The Carnival of Homeschooling is up at No Fighting, No Biting!
Tough love (but it’s really frustration)
May 17, 2012 By 1 Comment
In Tough love (but it’s really frustration), an English instructor at Quebec’s version of community college recounts her meetings with a promising student. That is, the students keeps promising to come to class and do the work, but doesn’t do it.
Also on Community College Spotlight: Some colleges offer a summer bridge to help poorly prepared students make the transition from high school to college.
What is a typical sixth grader?
May 17, 2012 By 3 Comments
According to Meredith Kolodner at Insideschools, many principals and teachers have been raising concerns over the rubrics and scoring procedures for this year’s standardized tests in New York State.
Sometimes the rubrics (for the written portions of the tests) are ambiguous. Sometimes they work against good judgment. Sometimes the writing prompt itself puts students and scorers alike in a quandary.
Here’s an example of the last of these:
In addition, a listening passage about a kid who loved music asked students to write about how the child in the passage is like and unlike a “typical 6th grader.” Teachers debated what would lead to a high score: does a typical 6th graders really like music? Does a typical 6th grader attend after-school? Take the bus? There was not consensus on what details would be considered “meaningful and relevant examples,” as dictated by the scoring guide.
Assuming that the description is accurate, I wonder what the test makers had in mind. What is the point of asking students to compare a character to a “typical” sixth grader? Is there such a thing? Are children supposed to know (or care) what a “typical” sixth grader is?
In order to receive a high score, a student must fulfill all the requirements of the task. Here an intellectually advanced student could easily get sidetracked with definitions of “typical” and fail to write the essay as required.
Rubrics have inherent limitations; you can’t standardize good judgment. When applied on a massive scale, they become more limiting still. But they are here to stay, at least for now. Given that state of things, it’s all the more important to create good test questions. This, apparently, is not one.
I scored tests this year but signed a confidentiality agreement. I am not allowed to discuss what I saw on the tests or in student writing. Thus I am limiting myself to commenting on what others have reported. In the past, New York State tests were released to the public after they had been administered and scored. This is good practice; we should all have the opportunity to see and comment on them. After all, they presumably reflect what students are expected to learn.
Seneca, “idle busyness,” and relevance
May 17, 2012 By 2 Comments
How relevant is “relevance” to good curriculum?
Earlier this term, I had my tenth-grade students read Lucius Annaeus Seneca’s letter “On the Shortness of Life” (De brevitate vitae). The letter contains the phrase desidiosa occupatio, which could be translated as “idle occupation” or “idle busyness.” The students seized on this phrase and cited it frequently.
In this letter to Paulinus (presumably his father-in-law, who oversaw Rome’s grain supply and was old enough to retire), Seneca argues against trivial occupations and for the study of philosophy. People complain that life is short, says Seneca, but it is actually long. People make it short by wasting it. He gives the example of the man getting a haircut:
Tell me, would you say that those men are at leisure who pass many hours at the barber’s while they are being stripped of whatever grew out the night before? while a solemn debate is held over each separate hair? while either disarranged locks are restored to their place or thinning ones drawn from this side and that toward the forehead? How angry they get if the barber has been a bit too careless, just as if he were shearing a real man! How they flare up if any of their mane is lopped off, if any of it lies out of order, if it does not all fall into its proper ringlets! Who of these would not rather have the state disordered than his hair? Who is not more concerned to have his head trim rather than safe? Who would not rather be well barbered than upright?
Seneca provides many more examples of “idle busyness”—leaders embroiled in battles and public affairs; men concerned with the ornamentation of their lives rather than the essence; and, worst of all, people who give themselves over to wine and lust. All of these people, in occupying themselves with many things, fail to accomplish anything of importance, as true accomplishment requires dedication and focus.
Finally, everybody agrees that no one pursuit can be successfully followed by a man who is busied with many things—eloquence cannot, nor the liberal studies—since the mind, when its interests are divided, takes in nothing very deeply, but rejects everything that is, as it were, crammed into it. There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living: there is nothing that is harder to learn.
What way of life, according to Seneca, allows for dedication to the important things? The immersion in philosophical works, or works of wisdom (sapientia).
Of all men they alone are at leisure who take time for philosophy, they alone really live; for they are not content to be good guardians of their own lifetime only. They annex ever age to their own; all the years that have gone ore them are an addition to their store. Unless we are most ungrateful, all those men, glorious fashioners of holy thoughts, were born for us; for us they have prepared a way of life. By other men’s labours we are led to the sight of things most beautiful that have been wrested from darkness and brought into light; from no age are we shut out, we have access to all ages, and if it is our wish, by greatness of mind, to pass beyond the narrow limits of human weakness, there is a great stretch of time through which we may roam.
