Coalition for Kid-Friendly Schools

Comments on "I Hate Homework. I Assign It Anyway."

2012-02-13T07:26:00.000-08:00

Some of the comments to "I Hate Homework. I Assign It Anyway" were terrific. Here's a few that I especially liked:

Uly, NY

Of course your students said they need homework. This is what they've been told every day since they were very small, by their parents and every one of their teachers. They believe it, but their belief is no evidence.

(And that's assuming that they answered honestly instead of trying to give the answer they thought you wanted to hear!)

Why not make homework optional, saying it's for those kids who think they need extra practice OR who have failed a pre-test on the subject (and who therefore have PROVEN they need the extra practice!)?

Scott B., Claremont, CA

Lahey thinks she's sealed the case for homework by asking her students, but she makes a basic error of research in so claiming. These students have been doing homework all their lives. For them to pronounce all those hours worthless would induce cognitive dissonance, so any research psychologist would predict that they would rationalize their answer to validate their behavior. There may be a good reason to assign some homework, but the opinion of students forced to do it cannot count as one of them.

Cheryl, Houston

Do you have students in schools now? It really has changed. My daughter in freshman year in high school was learning biology concepts that my husband, who has a phD in biochemistry, didn't learn until he was a graduate student. My dad, in his 80s, didn't take algebra until college, I took it in high school, my kids take it in middle school. The process may have started when you were in school but it has continued -- and the pendulum has, in my opinion, swung too far the other way.

As for homework amounts--

My husband, now a doctor, works monster hours, 14 hours a day is the norm, to the point where I worry about his health. However, my kids leave the house at the same time he does, but when he gets home, at 9 or 10 o'clock, the kids (ages 16 and 13) are still working ... on their homework. School till 4, sports practice till 5:30. They rush through dinner and showers, tackle the 3 hours of homework their schools pride themselves on assigning every night, and then, if they're to get anywhere near enough sleep, it's off to bed. It is not uncommon for them to fall asleep over their books -- or to break down in tears.

Unlike you at their ages, they have NO free time. I am alarmed to see my kids -- who are still children-- associate learning with feeling overwhelmed and exhausted, with no end in sight. Unlike you, I do not think that kids today are whiners who don't want to work hard; I think we, the adults, have taken things too far and are actually doing them harm.

bookworm, new york city

I homeschooled my two children until high school and struggled on and off over whether it was the right decision.

This year, my daughter started high school and has been inundated in homework, staying up until 1 or 2 am.

My main complaints are these:

1. It is too difficult for students when every teacher gives homework every day. Trying to navigate 7 or 8 classes of homework is maddening.

2. Homework becomes a penalty for conscientious students. Schools think that more homework will translate into better students, but indifferent students just ignore the homework and dedicated students who need the homework less are then saddled with more than they need.

3. Teachers make assignments without seeing the impact on the students. For finals week you would think that homework overall would be minimal so that students could study for tests, but instead teachers liberally applied homework, so students had no time to study for their finals because they were too busy doing homework for other classes.

4. Breaks should be homework-free. Kids need downtime. Why have a break if you're spending all your time doing homework?

After half a year in school, I'm glad I homeschooled my kids. Their learning didn't suffer and they had time to learn and play. Now my daughter is missing swim team, studio art, sleep, and free time. The school keeps emailing parents about fantastic opportunities that the kids can apply for...but who has time when there's all this homework to do?

wms, kansas

I am the parent of a second grader and of a first grader. I, too, hate homework. At this point in their lives it is simply busy work. Any homework my son can fly through in less than 5 minutes is not serving to reinforce anything. It is simply a mindless task assigned to fulfill some district guideline.

I don't think that any homework should be assigned in the elementary grades at all unless a child's teacher sees that s/he needs the supplementary practice as evidenced by his/her classroom performance. Beyond that, it has virtually no benefit and takes away time from family, exercise, free time to explore their own personal interests, and time with friends.

Respectful Individuals

2012-02-10T05:46:00.000-08:00

From a forum linked to kitchen table math, here's the graduation goals for one school district:

A graduate of the Eastchester Schools will be:

* A respectful individual
* A life-long learner
* An effective communicator
* A complex thinker and problem solver
* A competent and responsible user of technology

How did "a respectful individual" get to the top of the list?

The Education Gap Follows Income Inequality

2012-02-09T22:19:00.000-08:00

In today's NYTimes, Education Gap Grows Between Rich and Poor, Studies Show.

One reason for the growing gap in achievement, researchers say, could be that wealthy parents invest more time and money than ever before in their children (in weekend sports, ballet, music lessons, math tutors, and in overall involvement in their children’s schools) ...

“The pattern of privileged families today is intensive cultivation,” said Dr. Furstenberg, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Tell me about it!

Flunking the Brilliant Student

2012-02-09T06:34:00.000-08:00

I am sorry for whatever experience you had with education that got you this upset ... — Jessica Lahey.

Let's start here. Many years ago, I was in a high school English class that was studying Othello. I wrote a paper called "Iago's Death" that expressed my opinion that Shakespeare put Iago's death offstage (in contrast to every other Shakespeare tragedy in which every important character dies onstage) because by the end of the play Iago had evolved into a much more interesting character than Othello, and if Shakespeare had allowed Iago an onstage death he would have become the star of the show.

My English teacher said the paper was brilliant, gave it an A+, and told me that for the next paper he wanted me to expand on the ideas in the first paper. This was a very difficult assignment for me because I had pretty much said what I had to say in the first paper, and I didn't feel I had anything to add to it. However, I gave it my best shot, and after staying up all night, I managed to produce a longer version of the first paper.

My English teacher gave the second paper a C. He said it would have been an A paper from anyone else, but he expected more from me.

Was this a motivating experience for me? It was not. I decided that the game was rigged against me and I didn't want to play it any more. That was the end of my brief good-student period.

(This was in one of the highest-regarded public school districts in the country, by the way.)

I am beyond skeptical of the alleged character-building effects of bad grades given to good students, touted not only by Jessica Lahey in her blog, but by luminaries like the New York Times.

I've heard teachers say that they look for opportunities to give bad grades to good students because "it teaches them that it's OK to fail". Of course, they don't really mean that. No-one wants these kids to decide that it's perfectly OK to fail the occasional assignment — hey, why not the entire course? — and go to the local community college instead of a name college.

Nor will the occasional bad grade turn a previously grade-grubbing robostudent into an inwardly motivated free spirit (and again, nobody actually wants that result.)

Grade-grubbing robostudents are the natural product of a system that constantly grades students' performance, with the underlying threat that their future depends on their high school transcript. You can't cure them with the occasional personal reflection essay, graded by the teacher. You can't cure them with the occasional bad grade. Deep problems demand deep change.

Words Fail Me II

2012-02-08T07:54:00.000-08:00

In the NYTimes today, School Aide Accused of Abusing Students in Videos.

Exploring Outside the Comfort Zone

2012-02-07T09:21:00.000-08:00

I had the following exchange with Jessica Lahey on her blog, and it was so remarkable I thought it was worth re-posting here.

(Quick recap: Jessica Lahey describes assigning a personal reflection essay to her 8th grade English class. She gave one previously straight-A student a 0 on his first draft because she felt it wasn't revealing enough.)

FedUpMom
Feb 7, 2012 08:12 AM

There's a basic contradiction here. You're telling the kids, "Dig deep! Express yourself! Find out who you really are!" ... and then you hand out a 0 if the kid doesn't express himself the way YOU wanted him to.

It's still all about pleasing you; the kids just have to pretend that it's all about finding themselves. It's a head game.

It reminds me of the many homework assignments we've received, that, after a long list of rules and requirements, say at the end: "Have fun! Be creative!" That's not how life works. The kids can't have fun and be creative while simultaneously carrying out all of the teacher's commands to the teacher's satisfaction.

Jessica Lahey
Feb 7, 2012 08:26 AM

He had a zero for about 24 hours, and he understood it to be a temporary "try again." I suppose there's a certain amount of "you had to be there" to understand the entire situation and experience of my students. I understand that you are very angry and frustrated with schools and teachers that do not take the feelings of students into account, and I absolutely agree. However, it is my JOB to challenge students to dig deeper, look further, ask more of themselves when they need to. Teachers do need to foster, support, and encourage children in order to help them achieve all they can be, but we must also challenge kids to be their best, and sometimes that can make students uncomfortable.

I am sorry for whatever experience you had with education that got you this upset, but really, I am, and always will be on the side of the kids and their emotional and academic needs. I promise, we - teachers who ask kids to explore outside of their comfort zones - are not the enemy.

Well, if she asked the kids to explore outside their comfort zones by presenting them with challenging intellectual problems, I might be okay with it. But I don't see any reason, or excuse, for pushing adolescents out of their emotional comfort zone, by making them write revealing personal essays. How is that education?

Words Fail Me

2012-02-07T05:11:00.000-08:00

In the NYTimes today, School Linked to Sex-Abuse Claims Will Replace Faculty.

Reading the Signs

2012-02-07T05:00:00.001-08:00

Younger Daughter's reading has improved to the point that she often reads signs when we're out and about. The other day I was about to step into an elevator when YD called out urgently: "Mom! Don't get in! The sign says 'Do not use elevator!'"

Me: "Read the next line."

YD: " ... in case of fire. Oh."

Reading Disabilities and Comprehension

2012-02-06T18:20:00.000-08:00

From a comment to Dyslexia's Silver Lining, in the NYTimes:

Susan
Eastern WA

This is something I've noticed over the years with my students with a reading SLD (specific learning disability, about which there is absolutely nothing specific except the kid). Usually they have other marked strengths; it makes sense to me that visualization would be one of them. Often they also adept at anything hands on. In a school setting these kids almost uniformly test as behind in reading comprehension along with decoding, but I have found that almost uniformly this is not the case. It's a result of the test used to assess comprehension; the child, who may have little to no decoding skills at all, is required to read a passage and answer questions about it. If they could just figure out the words, most of them could answer just fine. So they are stuck in silly (for them) comprehension programs when they should be spending all their time decoding.

I think this describes my Younger Daughter. The school is always doing comprehension exercises with her, when, in my humble (!) opinion, the real problem is decoding. I don't think she has any problem with comprehension.

The Teacher Says I Can't Read That

2012-02-06T06:27:00.000-08:00

So, I picked up Blizzard of the Blue Moon at a nearby garage sale. When I brought it home, Younger Daughter, attracted to the unicorn on the cover, said, "I want to read that!". Then she leafed through the book and said, sadly, "I can't read this yet."

Me: "Of course you can! Read it to me, and if you get stuck, I'll help you."

YD: "Mrs. Second says I'm not ready for chapter books. I'm only on level H."

This is how "balanced literacy" cripples kids. Since reading isn't taught phonetically, and is believed to be about memorizing words on a word list, the reading a kid can possibly do is restricted to books containing only the very limited vocabulary that they've memorized so far.

And here's something I honestly don't understand — we've been working hard on YD's reading all year, and she's made tremendous progress, but her reading level at school has hardly budged. I'm not the only one noticing this: here's a comment from a mothering.com forum where a mother describes a similar situation with her son:

He is reading books such as "Runaway Ralph", the Junie B series, the Magic Treehouse series for fun, which are all at reading level M-O, yet at school the teacher identified him as level D (on A-Z reading scale, Z being highest level).

How do teachers assess reading levels? What's going on here?

Needless to say, YD is now reading Blizzard of the Blue Moon, with our help.

"I Hate Homework, But I Assign it Anyway"

2012-02-05T07:17:00.000-08:00

In the NYTimes Motherlode blog, I Hate Homework, But I Assign it Anyway.

I went to the author's blog and got completely annoyed by this post:

He Pushed Them, and They Flew

The post is about the middle-school teacher assigning a "personal reflection" essay, and the students' inadequate responses.

Ack! The preceding post, Tell Me A Story, is even worse, including this knockout remark:

Middle school students don't like opening up and exploring who they really are, so I particularly love to watch them squirm through this one.

Why should we blame kids for revealing personal details on the internet, when they've been taught at school that they have no right to privacy?

A Child's Garden of Verses

2012-02-03T14:34:00.000-08:00

Today Younger Daughter was tired, so I had her read a poem instead of a story. She read "The Cow" from A Child's Garden of Verses, and did pretty well with it. (This illustrated copy was, I believe, a present from my father: Thanks, Dad!)

I told her I would read a poem to her, and she proceeded to put bookmarks in just about every page of the book. I finally read her "The Land of Nod."

I think we should read more poetry with her; the meter and rhyme must be good for her developing sense of language.

Without further ado, here is "The Cow":

The friendly cow all red and white,
I love with all my heart:
She gives me cream with all her might,
To eat with apple-tart.

She wanders lowing here and there,
And yet she cannot stray,
All in the pleasant open air,
The pleasant light of day;

And blown by all the winds that pass
And wet with all the showers,
She walks among the meadow grass
And eats the meadow flowers.

The Long Arm of the Law

2012-02-02T09:18:00.000-08:00

I've decided to start collecting articles about the inappropriate use of law enforcement in the schools. Here's a start:

Girl's arrest for doodling raises concerns about zero tolerance

Changing Gears 2012: knowing less about students, seeing more

Mom of autistic son facing jail time for multiple tardies that have added up to a truancy offense

The US schools with their own police

Principals Handing Out Medications

2012-02-02T07:08:00.000-08:00

Teachers union says Philly school district violates policy on meds.

Sure, cut the nursing staff and allow principals and counselors to distribute meds to kids. Why not? What could possibly go wrong?

