Category Archives: Education

Grade Fog

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New and improved.

Props to Tyre for clearly posing the question. “Should students be rewarded for being friendly, prepared, compliant, a good school citizen, well organized, and hard-working? Or should grades represent exclusively a student’s mastery of the material?”

The buzzword is “standards-based grading”.

The better question is whether grades should represent exclusively a student’s mastery of the material or whether more subjective variables such as their attitude, citizenship, and effort should also be taken into consideration.

It’s hard to disagree with the standards-based graders assertion that assessment must rest primarily on mastery of course material. I want master pilots, plumbers, surgeons, and bridge builders. The question though is how far down that road to travel. For example, inevitably some students can demonstrate mastery of course material without attending class at all so why not eliminate compulsory attendance laws?

Related to that, why require athletes to attend practice, or musicians and actors to attend rehearsals if they are gamers who inevitably rise to the occasion once the race begins or curtain goes up? In actuality, the advocates are arguing for “standards-based grading lite”.

Also, everyone of us knows a litany of really smart people who never fulfill their personal or work-life potential because their flawed interpersonal skills and/or anemic work ethic.

Returning to my extracurricular references. Obviously athletes on a swim relay team, musicians in an orchestra, and actors in a drama troupe have to work together to achieve success. Just as it’s preposterous to think about a basketball player showing up at a game and trying to run a complicated offense or an actor showing up on opening night and having the necessary timing down, most students are going to take jobs that require them to be team members.

The standard grade-basers are arguing that as long as the student has the necessary knowledge in her head, she’s good to go. But is she?

Let’s start with the necessary knowledge, but not end there. I’m down with factoring in everything in Tyre’s opening list except “compliance” which is antithetical to independent, critical thinking upon which a meaningful education is built.

School-based teacher teams should identify important dispositions and interpersonal skills and then assess them in and outside of classrooms. Self-assessment should play an integral role. No doubt narrative will prove more useful than traditional letter grades.

Budget Blues

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Washington State—2011—Proposed cuts in education spending—in millions of dollars.

K-12 & Higher Education Spending Reductions
Use of federal education dollars (“Education Jobs”) (208.1)
Higher Education Across-the-Board Reductions (51.1)
Eliminate K-4 Enhancement (effective February 1) (39.4)
Reduce education reform programs (9.2)
Reduce OSPI administration and program funding (3.7)
Total (311.4)

S.O.B.

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2010 state of the blog.

I’ve studied reader statistics, top posts of all time, and taken a critical look at the blog. I’ve also studied successful blogs and identified certain commonalities.

My conclusion is I’ve failed. Yes, readership continues steadily upwards, but at too slow a pace. Participation is limited to some friends and family. I appreciate their comments, but after three years, it’s not nearly enough of a dialogue.

Why? Two reasons I think, my ambivalence towards social networking and my lack of focus. The lack of focus seems especially significant. Simply put, widely read blogs have a much clearer focus. They are “go to” blogs on one topic whether aging, triathlon, or baking. As you know if you’re a regular reader, my listed categories don’t really do justice to just how eclectic my interests tend to be.

Seven of the top ten most read posts of all time are education related. Bummer because professionally I feel like I did at mile 21 of the Seattle Marathon, running completely on fumes. The good news is I (think) I have a sabbatical coming up which will no doubt prove regenerative. On top of the fatigue, my normal healthy skepticism about the state of the national educational discussion has evolved into serious cynicism.

Then again education is what I know the most about. And when I skim the top rated education blogs, I have a sense that even in my depleted state I can make distinctive contributions within that part of the blogosphere.

So I’m going to try to write my way out of my professional funk by focusing much more closely on teaching and learning. I still intend on casting a pretty wide net, focusing on education writ large and not just formal schooling. And I’ll still provide the occasional fitness update.

Not sure yet, but contemplating a title change.

The metamorphis will take place over the remainder of the month. You’ll notice some changes starting with Monday’s post on a 11/27/10 NY Times article by Peg Tyre titled “A’s for Good Behavior“. Have your reading done ahead of time and please join me then.

Hope you stick around and make commenting a 2011 resolution.