My students said that they could relate it to their lives; they cited Facebook, TV, and other kinds of “idle busyness.” One student told me that this letter inspired her to change her priorities. Now, this sort of “relating,” while in many ways illuminating, has its drawbacks; students might overlook parts of the letter that don’t quite mesh with their understanding. Take this, for instance:
And what of those who are engaged in composing, hearing, and learning songs, while they twist the voice, whose best and simplest movement Nature designed to be straightforward, into the meanderings of some indolent tune, who are always snapping their fingers as they beat time to some song they have in their head, who are overheard humming a tune when they have been summoned to serious, often even melancholy, matters? These have not leisure, but idle occupation.
I, for one, take exception to this, and that is part of the point of reading. If Seneca’s points were exactly my own, then I would learn nothing from his letter. What is wrong with snapping your fingers to some tune, I ask, if that is what you love to do? But Seneca is not talking about what you love to do. He is not saying, “do what matters to you.” Though the letter is to one person, and therefore not framed as universal advice, Seneca unequivocally ranks some activities above others. That stumbling point (for many a modern reader) makes the letter more difficult and in some ways more interesting.
What does that say about “relevance?” Many educators insist that a curriculum should reflect the students’ own experience and cultural backgrounds, at least in part. Now, it’s easy to scoff at this, but it isn’t entirely wrong. It’s just a limited version of a truth. What’s most important is that students find meaning in subject matter (or lack of meaning, if that is its point). This meaning might not apply to their lives, at least not directly. It may not translate easily or completely into everyday language. It certainly doesn’t have to boil down to a maxim or moral. Meaning is the sense or significance of something.
Now, sometimes the meaning is immediate. You read a story and recognize the situation. You may even recognize the characters right away. The life of the story seems close to your own life. In other cases, the meaning doesn’t come for a while. You struggle a bit with the language and ideas. But eventually something comes clear, and with time, still more.
While students may enjoy “relating” to subject matter, they must learn to grapple with difficult and unfamiliar things. The relating may lead to the grappling but doesn’t do so automatically. Nor is the former a prerequisite for the latter. The former does not require much education; the latter does. Doesn’t it follow, then, that schools should focus on taking students to meaning, not on making things immediately relevant?
What matters is what we call it
May 16, 2012 By 20 Comments
There’s a really great article on differentiated instruction that came out in the Washington Post yesterday. It’s great in the sense that it tells the truth, even if it doesn’t really mean to. The reporter pretty clearly approves of differentiated instruction; the article has exactly two sentences out of three pages that are critical of the practice. The rest is a very informative puff piece.
My favourite part is a short but vivid description of a teacher who breaks her class apart for math instruction:
The first group to approach her half-moon table sat down with small whiteboards and markers. The five students drew pictures to help them think through the subtraction problem in front of them. Using squares, lines and dots to represent hundreds, tens and ones, they solved the problem by crossing out the symbols that corresponded to the number.
Rather than teaching formulas, the curriculum emphasizes lessons on place value and number sense so students can learn why formulas work. Students often use blocks, number lines and charts to solve problems and talk through the answers.
The second group, a little more advanced, practiced a different strategy. They broke each number into hundreds, tens and ones and solved it in three steps.
The third group moved on to practicing multiplication tables. Carter also squeezed in a short lesson from the third-grade curriculum on how to round numbers up or down.
I can’t help feeling that what’s going on is just a less efficient, less effective form of tracking. Bottom line: it’s still separate classes — they’re just in the same room with the same teacher. Galway Elementary, where this is taking place, has seven second grade teachers. So instead of having seven different teachers each teaching a separate math class (imagine seven different levels of differentiated instruction!) and giving those tightly defined groups their full attention, what we apparently have is seven different teachers each teaching just three separate math classes, with each class necessarily getting one third of a teacher’s attention.
In what universe is the latter considered the superior option?
The real issue here (of course) is race, which does indeed get passing mention:
The shift in math instruction in Maryland’s largest school system is the latest example of a move toward more mixed-ability classes that is mirrored in Fairfax and Arlington counties and across the country, with greater inclusion of special education students, more open enrollment in Advanced Placement classes and the elimination of some honors-level courses.
It’s all part of an effort to lift the performance of all students and overturn a legacy of sorting children into perceived ability tracks that often divided along racial lines.
That last sentence is a masterpiece of misleading rhetoric — both halves of it. Sure, it’s an effort to “lift the performance of all students”, but from where to where are we “lifting” performance? One might think that student performance will improve without schooling at all, as their brain matures. It may not improve very much, but it will improve. So what, exactly, is the goal here? It doesn’t seem to be maximizing every student’s performance, because if it were you’d split the classes up so that every teacher was giving a group of students their full, undivided attention working through math that falls directly in their ZPD (or which is appropriate to their ability, if you disdain technical jargon).