The Way We Were

2012-01-30T10:58:00.000-08:00

From a comment to Scraping the $40,000 Ceiling at New York City Private Schools: (as always, the comments are more interesting than the article):

Steve1946,NYC

I went to the NYC public schools in the 1940's and 50's. They were safe, rigorous, and clean. The teacher's were well educated, motivated, and made sure that each student worked to their capacity. All of my friends went to the same public schools and we all grew up to become professionals.
The halls were quiet and orderly. Those students who were academic went to one of the four city colleges which were free, while those students who were not were able to go to a vocational high school that gave them a skilled craft(- automotive, aeronautics, baking, nursing, electrical, manual trades-).
So what happened?
When contemporary public schools meet the above mentioned criteria parents flock to send their children to these schools- Hunter College Elementary and H.S., Stuyvesant H.S., Townsend Harris, Bronx H.S. of Science, Brooklyn Tech., Staten Island Tech in no particular order of quality - including the so-called 1%.

Josh Hill, New London

Yep. I think it fell apart for a number of reasons. The schools lowered behavior and academic expectations, and that's always a disaster. Talented women, no longer barred from other professions, chose to be doctors, lawyers, or professors rather than teachers, and we have been unwilling to make wages and working conditions for teachers competitive.

My mother, herself a NYC public school graduate, did some teacher evaluations for the BOE and was shocked at what has happened to the quality of the teachers. She compared the current crop to cocktail waitresses. These days the typical education major is in the bottom fifth of his college class.

Bowing and Scraping

2012-01-30T10:20:00.000-08:00

Back to the discussion of the parent letter here: Opting Out of Homework.

Now that I've communicated with Alfie Kohn I understand that this letter really was written by a parent, not by him. (Come to think of it, is there a man on the planet who would dream up "I respect you as my child's teacher"?) Of course, it is still a sample letter in the sense that Alfie Kohn put it on his website in the hope of inspiring other parents to write similar letters.

I certainly agree with the intent of this letter — to get a first-grader out of homework. But the tone of the letter gets on my last nerve. I am so done with the way parents are expected to address their childrens' teachers. It's beyond simple politeness; it's really subservience.

"I'm sensitive to your concern that learning be supported at home, and I intend to do this as best I can." Oh, for heaven's sake. Who works for whom here? Shouldn't we hold the teacher accountable for doing educational activities with our child, instead of allowing the teacher to think that's the parents' job?

I think all this bowing and scraping is a mistake. It just confirms the idea, already staunchly held by teachers and administrators, that they are the experts, they are in charge, and we parents are just standing by breathlessly awaiting their orders. This is why we routinely get patronized and bossed around. Let's not encourage it.

I say it's time to take back our home lives. Home is not an annex of the school, and we aren't volunteers. Our children belong to us, not the school. We should speak to teachers as equals, and not approach them hat in hand, begging for scraps.

Children's ADD Drugs Don't Work Long-Term

2012-01-29T07:40:00.000-08:00

In today's NYTimes, Ritalin Gone Wrong.

I was glad to see this article, which confirms some of my skepticism about the ADD epidemic. But it fails to mention what seems to me the most important feature of ADD — it is a disease of school, as discussed in this article by Peter Gray.

Parent Accountability = Jail Time

2012-01-25T08:24:00.000-08:00

via Happy Elf Mom's blog, Mom of autistic son facing jail time for multiple tardies that have added up to a truancy offense. Outrageous.

Whole Brain Teaching all day?

2012-01-25T07:47:00.000-08:00

From a comment:

One of the comments that I mentioned on my blog as well is that the WBT videos are used to display WBT techniques. They do not show an entire class. Since the video is used to highlight a specific technique, other aspects of classroom life are edited out for timing purposes.

Right, I've seen this argument before. I say, "How can you stand to spend the day doing this tedious, loud, pre-scripted nonsense?" and the reply is, "Oh, we don't do this all day."

It reminds me of a saucy English postcard I found somewhere on the internet, showing a young couple canoodling on the couch.

Young Lovely: "No, Bert! I won't trade an hour of pleasure for a lifetime of shame!"

Bert (hopefully): "It won't take an hour."

I have two responses to the "we don't do it all day" argument:

1.) Really? I'd like to see a video showing a WBT teacher engaging in some other kind of activity, like actual classroom discussion where kids make un-scripted remarks. Considering that there's about 8 billion hours of WBT videos on youtube, there ought to be at least a few that show something besides the standard call-and-response-with-gestures.

2.) So what? I wouldn't want my kids spending 30 seconds vowing to "keep their dear teacher happy." I wouldn't want my kids being told to say "Oh sweet mama, I want some free time!" as Chris Biffle has them do, or being told to groan because a classmate wasn't paying attention. This isn't education, it's just control freakery.

Unworkable

2012-01-25T05:50:00.000-08:00

In New Hampshire, a law was passed to allow parents to object to curriculum.

Under the terms of the bill ... a parent could object to any curriculum or course material in the classroom. The parent and school district would then determine a new curriculum or texts for the child to meet any state educational requirements for the subject matter. The parent would be responsible for paying the cost of developing the new curriculum.

Now, much as I would like to see schools take parents seriously, I can't see how this would possibly work. For starters, think of the time and effort that would be eaten up "determining the new curriculum" for one child. And how could the teacher, who is already juggling everything from the learning-disabled to the gifted in one overcrowded classroom, also oversee different curricula for different children? It's impossible.

Suppose I marched into Younger Daughter's classroom and told the teacher that I think Investigations is nonsense and I'd rather have Younger Daughter learn Singapore Math (true enough!). Does that mean the teacher now has to keep a different set of books for my daughter, and tutor her with Singapore Math? What would the rest of the kids be doing while this was going on? Could I specify that I don't even want my child to be exposed to Investigations, so they'd have to take her out of the room while the other kids were being taught?

Suppose there's another parent in the room who objects to both Investigations and Singapore Math, and insists on Saxon Math for her child. Now what?

We need parental input into the schools, but it should be at a much higher level, where the curriculum is chosen in the first place. Tweaking the curriculum one child at a time is madness.

Education and the 1 per cent

2012-01-24T11:29:00.000-08:00

In today's NYTimes, One Percent Education.

Martin Luther King on Education

2012-01-21T05:07:00.000-08:00

via Kitchen Table Math, an essay by Peter Mayer.

Not Just Happy in Heaven

2012-01-19T09:13:00.000-08:00

While we're on the subject of Martin Luther King, I heard a great observation on American Routes: the speaker is scholar Albert Murray:

[Martin Luther King] was of the earth. He wasn't just talking about "live so you can be happy in Heaven" — he wanted to be happy in Mississippi!

Martin Luther King and the America of 2012

2012-01-16T08:09:00.000-08:00

The older I get, the more shocked I am to remember how very young Martin Luther King was when he was killed. He was only 39. He was born the same year as my father, who is still around today, age 82.

If Martin Luther King could come back and visit America today, what would he think of our situation now?

Martin Luther King, at the end of his life, was working on the "Poor People's Campaign". He was in favor of the redistribution of wealth and a guaranteed minimum annual income for the poor, which would enable families to climb out of poverty. We've gone in the exact opposite direction from what he had in mind. In 2012, we have less economic mobility than Great Britain. If you're born poor in the United States, you will almost certainly remain poor for the rest of your life.

One of the first issues tackled by the civil rights movement was the desegregation of schools. Back then, Southern schools were segregated by law, and the black schools struggled with less funding. Black children who were really middle class, the children of ministers and prosperous farmers, were held back by being forced to attend low-quality schools.

When desegregation cracked open doors that had previously been slammed shut, black people with energy, talent, and ambition (many of them already in the top rung of black society) naturally rushed through those doors. But the unintended consequence was that they left behind their neighbors in poverty, whose situation has been steadily worsening.

Today, our public schools have been resegregated. We're newly segregated by college and professional-school attendance too. Today more than ever, our ruling class is the product of Ivy League schools whose exclusive admissions policies give an edge to the carefully-groomed children of the rich. Our Supreme Court is stocked only with graduates of Harvard or Yale Law schools; our last several presidents got degrees at Harvard or Yale. Our most recent non-Ivy president was Ronald Reagan!

What would Martin Luther King make of Barack Obama? I'm sure he would appreciate the symbolism of our first black President, and be amazed (as I was!) that this could be achieved as early as 2008. But I doubt that he'd be happy with Obama's accomplishments (or lack thereof.)

Obama, in spite of his pigment, is a natural member of the upper class, starting with his private school education (he never spent a day in an American public school). I've been reading the new biography of the Obamas by Jodi Kantor (I recommend it), and what strikes me most about Obama is how typical he is of upper-class careerists. He's all about climbing the ladder, which of course he's done spectacularly well. It should really not be a surprise that Obama perpetuated George Bush's tax cuts for millionaires; those millionaires are his friends, colleagues, and campaign donors.

Today's segregation is about economic class more than skin color, but it's just as destructive as the old segregation. And, just as in the days of Martin Luther King, American schools are part of the machinery that divides the haves from the have-nots.

Math Across the Curriculum in Georgia

2012-01-11T19:37:00.000-08:00

A Georgia elementary school sent home worksheets with questions like this:

Each tree had 56 oranges. If 8 slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?

If Frederick got 2 beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in 1 week? 2 weeks?

Frederick had 2 baskets filled with cotton. If each basket held 5 pounds, how many pounds did he have all together?

The next one I actually like:

Susan B. Anthony was fined $100 for voting for President. She only had $25, how much more did she need to pay the fine?

After I saw the Susan B. Anthony question, I realized that "Frederick" in the problems above was probably meant to be Frederick Douglass. Right?

How did these questions get sent home with the kids with no-one at the school saying "Wait a minute! This could cause offense!" It's mind-boggling.

Happy Martin Luther King Day, everyone!

Pushy Women Don't Get Raises Either

2012-01-10T13:26:00.000-08:00

From the Atlantic Wire:

Women don't get raises -- even when they ask. Forever research has told women they don't get raises because they're not assertive enough, not because men are sexist or anything silly like that. Turns out it does have something to do with discrimination. Even pushy women don't get raises. Looking at thousands of MBA grads, research from Catalyst, a a non-profit research organization that focuses on businesses, found no significant difference in the proportion of men and women who asked for raises or promotions. Yet, the women received slower compensation growth than the women who said nothing at all, whereas for the men it paid off. [The Washington Post]

Little Critter

2012-01-10T06:10:00.000-08:00

Recently, Younger Daughter's been reading Little Critter books, by Mercer Mayer. I recommend them highly. Younger Daughter likes them a lot; she'll read two at a time with great enthusiasm. They're funny, so parents can enjoy them too.

And, in contrast to Whole Language "look at the picture and guess" books, the pictures in Little Critter actually offer a second narrative which is opposed to the text. For instance, where the text is "I teach my puppy how to heel", the picture is the one shown above, where the puppy has wrapped the leash around his young owner. Where the text is "My puppy knows lots of tricks ... how to sit ..." the puppy is shown lying down; "how to play dead ..." the puppy is chasing a butterfly while his owner lies down. You get the idea.

So, if your child is "reading the pictures" instead of the text, Little Critter books would be a good antidote.

Frustration

2012-01-09T20:31:00.000-08:00

When I work on Singapore Math with Younger Daughter, I always have her read the directions out loud. For some reason, Sing Math often uses the word "altogether", as in "How many stamps do they have altogether?" (The curmudgeon in me wants to point out that "all together" would be more correct, but let's let it ride.) Anyway, YD consistently tries to read "altogether" as "together".

Me: "No, it isn't 'together'!" Read all the letters in the word."

YD: "So what? It means the same as 'together'."

This is exactly the kind of thing Whole Language advises; if the kid says "pony" instead of "horse", that's OK, because the meaning's about the same, right?

But of course, there are no two exact synonyms, and there are all kinds of contexts where it might really matter what word was chosen. If YD comes across a sentence like "Jude Law was in the altogether", I want her to appreciate it, or at least READ IT CORRECTLY.

Argh! I swear that kid is on her way to a PhD in Winding Mom Up.

Asian Parents

2012-01-07T17:10:00.000-08:00

First, from "The Family Guy":

next, from "Goodness Gracious Me":

A Guide to EduSpeak

2012-01-03T08:21:00.000-08:00

what they say	what they mean

respect	compliance
responsibility	compliance
ownership	compliance
good decisions	compliance
good choices	compliance
character	compliance
time management	compliance
creativity	multicolored compliance
gifted	compliant
good student	compliant
good parents	compliant
teach	demand compliance
teach	indoctrinate
teacher-parent partnership	teachers telling parents what to do
expectations	rules
consequence	punishment
motivate	apply carrots and sticks
behavior support	monitoring and punishment
social and emotional system	draconian discipline
good district	district with well-educated parents
trust the spiral	let the parents hire tutors
constructivist	contentless
technology	powerpoint

Reading Logs Discourage Reading

2012-01-02T15:13:00.000-08:00

I wanted to highlight a terrific comment from a teacher on the "I Hate Reading Logs" post, before it got lost in the tsunami of comments:

I have a great example of the damage a reading log can do. We have a set of twins in fifth grade. One twin has me…personal conferences to set reading goals/ talk about books 3x a week. The other twin has different teacher with a log and a 20 minute a night requirement. The mom came to me to ask for help because the girls are of equal ability and yet they are performing very differently. The twin that has me has finished 8 books already and reads nightly for long periods of time on her own. The other twin has finished one book. She asks her mom to time her and stops at exactly 20 minutes. Its sad! How can that possibly improve her reading. And it’s not just the amount of reading completed, its the attitude about reading. Some teachers on here are saying the log promotes responsibility, but I believe it hinders it. Give students the power and trust them, they just may surprise you!

Shortage of ADHD Drugs

2011-12-31T17:09:00.000-08:00

In the NYTimes, FDA is Finding Attention Drugs in Short Supply.