This Just In

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We have a winner of the Byrnes Family 2010 Positive Attitude award. The winner scored high on several criterion including:

• Takes initiative to completes chores and does so with good cheer.

• Never holds a grudge.

• Celebrates every member of the family every day.

• Most upbeat, most consistently.

• Always up for a walk or car trip.

• Most beloved by neighbors.

• Greets every visitor with unbridled enthusiasm.

• Most likely to snuggle with others on the couch while watching t.v.

* While he lost points for sometimes rolling in his own feces, he had enough of a cushion to still win going away.

The All Important Middle School Years

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For adults with children at home. If that doesn’t describe you, consider forwarding the link to a parent friend.

I’m not God’s gift to parenting, I’m sharing my story in the hope of provoking conversation and proving helpful in some small way.

As a young parent I had a hunch. My adolescence and gut told me that the quality of my daughters’ close friend decision-making would go a long ways to determining how they’d turn out as young adults. Consequently, we talked about it a lot and both daughters processed our teaching, but in very different ways.

Social scientists are finding out what many parents already know, siblings are often remarkably different one from another. In fact, they’re finding out they’re almost as different as a random sampling of children.

Our daughters’ close friend decision-making stories are illustrative of two things: 1) how different siblings often are, and 2) how true my initial hunch was that the nature of children’s close friend decision-making greatly influences who they become as young adults.

In this regard, the sixth to eighth grade time period seems especially important. Near the end of fifth grade Eighteen announced that she wanted to go to a small, independent, academically oriented middle school. “But all your friends are going to Washington Middle School.” “I’ll make new ones.” There were 32-34 people in her sixth grade class and the girls subdivided into two groups of eight or so. For some reason I can’t quite explain, Eighteen had no interest in working her way into the “cool” group. Instead, she became very good friends with other girls who were perfectly happy being the “geeks at a school for geeks”.

Individually and collectively they were unusually secure in themselves for twelve and thirteen year olds. Consequently, they unwittingly denied the “cool” group their primary leverage, elevated social status. Social status is only a competition when two or more groups willing enter into competition. Eighteen and her friends opted out of the competition altogether. It was a beautiful thing. They did well in school, they did meaningful community service, they excelled in music and athletics, they encouraged each other academically, they avoided the pitfalls of drugs and alcohol, and then they expanded their circle two and three-fold in their large, comprehensive high school. Now they’re doing well in excellent colleges across the country.

The GalPal and I could have been forgiven if we thought “This is cake.”

When Fifteen was twelve, she decided to attend small, independent, academic middle school too. Similar class size, similar subdivision of girls, totally different outcome. Fifteen wanted in the “in” group. The alpha cool student quickly picked up on this and from the get go took advantage of it by being friendly one day or week and nasty the next. The rest of the inner circle followed the alpha cool student’s lead, so socially, sixth and seventh grade was a hellish time. In an effort to try to fit in she compromised her true values and sense of self. Fortunately, she did this before the “in” group had access to drugs and alcohol.

By eighth grade, she gave up trying to be accepted by a group that she began to realize she didn’t really want to be a part of anyways. Socially, she spent most of the year alternating between making friends with seventh graders and hanging out by herself. Throughout this time, her mom and dad were impressing upon her the importance of befriending people who bring out the best in you, who make you a better person than you otherwise would be. She was tired, frustrated, sad, and very receptive to our teaching at that point.

High school has been redemptive. She has wonderful friends who share her values of doing well in school, respecting oneself and others, being physically active, and she’s healthier and happier than ever. She has a bright future.

She returned from a party the other day where she caught up with a middle school friend who attends a different high school. She learned the alpha cool student has fallen off the straight and narrow and no one from that inner circle is friends with her anymore. I feel badly for her and Fifteen probably does too. Her middle school meanness seemed rooted in insecurities that no doubt have gotten the best of her.

Post-party Fifteen reflected that she’s “so glad” she went through social hell when she did because now she has a better feel for who she is and how to choose and make close friends that share her values. Mutual friendships, friends that willingly accept one another’s quirks, friends that continuously welcome other people into their circle, friends that inspire.

