will be weak. We shall see.

I do hope that the study will consider curriculum, because it is much more stressful to teach without a curriculum (or with a bad one) than to teach with a good one. Some middle schools are curricular wastelands. I hope that it will also look at the schools’ discipline practices (not just policies). In other words, I hope it will look into the reasons for teacher stress in middle schools. Not all of this is inevitable, and not all of it is due to the kids’ ages.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , ,

Do we live in an age of “It”?

May 26, 2011 By

One of the most haunting books I have read over the past year is Martin Buber’s I and Thou (first published in 1923). I return frequently to certain passages, and I carry it in my mind.

Buber begins with the premise that there are two modes of language, two modes of existence: “I-You” and “I-It.” He is not talking about the pronouns as we use them in everyday speech; he refers to essential ways concepts. The “You” is something or someone we encounter in full, without possession, without measurement. It is a lonely and infrequent encounter, but it gives us a glimpse of eternity. The “It” is something we possess, measure, or even experience, and in that sense it is limiting.

Basic words are spoken with one’s being.
When one says You, the I of the word-pair I-You is said, too.
When one says It, the I of the word-pair I-It is said, too.
The basic word I-You can only be spoken with one’s whole being.
The basic word I-It can never be spoken with one’s whole being.

The “It” and “You” are not easily summed up; that’s why he devotes a book to them. The “You,” especially, is hard to grasp, but one grasps it in shivers. Here is one of my favorite passages (worth reading slowly):

Or man encounters being and becoming as what confronts him–always only one being and every thing only as a being. What is there reveals itself to him in the occurrence, and what occurs there happens to him as being. Nothing else is present but this one, but this one cosmically. Measure and comparison have fled. The encounters do not order themselves to become a world, but each is for you a sign of the world order. They have no association with each other, but every one guarantees your association with the world. The world that appears to you in this way is unreliable, for it appears always new to you, and you cannot take it by its word. It lacks density, for everything in it permeates everything else. It lacks duration, for it comes even when not called and vanishes even when you cling to it. It cannot be surveyed: if you try to make it surveyable, you lose it. It comes–comes to fetch you–and if it does not reach you or encounter you it vanishes, but it comes again, transformed. It does not stand outside you, it touches your ground; and if you say “soul of my soul” you have not said too much. But beware of trying to transpose it into your soul–that way you destroy it. It is your present; you have a present only insofar as you have it; and you can make it into an object for you and experience and use it–you must do that again and again–and then you have no present any more. Between you and it there is a reciprocity of giving: you say You to it and give yourself to it; it says You to you and gives itself to you. You cannot come to an understanding about it with others; you are lonely with it; but it teaches you to encounter others and to stand your ground in such encounters; and through the grace of its advents and the melancholy of its departures it leads you to that You in which the lines of relation, though parallel, intersect. It does not help you to survive; it only helps you to have intimations of eternity.

We need the It in order to survive and to make sense of the world, says Buber. But a person who lives by It alone is not fully human.

Why would “experience” belong to the “It” realm? Buber holds that experience is something we appropriate. We do this even with experience that we regard as mysterious.

And all this is not changed by adding “mysterious” experiences to “manifest” ones, self-confident in the wisdom that recognizes a secret compartment in things, reserved for the informed, and holds the key. O mysteriousness without mystery. O piling up of information! It, it, it!

Humans oscillate between the You and the It–and that is human freedom and fate. But at certain times in history, a culture may tip toward the It, and then the freedom is threatened.

But in sick ages it happens that the It-world, no longer irrigated and fertilized by the living currents of the You-world, severed and stagnant, becomes a gigantic swamp phantom and overpowers man. As he accommodates himself to a world of objects that no longer achieve any presence for him, he succumbs to it. Then common causality grows into an oppressive and crushing doom.

Especially in education, it seems that we live in an “It-world” that is no longer irrigated by the “You-world.” It is risky to translate Buber’s ideas into concrete situations, but I see a split in worldview between those who would measure everything and those who claim that the important things are unmeasurable.

It is not that the It is confined to the measurable, or that anything unmeasurable automatically belongs to the You-world. The You-world involves an encounter, a full relation to something. But there is a general tilt of thought toward the It-world; this can be sensed in the subjects themselves and in discussions of education policy.

