I am not saying this just to make Mikhail happy about assigning me the Accounting Department in my first year at Schwartz, but I really am enjoying working there. I had my misgivings early on, especially about the students treating me as a second-class citizen, a “fellow” who apparently has no clue about accounting, thus no need to pay attention to her. What I have been experiencing, however, is a great deal of gratitude on their part and a sense of appreciation that, at times, makes me feel a bit uncomfortable. After all, I tell them, I am only doing my job helping them with their presentations.

Maybe it is because of their responsiveness to me that I become a softee when it comes to the evaluation of their performance. Luckily I do not have to grade them, but I talk with their professor about how they did, and, more often than not, I find myself taking their side. I want the professor to be more generous, more understanding of how nerve-wracking a presentation can be, more embracing of the students’ individual skills and needs, etc, etc. On the professor’s side, I am facing a set of extremely well organized grading scale that breaks down final grades to the smallest percentage. This is how grading should really look like, I tell myself, envying the social sciences for their apparent efficieny that messy humanities people, let alone literature buffs like me, tend to miss. Yet, I feel like a coward when the professor mentions a student’s way of being too “soft-spoken” and I let it go saying only that her “softness” comes from her cultural training as a Japanese woman. (Apologies if this comes across as relying, yet again, on stereotypes about Asian women. Obviously not all Japanese women are low-key, but I just finished reading Kyoko Mori’s memoir, Polite Lies, and I think I got at least a better appreciation of Japanese cultural normativity than I had before reading the book.) Evidently, the professor, who has earned all my respect for his superbly organized way of doing his job, cannot let himself bogged down by my remark since he has to evaluate the final product, but I am left with a sense of failure.  I wish I had a way of giving more time and space to the process, of being able to assist each student individually while I do not run around myself trying to finish up my dissertation. In my dream-world, I use a grading rubric that includes “cultural baggage” as a big bonus point because I know how heavy it gets at times and how important it is to keep carrying it on in spite of all.

Has anyone else noticed the new signs on the subway? For the second time in two years, the MTA is conducting a survey of its riders. I don’t remember seeing the signs when they were doing the survey the first time around, but it was apparently some time in 2007, and they wanted to know what suggestions we had for making the subway system better. You can go to to their website and see the results — what they call the “Rider Report Card.”

Now the MTA wants to know exactly how and why we New Yorkers get around the city. When I first saw the advertisement for the survey I was skeptical. I couldn’t help but wonder if they were actually going to take our feedback seriously or if this was just a public relations move to get us all to feel a little more hopeful that better commuting days are ahead. When I got home, I went online to learn more about the survey. As it turns out, the MTA has contracted an outside firm, Nustats, to gather this information for them. Somehow, the fact that they are investing money to do this made me feel a little more confident that the MTA is actually making an attempt at genuine communication with its customers.  However, I found two things rather peculiar: The MTA does not actually mention this current survey on their web page; I actually had to google “MTA Survey” to find it. Also, the survey is not being made available to the public via the internet. In order to participate you need to either download a paper form from a PDF file or call a toll free number and take the survey over the phone. I’m curious about those choices. I’m also curious about the $500 prize they are giving out weekly to one survey participant who is to be chosen at random from a drawing. If you’re interested, go to:

http://www.nustats.com/mta/

As the presidential election approaches I find myself thinking a lot about communication between institutions and individuals and wondering how much weight does the individual voice carry. But also, how important is it that individuals feel their voices are being heard? Will the chance for $500 entice subway riders to actually pick up the phone or download the file and participate in this survey? How sincerely does the MTA actually want us to?

"As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of America, where do they go? It's Alaska!" Palin CBS interview, Sep. 2008

Test-Making 101: A Teacher’s Take

Most teachers know that multiple choice tests focusing on facts only are easier for their students to ace than essay tests requiring students to use those facts to analyze a problem and reason their way to a solution. A concrete example would be a map test requiring students to merely identify countries and geographic features of central Europe during World War II, versus an essay test requiring students to argue which side of the warring alliances, the Allied or Axis powers, had the geographic advantage during that war.

Know-nothing students can easily cram to memorize the map of Europe at that time and score an A on the first test. But to score an A on the second test would require an intelligence orders of magnitude higher. Requiring students to demonstrate an understanding of such things as the significance of the easily traversed plains of Poland and the limited coastlines of Germany in the context of the war, the second test would expose which students really deserved an A, and which knew how to cover their shallowness by excelling at rote memorization.

This puts me in mind of Sarah Palin right now, whom I picture desperately cramming with her debate coaches in McCain’s estate in Sedona for the Big Test on Thursday: the Vice Presidential debates.

With even the conservative punditry now conceding Palin is an “embarrassment” who is “not ready” to assume the presidency in the not-unlikely event of the death or disability of the oldest - and either the most politically reckless or medically clueless - presidential candidate in the history of the United States, Thursday’s debate, offering us a glimpse at the most sequestered vice presidential candidate in living memory, looms larger as a serious moment for the fate of the nation because, quite simply, it’s one of the only chances we’ll have to see the candidate think and talk on her feet, live and unscripted.

Palin’s Report Card So Far

Student Palin’s grade point average started with a sterling 100% for her public speaking assessment at the Republican National Convention. She turned in a gifted performance there, reading someone else’s speech off a teleprompter. A+.

But since then, in her three subsequent assessments - a number about which classmate Joe Biden, who has had almost daily assessments in the media and on the campaign trail, should complain to the principal, since the teacher is clearly showing favoritism to Palin by excusing her from all these tests - Palin’s g.p.a. has crashed and burned. She scored a C in her softball interview with Charles Gibson, a C in her love-fest with FOX’s Sean Hannity, and an F (a “Z-” grade being unavailable) in her debacle with Katie Couric.

What We Learn from Student Councils

Watching the former beauty queen and high school track star eat crow on the national stage is an experience not unfamiliar to that of many high school teachers who watch that painful annual ritual in high schools around the world called the Student Council elections. They always involve the popular kid - the cheerleader or football star with ill-starred academic records - deciding, due to ill-advised assurances that popularity is all that matters to win an election, to enter the race. Then on speech day, the cafeteria kings and queens face off against the Math Club and Literary Magazine whizzes, and the former show their stuff while the latter show their lack of stuff.

It often ends in tears on stage, pity in the crowd, and teachers afterwards trying to help the unfit student draw some wisdom from the experience about the difference between confidence and ability, and between sound advice and bad.

The McCain campaign gave Palin bad advice here. No mayor of a town smaller than many big-city high schools (only 6,000 residents) not yet through her second year as governor of a state whose population is smaller than all but North Dakota and Vermont should be expected to ace a test designed to assess the next president of the nation with the world’s largest economy and military. And that the McCain campaign didn’t foresee this blinding reality when they urged her to join the ticket speaks volumes about either its staggeringly bad judgment or, to go Rorschach on you, its withering cynicism regarding the intelligence of the American electorate.