Agent Boggs of the Drug Enforcement Administration said his agency was concerned that A.D.H.D. drug abuse was on the rise. “We see people abuse it in college and then continue to abuse it nonmedically once they leave,” he said.

Since the drugs have been shown to improve concentration, and not just in people with A.D.H.D., they have become popular among students who are seeking a study aid. And since they can impart a euphoria that users have likened to a cocaine high, the pills are sometimes ground up by people who snort them for a thrill.

Leveled Readers

2011-12-28T11:13:00.000-08:00

Bookmarking an excellent discussion about leveled readers (used in both my daughter's previous and present schools!):

Sara on Leveled Books

Stupid Principal Tricks

2011-12-27T18:11:00.000-08:00

Myer Elementary School principal gets slimed by 3rd graders Wednesday

Homework Blues said, in a comment to Pajama Day:

To add: Even more offensive are silly gimmicks the principal pledges to pull off if the kids read more. One local stunt had the principal lug her desk onto the roof where she spent the entire day.

Anonymous, lest you think I'm out to kill all fun too, what I hated about those ridiculous contests is each time the students read, they logged their reading logs onto a master graph. There was a goal and the principal promised to do something crazy if the kids met that goal.

No, I'm not out to ban fun. Hardly. What I didn't like about those condescending contents is that school keeps inventing new and ingenious ways to kill reading. Then, in lockstep motion, just as we predicted, the kids hate reading. Voila! Mission accomplished.

Now the school tears its hair out. The kids aren't reading! Oh, dear, we have NCLB, what shall we do?

I'll tell you what to do. Ban reading logs. Ban stupid assignments with dippy questions that cause children to groan in despair. Cultivate a love of reading. Then the principal won't have to die her hair green, climb a chimney or wade in the mud.

Reading is not a gimmick. It's a way of life. For some here, it's the only life!

Homework Blues, you said a mouthful. You're giving me flashbacks to the days when I used to watch the local news (haven't for many years.) Stupid principal tricks were a staple for "happy news" on the local broadcast.

Everything about this is wrong. As you point out, we're telling kids that reading is so unattractive that it has to be "motivated" by those in authority with all kinds of gimmicks and tricks.

Besides that, the assumption that it's fun for kids to see someone in authority humiliate themselves bothers me. Do we really want to promote this? Aren't we telling kids that of course they should enjoy making someone else uncomfortable? We're encouraging their worst instincts.

Why should we be surprised if kids don't respect the principal, after she's engaged in some ridiculous stunt? Kids know that they are at the mercy of the adults who control their lives, and it hardly builds their confidence to see the principal dye her hair a silly color, or spend a day on the roof, or whatever.

There's an element of narcissism in there too, as if kids' lives revolve around what the principal does. I don't see why the average kid would care what color the principal's hair is.

It's just so wrong-headed. Of course that shouldn't surprise me any more ...

Learned Helplessness

2011-12-26T20:00:00.000-08:00

Since we're on break, I'm channeling my inner Tiger Mom and working hard with Younger Daughter. We're going through the "finished" Investigations workbooks that her second-grade teacher sent home, completing some of the untried pages and fixing mistakes.

So, I turn to an untried page and say, "Let's do this one". Then YD just looks at me expectantly. She's gotten so accustomed to having the teacher read the directions to her that she doesn't even try to read them herself. Me: "Go ahead and read the directions!" Several times YD has started reading the directions, and reverted back to her worst habits of word-guessing, reading "color" for "circle" and "equation" for "equals". I think it's a form of learned helplessness, and I think it's got to stop.

So I had Sainted Husband type up a list of all the vocabulary words that show up in the workbooks, and we'll start drilling them with YD as part of her daily reading practice. Not only is Investigations heavily language-based, which creates unnecessary roadblocks for a language-delayed child, but the language it uses is not remotely aligned with the reading curriculum. I'm sure YD isn't the only second-grader who has trouble reading words like "equation", or, God forbid, "trapezoid".

If I were purely homeschooling YD, I could choose what curricula to follow, and we could use it in a systematic way. But since I'm sending YD to public school and afterschooling her in an attempt to bring her up to grade level, I vacillate between using the best curricula I can find (phonics and Singapore Math) and preparing her to deal with her classroom environment, which pushes reading "strategies" and Investigations math. I just hope it all works for her.

Pajama Day?

2011-12-23T07:50:00.000-08:00

Today is "Pajama Day" at Younger Daughter's public elementary school. She actually doesn't have any pajamas -- she just sleeps in her clothes. (So sue me!) Sainted Husband dressed her in clothes that look as pajama-like as possible, and they were off to the bus stop this morning.

I really really don't get the point of Pajama Day, or Silly Hat day, or Wear Something Purple day. I don't understand why people think it's fun or amusing, and I wouldn't have found it fun or amusing as a kid.

Perhaps it's because I'm a nonconformist at heart, as are both of my kids, and these "let's all wear the same unusual clothing item" days are really about conformity.

Nobody finds it fun or amusing if one kid decides to wear his pajamas to school; his parents would probably get an icy message from the school about appropriate dress. No, it's only perceived as fun or amusing if the whole school does it together on the same day.

Bah, humbug! I say.

Learning From Your Mistakes

2011-12-21T07:30:00.000-08:00

Recently, Younger Daughter's teacher has sent home YD's workbooks from their math program, Investigations in Number, Data, and Space. Looking through these books, the first thing that strikes me is the (large) number of uncorrected errors. Does the teacher correct these workbooks at all? If not, what's the point?

Older Daughter told me that in her experience, this is one of the main differences between public and private school. She was amazed to find that in her private school, they go over the homework the next day, in class, with the goal that everyone should understand all the problems. Back in public school, homework might be graded, but there was no attempt to fix mistakes.

I don't get it. What good does it do Younger Daughter to write wrong answers, if she's never corrected? It's actually worse than not doing math at all -- she's confirming wrong ideas. On this page, she's made a consistent mistake, thinking that "doubling" is the same as "putting a 1 in front of". (Hence, "4 doubled is 14", "7 doubled is 17", "9 doubled is 19", and "8 doubled is 18".)

I can see why YD thinks that schoolwork is mostly a question of filling things out.

When I work on Singapore Math with YD, I check her answers immediately after she writes them, and if the answer is wrong, I erase it and we go back over the problem. Every page is filled out correctly by the time we're done. Isn't that how it's supposed to work?

While we're at it, I can't believe the amount of wasted paper in the Investigations workbooks. They use an entire page for one simple addition problem. This also results in worse handwriting -- YD's handwriting is neater in the Singapore Math workbook, which gives smaller spaces.

Not the Only One

2011-12-18T07:12:00.000-08:00

I found this post in a dcurbanmoms forum thread called "Kindergartener doesn't want to go to school anymore."

My DS also started to dislike school in K and it got progressively worse as most of the other kids started to read and write with what must have seemed like ease in comparison to his struggles. It took until the end of 3rd grade to get the learning disability diagnosis and put all the pieces together. We thought there were social issues or something else going on but it was all frustration at having to work so hard to read and write and feeling stupid that he couldn't keep up with the others in class. He just couldn't explain to us that this is why he hated school until he was older so we got lots of vague complaints instead. The tummy ache complaint was a classic. I'm sure his tummy really did ache, but from anxiety about what was going to make him feel stupid in school that day, not from an actual physical issue.

Sounds just like last year with Younger Daughter!

Happy Christmas!

2011-12-16T19:25:00.000-08:00

Dead Quiet

2011-12-16T05:55:00.000-08:00

From the Whole Brain Teaching Forum:

A question from one WBT teacher:

Have gone over expectations of lining up many times. Hard to have a straight quiet line. Then I wonder is it really necessary? Feel like I am wasting too much time on this and my energy could be for something else. Any suggestions?

And an answer from another, who apparently missed the point about wasting time and energy:

I teach them four line expectations:

1. Laser-straight: the tiles on the floor help a lot, but we also have lines painted on our sidewalks. They know, because I remind them often, to make sure their left foot is on the line.

2. Dead quiet: I never allow any talking in my line. Not even to me.

3. Arms crossed: I used to allow kids to choose whether they crossed their arms or put their hands in their pockets, but I found that if you give an inch, they take a light-year. So, arms crossed only.

4. Faces forward: It's really irritating to me when people standing in line at theme parks aren't paying attention when the line moves forward, leaving a huge gap. I don't want my line to have gaps in it either.

I teach these four expectations, and slowly wean them off me reminding them of each one when we line up, and settle for the aforementioned "LINE CHECK!" They repeat "LINE CHECK!" and instantly snap to attention in a perfect, orderly, OCD-tickling line (tears of joy!). The key is consistency and unbending, unwavering expectation of perfection. As long as it's not perfect, we don't move. If we're already moving and it stops being perfect (arms swing out, someone talks, someone veers way out of line), I call "FREEZE!" and everyone stops. I say "LINE CHECK!", they respond appropriately, then we're on our way.

All of that sounds terribly militaristic, but the whole time I've got this "Gosh, isn't this fun?" maniacal grin on my face, and I'm constantly praising the ones who've got it right and encouraging the ones who don't. We've only been in school for a week, and my kids are trained. They know exactly what I want, and I get it...and they're as proud of themselves as I am of them, because they know they've got it together, and they're the best-behaved class in 5th grade.

Gee, how about aiming for the best educated class in 5th grade?

2 Bookmarks

2011-12-12T17:34:00.000-08:00

Bookmarking two articles from the New York Times:

First, a letter to the editor from Deborah Meier, about curriculum.

Second, an article about U.S. military schools, which outperform standard U.S. public schools, and are not subject to NCLB.

Homework at the South Pole

2011-12-11T11:13:00.000-08:00

The youngest-ever person to ski to the south pole, Amelia Hempleman-Adams, 16, tried to bring homework on the trek, but her father took the books off the sledge to lighten the load.

Dream Schools

2011-12-09T07:04:00.000-08:00

I want a dream lover
So I won't have to dream alone.
-- Bobby Darin, "Dream Lover"

TeacHer asked, in a recent comment:

I've been wondering about this recently: if you were to design the perfect school, how would it look? What about the perfect teacher?

Thanks for the question, TeacHer!

My dream school would combine the best of the progressive and traditional philosophies. From the best of the progressives, I would take an interest in the child as a complete human being, with physical and emotional needs as well as academic ones, and the goal of developing an independent thinker, with a continuing interest in learning. From the best of the traditionalists, I would take a true understanding and appreciation of content knowledge, including technical content like math and science, and a respect for linear, well-designed curricula.

So, with the progressives, I would throw out authoritarian classroom-management systems like PBIS and WBT, but with the traditionalists, I would throw out bad curricula like fuzzy math, non-phonics reading instruction, and meta-meta-meta "comprehension" questions that baffle and alienate small children.

My dream elementary school would assign no homework, or optional homework, and never restrict recess as a punishment, or for any reason. Teachers and administrators would work towards a genuine partnership with parents, not the current Jeeves-and-Wooster farce that passes for "partnership".

My dream teacher would be well-educated and genuinely interested in learning, as well as humane and caring (that's a surprisingly difficult combo to find!). She would be open to new ideas, and not ideologically wedded to certain techniques (and yes, I understand that a lot of important classroom decisions aren't under the teacher's control any more.)

And here's an impossible dream for you: just once, I would like to read a newsletter written by a teacher with no grammatical errors.

Readers, what would your dream school look like? How about your dream teacher?

Grown-up Good Girls

2011-12-05T06:57:00.000-08:00

From Chris' comment on Nicey-Nice:

I think it's a kind of prisoners' dilemma. If everyone spoke up, the resulting debate would have to be beneficial for the schools. But if you think you're going to be the only one who speaks up, the potential downside seems much more prominent than the upside. People are rationally reluctant to do anything that might offend the people who take care of their kids all day long.

Chris, I don't think it's a rational decision at all. I think it's cultural. I live in a high-achieving, well-behaved type of suburb where people send their kids off to school with the basic assumption that the schools will do a reasonably good job and all the parents need to do is support the school's efforts. Even I felt this way when Older Daughter started school!

On top of that, the school itself is constantly sending the message that parents will be judged, and parents don't want to be judged harshly. Parents regress back to their own childhood when dealing with school personnel. What I see among Moms in my neighborhood is a residual good-girlism, no doubt left over from their own school days. Perhaps I'm fortunate that I wasn't a good girl as a child, and it didn't take much for me to get over the desire to be approved of by teachers and administrators.

Parents are constantly excusing the school's behavior, and trying to distance themselves from those other bad parents. I had a typical discussion just this morning with a neighbor. The background is that she's applying to get her son into the gifted program, and met with a lot of hostility from the same psychologist who was nasty to me.

Neighbor: "I understand, I'm sure they get lots of pushy, obnoxious parents."

Me: "Maybe they do, but they should still assume the best of each parent they meet. They shouldn't start with the attitude that you're unreasonable. Don't we try to do the same for them?"

Happy Holidays!

2011-12-03T13:59:00.000-08:00

Older Daughter likes to put up decorations for the upcoming holidays, but she's less interested in taking down the decorations from holidays gone by. That's how we wound up with a "Ho Ho Ho" sign on our front door which is apparently dripping blood.

Nicey-Nice

2011-12-03T13:30:00.000-08:00

I want to tell you something
I wouldn't tell you no lie
Wild women are the only kind that ever get by
Wild women don't worry
Wild women don't have no blues.

-- Ida Cox, "Wild Women Don't Have the Blues"

I ran into a neighbor at one of our public school's events. She was surprised to see me there. The conversation went like this:

Neighbor: Oh, are you in the public school now?

Me: Yes. Our older daughter had such a terrible time in the public school that we moved her to a private school, and then our younger daughter had such a terrible time in the private school that we moved her to public school!

Neighbor (with big vacant smile): Aren't we lucky to have so many choices!