Maybe what we want is to lift everyone to some level of parity… but as nice as that might sound to some people, it’s simply not going to happen; the variety of human capability is simply too great. I ask again, to where shall we “lift the performance of all students”? There’s no real answer, of course, because it’s not a real goal: it’s a political slogan.
It’s also impressive how the reporter sneaked the word “perceived” into there, qualifying the terrible legacy of tracking, as if to imply that in that vague, mistaken past of ours, we were filled with folly and illusion to think that some kids were smarter than others. Yet I wonder if Michael Alison Chandler (the reporter) thinks that Elise Carter — the heroine of his story — is breaking her class up, if she is “differentiating”, based on “perceived” mathematical skill, or whether she’s actually latching on to real distinctions between her students. Bets, anyone?
Of course the teacher is recognizing real ability differences. No one (except perhaps the most extreme sort of communist conformists) really cares if we track students by ability, at least within subjects. After all, even the people who seem to be against it seem to be for it, as the article demonstrates; and it’s intuitively the best way to teach a subject.
But people care tremendously what we call it, and what it looks like from a distance.
UPDATE: Rachel Levy says in the comments that my comments above might be unduly harsh. Lord knows it wouldn’t be the first time I’d been to harsh, and if Rachel says you’re being inappropriately judgmental, it’s probably a good idea to stop and ask yourself if that’s so. So I did. And upon reflection, the only thing I’d backtrack on is the attribution of deliberate intent to mislead from my critique of that the very unfortunate sentence I singled out. It could very well just be a recitation of other parties’ stated motivations, related from their own point of view. (Which doesn’t stop it from being misleading, mind you, but does put the author in a better light.) I think the article is a fine piece. It’s well-written, well-researched, and informative. It still seems to me, though, that it’s written with a strong underlying opinion, one that is wrong-headed. Now, I could be misreading the article, and to a certain extent reporters are probably inclined to write nice things about schools that give them access to the classroom. It’s thus also conceivable that the approval implicit in the article is not genuinely the reporter’s own, but an artifact of the craft. But that doesn’t make it any less biased.
After college, what will you earn?
May 16, 2012 By 1 Comment
After college, what will you earn? Soon students will be able to see federal data on graduates’ employment and earnings to determine whether College X or College Y is a good investment.
Chicago employers who hire City Colleges graduates will get the first month of salary free.
Lawsuits on the western front
May 16, 2012 By 6 Comments
It seems like it’s a tougher time today than in days past to be a teachers’ union. They are on the defensive all over the country. From the public union battle royale in Wisconsin, to New York’s release of value-added data over union howls of rage (with the accompanying spectre of an implemented evaluation process), to the revolt of the urban mayors… teachers’ unions are under various sorts of legal, political, and institutional attack all over the country.
Out here in California, Students Matter has launched a lawsuit to strip away many of the institutional protections that teachers possess. Howard Blume tells us all about it:
A Bay Area nonprofit backed partly by groups known for battling teachers unions has filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn five California laws that, they say, make it too difficult to dismiss ineffective teachers.
The suit, filed on behalf of eight students, takes aim at California laws that govern teacher tenure rules, seniority protections and the teacher dismissal process.
* * * *
The group behind the legal action is the newly formed Students Matter. The founder is Silicon Valley entrepreneur David F. Welch and the group’s funders include the foundation of L.A. philanthropist Eli Broad.
The suit contends that teachers can earn tenure protections too quickly — in two years — well before their fitness for long-term employment can be determined. The suit also seeks to invalidate the practice of first laying off less experienced teachers during a budget crisis, rather than keeping the best teachers. And it takes aim at a dismissal process that, it alleges, is too costly, too lengthy and typically results in ineffective teachers holding on to jobs.
I’m uneasy about litigating what are essentially public policy questions in courts. It’s not really what they’re designed to do, and they generally don’t do a good job of it. (See, e.g., the consent decree for San Francisco public schools.) But at the same time, sometimes it’s the only option left to people. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to push too heavily against public employee union interests here in California.
Blume does an able job in his article tying this lawsuit to the overarching issue of teacher quality, and implying (correctly, I think) that this is part of a larger pushback against unions in general.