And as a result, the good cheerleader is undergoing a public humiliation that pulls at the heart-strings of any caring teacher. “Whoever put her up to this,” the teacher thinks, “should be ashamed.”

The Most Important Test in American History? A Plea to Gwen Ifill

But Palin rose to the bait, and the debate is set. She’s cramming in Sedona for a test any good teacher who knows this student knows she cannot ace - if the test is a form of assessment for thinking instead of memorizing.

And that’s what makes me think the most important person in this debate in not Palin, and not Biden. It’s the assessor - the person who creates the test questions.

So to PBS moderator Gwen Ifill, I can only offer this advice: give an assessment that will show the electorate not who can memorize the most facts. That kind of test leads to a class with all A’s. Instead, give a test that will show us how these candidates will use their knowledge-base to solve problems.

A very perceptive commenter on the Chicago Tribune’s blog says as much in the below:

The key to the debate will be for either the moderator or Biden to dig beneath the thin veneer of rote memorization that will be the basis of her performance. She has had plenty of time to memorize some statistics and talking points to certain questions she knows will be on the test, and even someone with her intellectual paucity can do that somewhat convincingly.

It’s when you dig slightly beneath the surface that she implodes. As anyone who has ever B.S.ed their way through anything knows, your goose is cooked when you’re asked to explain the basis of your statements. Being able to give simple, concise answers to complicated questions is way harder than it looks. You need to have a deep understanding of what you’re talking about - an understanding of international and domestic affairs that are the result of years and years of study and analysis, not just a few weeks of cramming.

If Ifill’s debate questions follow those guidelines, the nation benefits. If not, it may fall victim to the most fateful and disastrous consequences of grade inflation due to lack of assessment rigor in the history of the United States.

Palin is clearly likable, her policies and beliefs notwithstanding. But by putting herself in line for the Oval Office, we can’t let our sympathy for her soften our assessment of her. She’s not running for student council or small-town mayor. She’s running for 76-year-old-heartbeat-away-from-president. It shouldn’t be an easy test to pass.

–

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7 Comments

• At September 30, 2008, Kate Tabor wrote:

  On this, the Jewish New Year, where we wish our families and friends a good and sweet new year, we are looking at a nation whose capitol seems to be in chaos over the bailout of the financial markets and an election where there is the possibility of the beauty queen/weather girl as vice president. Oh, yeah - we are at war, too.

  So I wish us all peace and love in the new year. Clay, I appreciate your last three posts. They make me gasp, laugh, cry, and hope that together we are smarter than we seem.

  In life there will be at least one test. And yes, sometimes the test is cumulative.

  Kate Tabors last blog post..Little Moments Matter

• At September 30, 2008, Penelope M wrote:

  Heh, I wish your Student Council comparison were accurate. I've never been somewhere where it didn't come down to either no one else running or the popular kid winning.

  I look forward to this debate with great curiousity, that's for sure.

• At September 30, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  Ouch. Touche.

• At October 1, 2008, marian Hallin wrote:

  I am a great admirer of Gwen Ifill, a great admirer of great women and I can only hope that on Thursday the questions will be of an essay type. The American people deserve to just how qualified Sarah Palin is or how woefully ill qualified she is. Multiple choice questions from Ifill without followup depth questions will certainly be as revealing as Palin's qualifications appear to be at this moment......about as unqualified as can be!

• At October 1, 2008, Kate Tabor wrote:

  Hi Clay -

  Check out the most recent Couric/Palin-McCain interviews. Yes, that's right - they went back for more.

  Here's an excerpt on Talking Points Memo:

  http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/221008.php

  And you might like FiveThirtyEight.com and Nate Silver's thoughts on why McCain will keep Palin on the ticket: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/09/mccain-is-stuck-with-palin.html

  Kate Tabors last blog post..Little Moments Matter

• At October 3, 2008, Jabiz Raisdana wrote:

  Great article to think about:

  http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2008/09/sarah-palin-thr.html

• At October 4, 2008, Palin Debate Flowchart: Smiling Down the Decline | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] and intelligence a “passed test” on Palin’s part (and Ifill miserably failed my test for quality debate questions), post it, spread it, make it [...]

I just read an interesting article by Mark Bauerlein in The Chronicle about how students’ approaches to reading and interacting with information online seem to be hindering their ability to read and learn from texts in more traditional settings.  Specifically, he contends that:

The inclination to read a huge Victorian novel, the capacity to untangle a metaphor in a line of verse, the desire to study and emulate a distant historical figure, the urge to ponder a concept such as Heidegger’s ontic-ontological difference over and over and around and around until it breaks through as a transformative insight — those dispositions melt away with every 100 hours of browsing, blogging, IMing, Twittering, and Facebooking.

This brings up a lot of interesting questions as educators are increasingly trying to incorporate some of these technologies into the classroom and publishers are pushing textbook content into more profitable eBooks.  Are we actually helping students by doing all of this?  Some initial studies of middle and high school students suggest that technology-intensive curricula do not improve student achievement.

Bauerlein has many interesting points in the article and makes a good case for “unplugging” some aspects of teaching and learning.  However, in my opinion, the question of whether or not technology in general improves/impairs student learning is not that interesting.  Instead, we should be focusing our assessments on understanding which technologies can be usefully employed in which aspects of the curricula.  Finding pedagogical fit for relevant technologies seems to be what we are striving towards at BLSCI.  Thus, as an institute, we undoubtedly have much to contribute to this important discussion.

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A permanent present - what a haunting phrase. How bizarre and surreal it must be to serve a life sentence in the prison of the moment, trapped forever in the perpetual now, a world without end, a time without later.  — Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, p. 14

Call me crazy, but I couldn’t help but think of students when I read this earlier tonight.  A particular kind of student, anyway.  The Korean kind, for sure, and possibly, from what I read, more and more American ones too.

I mean the ones who are so over-scheduled with schoolwork, homework, SAT test-prep cram schools, and all the other madness that keeps them focused on memorizing the data and pounding out the grunt-work, one assignment and one GPA-increment at a time, year in and year out - from what, grade 9? Or is that too late to begin worrying these days? - that they rarely have time to pull back and reflect on anything at all. ¹

“A permanent present.” Isn’t that what the overload of content, testing, homework, and extra-curricular bullet-gaming for college applications is creating for our young?  It makes me wonder if school itself is not the cause of “A.D.D.”: when attention is constantly hurried in seven different disciplines from unit to unit, no option to pull the cord and get off the train, is it any wonder attention is deficient and understanding is, to quote an old Bowie line, a series of “one-inch thoughts”?

Maybe I’m wrong. I know I am with some teachers, bless ‘em. The ones that choose thought over coverage, choice over prescription.

That permanent present, by the way?  It’s a description of people who have had lobotomies or other traumas to the frontal lobe.