I am not simply referring to the rise of the social sciences and their emphasis on measurement. The humanities have many forms of measurement and analysis, many things that would fall under Buber’s “It.” Likewise, many scientists and social scientists acknowledge that not all of existence can be contained and analyzed. Both humanities and sciences make room, ideally, for both It and You. The problem is more a split of attitude–a desire to find truth at one pole or the other. Neither one can be understood without the other.

It is time for some irrigation.

Note: I made some edits to this piece on May 27.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: ,

Enter your edu-combination code

May 25, 2011 By

I meant to post something much earlier today but have been wrapped up in final edits of my book manuscript (before it goes to copyediting), final preparations for a presentation tomorrow, and final gazes at the trees and rooftops out my window before I move back to Brooklyn on Saturday.

I am so wrapped up in these things that I’m not sure what’s going on in education at the present hour. I gather there have been premieres of a new film, American Teacher, by Dave Eggers and Nínive Clements Calegari. I gather Mark Zuckerberg wants kids under 13 to have Facebook access for education purposes. But I don’t know enough about either of these things to write about them.

Then an op-ed by Rick Hess caught my eye: “Common Core: Giving Happy Lie to the ‘Reform Consensus.’” Hess states that many “reformy types” assume a consensus that just isn’t there, and that the small-government conservatives are finally speaking up and making this clear.

For several years now, would-be reformers have gotten away with claiming that there’s a goopy, groupthink “reform consensus.” They depict the edu-debates as a simple-minded morality play between a “reform” phalanx and “adult interests.” This line has been sold most assiduously by Democrat for Ed Reform-types and NCLB enthusiasts who think conservatives are supposed to quietly, cheerfully sign on to the grand schemes crafted by their betters.

I’m not in a position to evaluate Hess’s larger argument. But the imagined “goopy, groupthink ‘reform consensus’” has bugged me, no matter where it comes from. Many people have combinations of views that don’t align with a particular platform. And hooray for that. Without such variation, there would be no reason for an education discussion at all. You would have a set of views, you’d fight those holding the opposite views, and that would be that.

One thing that keeps me interested in education policy is the perplexing nature of almost every issue. If it weren’t perplexing, it would be just something to get done. Instead, it’s something to think about, fight for, learn more about, question oneself about, and so on. Yes, one needs to get things done at the same time; one can’t just dwell in perplexity. But the doing of the things also casts them in new perspective, as do reading, thinking, and discussion.

One doesn’t necessarily feel perplexed about everything in education; one may be sure about many things. But a hundred years ago, or a hundred days ago, one might have taken a different stance, even an opposite one. These matters change in meaning over time.

Nor does the lack of “consensus” preclude alliances of various kinds. But they are stronger if they make room for differences among the members, as long as the differences don’t render the alliance meaningless. For instance, two people working together on a curriculum may have very different ideas about school governance, but as long as school governance doesn’t figure large in their work together, they can disagree cordially and keep the work going.

There may be education groups and organizations whose members agree on most points. That has its place too. Many fine schools have a very cohesive staff who agree on the school’s goals and curriculum. The danger occurs only when the agreement gets smug–when those outside the circle are written off automatically or put under pressure to conform.

In-fighting and squabbling are sad things. Imaginary consensus is just as sad, if not sadder. What, then, is left? Hearty agreement, hearty disagreement, without shame or scorn. That, and the recognition that even the most well-considered views are approximations and that anyone can be wrong.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , ,

New NYC tests–of teachers

May 24, 2011 By

I was just in the midst of ruing the new teacher evaluation regulations in New York, which allow state test results (or value-added scores derived from them) to account for up to 40 percent of a teacher’s evaluation.

And now there’s more to rue.

According to the New York Times, New York City will be rolling out new standardized examinations, which will be used mainly to evaluate teachers, not students. This will mean one or two additional tests per year for elementary school students, and up to eight more tests a year for high school students.

It isn’t clear that these tests will affect the students in any way (except that they will take a great deal of time and test prep). But they will affect the teachers a great deal.

This part of the article has me scratching my head:

City officials want their tests to be different from the mostly multiple choice tests the state uses. A proposal given to testing companies for bids in April asks that the exams be based around tasks, like asking students to progress through a multistep math problem, modify a science experiment to get a different result, or write a persuasive essay. They should also reflect the more rigorous Common Core academic standards that New York and other states have adopted.