Well, yes, we are lucky to have so many choices. And, yes, I understand that most people aren't interested in long rants, and I'm careful not to rant at people that I happen to come across while I'm out and about. (That's what this blog is for!)

But I'm worried about the suburban good-mom culture which won't allow criticism of our schools. Our schools have real problems, and they will never be addressed without criticism, discussion, and dissent.

Another neighbor of mine is concerned about the math curriculum. She told me that she has been unable to get other mothers interested in the problem. They don't want to criticize the schools; they think their role is to support the school, no matter what. There's a widespread feeling that our schools are already "great" (i.e., they're attended by the children of professionals, who rack up impressive test scores) and nobody wants to rock the boat.

Of course the schools are very happy to have parents who don't ask questions or voice concerns or make complaints. They're not interested in hearing from parents in any case.

But how can the schools ever improve if they just do whatever they want, with no feedback from those most affected by their policies?

Progress 4!

2011-11-27T10:58:00.000-08:00

Today, Younger Daughter finished reading Big Max. Her fluency is vastly improved, the word-guessing has almost disappeared, and she will even admit to being interested in the story. Hooray!

On the math front, she's slowly working her way through Singapore Math 1B, and I've been teaching her how to tell time. She was struggling with the idea of "a quarter of an hour", until I hit on the idea of using a pizza toy she has (which was designed to teach fractions.) I think this visual will stay with her (in this case, demonstrating that "quarter after 7" is the same as "7:15"):

And to cap it all off, Younger Daughter was hanging around our front yard when one of her classmates stopped by, walking her dog, and invited YD to join her! One of the great benefits of public school is local friends.

Demotivators

2011-11-21T06:38:00.000-08:00

Chris' recent post at A Blog About School reminded me of one of my favorite websites, despair.com. Here's one of their demotivational posters:

My e-mail to Fragrant Hills

2011-11-15T17:56:00.000-08:00

So, as a follow-up to my little contretemps with the school psychologist (described in a previous post), I sent this e-mail to the principal, the school psychologist, and Younger Daughter's teacher at Fragrant Hills:

Principal, Psychologist, First-Grade Teacher --

I thought I should take the opportunity to explain, for the record, why I chose not to follow the recommendations of Ms. H's report for more testing for my daughter, YD. I gave this matter a great deal of thought. This was not a decision I made lightly or out of prior bias. Here is some of my reasoning:

1.) The report was written in a particular context. At the time, Natural Friends was hoping that we could get a 1:1 aide to work with YD in the classroom. The only way the state would pay the aide's salary was if YD had a documented medical condition. So Ms. H knew that her task was to support the case that YD had a disability that would justify paying for an aide. She was looking for evidence of a medical disability, and what we look for, we tend to find.

2.) Ms. H observed YD for a couple of hours in the classroom and saw YD engaged in panicky, disruptive behavior. Based on the behavior she saw, she made recommendations and theorized possible diagnoses. Now YD is in a different environment, and her behavior has improved considerably. If Ms. H observed YD today, she would see different behavior, and probably make different recommendations.

3.) The underlying problem is that YD doesn't like to be tested. Ms. H mentioned that most of YD's test scores were artificially low because YD was so resistant to taking the test. Testing, especially when carried out by people YD doesn't know well, is not a very effective way to find out who YD is, what she needs, or how she could best be helped.

4.) YD has already taken a number of psychometric tests (especially in reading and language development), and no-one has found evidence for any disability.

5.) The more time YD spends being evaluated and treated by specialists, the more she will come to believe that something is wrong with her. This will undermine her self-confidence and make it more difficult for her to learn. Instead of testing and evaluation, I think it's more productive to give YD intensive teaching so we can bring her academics to the level they need to be.

In summary, I would like to say that I take all recommendations seriously, but that doesn't mean I follow them all.

Thank you for your consideration.

FedUpMom

Second Conference

2011-11-15T17:13:00.000-08:00

Last Thursday I had a second conference at Fragrant Hills to discuss Younger Daughter's progress. The cast was similar to the first conference, but Sainted Husband wasn't there. So this time we had my fed-up self, the first-grade teacher, the principal, the reading specialist, the school counselor, the school psychologist, and, on a flying visit, the math specialist.

The meeting began, informally, with me talking to the reading specialist about YD's reading. I know the specialist socially because one of her kids was a classmate of Older Daughter's at a Montessori pre-school. We had a very pleasant conversation; she said she was working on phonics with YD (Hooray!), and showed me the book they were reading, about plants that eat bugs. She said YD enjoyed it, and indeed, YD later gave me an unprompted demonstration of the different ways bugs can be eaten by a plant. Later, the specialist said something about "strategies", and I said that YD had a bad habit of guessing that I wanted her to get out of. The specialist made a note of it.

I asked the first-grade teacher how YD's behavior had been, and she said, again, that it was basically okay. Sometimes there are minor problems, but the teacher doesn't find YD difficult to work with, and YD isn't disrupting the class. So far, so good. The principal asked the teacher what concerns she has, and the teacher said, "YD has come a long way from the beginning of the year, but I'm worried that the gap will keep opening up between her and the rest of the class. She's done OK on the spelling so far, but the spelling lists will just keep getting harder." (She mentioned the spelling lists twice.)

She said she was worried about YD's social development. When asked for an example she said that their new math curriculum (Investigations! Gack!) requires that the kids pair up for various games. She assigns the pairs randomly, so the kids will all meet each other. When she tried to pair YD up with a particular kid, YD said "I don't want to work with him!"

The school counselor said that maybe YD is worried that the other kid understands the math better than she does, and she'll be embarrassed working with him. I agreed that the fear of embarrassment is a big deal for YD.

(Inside the fed-up brain, I'm thinking, so what? YD didn't slug the kid. I think her reaction was pretty mature and reasonable. Why should they expect every second-grader to be able to work productively with every other second-grader? And why do they mix up math with social development?)

The math specialist came in, briefly, to show me the results of some testing she had done of YD. She said YD needed to work more on coins, clocks, and subtraction, which I made a note of so we can follow up at home. She also said that YD tested out in the average range compared to other kids. YD always shows up in the average range, which is remarkable, considering how hard she fights taking the tests at all.

(Back inside the fed-up brain, I'm thinking, if you can afford to spend 10 minutes explaining to me that YD doesn't seem to know her coin values, couldn't you have spent 10 minutes, oh, I dunno, teaching YD about coin values?)

That was most of the conference, except for the school psychologist expressing her contempt for me. Now that a little time has passed, I realize that, on balance, the conference went extremely well. The next one is scheduled for January. I figure if we keep on after-schooling YD, she should be in good shape by then.

My New Blog!

2011-11-15T08:58:00.000-08:00

I've started a blog about my paintings here:

Paintings B.Y. Randall

Come on by, have a look, and leave a comment so I know you're out there! Thank you!

The Mother Refuses

2011-11-12T08:05:00.000-08:00

Here's a highlight from my second conference at Younger Daughter's public school, Fragrant Hills. I'll describe the conference in detail in another post, but I wanted to describe this moment first.

Some background: in her previous school, Natural Friends, YD had been a big behavior problem. We brought in a psychologist who observed her freaking out in the classroom, ran a few tests, and wrote up a report, ending with recommendations that YD should be tested for any number of possible medical issues (partly to justify the state paying for a 1:1 aide to follow YD around and keep her out of trouble.)

In our previous conference at the public school, Fragrant Hills, the district psychologist, who had said nothing up to that point, asked me whether I had followed the recommendations in the report. It actually took me a moment to remember what the recommendations were, because the situation had changed so much (in particular, YD is no longer exhibiting the panicky, freaked-out behavior that the psychologist based her recommendations on.)

I said that I hadn't followed the recommendations on the report because I now believe that YD's problem was a mismatch between her needs and the teaching methods used at her previous school. I said that I don't think YD has a medical problem, and that I was skeptical of the recommendations. At the time, the psychologist nodded and didn't say anything, so I figured the conversation was over.

So, fast-forward to the second conference, last Thursday:

The conference was humming along quite well when the principal turned to the district psychologist and asked her (she had previously been mute) if she had any recommendations. The psychologist, who was turning over the pages of the old psychologist's report, said (and I wish I could convey the snotty, patronizing tones she used!):

"Well, the mother has made it clear that she has no intention of following recommendations."

Me (stunned): "what recommendations?"

Psychologist: "for more testing and a diagnosis."

Me: "what kind of diagnosis?"

Psychologist: "a disability."

Me: "like what?"

Psychologist: "... ADHD."

So ... the more I think about this, the more I think I need to call the psychologist on her outrageous, insulting behavior. It's almost as if she forgot I was in the room, and gave the principal the answer she would have given privately: "the mother is a deluded b*tch, who doesn't do what we tell her."

Readers -- what do you think? Any ideas about what to say in my e-mail to the principal? Stay tuned for our next thrilling adventure!

Last in Math

2011-11-07T17:13:00.000-08:00

"First in Math" is a website that allegedly teaches math through games. The company has apparently been wildly successful in selling its product to schools, on the grounds that it makes practice fun, and "kids love computer games!"

Both of my kids have been told to use "First in Math" as homework; Older Daughter at Natural Friends, a private school, and now Younger Daughter at Fragrant Hills, a public school. When Older Daughter got the assignment, I told her to ignore it, and we spent the time doing Singapore Math. Younger Daughter just got the assignment and wanted to give it a try, so I watched her play the games on the web site.

Ugh, what a complete and total waste of time. Younger Daughter was playing a game where you're supposed to add 2 numbers to get 10. For instance, you'd look at "3 + ___ = 10", and you could press buttons associated with the numbers 5, 6, 7 and 8.

Younger Daughter had absolutely no idea what she was doing, so she was just randomly pressing buttons and getting rewarded with little audio riffs. Here's the epic fail — if you give a wrong answer, there's no provision for explaining why your answer was wrong, or giving you a chance to find the right answer. You just get an audio riff and a little button that you can press to play again. If you press the button, you're set up with a completely different problem, which you can again answer randomly, and so on.

If you give the right answer, you get a slightly different audio riff and a little graphic that says "Cool!" or "You're Hot!" or "Way to Go!", but if you give the wrong answer there's no graphic, just the "play again" button. In other words, it doesn't actually tell you that the answer was wrong, it just neglects to give praise.

Younger Daughter's got the day off tomorrow, so I'm digging out the Singapore Math books. It's way past time to get started on them.

Learning to Read Chinese

2011-11-07T05:58:00.000-08:00

Because we have a Chinese-American daughter, our whole family at various times has studied Chinese. At the moment, it's mostly us parents who are studying, because Younger Daughter has been resistant, but I'm hoping to get YD back to it later.

Our teacher is American, and she's been teaching us to read Chinese characters by decomposing the characters into smaller pieces, called "radicals". Here's an example:

In this case, the top part of the character ("jia") represents a roof, and the bottom part of the character represents a pig. A pig under a roof -- what does it mean? Why, home (or, by extension, family), of course!

Here's another one:

Here, the radical in red means "female" (it's a pictograph of a woman), and the radical in black means "horse" (imagine four running feet and a flowing tail at the bottom.) This character represents something female, which sounds like the Chinese word for horse, "ma" (low dipping tone). What is it? It's "ma" (high even tone), which means "mother". (Famous advice to beginning Chinese speakers: "Don't call your mother a horse!")

You can see how decomposing a character into radicals is a big help in memorizing characters. So here's the funny thing — apparently, reading is never taught this way in China. In China, kids are taught to read purely through brute-force memorization. They get a list of characters and are told to write them out multiple times until they've got them memorized. If you talk to a Chinese-taught person about radicals, you're likely to get a blank stare.

I had this experience myself once. I was talking to a Chinese friend of ours, when I noticed the character "jia" in something he was writing. I pointed to it and said, "we were just studying that character! It's a pig under a roof!" He looked at me like I was crazy and said "it means home or family."

It's the Chinese version of whole-language versus phonics.

Progress 3!

2011-11-03T20:01:00.000-07:00

Currently, Younger Daughter is reading Amelia Bedelia, besides slowly working through the phonics at the back of Why Johnny Can't Read. I've started using a technique I read about somewhere on the web: holding a bookmark just under the line of text she's reading, to help prevent "wandering eyes", and keep her reading in sequence. Her fluency is improving a lot, and I think she's reaching the point where she can really enjoy the story.

My Cat

2011-10-30T09:12:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of kitchen table math, here's a great video of a kid "learning to read" using Whole Language. Notice the dull-as-dishwater "leveled reader" the kid is using, and the way the kid is encouraged to guess the word by looking at the picture. ARGH!

On Surprises in Reading

2011-10-30T08:18:00.000-07:00

[Educators] have devised thousands of ingenious exercises to train children in this insane method of reading. They make them complete such sentences as "There are fish in the l_____", "The package was tied up with str____", or "I went to the zoo and saw a kangaroo j_____". The child is praised if he obligingly reads, "There are fish in the lake", "The package was tied up with string", and "I went to the zoo and saw a kangaroo jump."

Unfortunately — or fortunately — life is not as simple and dull as all that. Real-life sentences are apt to read "There are fish in the lagoon", "The package was tied up with straps", and "I went to the zoo and saw a kangaroo just as tall as you are."

A child taught by look-and-say will go through life and miss all the interesting and unexpected stuff in print. He's been trained to assume that what comes next is always the expected word and therefore never discovers the fact that, as often as not, printed matter takes surprising turns. — Rudolf Flesch, Why Johnny Still Can't Read: A New Look at the Scandal of Our Schools

The previous principal of our Upper Tax Bracket elementary school once told an assembly of parents that she always reads the ending of a book first, "so I know where it's going." This was my first clue that we would not see eye to eye. Why would anyone do such a crazy thing? Authors go to a great deal of trouble to make their stories unfold at a particular pace and in a particular sequence. Why would you wreck that? If the principal goes to see a movie, does she first catch the end of the previous showing?