*     *     *

American college students expect to live longer, stay married longer and travel to Europe more often than average. They believe they are more likely to have a gifted child, to own their own home and to appear in the newspaper, and less likely to have a heart attack, venereal disease, a drinking problem, an auto accident, a broken bone  or gum disease.  Ibid., p. 18

Kids, I hate to break it to you, but my experience of you college-bound grade-junkies is one, overall - again, let’s bless the exceptions - of pity and disappointment.  You’ve got great grades, yes, but so little else. No driving passion for anything unique or original, no budding genius.  It’s more schools’ fault than yours, but you’re not completely free of blame.  You’re the ones allowing yourselves to be turned into carbon copies of “competitive college applicants.”  You can choose else-wise.

I hate to break this to you too:  the college of your dreams is no guarantee of happiness. You may already be decreasing your chances of future happiness by your daily compromises to get into those schools.  It’s hard to have a soulful life, if you sold your soul before graduating high school.  Souls are hard things to buy back.

*     *     *

Genius Defined (It’s not what you think):

Let’s take a quick detour into the meaning and origins of that word, “genius.”  Most of us don’t know what it means when we use it. Apple’s dictionary gives us a good etymology:

ORIGIN late Middle English : from Latin, ‘attendant spirit present from one’s birth, innate ability or inclination,’ from the root of gignere ‘beget.’ The original sense [tutelary spirit attendant on a person] gave rise to a sense [a person's characteristic disposition] (late 16th cent.), which led to a sense [a person's natural ability,] and finally [exceptional natural ability] (mid 17th cent.).

Wikipedia gives us a little more:

In Ancient Rome, the genius was the guiding or “tutelary” spirit of a person. . . .

In Roman mythology, every man had a genius and every woman a juno. . . .

Originally, the genii and junones were ancestors who guarded over their descendants. Over time, they turned into personal guardian spirits, granting intellectual prowess.

Wikipedia closes with this intriguing gem:

Sacrifices were made to one’s genius or juno on one’s birthday.

And that gem strikes me as crushingly ironic today, because today, we don’t sacrifice to our genius at all; instead, we sacrifice that genius itself  - to our schools.

Look at the emphasized words in the passages above, and tell me if I’m wrong when I say: the essence of genius is precisely what schools exclude.  What does that essence consist of?

1. Individual Inclination, Innate Ability

Note the root “gen” in “genius.”  Genius is present in our origin (same root), our genes, our genesis - our nature.  These shape and determine our individuality.  In this sense, “genius” is not about being brilliant, but about having a cognitive-emotional-creative fingerprint that is entirely unique from the moment we’re born.  To get homespun for a second, it’s just that thing that makes us tick, that piques our individual interest or curiosity.

Sir Ken Robinson tells the sad tale of the researchers asking six-year-olds if they were artists, and all of them saying yes; but asked four years later, deep into the assembly line of generic curriculum and one-size-fits-all learning, only a fraction of hands go up; and by adolescence, almost none do.  You may quibble with the difference between artists and geniuses, but to me they’re deeply related in this simple fact: artists pursue their own “individual inclinations and innate abilities” - their own genius.

2. Genius as “Tutelary Spirit”

More fun with definitions and etymologies: “tutelary,” defined: “serving as a protector, guardian, or patron.”  Its etymology: “from Latin tutela ‘keeping’ (from tut- ‘watched,’).”

So to the ancients, our individually innate inclinations and abilities, our”genius,” was that thing that protected us, guarded us, “kept” us, “watched” us and, most interestingly - playing with the sense of “patron” - fathered us.

To be clearer, to the ancients, the only teacher you needed was your own “genius,” your own curiosity and drive to satisfy it - whatever “it” is, which depends on who you are.

Quit reading if you’re not into this line of thought, because I want to follow it down another linguistic byroad to the obvious and, today, ubiquitous derivative of the old world “tutelage”: you guessed it - “tutor.”  It’s another crushing irony: though derived from “tutelage,” the deep old word associated with letting our genius be our teacher, the word “tutor” today has nothing to do with inborn genius, and everything to do with its opposite: school-manufactured uniformity and anti-individualism, anti-genius.  Again, the dictionary is my witness:

tutor |ˈt(y)oōtər|
noun
a private teacher, typically one who teaches a single student or a very small group.
• chiefly Brit. a university or college teacher responsible for the teaching and supervision of assigned students.
• an assistant lecturer in a college or university. [emphasis added]

Goodbye, genius; hello, schooliness.  Gone is the language of spirit, of nature, of self-tutelage now, and in its place is the lexicon of schools: “teacher, student, university, college, responsible for, supervision, assigned, lecturer.”  Genius, the once-”tutelary guardian, protector, and patron” of “natural, innate inclination and disposition” is overthrown, and in its place now is the academic teacher, the master of a classroom, stuffing the headpieces of the young with the straw that will be transformed into golden grades.  To hell with your genes, your nature, your curiosity.  My job as a tutor is to help you advance to the front of whatever class you are forced to take.²

The Why of this Rant: To Students

flowers, drowning

College will not make you successful.  A degree that gets you a good job will not make you happy.  Unless: you remember your genius (if any has survived your schooling), and let it drive your educational choices.

I can’t tell you how many well-heeled parents I’ve spoken with at length in parent conferences over the years, parents wealthy, attractive, full of status and prestige and awash in luxury, who have nonetheless left me, again, feeling little more than pity and disappointment.  The sparkle in their rings and watches did not extend into their conversation, their wit, their eyes.  They had succeeded at the college game, made buckets of money, but with all of that success, had failed to find happiness.

The exceptions? Bless them, they seemed to choose an education in line with their genius - not their parents’ or their society’s wishes.

And all of this comes from a few pages from a book on that wonderful new field of psychology, “happiness studies,” and its wonderful news that, when it comes to making choices that steer us to happy futures, we’re our own worst enemies.  Check it out. It’s a good read - and hey, it will also impress your SAT essay reader, since it’s by a Harvard professor.

–

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1. I read recently that the ETS is now floating a PSAT clone for the middle school years.  Great work, bastards. Rob even more living and learning from childhood by making them obsess on indelible test scores even earlier in their childhoods.  Pocket more profits from your stupifying study guides for tests that kill curiosity and implant the quest for the safe, right answer.
2. And let me tell you: my tutoring experience so far has been fun, but shocking too. The parents are generally indifferent to the growth of any passion or wisdom or skill in their children that is not related to helping them ace this or that class or test.  They seem no more concerned, in other words, with the genius of their children than schools are.

21 Comments

• At August 22, 2008, Andrea Hernandez wrote:

  I teach in a private school where I am also a parent and can tell you firsthand the pressure to have academically gifted children who are also talented at sports and music and fluently multilingual. Why? Parental ego? Wishes and hopes for child's future happiness? Complete delusion?

  I have to believe that the motivation for this craziness is love of one's children and a belief in education as the key to a rich and fulfilling life.