It’s possible that these will be an improvement over the bland and basic multiple-choice tests (which students will still have to take). But isn’t it a bit rash to use these brand-new tests to evaluate teachers, when many schools haven’t even figured out their curricula? And while these tasks look complex on the surface, is there any guarantee that they will be so in reality? Will the scoring follow a mechanical rubric, or will the scorers read students’ writing carefully for its substance?

Even more peculiar is the DOE’s assertion that the purpose of these tests should be “transparent”: [Read more...]

Filed Under: Education, Testing Tagged With: ,

The teacher as translator

May 24, 2011 By

In a recent blog, Larry Cuban writes that when it comes to education, we are guided by both reason and emotion (or conviction):

We prize new knowledge derived from hard and soft sciences and their applications to life insofar as what they can do for us individually and collectively. We listen to experts. Yet every day in so many ways we pursue our beliefs, apply our values, and follow our emotions. Nothing new here except on those occasions when rationality, science, and emotions light up policy issues that touch our daily work and life.

I agree; our reasoning and our convictions keep each other in check. Too much on the reasoning end, and we forget what we’re doing this for and why it matters. We hear about “results” but not about what the results actually mean. Too much on the side of convictions, and we become isolated in our beliefs and passions, unable to convince anyone else because, after all, “everyone is entitled to his or her own beliefs.”

I suspect that many if not most teachers are fired up by experiences they had in the past–good schools, bad schools, or learning they pursued on their own or with a mentor. It takes some time to sort out those experiences and understand what they mean and how they translate into one’s own practice.

One of my favorite professors made many a class session a voyage and a romp. Once he began to speak, you weren’t sure where he would take you. Somehow the forays through architecture, music, history, and words would come back to the poem that was the starting point–and there was a point to it all. Every seeming digression had its place. He did most of the talking (as I remember), and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. I still remember how he would seize on certain words or lines in a poem–how he could bring out the thunder and undercolors in them.

I couldn’t teach exactly like that; I don’t think many could. It requires a particular kind of storytelling gift–a way of keeping the listeners convinced that what’s coming is important, even if they don’t know where it’s heading. It also requires an ability to bring together many subjects, convincingly, not superficially, in a short time. The “connections” were sometimes whimsical but never cavalier.

But while I could not replicate this professor’s teaching, I have taken many a hint from it. I know (this is where convictions come in) that too much sticking to the point can miss the point, and that a digression can take us closer to the truth, in many cases, than can a linear truthward march. So I have taken his lessons, but taken them slant.

The same can be said for research and what we learn from it. Rarely do we “implement” the findings without any translation whatsoever. If research suggested, for instance, that memorization of poetry was correlated with greater comprehension of it, and if one found the research sound, one would still have to decide which poetry to teach, how to require or encourage memorization, and what to do with the memorization.

So, whether it is research we are listening to, or our own experiences and beliefs, or both, we still have to do the translation work, which is the trickiest (and often the most interesting) work of all. It is closer to poetry translation than to literal and direct translation, as one has to consider form, substance, and the demands of the particular classroom.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: ,

Paradox of the pink slip

May 23, 2011 By

I was just thinking about the ancient Greek logic problem, “Paradox of the Court.” It is as follows (in the version told by Aulus Gellius in his Attic Nights). The sophist Protagoras has taken on a student Euathlus. He asks Euathlus to pay him half of the money up front and the other half after he wins his first court case. But Euathlus, after a long period of study in which he shows progress and prowess, does not take on any court cases at all. Protagoras then sues him for the amount owed.

When they appear before the judges, Protagoras offers the following argument: If I win the case, then I will be paid for the instruction. If I lose the case, then I will still be paid, as you will win your first court case and will therefore owe me the money.

Euathlus counters: Not so. If I win the case, then the court will relieve me of obligation toward you. If I lose the case, then I will have no obligation, as I will not have won a case.

The court finds itself unable to make a decision and postpones its decision to a distant date. (In a note to the story in the 1795 edition of Attic Nights, the translator Reverend W. Beloe commented, “This notion of deferring a decision to a distant period of a perplexing and difficult question, is ridiculously followed by our houses of parliament. It is common to defer the discussion of a question in the house of commons to a period when it is well known the parliament will not meet.”)

To resolve this paradox, we have to assume that we have all the necessary information. That is, we have to exclude the possibility that the agreement might have been invalid in the first place or that some other circumstance might have rendered it null and void. (Otherwise the argument becomes trivial.)