That chapter of our family life was anything but cake. It was hard to watch without swooping in, but had we helicoptered in, we very likely would have shortchanged the personal discoveries and growth Fifteen experienced.

I couldn’t be more proud of her and grateful for her great leap forward.

Housing Prices

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The conversation turned to real estate on a recent Saturday run when I shared my opinion that many sellers in our community were slow to grasp the correction as evidenced by their overpriced houses languishing on the market for six months to a few years.

You would have thought I suggested we extend our 10 miler another 16.2 just for the fun of it. The right wing nutters immediately jumped on me for assuming I knew more about free markets and home values than the actual homeowners themselves. And more importantly, who did I think I was, homeowners have the right to price their houses however they want.

Of course they do just like they have the right to be irrational and waste money more generally. Check out this chart:

credit—Jodi Ashline Newsletter

In the end, the average “priced right” and “priced reduced” home sell for the same price, but the “price reduced” home is on the market an extra 162 days. If “price reduced” homeowner has $100k in equity, and that equity was invested for 162 days @ 5%, they passed on earning $2,219. That’s the cost of exercising your constitutional right to overprice your home.

Around here at least, it appears that the larger and more expensive the home the greater the tendency to overprice it. That’s counterintuitive if one assumes, on average, the most well-to-do homeowners are the most business savvy, but I digress. We can also assume a much smaller pool of prospective buyers (I know it only takes one) and therefore the “average days on market” I suspect is far greater than 197, but for consistency sake we’ll stick with that.

Let’s consider a waterfront home that is four times the average at $1,317,392. Ultimately, after 197 days, overpriced sellers have to reduce their price $251,008 ($62,752 x 4). Let’s compensate for the too short “average days on market” by assuming that our waterfront sellers own their home outright. If “expensive price reduced” homeowner has $1,066,384 (the final sale price) in equity and had invested that for the too short 162 days @ 5%, they passed on earning $23,665.

To which the nutters might say, “That’s waterfront sellers right.” Which again, of course is right, just irrational.

Since I’m on math fire, and the nutters are down for the count again, one related thought. One oft repeated housing axiom is that housing corrections don’t matter if you’re buying and selling into the same down market. That’s only true in one of three possible scenarios—buying and selling similar priced homes. It doesn’t hold for buying a more or less expensive home than sold.

For example, consider the case of buying a more expensive home. Imagine you could sell your existing home for $300k or $100k less than its peak 2007 valuation. You buy a home for $1m or $250k less than its peak 2007 valuation. Had you made that move in 2007, it would have cost $1,250,000-$400,000 or $850,000. Today, the equation is $1m-$300,000 or $700,000 for a savings of $150k.

The opposite is also true. As a result of the correction, it’s more expensive to move down. Imagine you could sell your existing home for $600k or $200k less than its peak 2007 valuation. You buy a home for $300k or $100k less than its peak 2007 valuation. Had you made the move in 2007, you would have pocketed $400k, $800k sale price-$400k purchase price. Making that move today you would only pocket $300k, $600k sale price-$300k purchase price.

So assuming one has the resources, it makes more sense to move up in down markets and down in up markets.

School’s out nutters. Do they give out Economics Nobels for this stuff?

Carrots Not Sticks

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Business true believers assume workers are motivated exclusively by economic incentives. Consequently, they advocate paying teachers based upon how their students do on standardized test scores. But the rub of course is that the total “salary compensation pie” doesn’t increase, so instead of three teachers making 40k, one will make 30, one 40, and one 50.

I’ve already described the problems with this approach here and here.

An alternative is to get foundations and wealthy philanthropists to contribute to “teacher bonus endowments” in every district in the country. These endowments could enable school community committees to identify and award exceptional educators. Bonuses could be 1k, 10k, or as in this story from today’s LA Times, 25k.

Teaching and Texting

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Starting five or so years ago, the student teachers I work with really started wrestling in earnest with what to do about their students’ cell phones that started bubbling up in secondary school classrooms everywhere.

Despite a range of school-wide “no cell phones in class” policies, the typical secondary student continues to send over 3,000 texts a month from behind textbooks and under desks.