  I completely agree with your assertion that happiness comes through knowing yourself and following your genius. If only it were so simple. By that I mean, if only our schools and society recognized that genius comes in many packages, that everyone's path is not supposed to be the same. As for schools (and schooliness, of course!), I have long been a believer that if schools would do a better job of acknowledging and teaching to different talents, overall academic performance would improve as a result. Who wants to be beaten over the head with more and more academics when your true love and talent is music (or art or p.e. or....). But, as high-stakes testing becomes more high-stakes, schools respond by taking away art and music. Vicious cycle.

  Andrea Hernandezs last blog post..As Real as Gravity

• At August 22, 2008, Andrea Hernandez wrote:

  related article you might find interesting here-

  http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=402674&encCode...

  Andrea Hernandezs last blog post..As Real as Gravity

• At August 22, 2008, Bill Fitzgerald wrote:

  Hello, Clay,

  The Middle School PSAT is being rolled out in 2010 -- I read about it on August 8th in the LA Times: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-test8-2008aug08,0,1941799.story

  On a related note, the Princeton Review, one of the test prep companies raking in cash fueled by parental fear, recently posted the private information of over 100,000 students on their web site for 7 weeks. The story was in the NY Times this week; I blogged about it a couple days ago, and I'm truly amazed that no one seems to care. Those interested can google this string to read more: Princeton Review leaks student data

  Sure makes me wish some crazy person would advocate for an entire graduating class to boycott the SAT, and deprive the test of any pretense of statistical validity, and force colleges to figure out another way of admitting students, as colleges couldn't survive without tuition revenue.

  FWIW, you've been on a tear as of late. Thanks for the thought-provoking reading.

  Cheers,

  Bill

• At August 22, 2008, Charlie A. Roy wrote:

  I spent yesterday at Freshmen orientation explaining to our children that the mission of Catholic education is to educate the whole person to fulfill their God given dignity in line with their unique gifts. Then I attended a curriculum meeting and had the aching thought that we pay much more lip service to this mission than actually fulfilling it as i listened to a self study be denied because of what it would do to the whole GPA game amongst our seniors.

  I'm thinking about returning to commodity trading to make enough money to open my own school and see if it can't be done a better way.

  Charlie A. Roys last blog post..Finding Balance

• At August 22, 2008, KarenJan wrote:

  Clay,

  This is such a timely post for me to read. I discouraged my son from taking the PSAT and the SAT. (a little less money in the pockets of the ETS! I have joked about starting an organization called, "Mothers Against the SAT") I also encouraged him to pursue something other than the traditional college route as it is not what interests him or what he is skilled at.

  He had one teacher who recognized he was good at something in HS - she validated his digital photography skills - his eye for visual detail and visual composition.

  Now, all his peers are leaving for college and he is not. He is still figuring out what is ahead for him. The world is still his but I am feeling guilty that I limited his options by encouraging him to pursue alternatives that did not include applying to a four year college or university.

  I know I didn't, but the pressure to do the "schooliness" route is intense not just K-12 but beyond.

  (We live in Massachusetts, the pressure is great).

  Thank you for helping me remember what is important.

  KarenJans last blog post..Got Architectural Barriers?

• At August 22, 2008, Michael Doyle wrote:

  Once again you have my head buzzing--I'm going to throw out a few (incomplete) thoughts. Your post was incredibly powerful--it gets to the heart of education (to life, really).

  Every now and then a good discussion breaks out in the faculty lounge. Really. They often end badly, with someone ranting about "these kids!" or "this administration!" or "you don't understand!" which is why a place like Beyond School matters.

  What's the point of education? The question often comes up when we discuss curriculum, which we do a lot in our department.

  I think American public education exists for two primary reasons, and I continue to teach with these reasons in mind.

  1)To prepare our children for an active role as responsible citizens in our democratic society.

  2) To enable children to pursue happiness

  The first reason doesn't get much flack--who's going to argue with Thomas Jefferson? If the conversation drifts to what I mean by "responsible citizens", a few folks get a little upset that it doesn't jive with "compliant, docile consumer" (though I think they use the words "good American"), but I'll save my long-windedness on that for another day.

  I will say that I have a beautiful copy of the Bill of Rights that I will post to a wall as soon as I get a permanent classroom; it beats a headshot of whoever happens to be our current monarch.

  The second part, the pursuit of happiness, doesn't get too far in discussion. It is a dangerous idea to bandy about in unhappy places, especially in a culture that is confused about what happiness means (or rather, how to know happiness).

  Quite frankly, the idea of using education to help child pursue happiness pisses off a lot of people I talk to. Apparently our job is not to create happy citizens, but rather to prepare them for college. (They're not, of course, mutually exclusive, but neither are they interdependent.)

  Again, I am not talking about "Whoopee! I won the lottery, let's all go out and get smashed!" happy, and neither was Jefferson (there's that name again) when he wrote the Declaration of Independence.

  What makes others happy?

  None of my business as a public school teacher, I guess, but I think we do just that when we insist that students do such-and-such to get to college to get a degree, make money, so...they can be happy.

  What makes me happy?

  Sitting outside as the sun sets, knowing I did some worthwhile work (not 14 hours of "some", but some), sharing songs with others I love, ideally with an instrument one or two of us can play, eating food that tastes good, sitting on chairs someone I know built, sharing true (if not factual) stories.

  My tastes are not universal, and I dare not impose them on students, but at least I have an idea of what makes me happy, and most of what makes me happy makes others happy as well.

  Relaxing with people we love, sharing stories we people we love, breaking bread with stories we love, creating things with people we love. (Yeah, I know, sounds like the Ann Arbor Hash Bash, and people are quick to dismiss these ideas--but I suspect they're universal.)

  How do I get children to a point where they can pursue happiness?

  Provide them with practical tools to get them there.

  How does a science teacher do this?

  Teach them to separate observations from delusions, show them how to critically question what they know, and just as important, how to critically dissect what others tell them.

  Oh, yes, one more thing--to show them how complex and large the universe is. Show them. And allow them to realize they are part of something larger.

  The title "science teacher" subtly belies a much bigger problem--we compartmentalize schooling. If someone asks me what I do for a living, I say I teach, not "I'm a science teacher."

  Probably the best way to help children become happy citizens is to surround them with happy adults. This often happens in the home, less often in school.

  Too many teachers are counting the days to retirement.

  I think the next best way to enable children to pursue the good life is to give them practical life skills, skills that allow independent living as well as independent thinking.

  Ideally this happens at home--kids should learn how to build, fix, read, sew, grind, plant, change a tire, set a toilet, shingle a roof.

  Sorry to ramble, but you touched a big nerve with a high voltage line.

  Michael Doyles last blog post..What's matter?

• At August 22, 2008, Michael Doyle wrote:

  I didn't even get to a "permanent present"--if you are in a state of general happiness, I bet you're in some sort of permanent present as well.

  Shoot, the permanent present is all we really have. The problem is too many people are striving for an imagine future or trying to recapture some rapturous past.

  I'd argue that the reason we find acknowledging the permanent present so frightening is that many of us are not happy.