Assuming, then, that the agreement between Protagoras and Euathlus is valid, and that Euathlus has not won a court case so far, then Protagoras’s first scenario, in which he wins the case, is implausible if not impossible. The only condition under which he might win the case would be a misjudgment of the court or the emergence of new information.

Protagoras neglected to include in the agreement a provision that Euathlus would actually take on court cases. Had that provision been included, Protagoras might have stood a chance. But Euathlus is not under any obligation to plead a case, and it appears that he’s enjoying his ongoing studies. It’s possible (though it seems far-fetched here) that the judges could decide that the “essence” of the agreement included an implicit understanding that Euathlus would take on cases after a certain period of study. But once one gets into essences, all sorts of things are possible.

So, the overwhelming odds are that Protagoras will lose the case. It is true that, once the court has made its ruling, Euathlus will have won his first case. But until the court makes this ruling, Euathlus still has not won. Thus, Protagoras cannot claim that he is owed money for something that had not taken place yet at the time of his claim. In fact, he may owe money to Euathlus for causing such a stir in the first place.

Protagoras might decide, after the ruling, to sue for the money, and in that case he’d be entitled to it. But the costs of the previous lawsuit (assuming there were any) could diminish his final returns.

Protagoras’s tactical approach is to sue preemptively, as it seems it can only benefit him. But his logic is flawed, because one option really doesn’t exist, and the other won’t be as profitable as he thinks.

In addition, he commits a moral error, which does not come up in the logic problem. It is an error of indifference to his rightness or wrongness. His attitude is: “It doesn’t matter if my case has basis or not, so long as I get the money.”

It seems that a similar tactic (though different logic) is involved in firing at least 50 percent of the school staff (one of the school turnaround options under Race to the Top). Someone might reason, “If this helps the school improve, we win, because the school improves. If it doesn’t help the school improve, we still win (funds, anyway), because we have shown that we are taking the required steps toward improvement.”

But, just as Protagoras neglected to consider the sequence of events, so those who recommend the firing of a school’s staff neglect the discrepancy between taking “required steps” toward improvement and doing something that might actually help. Although the reasoning in the two situations is different, the moral error is similar: it consists in taking action regardless of whether it is right or wrong, with the assumption that it will pay off in one way or another.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , ,

Alfred North Whitehead on “inert ideas”

May 22, 2011 By

One of the most remarkable essays I have read on education is “The Aims of Education” by Alfred North Whitehead. First published in 1917, it calls some of our current “wars” into question, particularly the apparent battles between progressives and traditionalists. When Whitehead argues against the danger of “inert ideas,” he seems both progressive and traditional at once.

Whitehead (1861-1947) was a mathematician and philosopher. He co-authored the Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell. He is the founder (to some degree) of “process philosophy,” which he explains in Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology.

Already, I am bristling, because the very idea of “process philosophy” sounds like so much nonsense. But when Whitehead says something, he makes you think–in a way that differs from what you might expect. His points don’t fall in the usual classifications.

The second paragraph of “The Aims of Education” reads:

In training a child to activity of thought, above all things we must beware of what I will call “inert ideas”–that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilised, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.

Now, this is interesting, because such “inert ideas” could consist of disjointed facts and big, vague concepts. In other words, schools that emphasize isolated bits of information and schools that emphasize ungrounded “critical thinking and problem-solving” are committing a similar error. They are giving students material out of context. As commenters on Michael’s most recent post have suggested, it is the motion of a topic that makes it interesting and memorable. Daniel T. Willingham has made similar points in his book, Why Don’t Students Like School?

But am I reading things into Whitehead? Not at all; here’s more:

Furthermore, we should not endeavour to use propositions in isolation. Emphatically I do not mean, a neat little set of experiments to illustrate Proposition I and then the proof of Proposition I, a neat little set of experiments to illustrate Proposition II and then the proof of Proposition II, and so on to the end of the book. Nothing could be more boring. Interrelated truths are utilised en bloc, and the various propositions are employed in any order, and with any reiteration. Choose some important applications of your theoretical subject; and study them concurrently with the systematic theoretical exposition. … Also the theory should not be muddled up with the practice. The child should have no doubt when it is proving and when it is utilising. My point is that what is proved should be utilised, and that what is utilised should–so far, as is practicable–be proved. I am far from asserting that proof and utilisation are the same thing.

Very interesting. So there should be “theoretical exposition,” short and thorough, alongside (and clearly distinct from) practical application. The theory should be presented in a systematic manner, but “interrelated truths” should be utilized “en bloc.”