I used to be utterly baffled that teachers are always telling kids to try to predict what happens next in the story, or to guess the story after looking at the jacket cover, but now that I've been researching the pedagogy of reading, I get it. Whole-language types actually believe that reading "comprehension" PRECEDES the reading of the words on the page! As Alfie Kohn says, it’s easier to decode a word when you already know what it means. This is the exact opposite of the way anyone who actually cares about reading would approach it, but why should that slow them down?

I even resent the very widespread practice of describing the opening of a book on the jacket blurb. This is especially bad news with mystery stories. "When the body of Mr. Allington is discovered in the garden shed, impaled on his own swordfish ..." Yeah, thanks for that. Now the first 20 pages of the book, which were a subtle lead-in to the discovery of Mr. Allington's body in the garden shed, have been ruined for me.

A Pox on "Progressive" Whole Language

2011-10-28T07:58:00.000-07:00

To hear [educators] talk, the word method is the only method of teaching reading that fits into the whole of modern educational theory. It's all part and parcel, they say, of modern, enlightened education.

I say it isn't so ... The fact is, I am on the whole on the side of progressive education. I have a Ph.D. degree from Teachers College, Columbia, and I am a sincere admirer of John Dewey. I think education should be democratic, free of senseless formalism and drill, based on interest and meaningful experience, and inseparably joined to the real life that goes on around the child. — Rudolf Flesch, Why Johnny Can't Read.

What really distinguishes Whole Language teachers, though, is not just a broader array of strategies for helping children learn to decode text, but the belief that reading is more than decoding text. A child filled full of phonics rules may be able to pronounce a word flawlessly without having any idea what it means, much less what its relation is to the words sitting next to it. (Some critics refer to the process of getting kids to call out the words in front of them as “barking at the page.”) Whole Language teachers insist that reading is first and foremost about meaning. — Alfie Kohn, On Teaching Reading, Spelling and Related Subjects

Frankly, I'd rather watch Younger Daughter "bark at the page", correctly, than guess wildly without even looking at the page, as she was taught at her "progressive" private school. As Rudolf Flesch says of a struggling whole-word student, "Characteristically, he doesn't look at the word in the book, but stares into space."

According to Alfie Kohn, "Once they can recognize the first letter of the word, that, along with other clues from the context, can help them predict the rest." Thanks, Alfie. That's why I've got a kid who, confronted with the word "on", guesses "octopus".

A Whole Language teacher would rather spend her classroom budget on the kind of children’s stories that can be found in bookstores and libraries. The underlying assumption isn’t just that reading material doesn’t need to contain controlled vocabulary, where new phonemes or skills are introduced on a specific schedule. Rather, it’s that such texts ought to be actively avoided. Better to have a child read a well-written story about an interesting subject. — Alfie Kohn.

Well, sure, that's the theory, but in practice schools teach whole-word reading using "leveled readers", coded from A to Z, that are just as boring as Dick and Jane. A typical "leveled reader" book would be something like "Kate Gets Dressed". Each page of the book has a sentence beginning "Kate puts on her ...", with a big picture on top. Under the picture of Kate putting on her socks, what do you think the text is? This enables kids like my daughter to fake reading, without ever actually learning to read the words the book allegedly teaches, like "socks" and "mittens".

As Rudolf Flesch points out, once they've learned phonics, kids can read anything they want. It's the concept of whole-word learning that dooms kids to boring books.

Alfie Kohn claims that Whole Language actually teaches decoding better, "Because it’s easier to decode a word when you already know what it means." That's ridiculous, and a terrible way to teach reading. What if the author wrote something unexpected? And why should we ask small children, with their limited life experience, to correctly predict what the author wants to say?

... a child may be temporarily stumped by a tricky word. In that case, the Whole Language teacher might invite him to speculate about what the word could be. Or she might say, “Skip that word; we’ll come back to it later.” And if he tries and makes a mistake? Suppose a child is slowly reading aloud from a story that includes the sentence I think my car needs new tires. He gets through the first six words and then pauses before blurting out, “Trees.” A skills-oriented teacher would likely say, “No. Look at the letters again. What comes after the t?” But a Whole Language teacher is more likely to respond, “My car needs new trees??” Does that make sense to you?” Then, once he gets the word right, she’d probably call his attention to the way it’s spelled. — Alfie Kohn.

Again, a terrible way to teach reading (and notice how it's being pushed by the district of Upper Tax Bracket!) If we can predict beforehand what the author will say, why bother reading at all? What if the kid is reading science fiction or fantasy, and the sentence is "I think my car needs new wings"? Notice that Kohn is suggesting kids should read only books that make sense to them, so they can predict what the words should be. Think how very limiting that is, especially to a small child! It's the exact opposite of what I want the reading experience to be for my kids. If reading doesn't communicate something new and surprising, really, what is the point?

You can bet that when I work on reading with Younger Daughter, I do exactly what Kohn says I shouldn't do. I say, "look at the word! What's the next letter after t?" If I used Kohn's method, I would "probably" get around to teaching the phonics, after telling my daughter she should have magically intuited the word from context.

On teaching spelling, Kohn suggests "They might be invited to write a word as many different ways as possible and then to evaluate the different spellings, finally checking out which one is in the dictionary." How is that less annoying than just telling the kid the correct spelling? And how likely is it that the kid will even remember the correct spelling after he's just laboriously written out all the possible wrong spellings?

This is the kind of thinking that gives "progressive" education a bad name.

Tests Are Biased

2011-10-28T06:32:00.000-07:00

A friend sent me a link to an excellent Onion video. Are tests biased against students who don't give a *bleep*? The purpose of school is to prepare kids for the real world, and in the real world, people don't give a *bleep*. Caution -- adult language!

Comprehension Strategies

2011-10-27T06:54:00.000-07:00

The above is a "skill card" sent home as part of the "reading bag program." I'm supposed to practice these with Younger Daughter every night as her "home reading coach."

The scan is a bit hard to read: here's what it says:

Before Reading

Tell the title of a favorite book and some specific details about the book.

Preview the story by creating a story from reading the title, looking at the cover and reading the pictures.

Connect events during picture reading with words like "and then ... next ... or after that ..."

During Reading

Self-correct.

Read in short phrases most of the time.

Recall what you know about the topic.

Ask yourself questions as you read.

Make connections as you read.

Think about the reason why things happen.

Picture what is happening (visualize).

Try to understand the characters' feelings.

Think about similar experiences and stories as you read.

After Reading

Start at the beginning and tell what happened. Include most of the important events from the beginning, middle and end in sequence.

Refer to most characters by name in retell.

Is this fiction or nonfiction, and how do you know?

What part of the book did you like best and why?

What connections did you make while reading (personal experience, background knowledge or another book)?

Keep in mind that we're supposed to accomplish all this within 10-15 minutes per night of reading! The "Before Reading" instructions alone could easily take up 15 minutes, time that would be better spent actually reading (or actually teaching reading, as is the case with us and Younger Daughter.)

The "Before Reading" skills are exactly what Younger Daughter should not do. She already faked her way up to level E in the leveled readers at Natural Friends; the more she learns to make up stories based on the pictures, the better she will get at guessing and faking, and the harder it will be for her to learn to actually read.

As for the "During Reading" and "After Reading" activities, what a turnoff. No wonder we're raising a generation of kids who hate books. Kids don't need to be instructed in how to appreciate a story; story-telling (and story-listening) is a universal human experience. Read to your kids, find books your kids will enjoy reading, and get out of their face.

Word Attack Strategies

2011-10-26T09:32:00.000-07:00

Stop if something doesn't look right, sound right, or make sense.

Look at the picture.

Say the first letter sound.

Reread: Go back and try again.

Blend: Say the first two letters.

Cover part of the word.

Chunk: Look for parts you know.

Say "blank", read on, and come back.

Think of a word that looks the same and rhymes.

Try a different sound for the vowel.

Once again, what's the one strategy that's not mentioned? Why, sounding out the word letter by letter, the one strategy we're trying to teach Younger Daughter.

Trying a different sound for the vowel is not a bad idea, but it should be at the top of the list. And "Look at the picture" shouldn't be on the list at all. That's how I got a kid who would look at the word "Chester" and say "chicken", because there was one in the illustration.

Mom, or "Home Reading Coach"?

2011-10-25T15:11:00.000-07:00

More deathless prose from the Upper Tax Bracket School District, found in Younger Daughter's backpack:

Dear Parents,

We are ready to start our reading bag program at 2D! ...

Once your child has completed their 15 minutes of reading, they will write down the books they have read in their reading record book. You will sign the log sheet to show the reading has been completed. Use this time to sit with your child as the home reading coach. The reading should be easy and fun for your child. It should not be a struggle.

Please be sure to practice the skill card with your child as part of their 10 - 15 minutes EVERY night as well. There is a white card for decoding strategies and comprehension strategies. There is a colored card that is for the next attainable level. These strategies will not only help your child be a better reader, they will help your child advance to the next reading level.

... Thank you,

[no signature]

P.S. Have Fun Reading!

Next up, the comprehension and decoding strategies!

Easing Up On Homework

2011-10-24T19:10:00.000-07:00

In the NYTimes, At Elite Schools, Easing Up a Bit On Homework.

I can't get very worked up about this article. Apparently some elite NY private schools are starting to discuss the stress they put their students under, and talking about reducing some of the homework load. It doesn't sound like any radical changes are in the works.

The comments, as usual, are more interesting than the article. I liked the unintentionally hilarious account by a Dalton grad, (or as he calls himself, "a Dalton alumni" — don't get me started!) explaining that the great thing about his very expensive private high school was that he learned to get through Lit classes without reading the assigned books. Ain't learning grand?

Dalton teaches you to learn, and to learn very very efficiently. For example, I never read a single book for English class because it was, in my opinion, a huge waste of time. The only time I would read was if there was a reading test, like the one on Macbeth. Besides that, doing all the reading was highly inefficient. The teacher doesn't grade you on how well you read the book; the teacher grades you on the paper you hand in. Instead of reading, I'd take great notes in class and sparknote the book if I could. Then when it came time to write the essay, I'd research what other scholars had said, synthesize what I found, then put my own spin on it. Took half the time.

Ovarachiever's footnote: it is never right for a person to describe himself as an "alumni", because "alumni" is plural. One person is either an "alumnus" (masculine) or an "alumna" (feminine).

When Big Sister Grows Up

2011-10-24T14:53:00.000-07:00

OK, it's my blog, I get to post cute things the kids say. Today I overheard a conversation that went like this:

Older Daughter: "I'd like to have a small house on a really big piece of land full of enormous trees, and I'd hang a swing from every tree."

Younger Daughter: "You could do that, when you grow up to be a human."

More Progress!

2011-10-22T07:49:00.000-07:00

This morning Younger Daughter read the title of "Why Johnny Can't Read, and What You Can Do About it." In general, she is doing much less guessing and much more sounding out (although if she's being careless, she still guesses — for instance, she tried to read "knight" as "kangaroo" this morning.)

When she makes mistakes now, they are more likely to be what I think of as "good" mistakes — that is, mistakes that result from applying phonetic rules to strangely spelled words. For instance, she was looking over my shoulder the other day, and correctly read "grown", except she pronounced it to rhyme with "crown." In my book, that's a good mistake, but a weird spelling. Why should "grown" and "groan" have wildly different spellings but the same pronunciation?

Patronizing Much?

2011-10-20T17:25:00.000-07:00

In Younger Daughter's backpack this week, a helpful missive from our school district:

The Upper Tax Bracket School District values parents and teachers working together as partners to maximize the educational experience of all students. The fall Parent/Teacher Conferences ... provide an opportunity to establish early communication, develop a collaborative relationship, and create common goals. This partnership recognizes and values the teacher's expertise and the parents' unique insights as they work together to establish shared expectations for the child's social and academic growth.

As you prepare for the fall Parent/Teacher Conferences, the following ideas and questions were developed as a resource for parents.

... ACADEMIC PROGRESS ...

What does my child need to work on most?

How can I help?

... HOMEWORK ...

How much time should my child be spending on homework?

Does my child assume responsibility for homework assignments?

How can I support my child at home with the responsibility of homework?

... AT THE CONFERENCE ...

Be sure to ask the teacher for specific suggestions on ways to help your child do well.

In other words, the proposed partnership consists of the school saying "Jump!" and the well-behaved parents politely asking "How high?"

Notice that the teacher is presumed to have "expertise", while the parents can offer "unique insights". Thanks for the partnership, guys.

I'm amazed that they think parents routinely "prepare" for teacher conferences. Really? The 10 minutes I've spent blogging this thing are more preparation than I've ever done before.

Feel-Good Speakers

2011-10-19T09:41:00.000-07:00

An Anonymous commenter said:

What's INSANITY to me is that my program will, on the one hand, promote the Sir Ken video about how schools are based on the factory model and that kills divergent thinking and we need to differentiate, and then, on the other hand, they'll slobber all over how awesome WBT is.

How can they NOT see that WBT is THE MOST factory model based education system ever?? And that it is the least likely to encourage divergent thinking? I'm baffled.

Anonymous, I've had similar experiences. I remember the time I mentioned Alfie Kohn to the former principal at our local public elementary school, Fragrant Hills. To my amazement, she said "oh, Alfie Kohn, isn't he wonderful! You know, we had him here for a talk." I was momentarily struck dumb. I thought, if she likes Alfie Kohn, why is she defending tedious homework assignments for first graders? Why is she protecting the fifth-grade math teacher who is bullying my child into major depression?