It’s not clear to me that these sorts of protections are going to help with teacher quality, though. Procedural changes will only get you marginal improvements here and there. If teacher quality is a serious concern (and I’m not 100% sure it’s a problem, though it seems plausible) then what you should really do is address the substantive issue: get a different sort of teacher ex ante. To use an analogy: if the cars you build are not loved by the consumer, you have two options: increase your quality control, or design a better product. And the unions wouldn’t have as much political leverage if you tried to tighten up teacher qualifications — indeed, they might support it so long as you grandfathered in all the existing teachers. I’ve never met a union that didn’t like barriers to entry.
Mindfulness or abdication of mind?
May 16, 2012 By 10 Comments
Leon Wieseltier’s critique of Google’s “emotional intelligence” curriculum (“The Tao Jones Index,” The New Republic, May 24) is worth reading and rereading. In a few words he nails what’s wrong with the concept of workplace “mindfulness” (as put forth by the Google engineer Chade-Meng Tan) and points to larger problems as well:
“Pay[ing] attention moment-to-moment” is a renunciation of the critical temper. The pure present is for infants and mystics. The serenity that Meng teaches is a go-along, get-along quietism, an organizational submissiveness—a technique designed to strip the individual of any internal obstacle to the ungrumbling execution of his tasks. … Meng and his authorities—“happiness strategists,” “leadership scholars”–insist upon the “non-judgmental” character of the mindful ideal. This is one of the great American mistakes. Instead of teaching people how to judge, we teach them not to judge—but there is no circumstance or context in which the absence of judgment is not a judgment, specifically one of accommodation and acquiescence.”
In other words, mindfulness of this sort amounts to abdication of mind. Read the whole piece.
I see this play out in school curricula and policy: ”Instead of teaching people how to judge, we teach them not to judge.” We give judging a bad name, equating it with knee-jerk reaction. At its best, judgment is anything but knee-jerk. In fact, if we do not know how to exercise judgment well, we are all the more susceptible to impulsive reactions, both our own and other people’s.
I have attended PDs where everyone was supposed to create quick “art,” put it up on the wall, and then take a “gallery walk” around the room, writing ”nonjudgmental, observational” comments on Post-its and placing them upon the rushed piece in question. Nonjudgment of this sort should have its own circle or pouch in the Inferno. My guess is that Dante would have included it in Malebolge, the Eighth Circle, which has ten pouches for ordinary fraud.
Update: A number of commenters below seem to have taken Wieseltier’s article (and my post) as an attack on mindfulness itself. As I see it, Wieseltier is criticizing a particular sort of workplace spiritual doctrine and its attendant jargon.
Plagiarism as a science
May 15, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Courtesy of EducationNews.Org, we learn that TurnItIn.com issued a report recently about plagiarism.
The most interesting thing about the report is its taxonomy of plagiarism — ten tidy little categories that neatly lay out various ways that students academically misbehave. We’re told which are the most common and which are of the most concern to educators.
The conclusion of the report is a little underwhelming — teachers should be clear about their academic standards — but the taxonomy is a neat way of thinking about the issue.
It’s not the only way, of course, and it’s a little cartoonish, but if you’re not going to sit down and do semi-rigorous conceptual analysis of academic dishonesty, it’s a great place to start.
Degrees and professionalism
May 15, 2012 By 7 Comments
If Ted Purinton is to be believed, there’s some uncertainty about the future of and role of the Ed.D. degree, primarily due to the fact that whither go the Ivies and other preeminent universities, so follow the other colleges. Once upon a time, the Ed.D. degree had an image problem. But then…
Within the field of education, Ed.D. programs had for a long time been assumed to be inferior to Ph.D. programs, and only marginally useful to the improvement of educational practice, policy, and administration. That is, until Vanderbilt University, the University of Southern California, Harvard University, and a few other institutions revamped their doctor in education, or Ed.D., programs within the past decade (with Harvard creating an Ed.L.D. in educational leadership), emphasizing practice over scholarship and school-based improvement over university-level teaching.
And all was well with the world. Until…
Just recently, however, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, home to one of the most influential Doctor of Education programs in the nation, was granted permission by the university to offer its first Ph.D.; further, its Ed.D. will eventually be eliminated. For many decades, the university did not see the field of education as worthy of the Doctor of Philosophy degree. Times have changed, of course; the Ph.D. appears to look better to Harvard applicants, and the university has recognized the need for and the interdisciplinary nature of educational research.
The question to be asked, then, is supposedly this:
What impact does the elimination of a practice-related doctoral degree have on the prospects of educational professionalism?
Purinton seems worried that education’s professionalism will suffer as its primary doctoral-level degree becomes more removed from applied practice, that the more practical sorts of degrees (such as the Ed.D.) are part of a structure that generates a sort of working professional knowledge. I suspect that this worry might be misplaced, in part because of the structure of education in this country, and in part because of more philosophic considerations.
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