It sounds a bit like dysgraphia, which I also show some signs of.
I did try to get around it by switching hands when the pain got too bad, but teachers wouldn’t allow me to. I spent most of my time writing the absolute minimum I could get away with, which led to me being amongst the top students in my school for science, maths, geography and German, yet one of the worst in English (both language and literature classes). No-one at my school worked out it was because of a learning difficulty.
I still hate writing more than about a sentence using pen or pencil, and generally avoid it.
This article started off strong but ended weak and toothless. More emphasis needs to be put on the ideologies behind the coercion in the education system, which the second and third paragraph began to outline, rather than the windy details of the political drama.
Given the peak near 1960, it looks like the term might have been part of New Math.
Edit: In the Feynman article, the section you mention is on the transition between page 11 and 12 and calls it the number line. For those who haven’t read it, he likes it:
Incidentally, if these numbers are written as dots equally spaced along a line - called the number line - this becomes very useful later for an understanding of fractions and also of measurements; for inch-rulers and other things like thermometers are nothing but a number line written along the edge of the ruler. Therefore, putting the numbers on a line is useful, not only for learning addition in the first place, but also for understanding other types of numbers.
Parts of it survived and other parts didn’t. The stuff for arithmetic operations was more durable than the idea that all kids should learn set theory & other stuff: New Math - Wikipedia
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Education is not about the dehumanization of children. Rather, it should not be. Standardized testing works against education. Standardized testing is about one size fits all. People learn differently. People teach differently. It is no coincidence that educational standards have dropped along with the funding of public ed. It is no coincidence that there is a school to prison pipeline in poor communities. It is no coincidence that the oligarchy has its dirty, oily fingers in the education pie. Children are only units of measure to these people. Children are only the grade at the top of the page of the test created to measure their failure and to weed out the “different” individuals. But what do I know. I am just an old DFH.
With ELA (English Language Arts) the Common Core isn’t a list of what kids should learn in the traditional sense. It’s a list of what skills a child should have in relation to dealing with text. These skills are also very strange in terms of the real-world way kids interact with text. They have almost nothing to do with how most people — and I would assume the readers of a site like BoingBoing — relate to text. They separate the text from its content, insisting that the student analyze the text structurally. This is light years from the standard reading comprehension questions most of us grew up with.
I am a middle school English teacher in New York state, so I’m seeing this first hand. Without even touching the punitive aspect of the Common Core against students and teachers, these are a lousy set of standards. They weren’t developed by teachers who teach the grades the standards are meant to evaluate; they were developed (mostly) by people in the testing industry. This means they are great for people in testing or educational publishing but have little to do with the way we interact with written text.
Here’s an example of the sixth-grade standards:
“Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are 4. used in a text, including figurative and connotative meanings; analyze the impact of a specific word choice on meaning and tone.” (http://www.engageny.org/sites/default/files/resource/attachments/nysp12cclsela.pdf) This is pretty complex stuff for sixth-graders, especially ones who are struggling with enjoying reading on the whole. Because something like this is being evaluated and not general understanding of context, I have to force kids to analyze word choice and how it relates to the larger intent of the piece. This is not developmentally appropriate for most kids this age, nor is it a great way to teach literature.
I’m pretty good at getting kids to like literature, even the unwilling ones, but if I had to keep stuffing these kinds of skills down my kids’ throats, they’d shut down. These skills are boring and pedantic. Unfortunately this in exactly what my kids just spent four and a half hours getting tested on, which meant also that I’m getting evaluated on these same poorly-writtem standards.
Standards need to be written by teachers, not by evaluators, in coordination with what the community wants. Otherwise we have a mess, like what we see with the Common Core.
During the first round of standardized teacher evaluation mania my then district piloted teacher evaluations. Every aspect had to do with how teachers interact with administration: participation in committees, use of sick days, etc. The union complained because nothing in the evaluation had anything to do with teaching. Round after round of teacher quality measurements have come since then, and they have all been different kinds of silly. You have to evaluate the teaching behaviors of teachers, the outcomes have too many compounding factors. Evaluating teachers is ideally done by skilled administrators or senior teachers actually watching teachers teach. That involves a lot of time. And that costs money. Saying unions have been against teacher evaluations without saying why is dishonest. I have only been formally observed once in the last ten years, even though my district policy and state law say I should be observed at least annually or thrice annually. That seems like a good place to start.
There’s a difference between being bitchy and being a bully. BB would ban me for bullying, but not for getting bitchy when someone pops on to spout silly contrarian pearls like ‘tests are my favorite part of school’, as if one’s personal preference for tests means we should all shutup about CC and start enjoying the incessant testing our children are being put through. If you don’t see the ass-ness of that statement I have nothing else to say.