The only explanation I can come up with is that teachers and administrators view people like Alfie Kohn and Sir Ken Robinson as inspirational speakers, and they do find them inspiring, in a transitory, feel-good sort of way. Listening to speakers like this allows teachers to feel that what they do is noble work. They don't confront the vast gap between the theory presented by these speakers and the actual day-to-day life of the school.

It's like listening to a popular, charismatic preacher who gives a terrific sermon on the glories of heaven on Sunday. Then you've got the rest of the week to go right back to your lustful, gluttonous, dishonest ways.

I've seen teachers complain that "Alfie Kohn sounds good, but he doesn't give practical tips", but now I'm starting to think that's really the key to his popularity. If he had a practical plan, somebody might have to carry it out. They like him better as the pie-in-the-sky visionary he is, who presents no real threat to business as usual.

Whole Brain Boo-Hoos

2011-10-17T06:34:00.000-07:00

I've decided that one of the functions of this blog is to be a voice on the internet in opposition to Whole Brain Teaching. Chris Biffle is relentless in purging dissent from every website he controls, such as the Whole Brain website and the various teaching videos on youtube. I was banned from posting on his youtube sites after I asked polite questions. So one function of Kid-Friendly Schools will be to express criticism, to correct the internet impression that WBT is universally accepted.

Also, the posts pretty much write themselves!

Here's an example of the casual cruelty that ensues when teachers are encouraged to focus on compliance, instead of the well-being of their young charges.

From the Whole Brain teaching forum:

and the boo.hoo's fell [terrible punctuation brought to you by Annette Warren, a Whole Brain model teacher!]

The power of the scoreboard was felt...and the tears fell, oh my. My first graders lost today. We counted the smilies and frownies and I won. The bet was a minute early out so a minute late is what we did. Standing behind our chairs hands over our eyes thinking how we could do better. I had stepped out the door to announce to mommies and daddies why we were late. When i came in I heard" Ms. Ladybug (they call me this) Katie is crying for real!

Once she started another little one started, so i walked the girls out and explained they took our score board real serious, theclass I think we win tomorrow:-)

Annette.

(a response from another WBT model teacher, Andrea Schindler: )

Lol those little cryin darlins!!! If I hadn't have done kinder I don't think I could have handled criers. But i learned. They stop. Sounds harsh but they really do!

Ps howd they do the next day:)?

(a follow-up from Annette Warren: )

My little cryin first graders did exceptional the next day and now all I have to say is "do I need to go to the scoreboard?" They give me the your out gesture and a loud no way. We have a little monkey under frownie star and he is holding practice tickets...he has not passed out on yet, guess we don't monkey around in first grade.
Annette.

(a response from a WBT intern: )

Annette, I always smile at your posts! I am truly enjoying how powerful the scoreboard can be for so many students! I am preparing to get the students on board for practice cards. We have already been in school for 11 weeks. I think its time!!

Tee hee, what a giggle, making 6-year-old children cry. Lovely.

P.S. I'm trying to teach model Whole Brain Teacher Farrah Shipley how to spell "comprehension". Wish me luck!

Just Add 90 Minutes

2011-10-16T06:48:00.000-07:00

In today's NYTimes, Thomas L. Friedman writes a love letter to Rahm Emmanuel, currently the mayor of Chicago:

Emanuel’s pride and joy is the new mandate that he and his schools chief, Jean-Claude Brizard, pushed through for next year to have the school day for Chicago’s 400,000 students extended by 90 minutes and the school year by about a week. The teachers’ union leadership has accepted that this will happen but wants more say on how to use the time — and more money. Parents are thrilled, but it will clearly require more talks with the union.

Of all stupid ideas, the idea that we can improve school by making kids spend more time there is one of the worst. Kids already spend too much time at school, much of it wasted. If "parents are thrilled", as Friedman claims, it can only be because it solves some of their day care problems.

I liked this comment, from "nina":

Hogwash! We have one of the worst public school systems in the country, hence, our children are woefully unprepared. Very many of our teachers here are unequipped to handle the very bright students as well as the really behind students. The really smart ones get bored; the ones who need real help get social promotions. It is just a mess. All of the teachers lack adequate supplies (so many schools don't send textbooks home it's a shame; even in classrooms, there are often not enough books for classwork) and many of their buildings are in need of repair. So many teachers are untrained in real-world pedagogy, so a longer day just gives students more time to suffer in the classroom. Many teachers don't do an adequate job with the time they already have, so the solution is NOT to give them even more time in the day.

... I spent so much time educating my own child during k-8 that I am tired (she may as well have been home-schooled)--parents should SUPPLEMENT the training kids get at school, not the other way around! The paltry few great teachers we do have still have to work miracles without proper resources.

None of Your Business

2011-10-15T06:55:00.000-07:00

(My previous post was mysteriously eaten by Blogger, so I'm reposting it.)

The other day I brought Younger Daughter to school late. Everyone in the office was on the phone, so I looked around and found this form, filled it out, and gave it to the teacher.

You'll notice that in the case of either absence or lateness, the parent is required to state a reason. The implication is that the reason must be accepted by the school. If the reason isn't good enough, will you get a phone call?

It's one more subtle way that the public school tries to exert its authority, not just over the child, but over the parents.

I was astonished the first time I brought Older Daughter in late to her private school, Natural Friends. I had a conversation with the person behind the front desk that went like this:

Me: "I'm bringing Older Daughter in late this morning."
Desk-person: "OK, she can go join her class."
Me: "Do you need me to fill something out? Sign something?"
Desk-person: "Nope."

P.S. On the form for Younger Daughter, the reason I gave for her lateness was "Bad Morning." True enough.

None of Your Business

2011-10-14T10:21:00.000-07:00

If you're having trouble reading it, the relevant lines of the form say:

Is late due to Time?

Great Blunders of History, part 1

2011-10-14T06:38:00.000-07:00

James Boutin of An Urban Teacher's Education wrote a post in response to a question I asked him about curricula for world history. He mentioned that his goal is to present history as a series of narratives, which I agree is the most engaging approach.

For me, history is especially interesting when you get the sense that things could have gone differently. You can get this sense by contemplating mysteries and errors.

So, here's one of my favorite historical blunders — made by an archaeologist.

In 1907, Theodore Davis, a leading Egyptian archaeologist, was digging in the Valley of the Kings when he came across a small pit containing various funereal artifacts, one inscribed with the name of Tutankhamun. After some further investigation, he concluded that this pit must be all that was left of the missing tomb of Tutankhamun, and since it was found, "the valley was exhausted", and there was no point to any further excavation in the Valley of the Kings.

In 1922, Howard Carter found the real tomb of Tutankhamun. The steps leading to the tomb were less than 10 feet away from where Theodore Davis had stopped digging.

It is now believed that the cache found by Theodore Davis was the leavings of a funeral feast engaged in by the priests involved in Tutankhamun's burial.

Involve me Out!

2011-10-12T07:47:00.000-07:00

"Include me out!" — Samuel Goldwyn.

The current emphasis on "parent involvement" started when study after study confirmed that the strongest predictor of a child's performance on standardized tests is the income level of the parents.

To me, the obvious conclusion is that the schools have no effect on student achievement, which means that most of what they do is a waste of time. This is why we need true school reform (beginning with the curriculum!), not corporate reform.

Of course, this isn't the conclusion that educrats came to. "Hey, the kids of middle-class parents do better academically. We should try to make all parents behave like those middle-class parents!" This is why we have homework in elementary school. It's not even about the kids — it's about "parent involvement". The fantasy is that assigning homework will result in educational family time, with Mom and kids sitting around the kitchen table, all doing their approved work — Mom balancing the checkbook, and Daughter writing her rainbow spelling words (just listen to Janine Bempechat!).

Those of us who are already middle-class parents are rightly insulted by these attempts to strong-arm us into doing what we were already doing, and probably more effectively than the school's way. For parents in poverty, they may be actually unable to carry out the school's directives. Maybe the parents can't read the instructions because they are illiterate, or don't speak English. Maybe they're too frazzled by working a poorly-paid job that takes two hours of bus time to return home from. Maybe the kinds of problems they face in their daily lives make the rainbow spelling words look like a cruel joke.

Schools should solve their own problems instead of trying to control parents.

Teachers Judge Parents

2011-10-11T10:08:00.000-07:00

In the NYTimes, Parents Don't Change, But Children Do. This is yet another essay written by a teacher complaining about parents.

The teacher says "It may be acting out, or it may be turning inward, but when there is a giant hole in a child’s life, that is one thing that is never invisible." Well, maybe that giant hole was caused by a miserable school experience. Maybe the child is being bullied (by a student or a teacher), maybe the child is confused by a bad curriculum, maybe the child is bored senseless.

The teacher talks about a child whose grades went up, and says "Most children are not as self-motivated by an intrinsic desire to succeed." It isn't possible to have an intrinsic motive to succeed if the terms of success are defined by someone else. In other words, the desire to get good grades is not an intrinsic motive, but an extrinsic one. The desire to learn can be an intrinsic motive, but the teacher doesn't mention it.

The teacher says, "In four years, I have never seen a parent who started out absent get involved." In other words, in four years, the teacher has utterly failed to reach out to absent parents. Whose fault is that?

I am one of those dutiful parents who shows up for the parent-teacher conference, and in my experience it is almost always a waste of everyone's time.

Instead of asking, "how can parents be encouraged to be involved in their child's education?", I'd rather ask, "how can schools be encouraged to take responsibility for their students' learning?" Teachers can't control parents, as the essay notes, and their time would be better spent looking for ways to improve their own practice.

Fran Lebowitz: America Hates Smart People

2011-10-10T08:16:00.000-07:00

From "Public Speaking":

America's always hated eggheads. When they invent the term "elite", they don't mean rich. America loves rich people. They mean smart. "We don't want these elites in here, we don't want any smart people in here."

Alfie Kohn vs. Janine Bempechat on Homework

2011-10-09T06:43:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting radio debate between Alfie Kohn and Janine Bempechat about homework:

Cursed by Students, Homework Finds Skepticism Among Researchers

As I've remarked before, I don't always agree with Alfie Kohn, but I can safely say that I never agree with Janine Bempechat, from her first utterance, where she claims that homework is beneficial because "it helps kids develop the ability to endure boredom", through her summing-up (which elicits a shocked "Wow!" from Alfie Kohn):

I think fundamentally we're talking about cultural models of learning, and in all the complaints about homework, what I hear is a subtext of people feeling sorry that children have academic work to do, and I think pity is the kiss of death where children's learning is concerned.

Talk about not taking kid's unhappiness seriously!

Bempechat consistently takes the teacher's point of view, while patronizing parents and children:

Teachers like to give homework because it's a primary way to involve parents, and it's critical to involve parents in their children's learning.

After she acknowledges that the research is clear that homework has no correlation with achievement in elementary school, she goes on to say:

At the elementary school level, teachers give homework in order to foster adaptive beliefs and behaviors around learning ... it's very short-sighted to argue that we should throw homework out just because kids — it doesn't make them do any better.

So, the fact that homework doesn't help kids do better academically isn't enough to support an argument that we should throw it out? What kind of support is she looking for? Would we have to show that homework causes cancer? What?

Fran Lebowitz on Reading

2011-10-08T18:53:00.000-07:00

I've been a Fran Lebowitz fan for a long time. She's all over youtube at the moment because of the excellent Martin Scorsese film, Public Speaking (available on Netflix!)

Here's a clip of Lebowitz discussing Austen. I was especially interested in her remarks on reading, starting at about 1:18.

To lose yourself in a book is the desire of the bookworm .. I mean to be taken. That is my desire ... I want to be taken.

... This is the opposite way that people are taught to read now -- people are consistently told, you know, "what can you learn about your own life from this novel? What lessons will this teach you ...? How can you use this in your ...?" This is a Philistine idea. This is beyond vulgar, and I think that it's an awful way to approach anything. A book should be the same. It should take you away. A book is not supposed to be a mirror, it's supposed to be a door.

Foreign Policy Homework

2011-10-08T07:31:00.000-07:00

From today's NYTimes, U.S. Envoy Puts Match to Bridges With Iraq Tell-All:

The day-to-day reconstruction projects, he argues, were done as much to satisfy the bureaucratic need to demonstrate measurable progress as actually to make measurable progress.

Goodbye, Steve Jobs

2011-10-07T06:27:00.000-07:00

We all knew Steve Jobs was dying but it still came as a shock to hear that he had died.

Steve Jobs was the kind of genius that our society used to be good at producing. He was a child of the '60s who took LSD and dropped out of college (which he perceived to be a rip-off of his working-class parents). He started a company in his garage which ended as one of the most important companies in the world and changed our culture forever.

Although he worked in computers, he was never a techie. He was all about the human interface — the comprehensible graphics, the user-friendly click wheel, the product that you can take out of the box and use immediately, without reading a manual (who wants to do that?) or installing software.

Any middle-class parent today whose young-adult child followed Steve Jobs' path would be spitting tacks. Drop out of college, and then spend a year sleeping on your friends' floors and studying calligraphy? Travel to India and return as a Buddhist with a shaved head? No! Do your homework, take your AP classes, graduate from a top-tier college, and grab one of the few well-paid jobs left!

Creativity, innovation, and genius are fostered by freedom. Where will our next Steve Jobs come from?

"Love What You Do"

2011-10-07T06:02:00.000-07:00

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. — Steve Jobs, 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

I have extremely mixed feelings about this oft-quoted advice, for reasons I'll list here:

1.) Steve Jobs, like a lot of men, was able to devote himself to the work he loved because he had a wife who took responsibility for running the house and raising their children.

2.) Sometimes the work you love doesn't pay well. If you love to paint pictures, or sing, or dance, or write a blog, or raise the aforementioned children, you are not likely to generate a living wage doing what you love.