  But I'd best read the book--I think I might be comparing apples and oranges.

  (I may eventually drag parts of your discussion over to my blog, with accreditation, of course. Typing in these tiny comment boxes without a chance to edit after the fact is contributing to my rapid loss of hair. I cringe when I reread parts of my posts after hitting the submit button.)

  Michael Doyles last blog post..What's matter?

• At August 23, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  @Doyle: Your "about" sidebar's image of children "confounding" education by playing in ponds was in the mental ether when I wrote this post. (And you can always submit a corrected comment and ask me to delete the first draft.)

  @Andrea: Vicious. @KarenJan's "fantasy" of starting a "parents against the SAT" should be re-categorized as a project. Shirky's Here Comes Everybody is full of ideas of how to do that.

  @Charlie: It must be hard to be an administrator. As I commented on your site recently, you've opened my eyes to just how hard that job must be for administrators who really do want to make changes against the grain.

  @Bill: That's the second time you've mentioned that boycott, and I know you think it implausible (and I agree). But I can't help but think in this age we have the tools to raise a high-decibel ruckus to put these charlatans in the spotlight. FairTest.org is trying. A professor at MIT is also doing a good job. And SAT-optional schools are increasing. Again, I think of Shirky. When life stabilizes, it's something to tinker with.

  @KarenJan again: I think you did the right thing. You can always tell which people followed their genius (Joseph Campbell called genius "bliss") - there's a there there.

• At August 23, 2008, Paul C wrote:

  Hi Clay,

  Brilliant post. Great to see that your blog site is a fertile garden for cultivating your own intellectual fruits and vegetables - all organic.

  I spent a day with Will Richardson at a workshop this past week. Just think if our student savants had the opportunity to receive quality instruction about establishing their own blogs and were empowered to develop their literacies.

  I recently read an excellent article about "The Essence of Understanding" which fits in well with this discussion - engaging the intellectual fire.

  An overview can be read at:

  http://quoteflections.blogspot.com/2008/08/dimensions-of-understanding.h...

  Paul Cs last blog post..Music to Bring One to Tears

• At August 23, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  Okay, Doyle, we aim to please. I sought and found an "edit comments" WordPress plugin. Commenters now have five minutes to edit after submitting.

  Let's see how it feels.

  It's butt-ugly, but that's okay, I guess.

  [Edited update: Works spiffingly.]

• At August 23, 2008, Bill Farren wrote:

  I enjoyed this post (and comments!) immensely. In this season of motivational dog-and-pony shows aimed at kicking off a successful year of grade-grubbing, we'd all be better off simply foregoing the pre-fab prof-dev and instead, read this post aimed at preventing more soul detachments.

  I'm definitely all over the SAT boycott thing. I think it's an interesting idea with much potential. My concern is: if a boycott were undertaken and large amounts of people participated, would some other equally heinous metric take the SAT's place? Humans seem to like to be able to compare each other in very objective ways.

  I don't know. There's a lot to think about here.

  Bill Farrens last blog post..Aerial Viewing

• At August 23, 2008, The Death of Genius in the Name of College wrote:

  [...] http://beyond-school.org/2008/08/22/death-of-genius/ attitude, post-secondary system, success [...]

• At August 23, 2008, Your page is now on StumbleUpon! wrote:

  [...] Your page is on StumbleUpon [...]

• At August 24, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  @Andrea, thanks for that link, by the way. A good read.

• At August 24, 2008, How Freedom Can Depress Students: More from Happiness Studies | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] here for Part 1: On the Death of Genius for the Sake of College] The fact is that human beings come into the world with a passion for control, they go out of the [...]

• At August 25, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  Andrea, I'm both testing a new "threaded comment" plugin I just installed with you as the 'guinea pig' (and did I spell "guinea" right, he wondered perfectly in line with Andrea's latest post), and also by choice - just to say I like "as real as gravity" as a blog title because it goes beyond "tech" and "work," and into directions my mind loves.

  And while I'm at it, let me add that I've enjoyed the comments and the tweets, and enjoy your writing in them and on your blog.

  Check out BS post (god i love that abbreviation) to see how the plugin looks. (And by the way, I can't highly enough recommend taking the plunge into self-hosting a WP blog early instead of late. The longer you stay on blogger, the more dead links you'll have when you jump ship to WP - and the longer you'll go without the tinkerer's fun of self-hosting. Presumptuous of me, I know, but I started on blogger too.)

  Clay Burells last blog post..How Freedom Can Depress Students: More from Happiness Studies

• At August 26, 2008, John Larkin wrote:

  Enjoyed navigating the textual pathways presented by your well hewn words Clay. Your readers have expressed my thoughts. I have arrived late. Yet I need to share an anecdote that I feel illustrates the fact the system is not nurturing innate ability.

  Attended a professional development day not long back. All but one component was largely irrelevant. Some attendees were reflecting on it after the event and remarked that perhaps the day was designed to give the teachers present an insight into the boredom experienced by the students that attend their schools each day. Was going to blog this anecdote myself but it feels more at home here.

  "Tell you who you are if you nail me to your car"

  Cheers, John

  PS. Clay, the link to Ken Robonson's site is broken. ^_^

• At August 26, 2008, John Larkin wrote:

  I remember! I have been racking my brains as I knew that something I had heard today was relevant for this post. It just popped into my head.

  A Year 10 student uttered one of those great observations in history during lesson one today. I was sketching a diagram on the board. It employed stick figures.

  She said, "Whoever invented stick figures was a genius".

  That was such a revelatory moment for her and also for me.

  Cheers,

  John

• At August 26, 2008, Whoever invented stick figures was a genius wrote:

  [...] was a revelatory moment for her and also for me. That person was a genius. addthis_url = [...]

• At August 28, 2008, Whoever invented stick figures was a genius! wrote:

  [...] It was a revelatory moment for her and also for me. That person was a genius. [...]

• At August 30, 2008, Science teacher: Beyond School wrote:

  [...] means he's going to throw quality stuff past you at high velocity.I'll be dwelling on one--say, "On the Death of Genius for College"--and he'll throw 3 straight fastballs past me while I'm still gawking.I start school in a week. I [...]

“I want to stress that this book is not, and never was, intended to replace any textbooks of history that may serve a very different purpose at school. I would like my readers to relax, and to follow the story without having to take notes or to memorise names and dates. In fact, I promise that I shall not examine them on what they have read.”
–E.H. Gombrich, preface to the Turkish edition of A Little History of the World

Schooly History: Neither Forest nor Trees (or, “History as Test-Garbage In, Test, Test-Garbage Out”)

I’m tutoring a couple of Korean students home for the summer from their Oregon high school. Like many English language learners, they’re wonderfully bright, but challenged by the readability level of their assigned  high school texts. And like many students generally, all their years of schooling in history have failed to equip them with any coherent understanding of the flow of history at all.