I replied to the original comment about how tests are great, so expressing disgust at ‘verbal abuse and bullying’ was not the thing I was referring to, though its a stretch to call what I said either of those things, IMNSHO. What I called the commenter unhinged about was her statement that corporate drones pay all the taxes and we should all be grateful to them for supporting us via their taxes. That was delusional and slightly unhinged, and was in response to me stating that she was likely a great fit for the corporate structure given her love for testing. It turned out I struck a never with that one. I don’t know why exactly. If one is a corporate worker and loves it, why the defensiveness?
In closing, if you think what I wrote was bullying and abusive, then go back to your cuddle party and cry to the pile, and those of us who aren’t afraid of our own shadows will manage to carry on without you. Somehow.
Thanks for chiming in @Spoonbill. Its nice to hear from a teacher who is dealing with this mess on a daily basis. I can absolutely see how in 6th grade those techniques would be out of place. In fact I’d argue they’re not really appropriate until, perhaps, the later part of high school, if at all. When I was young the closest we came to something like this was diagramming sentences, which was a useful thing to do, though if we’d been heavily tested on it I’m not sure how we would’ve done because it takes a while for stuff like that to really sink in. And when kids are just learning to read real literature taking apart text in such ways seems to me like a sure-fire way to alienate them from reading.
Bureaucrats and test creators have no business creating something as expansive as CC, though as described upthread, its a lucrative racket for them, and that seems to be the only consideration in our brave neoliberal world.
“Vendor lock in”: thank you for supplying a short-hand term for what I am talking about. Have been needing that.
I don’t mean “area model” is bad and therefore idiosyncratic because it has some odd aspect to it. My only issue is including non-CC mechanics on a CC test, thus “vendor lock in”. I will take your cue and avoid ‘idiosyncratic’ in future discussions for the sake of clarity.
Disagree. One of the very first points proponents of CC standards make is that “CC standards are not a curriculum” and there are both political and legal reasons for wanting to make this point very clear. States that have adopted CC are only required to perform CC testing and the curriculum purchasing or development decisions are left to the states. The CC standards are the guide for any curriculum developer, such as your mathematician friend’s company. A CC curriculum provider only has to make the curriculum “aligned” with CC, not develop and supply the CC tests. One of the aims of CC is to create a single set of standard-referenced (non-normalized) tests that is used across all states, regardless of the curriculum.
The CC standards are lack rigor and robustness. These weaknesses are, in part, how the standards create opportunity for vendor lock in. Check out the guidelines from the ANSI organization for how industry standards should be developed, worded, and vetted. CC standards were not developed by any process approved by any standards development organization. In the long run, this means that any changes to correct faults in the CC standards will be resisted by Pearson, as the changes have to be re-validated and then will have to be reflected in updated curriculum. This is what I mean by lack of robustness. Pearson’s business model is well protected by the current implementation of CC and will remain so as long as CC is in use in so many states.
… Really? One of the most fundamental reasons for the existence of a plurality of political opinions, and you’re “astonished”? Come on now. There are lots of positions people can hold within different coherent ideological systems. Let’s not act like someone was dropped on their head as a child just because their beliefs stem from different values than yours.
What? No–It’s like seeing all the baby carrots in the bag stack themselves neatly, or like the satisfaction of getting all the water out of a sponge in one squeeze. It’s a completion thing.
Until then there’s no sense in supporting this archaic system that gives us a bunch of idiots who don’t know how to act like civilized adults and believe things like ‘voting to deny another group rights’ is the sort of thing a human being should do. It’s not working . . as evidenced by actual outcomes.
Once Awesome, Inc starts up we’ll have something much better to work with. Children learning useful fundamentals based on how they actually learn and given freedom to discover in ways that embrace the variety of humanity rather than forcing us to be incompetent clones.
You may think I kid. . . but there’s nothing else out there that is designed to give us our lives back by exploiting capitalism rather than avoiding it. . . and I’m honestly getting tired of all these incremental improvements.
Every baby on the planet should have the potential to live an amazing life and it’s time to break the birth-nation lottery, right?
I think you make a lot of very good points. I was an educator (teacher, principal and then part-time teacher again after retirement). Common Core isn’t all that different from any of the other “standardized” curriculums that came down over my 34 years in public education. Although, there is more emphasis on process, which is certainly a good thing. When you get right down to it, we are teaching essentially the same things now we taught 30 years ago - with perhaps the exception of computer and other technology-related skills. What has changed most drastically is the amount of time that is spent on testing. Rather than being a useful diagnostic tool - in my opinion, generally better used to evaluate the effectiveness of programs and overall curriculum than of individual students - testing has become part of the problem. It is hard to over-emphasize HOW MUCH INSTRUCTIONAL TIME is given away to test preparation and test-taking. Never mind the expense of it all. The stress levels connected with testing are off the charts now as compared to even ten or fifteen years ago. I will never forget the time I went looking for a student who was going to small -group test with me. She wasn’t in her homeroom, and one of her classmates informed me that she was in the bathroom throwing up. I went to check on her. I told her I thought she needed to go to the nurse, and that we could make the testing up with her the next day. She patted my arm, and said “Don’t worry. It’s OK. I always throw up before the test.” We have lost our minds when it comes to education. A little Common Sense would go a long, long, long way to improving our schools. Sorry for being long-winded. Even in retirement, my soapbox is close at hand!