In none of this can the details of the subject or the hard work of practice be avoided:

All practical teachers know that education is a patient process of the mastery of details, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. There is no royal road to learning through an airy path of brilliant generalisations. There is a proverb about the difficulty of seeing the wood because of the trees. That difficulty is exactly the point which I am enforcing. The problem of education is to make the pupil see the wood by means of the trees.

But what of the aims of education? What are they? Whitehead writes:

What education has to impart is an intimate sense for the power of ideas, for the beauty of ideas, and for the structure of ideas, together with a particular body of knowledge which has peculiar reference to the life of the being possessing it.

Here’s where things get a little shaky for me. What does he mean by “peculiar reference”? Does he mean that studies should be of personal relevance to each student? Or does he mean that a subject taught in motion is a subject made relevant–that the very motion, the procession from one idea to another, consitutes the relevance, as it helps us see where a particular idea comes from and where it is going? I believe he means the latter. He continues:

The appreciation of the structure of ideas is that side of a cultured mind which can only grow under the influence of a special study. I mean that eye for the whole chess-board, for the bearing of one set of ideas on another. Nothing but a special study can give any appreciation for the exact formulation of general ideas, for their relations when formulated, for their service in the comprehension of life. A mind so disciplined should be
both more abstract and more concrete. It has been trained in the comprehension of abstract thought and in the analysis of facts.

There is much more to the essay than I am conveying here. What’s tantalizing is that some of his ideas are so good and can be misunderstood so easily. They resemble, at first glance, some of the education jargon out there (regarding the “joy of discovery,” for instance) but mean something quite different. One need not agree with all of his points, but they raise the possibility that there is something beyond the oppositions familiar to us today.

I bring up Whitehead in my forthcoming book, Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture. I am grateful to the mathematician who brought Whitehead’s essay to my attention.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , ,

Why do educators resist change?

May 21, 2011 By

In an Education Week blog (cross-posted at Dangerously Irrelevant), Scott McLeod offers ten reasons courtesy of IBM, and another two reasons of his own.

I offered a thirteenth: “the change is seriously flawed.”

I have seen many situations where teachers’ and administrators’ genuine concerns were dismissed as generic “resistance to change.” Supposedly, if you were “forward-looking” and a “team player,” you kept your skepticism muted.

Once I worked in a library that was converting from its file catalogs to an online catalog. A “change consultant” came to train us on preparing ourselves for change. She gave us a questionnaire to assess our readiness for change. It had questions like, “How often do you buy a new pair of shoes?” “When you go on vacation, do you go to the same place every time, or do you like to try new places?” All of this had very little to do with switching to an online catalog. Nor was there much “change resistance” among the staff in this case–it seemed the management had simply anticipated resistance and brought the change consultant in.

To deal with any change, and to understand people’s responses to it, one must look closely at what the change entails. Not all change is well considered.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , ,

Robert Pondiscio: Building a better Edsel

May 20, 2011 By

Down the street on the Core Knowledge Blog, Robert Pondiscio reports on an email he received from a strong supporter of charters. She told him that she had visited a Big Name “no-excuses” charter school and discovered, to her dismay, that the curriculum was “all fuzzery all the time,” with minimal direct instruction:

Teachers aren’t allowed to use direct instruction for longer than a few minutes; then the students must repair to their pods and discover knowledge. After they discover knowledge, which means solving ONE problem, they return to the rug and explain their “strategies” to each other. Although the school prides itself on efficient use of time, the students I saw were spending a lot of time doing nothing at all while they waited for the other kids to finish so the whole group could migrate back to the rug.

And yet, as far as available data go, this school is doing “very, very well,” reports Pondiscio. What is going on here? Short-term data do not necessarily translate into long-term achievement. This seems to be the upshot of a recent report by KIPP, which states that “only 33 percent of students who completed a KIPP middle school 10 or more years ago have graduated from a four-year college.” That’s much better than the average rate for low-income minority students. All the same, Pondiscio notes, it shows how much work lies ahead.

Perhaps the data reflect temporary results, suggests Pondiscio, not the sort of learning that will last. Perhaps we’re putting all our energy into building the best possible Edsel–that is, bringing everyone up to a familiar level of mediocrity.

Pondiscio writes, “The long view may be slowly, quietly emerging–as it should and must–as the question in education reform.”

Read the whole piece.

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