This I’ve confirmed with almost all students (not just English Language Learners) in high school classrooms over the years by doing this simple exercise: Scramble the major periods of history in a random cluster on the board or a handout - you know, “Medieval Period,” “Cold War,” “Roman Empire,” “Enlightenment,” “Age of Exploration,” “Classical Greece,” “Industrial Revolution,” “Greek Heroic Age/Trojan War,” “Renaissance,” “Sumer,” “Solomon Builds the Jewish Temple,” “Scientific Revolution,” “Alexander the Great,” “World War I and II,” “Mohammed and Islam,” “The Crusades,” “Egyptian Pharoahs,” “The Reformation,” “Buddha,” “The Romantic Era,” “The Catholic Church Begins,” “Confucius.” (We can quibble about this list, of course, but for now play along.)

Then tell the students: “Make a list in which you place these major historical events and periods in the correct chronological order.  Then, write the approximate dates you think each one took place or began.”

Then wander the room monitoring the students’ progress. In almost all cases, depending on your personality, you’ll either laugh or weep. It’s not unusual to see the Industrial Revolution occurring before the Middle Ages, the Holocaust during the Enlightenment, and Columbus before Confucius. Stalin was a Renaissance Man. What a muddle.

I tried this on my “advanced placement” seniors this year, and the above description fits (again, there were about two exceptions). Whatever history they’d learned seemed to be garbage in for the test, then garbage out.

Penetrating the Students to Reach the Learners

I recommend doing this with students, because in my experience, it opens up a wonderful space for asking, “How could you have gone through more than a decade of schooling and remember - or understand - so little of what you were supposedly taught of the story of our species on this planet?”

The nice thing about this conversation is that it leads wonderfully into the follow-up: “You’re about to graduate and become adults. You won’t have many more chances to get your head around this story, which truly educated adults should know. If I promise that this 5,000 year old story is really pretty easy to learn and know - as a story - do you want to take this opportunity (possibly your last) to learn it?”

The refreshing thing: By a wide margin, the answer is a very sincere “Yes.”  This conversation seems to penetrate the thick defenses against schoolwork that students have built up over the years, and get them in touch with that part of us that simply doesn’t want to be ignorant about basic things like history. It’s a wonderfully ironic “a-ha” moment that, if subtitled in a film, would read, “How the hell did I remain so ignorant of all this stuff after having it crammed into me for all these years? What a debacle! What a charade, my high GPA!”

History Teacher as Epic Bard, Students as Bardic Apprentices

At that point, the 5,000 year story of history has what it needs to be enjoyed: an eager audience, and (we pray) a skillful story-teller (I’d like to be humble here, but I know my strengths as well as my¹ weaknesses, and telling the story of the last 5,000 years as a narrative, as the real Greatest Story Ever Told - full of gut laughter, wistful “what ifs,” amazing characters and events, philosophical wonder, and chains of cause and effect over centuries, over millennia, all liberally peppered with audience-participation requests for predictions, connections to earlier episodes, summaries of why Marx couldn’t have come earlier than the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment couldn’t have come before the Renaissance, on and on - that is one of my strengths).

But hearing the story, being mere audience, isn’t enough to learn it.  Like the bards that kept the Iliad and Odyssey alive through several centuries of the Greek “Dark Age,” during which reading and writing disappeared, and the story lived through oral transmission from older to younger storytellers, the students need to rehearse what they’ve heard from teacher - and a simple, low-tech way for them to do that is simply to re-tell the story they’re hearing, episode by episode, as simple written narrative summaries.¹

Back to the two students I’m tutoring: Today we just concluded our last class together. Over the course of two or three hours of this story-telling for each of twelve days, they’ve gone from the muddle above to being able to tell the story of five millennia, with approximately correct dates, causal connections, main players and events - and with enthusiasm. That’s roughly how long it took Homeric bards to recite the Iliad and the Odyssey.

I share this simply because I find it wonderful, but vexingly difficult to implement in the school setting. In schools, bells would have stopped the story. Other classes would have choked and vitiated the story’s roots with competing homework. Large class sizes would have made the constant comprehension-checking conversations impossible - unless one of you can suggest a way to pull it off, for which I’m all ears.

I know it’s not fair that all students can’t afford this kind of private education - but I wonder if a different approach to delivering it (YouTube presentations?) might not narrow that unjust gap.  But besides that, I just discovered a book that comes very close to that “bardic” approach to narrative history.

E.H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World: The Big Picture for Little People, English Language Learners, and Historically Clueless Adults

Gombrich is deservedly acclaimed for his majestic The Story of Art, which was my college art history textbook; but he wrote A Little History of the World for children. The results are overall wonderful: the readability level, lexically and syntactically, is appropriate for eight-year-olds, but better still, so is the tone. By tailoring his story for that toughest of audiences, eight-year-olds - too young to pimp for grades and too alive to endure boredom - Gombrich succeeds at restoring the wonders of storytelling to world history, in a way that has both entertained me and, better still, clarified for me some of the basic stories and their significance to the bigger story. Best of all, he refuses to underrate his audience by refusing to dumb history down; the waters stay deep, but because they’re unmuddied by too many names, dates, and ten-dollar words, they’re clearer too. They never lose track of the storyline. (To see just how “deep” this history is, check out this commentary on the controversy it has caused between conservatives and progressives in England. And I’ll add my own little cavil: Gombrich seems to lose his objectivity when treating Judeo-Christianity as history, implying more metaphysical truth in it than in the other world religions he discusses. But maybe I’m just sensitive that way.)

So whether you’re a homeschooler, a parent wanting your child (and maybe yourself) to know history better, or a teacher with a textbook at frustration readability level (or pedantry level) for some or all of your students, I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s almost 300 pages long, and a total page-turner for me.

And best of all: If you failed that little history challenge above, I guarantee you you’ll pass it after reading this book. The story takes care of the plot in such a clear, lucid way that you’ll never again reverse Romans and Romantics.

Bonus Video: The Perfect Prehistoric Introduction

My students spent the night in our apartment last night, and we had dinner and a movie night. I couldn’t resist showing them “The Dawn of Man,” the 20-odd minute prelude of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, as I’ve done at the beginning of so many history and literature classes in schools.  It’s a stunningly realistic “Genesis for moderns,” as I see it, complete with the (technological) “Fall of Man” and Darwinian “Cain and Abel” story. Just stunning. Enjoy:

(Thanks to Christopher Sessums for tweeting me the link.)

—

¹ For you techies out there, I will add that my favorite unit design since I drank the digital koolaid employed videotaping students telling the story to class in pairs, episode by episode, and embedding those videos in a student-created wiki history textbook (scroll to bottom for student lectures) a couple of years ago; they also rehearsed all the episodes, not just the ones they orally re-presented, by summarizing them - as stories - in Moodle forums. In retrospect, this local, low-key unit seems more valuable than the splashier global collaborations these same students did in other units - and danah boyd’s findings that teens just aren’t very interested in connecting with strangers in global collaborations - because they’re more keen to extend their face-to-face school relationships with these tools instead - seems to explain this phenomenon. I was far more abuzz about global collaboration than my students, and I didn’t get it until I watched danah’s presentation on YouTube a few weeks ago.  Oh what the heck: here it is. danah starts in the middle third, wearing the wool cap:

1. many

9 Comments

• At July 19, 2008, Maya Tutorials wrote:

  Awesome, I am serious history fan and I am loving this book.