Now, some of my twenty-something student teachers, who’ve come of age during this era of inveterate texting, are doing it in my classes. As a result, we’re at the point where many texting school administrators are asking texting teachers to enforce no cell phone policies. And they wonder why they aren’t making any headway.

A first year writing student of mine told me that he and his football teammates recently volunteered in an elementary classroom near campus. He was amazed at the way the teacher capitalized on their help—by texting away on her cell phone throughout their entire time with her students.

Consider two contrasting texting schools of thought. One is the “embrace change, why fret about new forms of communication” school. These people point out that you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube and that interpersonal communication has been forever changed. Within schools the onus is on educators to adapt to this new, permanent reality. Work with not against incessantly wired young people. In fact, figure out how to use texting, cell phones, Facebook, and social networking for academic purposes within the classroom. To do otherwise is to risk becoming even more irrelevant.

While I’m sympathetic to that argument, I embrace a “model for and teach young people how to use cell phones and related personal technologies so that face-to-face interactions aren’t indelibly compromised” school of thought that’s really more about electronic etiquette writ large than just texting in schools. I’m not willing to take a laissez-faire, “texting in classrooms is way too pervasive to do anything about” approach.

When it comes to assessing my graduate student teachers’ class participation and professionalism, I ask them to help me assess themselves on these eight points:

1) I was prompt and attended each session.

2) I communicated as far in advance as possible about any class time missed.

3) My cell-phone never distracted anyone.  It never rang and I never text messaged during class.  I didn’t surf the net or catch up on email on my laptop.

4) I was careful not to dominate discussions.  I listened carefully to others and was attentive during my peers’ presentations and class discussions more generally.

5) My questions and comments often deepened class discussions.

6) I was conscious of others’ learning and purposely contributed to positive group dynamics.

7) [If applicable] I directly and constructively communicated any concerns I had during the course.

8) The course was better than it otherwise would have been as a result of my participation.

The most recent student I asked to stop texting could have argued that despite her texting, she’s excelling at 7.5 of the 8 points, so what’s the big deal. The big deal is this half point, “I listened carefully to others and was attentive during my peers’ presentations and class discussions more generally.”

She did argue that she’s a skilled multitasker and that she has no problem keeping up with everything. She’s unaware of recent neurological research that shows there is a clear multitasking cost in terms of divided attention.

For me there’s two issues, divided attention, and most importantly, eye contact is integral to a successful seminar. I design and teach the seminar to help students realize, for some of them for the first time ever, that they can in fact learn from one another. For that to happen though, they have to continuously and conscientiously track whomever is speaking. No matter how skilled the texter, texting inevitably compromises that.

It’s fascinating to me that each of this semester’s texters had no clue I was aware of their texting. One seminar has ten students, the other sixteen, and we sit around an oval table. As a result, it’s extremely easy to detect because heads dip and eyes go straight down.

I wonder what percentage of my students would say I should just chillax about in-class texting. I’m hopeful it would be a minority and that the majority appreciate my efforts to preserve the classroom as one of the last bastions of direct, eye-to-eye, interpersonal communication.

Websters—2011

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As these new entries in the 2011 Webster’s dictionary illustrate, the English language continues to evolve. Remember, to truly learn new words it’s important to integrate them into your speech as much as possible.

• dinorossi—to repeatedly come up just short of one’s objective. Also rossied or d-rossied. I hit the jump hard and caught major air but rossied the landing.

• notredame—of or pertaining to a once great individual or group that is loathe to accept its obvious decline. Also notredamed; notredamenation. Like Ancient Romans, 21st century citizens of the United States were caught off guard by their collective notredamenation.

• christopherhitchens—the incessant turning of events and topics into unmitigated negatives. Also c-hitched. I enjoyed Lester Brown’s newest book until he returned to form and c-hitched half way through.

• obamathon—something doomed, over time, by unrealistic expectations. Also female-obamamama; conservative-obamanation. It became clear early in the season that Jake Locker’s Heisman Trophy campaign was an obamathon to the voters.