3.) A great deal of work is unlovable. Bedpans must be changed, toilets must be cleaned, iPods must be assembled. Nobody loves this work, but it must be done. Our economy had a spot for one Steve Jobs, but thousands of toilet-cleaners.

4.) Our society is not fair. We don't all get the same shot at finding — and getting paid for — work we love. Steve Jobs had all the advantages that accrue to tall white men.

5.) Now that the global economy has been wrecked, with no relief in sight, people are less likely than ever to be able to do the work they love. At this point, it's almost cruel to tell new college grads, probably carrying a huge load of debt, that they shouldn't "settle", when they're lucky to find a job at all.

Distinctions

2011-10-05T18:54:00.000-07:00

A recent conversation with Younger Daughter:

YD: "I've decided to be a vegetarian."

Me: "OK."

YD: "It's too bad I can't have Christmas."

Me: "No, that's being Jewish."

YD: "... oh ... right. Is [Older Daughter's friend] Jewish?

Me: "Yes, she's Jewish and also vegetarian."

A Mother Speaks Out

2011-10-04T08:11:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting blog post from the mother whose son got kicked out of a Harlem Success Academy (first discussed in my blog here: Cherry-Picking Charter Schools):

My Special Child, Pushed Out of Kindergarten at a NYC Charter School

I learned from this post that parents at HSA are actually required to buy their kids' uniforms! How can that be justified for the children of the poor, in a school supported by taxpayers?

Taking Kids' Unhappiness Seriously

2011-10-03T13:24:00.000-07:00

From The Homework Myth, by Alfie Kohn:

When our kids complain about constant, compulsory homework, some of us respond with compassion: "Honey, I know you don't like it, but ..." What follows that "but" is either an effort to defend the homework or an assertion of its inevitability (which suggests we're unable to defend it.) We try to be understanding, but our message is clear: How the child experiences the assignment ultimately doesn't matter. "My son cries about homework every other day, and I have to tell him he has to do it", says the mother of an eight-year-old. Other adults, meanwhile, are unsympathetic, confident that children's concerns can safely be ignored.

... The first thing that strikes me about these two reactions, the gentle and the harsh, is that they differ in tone but not really in substance. In the final analysis, both fail to take children's unhappiness seriously and both are therefore disrespectful. Even more important, if we fail to appreciate the significance of children's reactions, how those reactions color the way they think about learning and about themselves, we're not just beign rude. We're being foolish ... people of any age are less likely to derive value from doing what they experience as unpleasant or simply worthless.

From an Anonymous comment on Spelling Word Extension Activities:

While I sympathize with the fact that a lot of homework is busywork and parents might find it pointless, I fail to see how the difficulty of getting your child to do her work should be a factor in the teacher's decision as to whether or not to assign said work.

I see this argument crop up a lot amongst parents. "It takes forever just to wrangle my child into doing homework, and it eats up so much time in the evenings!!" This is usually paired with "the work is easy mind numbing busy work". So, if both of those things are true, it seems the problem is not that your child is having difficulty understanding the work, she just doesn't want to do it.

I don't want to do a lot of things- reports at work, cleaning my toilets, memorizing theorems for geometry, etc. etc.- but just not wanting to do them is not excuse enough for me not to do them. If you have such an issue getting your child to do her own homework when it is a simple spelling exercise that it seems she understands how to do perfectly well, it doesn't seem that is the fault of the teacher.

I agree with Alfie Kohn on this one. We need to take our children's unhappiness seriously. It's not trivial or irrelevant or a less worthy argument to point out that my kids avoid homework at all costs, and it's a headache to get them to do it. It's a central part of the problem. If my kids actually liked their homework, I would never have started campaigning against it.

If we're going to make our kids do something they don't want to do, we'd better have a compelling reason. If we're going to make every weekday night stressful and unpleasant for our families, it should only be because we have no other choice.

The vast majority of the homework my kids have been assigned is pointless, tedious, unnecessary busywork. It's not worth the unhappiness it causes.

A Conference at the Public Elementary School

2011-10-01T20:36:00.000-07:00

So, last Wednesday we had our first conference at the local public elementary school, Fragrant Hills, to discuss Younger Daughter's situation. It was attended by the obligatory cast of thousands, namely: my fed up self, Sainted Husband, YD's first grade teacher, her student teacher, the principal, the reading specialist, a district teacher trainer, the school counselor, and a district school psychologist.

The meeting began with me asking the first grade teacher whether YD's behavior had been OK so far. To my immense relief, she said it had. Sure, YD could be loud, or stubborn, but it was within normal bounds and the teacher was able to work with her. Hallelujah! (I believe I even said that.)

The school had done a bunch of assessments with Younger Daughter. To no-one's surprise, she is below grade level on both reading and math. The reading specialist said, "with your permission, I'd like to pull Younger Daughter out for intensive reading help, especially phonics." Me: "Yes, please!"

I explained that we had been working hard on reading with YD at home. I wonder if the day will ever come that someone from the school shows an interest in this, or asks what techniques or methods I'm using. As it was, nobody responded. I said that we were trying to get Younger Daughter out of the habit of guessing at words, and I gave a recent example, where she looked at the word "bats" and, instead of sounding it out (as I've seen her do successfully!), guessed "basket".

Later in the meeting the first grade teacher said that she would send home little books that they were reading in class, and the teacher trainer chimed in enthusiastically that we should work on these books with Younger Daughter, because she had already heard them read, and knew the story and the vocabulary. I didn't argue with them, but this is exactly what I don't want; it's too easy for YD to guess and fake her way through a book that she's already familiar with. I'll stick to our own books and phonics drills.

The district psychologist asked whether we had followed up on the recommendations in the report written by the psychologist who observed Younger Daughter back at Natural Friends. The recommendations were all about getting Younger Daughter assessed for an alphabet soup of possible diagnoses. I said that we hadn't done any of that, and I was skeptical of the recommendations. I said that I now believed that Younger Daughter's problem was a mismatch between the teaching methods used by her previous school and her particular needs, and I don't think Younger Daughter has any medical problem.

And that was pretty much it! All in all, I think it went very well. Everyone in the room seemed confident that they could work with Younger Daughter.

Why Parents Are Told to Read to Their Kids

2011-09-30T08:18:00.000-07:00

From Why Johnny Still Can't Read, by Rudolf Flesch: the beginning of Chapter 13, "It's the Parents' Fault":

Once upon a time — around 1908 when Edmund Burke Huey wrote his famous book The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading — there lived a little boy in or around Boston, Massachusetts. His parents were well-to-do, kept a staff of servants, and had plenty of leisure time on their hands. The house was large and comfortable and contained a cozy library, with a plentiful collection of favorite children's books on some lower shelves.

One day Dr. Huey came for a visit. The boy was four years old at the time.

He had never tried to read, but had a new pictured storybook which contained lines from Old Mother Hubbard. He knew the story already, but had me read it aloud over and over again, following my finger over the lines and also keeping the place by the pictures. He would then "read" by turns with me, and actually came to keep his fingers "on the place" throughout, at the first sitting. All that is needed is books of good old jingles and rhymes and folk stories and fairy tales, with illustrative pictures, and a mother or father or friend who cares enough for children to play this way and read aloud to them. The child will keep it up by the hour and the week and the month, and his natural learning to read is only a question of time.

Huey's recipe for teaching reading is almost exactly what is being followed to this day in most of our schools. They expect the child to be taught by this miraculous method at home and are sorely disappointed if the parents leave them in the lurch.

... To judge from the look-and-say teacher's manuals of the 1980s, it's perfectly clear that the schools still rely on home teaching just as much as Huey did. Word-by-word-taught reading is impossible to teach in the few snatches of time the normal modern school gives to the individual child. There has to be enough time for one-person tutoring, and that person, by necessity, is the mother rather than the schoolteacher with her full classroom and innumerable other chores.

And so the schools assume that the parents play an enormous part in teaching the small child to read, and they're consciously or unconsciously fiercely resentful when parents fall down on that unspoken contract.

... And so the responsibility for Johnny's reading trouble is neatly placed on his parents' shoulders. There isn't a single piece of advice to parents from the look-and-say people that doesn't recommend lots and lots of time reading aloud to the child, letting him or her see the words on the page. This will make the child memorize the words and sooner or later the Huey-type miracle is going to happen.

There's no lack of advice on exactly how the mother is supposed to proceed ...

Here's the advice of Professor James E. Flood in the May 1977 Reading Teacher ...

1.) Start the reading with some warmup questions.
2.) Interrupt the reading often with questions to see whether the child is following the story.
3.) Interrupt the reading often to repeat what the book says.
4.) Go over the story again when you're through.

Pointless Homework of the Week

2011-09-27T18:44:00.000-07:00

OK, this one is from Older Daughter's expensive private school, Friends Omphalos.

Journal due Tuesday

Write an open topic journal. Introduce yourself. Talk about goals for the year. What has interested you so far about social studies.

Here is what journals should be about.
1.) Your thoughts and reactions to things learned about in class or in doing homework.
2.) Your reactions to the class itself. How is the group working ... etc ...
3.) Anything that relates somehow to social studies. This is broad. Many, many things are related to social studies. Perhaps virtually everything is.

What your journal should not be is a diary. For instance, I do not need to know what are [sic] for breakfast, whether or not you walked your dog this morning etc...

To add insult to injury, this assignment will be graded! What could possibly be the standards for grading this thing?

Here's our e-mail exchange so far: the first is from Yours Truly:

Mr. Pointless -- we have been trying to help Older Daughter with her Social Studies homework but we are completely baffled by the Journal assignment. Older Daughter can't think of anything to write because she can't figure out what the purpose is, and we can't figure it out either. What is she supposed to learn from this assignment?

Thank you.

Sincerely, FedUpMom.

And the reply, from the Obscure Desk of Mr. Pointless:

Hi FedUpMom,

I wish Older Daughter would come to me with her concern.

That said, the purpose is for kids to write for fluency and to consider items discussed in class, read or seen for homework, or to talk about items related to social studies. For instance, and I said this when explaining it in class, any current events issue or event relates to social studies. It is supposed to be wide ranging. It is how I get a sense of what kids are thinking about and their reactions to the class.

I would suggest Older Daughter
1) share her goals for the year.
2) Consider things talked about in social studies thus far... for instance would she like to live in 1900? Why or why not?
3) How does she feel about school, class, etc... For instance, she can clearly let me know that this assignment has troubled her. This would be a perfectly appropriate use of a journal.
4) Is there an issue or event in the world that she is worried about, happy about, interested in?

I will assign these journals regularly. I get to know what my students are thinking about.
I hope this is helpful.

Argh! These people drive me crazy! I hardly know where to start.

"Comprehension" is a Boondoggle

2011-09-24T08:00:00.000-07:00

The issue of "comprehension" is a boondoggle that educators use to make what they do look much more complicated than it actually is, and to justify bad curricula that don't teach comprehension or rote learning or anything at all.

For instance, confronted with a 6th-grader who can't add two fractions with large denominators (because she can't conveniently draw the pie chart), educators say "that's OK, the important thing is that she has deep conceptual understanding." (And how is the pie chart any deeper than the standard algorithm for adding fractions?)

Similarly, confronted with a 7-year-old who can't read because she thinks she should be able to guess everything from context, educators say, "that's OK, the important thing is that she WANTS to read, and she understands a great deal when you read out loud." (That's pretty much what Younger Daughter's first-grade teacher told us at Natural Friends!)

In both reading and math, educators (often, unfortunately, those who train the next generation of teachers) use the issue of "comprehension" to distract attention from the point that their methods don't work; then they promote false dichotomies in an effort to sound "progressive".

In math, the false dichotomy is between "rote learning" and "conceptual understanding"; in reading, the false dichotomy is between "word-calling" and "comprehension".

Now, it might happen that a child could have technical skills without deep comprehension. For instance, she might be able to perform long division without understanding why it works, or she might be able to read a word off a page without understanding its meaning or context ("Mom, what's a carriage return?")

But the opposite doesn't hold. You can't have deep understanding without technical skills. If a kid can't read a word off the page, or add two fractions, that doesn't magically prove that she has deep understanding instead.

Ideally, skills and comprehension should march together hand in hand. Kids should acquire skills and also understand how and why they work. This might be a gradual process; comprehension can deepen over time. Often, comprehension is the result of continued practice of technical skills (one more reason to teach the skills first.)

Word-Calling vs. Comprehension

2011-09-24T07:13:00.000-07:00

From Why Johnny Still Can't Read, by Rudolf Flesch: he's quoting from Teaching to Read, by Mitford Mathews:

On page 159 of his delightful book Teaching to Read, Mitford Mathews tells the following story:

A group of educators visited a Chicago parochial school where the Leonard Bloomfield phonic system was taught.

They were taken into a classroom of perhaps 40 first grade children. On the teacher's desk were elementary books from various grades. The visitors were invited to select a book and ask any of the children to read from it. The readiness with which the children read was unusual. One of the guests happened to pick up a sixth-grade science book and asked one of the boys to read a passage from it. In doing so the child encountered and read the word "satellite". Father Stoga (the superintendent) asked him what the word meant and the child said it meant a big object in the sky. Dean Gray, the man who gave us Dick and Jane, found the answer unsatisfactory, showing that the child was reading, that is pronouncing, quite beyond the vocabulary appropriate to his age, and not getting the sense of what he read. He explained to the other visitors that what the children were doing was in no sense remarkable. He said that reading experts had long known that children could rather quickly be taught to pronounce words with remarkable glibness but that real understanding of what was read was another matter entirely. He pointed out that these children were mere word-callers, that they were pronouncing well beyond their mental ages, and that they were heading straight for serious trouble later in their reading development.