• At July 20, 2008, Paul C wrote:

  I am sure to get the Gombrich history. It reminds me of Lynne Truss' Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, that wonderful book which brings punctuation to life with her delightful anecdotes and examples for the various punctuation marks.

  The panda, by the way, is on the cover of the book erasing the comma in Eats, Shoots and Leaves...

  Students love this book.

  Excellent post.

  Paul Cs last blog post..Making the Most of Time

• At July 20, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Paul,

  ES&L has been on my to-read list for too long. Another good summer read, and thanks for the reminder.

  Clay

• At July 21, 2008, Penelope wrote:

  I actually do a much smaller version of it (just from the Renaissance on) as part of my end-of-year review with my World History II kids, but I am tempted to try the whole thing on the first day of class. It would make for an interesting start to the year.

  Penelopes last blog post..The end of summer break...

• At July 22, 2008, Jen wrote:

  Thank you for the lead on "A Little History..." I've ordered a copy and expect it by week's end.

  We do homeschool and our daughters, 8 and 5, love history. I was never into it for that very test-garbage reason, so I've used a more literary approach. My girls LOVE stories, activities, hands-on learning, so that's what I try to include. We don't focus on dates, rather the order of events (what action led to what events and the outcome and ensuing events). It seems to be working.

  How much can an 8 year old really get from history? A lot when you're talking concepts, not dates and names regurgitated on a shred of paper.

  Next week we take history on the road. We're taking two months to travel the Lewis & Clark Trail, visiting Native American lands, museums and sites along the way. Can hardly wait 'til we can afford to travel to other parts of the world. I'll never forget my first visit to Rouen, France and the revelation that Joan of Arc was NOT a myth, but a historic fact. Huh!

  Keep up the great work on this blog. It's wonderfully educational and enjoyable. :)

• At July 22, 2008, Not for children, not for sleeping: Goodnight Bush « Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub wrote:

  [...] Slightly off-topic, but wonder if you’ve discovered E.H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World, a narrative world history for children I’m greatly enjoying as an adult. I wrote a bit about it here. [...]

• At July 25, 2008, Does Flat Fall Flat for Teens? Re-thinking Global Collaborative Learning Projects | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] embedded danah’s presentation in a footnote to my post last week about getting students to learn the story of history, but here it is again. She starts around the 8 [...]

• At July 25, 2008, I’m back: link dump. « Mild Opinons wrote:

  [...] Burrell at the Beyond School blog has a thought provoking post on Why History isn’t Learned, and How Story Helps Change That. I played with the test that he proposes and scored pretty well (though I would indeed quibble with [...]

• At July 26, 2008, Drupal wrote:

  [...] at school. I would like my readers to relax, and to follow the story without having to take ... READ MORE[rsslist:http://beyond-school.org/2008/07/19/gombrich-world-history/] Education Feed: Memeology [...]

Contents:
1) Dry but necessary (and interesting, really) background to computer-assisted “corpus linguistics”;
2) Application of Vocab Profiler to a little “Scribe 2.0″ medieval satire I had fun writing way back when;
3) Tutorial on some uses of Vocab Profiler to aid in scaffolding classroom reading comprehension;
4) Caveats and Take-Aways

Dan Meyer just posted a refreshing little jeremiad against Wordle and Animoto, with which I largely agree - they’re fun, sure, but require all the mental and creative activity of slipping some coins into a Coke machine and then pulling the can from the tray.

Anyway, that post spurred me to share an old tool I’ve used since teaching ESL in Shanghai a few years ago.  It’s one of a muscular suite of tools made freely available at the Université du Québec à Montréal’s “Compleat Lexical Tutor” called VocabProfiler.

To appreciate what the VP does, it helps to have a bit of background in corpus linguistics, the computer-assisted analysis of word frequency in the English language.

OVERVIEW OF CORPUS LINGUISTICS FOR VOCABULARY TEACHING:

By scanning millions of words from a broad representative sample of English texts - newspapers, textbooks, novels, and more - and then counting the frequency of both words and word families (like Latinate words and their derivations), linguists could identify which words in the English language are necessary to know in order to comprehend an average adult text.

ESL research posits that for a text to be suitable for a reader (at the reader’s “instructional level”), that reader should know 95% of the words in the text. In other words, if the reader is unfamiliar with more than 1 out of 20 words in the text on average, comprehension breaks down, and the reader is cursed with a text at “frustration level.”

Corpus linguistics helps us figure out which words and word families are necessary to know to reach that golden 95% of lexical knowledge that enables reading comprehension. What it shows is that learning the 1,000 most frequent words and word families in the English language allows a reader to comprehend around 74% of words in an academic text (and the percentage is higher for  newspapers, fiction, and conversational English).

While 74% lexical comprehension is a powerful payoff for learning those first 1,000 words (the “1k list”), you’ll note that it still leaves us 21% short of the magic 95%.

Learning the second most frequent 1,000 words and word families, though (the “2k list”), covers an average of 5% more (in academic texts). So knowing the the first 2,000 most frequent word families in the language brings us up to 79% lexical familiarity with academic texts. That’s powerful and efficient vocab work, but it still leaves us 16% short, still doomed to frustration-level reading - “barking at text” without comprehending the meaning.

And here’s where things get interesting. Logically, you’d think learning the 2,001st-3,000th most frequent words would be the sensible thing to do after learning the first 2k, but that’s not true. You only gain a percentage point or two. (Think of the Long Tail applied to English vocabulary: we all use the top 2k, but after that, the hundreds of thousands of other words in the language flatten out.)  Instead, your next big vocab-learning investment should be in a group of 570 word families that, once learned, add another whopping 8.5% of lexical comprehension to academic texts.  This group is called the Academic Word List (AWL).

The AWL is that group of words that show up frequently across the entire range of academic disciplines - words like this list from a text of my own I just crunched: “accurate, achieve, conclude, conduct, create, deny, error, final, focus, ignorant, instance, labour, normal, plus, task, tradition.” [Update: An excellent set of online quizzes for all 570 of these AWL word families, arranged in sublists from easier to harder, can be found at this University of Victoria site.]

So let’s recap the math:

Lexical Coverage of Average Academic Text from Learning the 2,000 Most Frequent Word families + the 570 Academic Word List:

1k list ≈ 73.5%
+2k list ≈  4.6%
+AWL    ≈  8.5%
total comp:  86.6%

(Here’s a nice graphic (source) showing the coverage of those word/word families for conversational English, fiction, and newspapers, respectively:

Before moving on to the tool I promise to show you, let’s deal with the question: How do we know what words to teach to bridge the gap from 87% to 95%?