Ygret, one of my most profound disappointments when I left school was that a few of the people I knew who had been bullied and harassed in school, when they were finally given power over others, demonstrated that the reason they weren’t busy demeaning and attacking others in school wasn’t because it was wrong, it was because they weren’t invited.
Your actions here (not just in this post, but as a pattern I’ve seen in other threads), reveal that as long as someone holds an unpopular opinion (I like tests!), you feel it’s safe to become personally abusive. The “kick the nerd” vibe ran very strongly through the initial post and your later reply.
I have no idea whether you’re only abusive in cases where it’s safe for you to do so, and you feel you have the support of the moderators and whatever coterie gave you the two likes on your initial attack, or whether you’re also abusive in real life, where there may be consequences, but the “rough and tumble” of the internet doesn’t mean that bullying isn’t bullying. It just means that you aren’t likely to pay the same price as you would if you did it in real life.
I’m certain you are capable of better than this. Most people stopped getting their jollies by demeaning others by the time they left high-school. Do you really want to be among the group that didn’t?
for there to be an apples to apples comparison the stakes have to be the same and they are not the same. law schools are not being threatened with government takeover if the passing percentage of their students on the bar exam is less than 95% for more than 2 years. meanwhile school districts are threatened with such a takeover. as of 2013 the average passing rate on the bar exam was 76.5% and the best passing percent of any state was montana, with a passing rate of 89%. that means that if law schools were being held to the same standards as public elementary and secondary schools most law schools would either be currently under the control of the department of education or they would have made enormous changes in their curriculum to make their passing rate go up. we can’t actually make it a true apples to apples comparison because law schools aren’t required to take every single person who applies for a spot the way public schools do.
I’m not exactly sure what point(s) you are in favor of. I think we mostly agree on principles.
Law schools are accredited by the ABA, which is authorized by the DOE. Any school that repeatedly fails to adequately educate their students to practice in the field should be closed (most readily assessed by bar pass rates). The authority to close poor schools is there - the political will to do so is sketchy. Because lobbyists, because money.
Not sure what the point is here, as you are discussing both entrance and exit criteria. Law schools have the privilege of setting and enforcing demanding admission standards. If anything, selection bias should be in their favor (i.e., they get to select the most qualified students who are most likely to be successful throughout their career) and thus their exit criteria (bar pass rates) should be higher and more homogeneous. The fact that they are not suggests that there are a lot of crappy law schools taking marginally qualified candidates.
Just because law schools have questionable performance on exit criteria does not mean we should lower the bar for other types of educational institutions. Each field is different and will likely have a different standard for acceptable exit criteria. If the current DOE rate for high schools may be too ambitious then it should be changed.
But my point remains, even if the current standard is too ambitious, it is correlated temporally with a record-high rate of HS graduation. That’s an important data point that needs to be included in the discussion of the value of standardized testing and uniform curricula.
What you’re calling bullying is my tendency to argue in a sanguine way, and to occasionally put in a jibe at someone here or there when I think they’ve said something incredibly narrow-minded or insulting. Neither you nor the OP we are discussing ever addressed my main point, which is that its insulting to come into a thread about a real issue and, in a pat, blase, and dismissive way, make light of other people’s concerns by declaring yourself immune to the issue at hand, as if your personal situation/preference is relevant at all to the discussion.
Too often on BB I see people doing just that, as if being contrary is some kind of virtue and adds to the discussion. What you see as unwarranted aggressiveness on my part I see as reacting to a form of aggression being put out by others, albeit usually in passive or dishonest form. I bristle at that sort of ‘argumentation’, and if it upsets someone well, they upset me too. You apparently come from a place or scene where raising one’s voice is the biggest crime, whereas I come from a place where saying passive aggressive things and being coy in a serious discussion are bigger crimes, and often warrant a smack back.
If you don’t like my style that’s not my problem. Because I have a massive ego I’ll compare my style to Matt Taibbi. He gets no small amount of grief from people who don’t like his “foul” language and the way he stakes out his position on issues he is reporting on. They claim it weakens his argument and influence. I don’t think so. What I find troubling is fake-objective “reporting” that pretends at fairness but leaves out incredibly important facts that would totally change a story if included. There’s way too much fake politeness in our society. It makes for stunted discussions and worse, allows people with incredibly retrograde and dishonest arguments to be treated equally to those who speak the truth. If we had a bit more smackdown culture in our political discourse it might shame some of those who make such dishonest arguments from opening their damned mouths and polluting our world with their drivel. If I have in some small way taught that poster not to open his/her mouth without thinking in the future I consider it a job well done.
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