• tigerwoods—to forego one’s family and reputation for extramarital sex. Also tdub; tdubbed; tdubbing. The South Carolina Governor said, “The hell with it, where’s my hiking boots and map of the Appalachian Trail? I’m tdubbing it.”

• claybennett—1) to say one thing and do another; 2) to steal. Also cbennett; cbenn; cbenned; claybennetted. 1) Whenever I call her, it’s someone else, think she cbenned me? 2) I didn’t have my wallet and was really hungry, so I claybennetted some powder donuts.

• nancypelosi—to fake smile even when deeply angered. Also nancypelosied. Despite the auditor’s obnoxiousness, I nancypelosied my way through the IRS interview.

• hailegebreselassie—to dominate opponents at different times and in different contexts, also gebb; gebbed; hgebb; hgebbed. Again, Ron gebbed Dave and Lance throughout the 2010 cycling season.


How Autobiographical?

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Awhile back, I started out a fitness update with a passing reference to an encouraging sibling of mine who once told me “no one cares” about my swimming, cycling, and running.

That begs a larger question. What type of writing do readers, blog readers more specifically, find most interesting?

I’m not entirely sure, but I have some hypotheses. Think of the blogosphere in terms of a continuum with writers either off the stage altogether, on the stage’s edge, or center stage. Put differently, there are blogs focused almost exclusively on impersonal specialized content of some sort; other blogs that focus on the sometimes personal application of relatively impersonal specialized content, and blogs whose content is in essence the personal details of the author’s life.

I don’t read a lot of blogs, but here are a few that I do that represent fairly well the different points on the continuum. Each is wildly successfully at least measured by readership. Also interesting, Cowen and Trunk self identify as having Aspergers.

Example one, Marginal Revolution by Tyler Cowen, an economist. Written primarily for other economists, the content is sometimes a reach for me, which is nice. Cowen is scarily prolific posting several times a day. The main thing to note about his blog is he’s mostly off-stage. Sure he’ll ask for restaurant suggestions for where ever he’s traveling next, and he’ll summarize what he’s reading every few weeks (also scary, seemingly a book a day), but don’t look for him to write about whether he’s getting along with his wife or daughter or his non-academic interests.

Example two, DC Rainmaker by Ray Maker, a triathlete. I highlighted Ray’s blog recently. Written primarily for other triathletes, the content tends towards the science of triathlon training. His reviews of triathlon related electronics are the clearest, most detailed, and intelligently written up on the internet. He’s also an outstanding photog who sprinkles twenty or so pics in his three or four posts a week. Ray is my “stage’s edge” example. Two-thirds of the time he focuses in on all things triathlon. The other third, you learn about his worldwide travels (I’m guessing he does IT for the State Department), his fascination with sharks, his love of cooking and food, and “The Girl” who he was recently engaged to.

Example three, Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist. Penelope is the undisputed “center stage” champion. She’s successful I suspect for the same reasons the authors my writing students and I are reading—Esme Cadell, Sherman Alexie, and Frank McCourt—are: 1) She understands that not every moment in every day and not every day in every week is equally interesting. She’s skilled at teasing out from the details of her life “critical incidents” that encapsulate the most interesting elements of her life that also resonate with other people. 2) When describing and exploring the meaning of the critical incidents of her life she grabs readers by the collar by providing intimate details even when they are not flattering. Scratch that, especially when they’re not flattering. And there-in lies the third reason. 3) She doesn’t self-censure herself, instead she opts for authenticity, transparency, the unvarnished truth, pick your phrase(s). In the same literary vein, Tina Fey’s or Liz Lemon’s self-deprecation on “30 Rock” is pure genius.

So in essence, my sib didn’t go far enough. If I self-censure myself and churn out safe, vague, self-conscious descriptions of the personal aspects of my life no one will care for any parts of my personal life story let alone the swimming, cycling, and running chapters of it.

And in all honesty, three years in and I still haven’t figured out yet how to follow Trunk’s, Cadell’s, Alexie’s, and McCourt’s examples in this format. For example, I’ve consciously chosen not to write about the most personally significant thing that has happened to me this year. I’m not quitting though and I suppose this post is another step in the process of figuring where I want to sit on the continuum and exactly what type of blogger I want to be.