Sad, Sad, Sad

2011-09-22T18:14:00.000-07:00

Another teenager committed suicide in response to homophobic bullying. The boy had previously made an "It Gets Better" video. See the NYTimes article, "Suicide Draws Attention to Gay Bullying."

Our schools should be safe for all of our children.

Spelling Word Extension Activities

2011-09-22T06:21:00.000-07:00

Sent home in second-grade Younger Daughter's backpack, stapled to the front cover of one of the composition books we bought her (from the list of school supplies -- when I was a kid the public schools weren't allowed to require parents to spend money! -- don't get me started.)

Spelling Word Extension Activities

Directions: Each school night, Monday — Thursday, choose an activity and complete it on a new page of your spelling journal. Start by writing the date at the top of the next new page. For each activity, you must use all of your spelling words.

1. RAINBOW WRITE

First, write each word in pencil. Then trace over each word THREE times each, using a different colored pencil or crayon. Trace neatly and you will see a rainbow.

2. SILLY SENTENCES

Write silly sentences using at least one spelling word in each sentence. Underline your spelling words.

3. DRAW IT

Illustrate your spelling words. Be sure to LABEL your pictures with your spelling words OR draw your favorite character saying your words.

4. SQUIGGLE SPELLING WORDS

Write your spelling words two times. First write them in regular, NEAT letters. Then write them in squiggly letters or bubble letters.

5. WRITE A STORY OR A MESSAGE

Write a story or message to someone using your spelling words. Underline your spelling words in the story or message.

6. CUT OUT WORDS

Find the letters of your words in a newspaper or Magazine. Cut out the letters and spell your words OR stamp them if you have letter stamps.

7. TYPE 'EM

Type your words two times each on the computer. Make sure each word is in a different font and color.

8. OTHER HANDED

First write your spelling words the way you normally do. Then try writing the list with your other hand!

9. WORDS WITHIN WORDS

Write each spelling word, then try to find at least two words that can be made from the same letters inside the word. Ex. Earth; the; hat; rat; rate; her

10. VERTICAL WORDS

Write your words going down the page instead of across. Write them TWO times each.

Next up: my e-mail to the teacher explaining why we won't be doing this. I think I'll simplify my life and just say we don't have time, which is true. However, for my blog I will also say that this is a huge time-waster and typical of the madness that ensues when teachers try to make homework "fun".

I should explain that YD was given 12 spelling words, plus 2 challenge words, which, if I understand the labyrinthine directions correctly, she's also supposed to practice. Think how much time a resistant 8-year-old would take to actually do any of the above activities! Just choosing one out of the 10 methods could take any child skilled at procrastinating (either of my kids, for a start) at least a half-hour.

Brainstorm to Opt Out

2011-09-20T19:50:00.000-07:00

Recently, KSP sent the following comment to StopHomework. With her permission, I'm reposting it here. I hope some of my regular readers will have some useful ideas. Please chime in!

KSP says:

Hi, it’s me again after a year of silence.

So I found a group of like-minded mothers this summer after negotiating to opt out for a year individually.

We went to meet with the principal before school, and our concerns around stress from homework were communicated to the teachers.

There seems to be less homework this year and the homework seems to be more meaningful.

On Back to School night, the teachers send messages like, “let’s not make homework stressful.” “let’s make it fun.”

Great progress.

But, here is what I am not happy about.

Today I received a new and updated school homework policy, which added kindergarten.

Please look at the time assigned for each grade:
K: 15-20 minutes.
1: 20-25 minutes
2: 25-30 minutes
3: 30-35 minutes

Reading is assigned in addition. It’s much more than the 10 min. per grade rule especially in the lower grade.

Also, in the policy, there is still a consequence to not doing homework.
I tried opting out last year and my son’s report card’s homework section was marked down. I thought the teacher and I had agreement it was more of my choice to opt out.

There are other parents who don’t come to meetings, but voiced that they will support us. There is a teacher or two and a board member who support us too. At the same time, there is the other end of extreme who wants more homework and more rigorous curriculum.

My group wants to make “opt-out without consequence” a formal policy. How realistic is that in this education climate of high pressure and top-down approach? How can we make this happen?

Please help me think this through.

@KSP, I wish you all the success in the world. "Opt out without consequence" is a great idea.

And it really gets my goat that homework in kindergarten is now considered normal. AARGH! I saw a comment on another blog where a mother described her child's school as child-friendly because "there's no homework before first grade." Sigh.

No Quality Control in Teaching Reading

2011-09-20T06:18:00.000-07:00

From Straight Talk About Reading, by Susan L. Hall and Louisa C. Moats, Ed. D.:

The unanswered, obvious question for most parents is "Where is the quality control?" A mother of a child who was having trouble learning to read contacted me for information beginning in January of her daughter's first-grade school year. She was concerned that her child was having so much trouble learning to read and was falling behind. She decided that the first step was to have her daughter tested to determine if she had any learning disability ... By March she had completed an educational diagnostic evaluation which determined that her child did not have a learning disability. The psychologist who tested her daughter recommended a private tutor who uses a systematic phonics approach to teach reading.

Within three months of tutoring, her daughter was completely caught up in reading. We met in late June after the school year was over. This mother proudly showed me the reading, writing, and phonics material her daughter had completed in tutoring over the spring and early summer. After looking at papers that demonstrated a sequential and systematic approach to phonics instruction, I brought out my file with all my daughter's language arts papers from her first-grade class -- a different first-grade class in the same school -- and we spread them out on the dining room table. This mother was outraged that she was paying private tutoring fees for her daughter to get essentially the same instruction that my daughter received during first grade, while her daughter sat in another classroom not getting what she needed. I shared this mother's anger because my older child had had her daughter's first-grade teacher two years earlier, and we had to hire a private tutor for him as well.

Follow the Blogs!

2011-09-19T06:08:00.000-07:00

Two fellow bloggers have been smokin' hot recently.

NorthTOmom has written a fascinating and well-researched piece about the perils of teaching reading "comprehension" here:

Summertime, and the Reading is Easy

I'm still thinking about my response to this post, which will likely become a post of its own!

And Chris shares his observations about the behavior-rewards system PBIS here:

Scenes From the First Week of School

Find 3 Things Wrong With This Picture, Part 3

2011-09-18T13:49:00.000-07:00

From "My Second Grade Reading Records", sent home with Younger Daughter:

1.) I consider myself a good reader, and I don't do any of these things, certainly not consciously.

2.) Spelling out all these steps makes reading seem like a dreary chore.

3.) Sometimes I don't want to make a personal connection.

Find 3 Things Wrong With This Picture, Part 2

2011-09-18T06:24:00.000-07:00

From "My Second Grade Reading Records", sent home with Younger Daughter.

I've got more than 3 this time. As the parent of a child who was taught these kinds of strategies more than phonics, and as a result tries to guess and fake her way through reading, this one really winds me up.

1.) What's missing? The one strategy that actually works -- look at all the letters and SOUND THEM OUT!

2.) What does "get your mouth ready" even mean? And why should you "get your mouth ready" in preparation for looking at the pictures?

3.) Kids should not be encouraged to "look at the pictures" before they start reading the words. This is how we train kids to be word-guessers instead of readers.

4.) Kids should not be encouraged to first scan the words and find ones they already know. They need to learn to read the words IN ORDER, by reading the word's letters IN ORDER.

Find 3 Things Wrong With This Picture, Part 1

2011-09-17T13:21:00.000-07:00

From "My Second Grade Reading Records", sent home with Younger Daughter:

OK, I'll go first.

1.) Giving rewards for an activity that should be enjoyed for its own sake is demotivating.

2.) The rewards listed are trivial. It's downright insulting to ask a group of kids to read 250 books just to get a sticker.

3.) Giving a "No Homework Coupon" as a prize is a terrific way to cause all kids to hate homework and perceive it as pointless, even if they previously liked it.

Phirst Phonics

2011-09-17T12:26:00.000-07:00

The other day I tried to get Younger Daughter to read some Bob books with me. She was extremely resistant, and I think a bit insulted; she sees these as "little kid" books that she has moved beyond. Fortunately I've found that she's quite willing to do the exact same kind of phonics drills in the back of Why Johnny Can't Read, probably because this is a grown-up book that she sees Mom reading.

What We Say, What They Hear

2011-09-17T08:47:00.000-07:00

The other day I went to pick Younger Daughter up at the bus stop. The conversation went like this:

Me: How was school? Did you have a good day?

YD: Yeah ... do you see this stuff on the back of your hand? It's called "vines"!

Me: Um ... I believe they're called "veins".

YD: No, they're vines! They wind around and around our whole body. They hold us together. We learned about in science class.

Me: Well, the way we learned it is they're called "veins", and they carry blood around your body.

She probably still thinks they're called "vines", but at the moment I'm too busy teaching her to read to worry about it much.

Character Ed: Bah, Humbug!

2011-09-14T10:15:00.000-07:00

In today's NYTimes, What if the Secret to Success is Failure?, about attempts to teach good character traits.

At a KIPP school, they've designed a report card:

Logistically, the character report card had been a challenge to pull off. Teachers at all four KIPP middle schools in New York City had to grade every one of their students, on a scale of 1 to 5, on every one of the 24 character indicators, and more than a few of them found the process a little daunting. And now that report-card night had arrived, they had an even bigger challenge: explaining to parents just how those precise figures, rounded to the second decimal place, summed up their children’s character. I sat for a while with Mike Witter, a 31-year-old eighth-grade English teacher, as he talked through the character report card with Faith Flemister and her son Juaquin Bennett, a tall, hefty eighth grader in a gray hooded sweatshirt.

... Witter pulled out a green felt-tip marker and circled one indicator on Juaquin’s report card. “ ‘Pays attention and resists distraction,’ ” Witter read aloud, an indicator for academic self-control. “That’s a little lower than some of the other numbers. Why do you think that is?”

“I talk too much in class,” Juaquin said, a little sheepishly, looking down at his black sneakers. “I sometimes stare off into space and don’t pay attention.”

Oh, please. Is there no end to the meddling our schools engage in? If I were Juaquin, I would never want to step foot in school again, after such an invasive and humiliating experience.

Meanwhile, at an affluent private school in the Bronx:

[Guidance Counselor] Cohen said that in the middle school, “if a kid is a C student, and their parents think that they’re all-A’s, we do get a lot of pushback: ‘What are you talking about? This is a great paper!’ We have parents calling in and saying, for their kids, ‘Can’t you just give them two more days on this paper?’ Overindulging kids, with the intention of giving them everything and being loving, but at the expense of their character — that’s huge in our population. I think that’s one of the biggest problems we have at Riverdale.”

I am extremely skeptical of the alleged character-building effects of bad grades. Bad grades are just as likely to provoke depression and despair as hard work and persistence, especially if the child perceives them as unfair.

For kids to grow as complete human beings, they need autonomy, privacy, and free time. They need the chance to figure things out for themselves and develop their own point of view. No report card can help kids achieve this goal. The only way for kids to develop true character is to have genuine, real-life experiences that grow naturally from their own interests.

I fear that at this rate, the first genuine, unmediated experience our kids are likely to have is post-graduate unemployment.

Ron Clark Bashes Parents

2011-09-09T19:17:00.000-07:00

What Teachers Really Want to Tell Parents, by Ron Clark.

Ron Clark is an A-1 creep; a sadistic, self-promoting control freak.

From a review of Clark's book, The Essential 55: An Award-Winning Educator's Rules for Discovering the Successful Student in Every Child:

What really turned me off from this book was that it is painfully Anti-kid and Anti-teacher. Instead of raising child self-esteem and documenting actual achievements, readers are treated to a continuous line of Mr. Clark's unregulated stunts. Nowhere else have I seen an educational author earning money from his experiences of humiliating both students and teachers. Until now.

According to pointless RULE 9, Mr. Clark will take back any gift you don't thank him for in three seconds. After one little girl won a set of books from him, our heartless author states on page 24, "The little girl was so excited that she was jumping up and down." Guess what. She forgot to immediately say thank you, and her gleeful classmates pointed it out. Mr. Clark then took away her earned reward and traded it in for lasting humiliation. He was then kind enough to share this humiliation with the world and profit from it in this very book. Have you thanked her for that Mr. Clark? Can you give her that excitement back? His excuse on page 25 was, "... I had to remain consistent." If you are wondering readers, this type of behavior will consistently transform employed teachers into unemployed ones.

It became obvious to me, that everything Mr. Clark did in his classroom (including going to teach in Harlem) he did to eventually make part of a future book; this book. Take RULE 16 on page 56. "Homework will be turned in each day..." In this section we learn that the amazing Mr. Clark got 100% of his class to turn in their homework for 62 days in a row. Something smells fishy here when he uses the phrase "homework participation," instead of homework completion. To get this 62 day run of whatever it is, he uses "peer pressure." This is code for bullying. If he doesn't like a kid, he turns the class loose on them stating "Well, I let the class lay it on thick." If the kid is his best student who is reduced to tears because she is the one who forgot her work on day 63, then Mr. Clark says, "Class, we need to have a talk." What happened to taking back books on page 25 and, "...I had to remain consistent."? Again new teachers, if you want to be fired, be like Mr. Clark.

Mr. Clark actually hides behind RULE 49 "Stand up for what you believe in," after giving a detention to a model student on page 139. Her sin? She had forgotten to bring to class a piece of blue paper. Really, how important are homework streaks when homework consists of carrying a colored piece of paper to and from school? The once happy, well-adjusted student, "...had cried all night long" because of this undeserved detention. Are we seeing a pattern here folks? Mr. Clark then refused to remove his martinet policy or the detention. If not for his preposterous fame, I don't see how he would have kept his job. Instead we read, "...that class went on to have twenty-three days in a row..." of what? successful colored-paper carrying? I am curious, what story of child humiliation arose at the end of that streak?