The short answer: we don’t (or I don’t, anyway).  One helpful approach is to focus on the specialized academic language specific to any discipline.  Words like metaphor, simile, paradox, hyberbole, and so forth, for example, are not on the AWL because they’re specialized literary vocabulary, so if you’re a literature teacher, you know the specialized literary words that are high-frequency to your content area.  Teachers in math, science, social studies, art, music, and so forth similarly know the high-frequency vocabulary of their disciplines.  Those specialized subject-area lists are an obvious first step to bridging that gap.  BUT HERE’S THE BEAUTY (cue segue music): you can use the vocabulary profiler to identify any words not in the 2k and AWL that are in your course readings, and pre-teach them to enable 95% comprehension of your specific class texts. (You can use it for much more, but one thing at a time.)

So let’s move on to the Vocabulary Profiler.

Let’s pretend that you are assigning my post “Adventures of Scribe 2.0” - a bit of satiric fiction I abandoned after that post in the second month of this space, when only Diane Cordell, Patrick Higgins, and Christopher Watson were reading me .

Here’s the text:

Monk Expelled for Creating “Devil’s Workshop”

29 December, Anno Domini 1527
Wittenberg, Saxony
The Catholic Press

Visionius Neocogitus, a 21-year-old neophyte in the hallowed Benedictine Monastery in Wittenberg, was expelled from the Order yesterday for disobeying the Abbot, dishonoring the time-honored traditions of the ancient Order, and “making pacts with the Devil.”

The young neophyte was charged by his Abbot, Father Orthodoxius Paleologus, with shirking his sacred duties in the scriptorium, malingering, and spreading heretical ideas.

“Young Neocogitus is not suited to holy work,” said Paleologus. “From the moment he entered the Brotherhood, he was a force of discord and disobedience. Not an hour passed without Neocogitus doing something to disrupt the solemn traditions of the Order. After much soul-searching, fasting, and praying over the problems caused by this wayward youth, the Holy Spirit finally spoke to me, and said, ‘For the good of the Order, Neocogitus must go’.”

A Promising Beginning

The trouble began on the first day the young neophyte was brought for training in the scriptorium, the vast chamber in which monks of the Order have been hand-copying the Holy Writ for the last 600 years.

According to Friar Heironymous Tuck, the monk charged with training young Neocogitus in the science of holy transcription, the neophyte was arrogant, sarcastic, and insubordinate within a minute of entering the hall.

“Neocogitus beheld the glorious sight of these dozens of God’s servants, backs bowed and heads down in pious, meditative labor, dutifully performing God’s work,” said Tuck. “And he had the audacity to snicker. I smelt a whiff of sulfur, and knew we had a heretic in our ranks.”

But Neocogitus mastered his spleen, said Tuck, and went on to prove himself an unusually able apprentice.

“There’s no denying the young man was uncommonly quick to learn,” Tuck continued. “All of the finer points of the book-copying arts–copying in neat script, in straight lines, spelling correctly, and above all, staying awake and alert–Neocogitus mastered within a day.”

Indeed, by the end of his first eight-hour duty, the young man had produced a flawless reproduction of the Book of Genesis–a task that took three times as long for far more experienced scribes.

More remarkable still, by the end of his first month as an apprentice scribe, Neocogitus achieved what had never been done before: he had produced an entire copy of the Bible–all 66 books, plus the Apocrypha.

“It was a miracle,” said Tuck. “It had never been done before. And it was perfect, flawless: I personally checked each and every line for errors–and there were none.”

Abbe Paleologus heard the news with joy. “It seemed a sign from heaven,” Paleologus said. “There were so many heathens living in the darkness, helpless to see the light without God’s word. Yet, because there were so many more heathens than there were monks to copy the Holy Writ–and because it normally took six months for a scribe to produce one correct copy–it seemed we would never be able to rescue all the heathens from their ignorance.”

“But this young monk, Neocogitus,” the Abbot continued, “seemed sent to improve our chances. I had heard that his conduct was often troublesome, irreverent, and lacking in humility. But at the time, I thought this was one more instance of God’s mysterious ways. This whelp would help us spread God’s word with godspeed.”

“Little did I know,” he concluded, “that this was not God’s work at all–but the Devil’s.”

The Devil’s Work

Neocogitus’ first Bible aroused curiosity throughout the monastery. The Order was abuzz with talk about its inerrancy, legibility, elegant script. Above all, however, the talk focused on this question: how had the young man produced it so fast? Was it really possible to produce an accurate copy of the entirety of the scripture in one short month?

To get to the bottom of this mystery, Father Paleologus summoned Neocogitus to his chambers for a private interview.

[WHAT is the secret to Neocogitus’ miraculous powers? LEARN THIS, and more, in the NEXT EPISODE! ON SALE AT BLOGSTANDS SOON!!!]

–There’s a lot of specialized vocabulary here from Medieval history, religious studies, and more, so you know your students won’t be familiar with much of it.  Solution: crunch it through the Vocabulary Profiler.  After copy/paste/submit, this is what you get on top of the screen: an overall breakdown of the percentages of words from the lexical bands relative to the entire text, as you see here (click this and all further images for larger view):

How is this helpful?  Several ways, primary among which is the simple breakdown it gives you of the percentage of words not in the high frequency bands. If that percentage is high, then maybe it’s simply not a text suitable for the readability level of your class’s age group. This is a common problem in high school, where content teachers untrained in literacy research go overboard by assigning college-level texts to students incapable of comprehending their lexical (and syntactic, but that’s a different beast) complexity.

Scrolling down that same screen, the next thing you see is a color-coded breakdown of where each word in the text falls in the word frequency range from corpus linguistics.  (Blue = 1k, Green = 2k, Yellow = AWL, Red = Lower-frequency “off-list” words) (click image for larger view):

While it ain’t as pretty as Wordle, it’s much more useful for teaching (and learning, as I’ll show later).  You can simply have students scan the red words themselves to look them up before reading, or you can prep the pre-teaching vocab lesson yourself.

“But wait a minute,” you say. “What if it’s a long text - say, a 20 page chapter from a novel?”  Good question, and VP helps you with the following breakdown as you scroll down the screen (click image for larger view):

–what you see in this “type list” (”types” are the individual words in the text) is an alphabetized list of each word, grouped in the four frequency bands, and followed by the number of appearances each word makes in the text.  This is key . In the above example, we can see that the words neophyte, monk, heretic, and abbot in the red “off-list” (low-frequency) range show up several times in this short text, and thus decide to give them more emphasis in pre-teaching the text’s vocabulary.  (If this were a longer text, this frequency count of off-list words would serve the same purpose.)  You’ll also note it gives you a handy list of the general purpose academic vocabulary from the AWL that will benefit all students across the curriculum.

TAKE-AWAYS, CAVEATS, and REQUEST FOR CAVILS:

What are some other take-aways from this little tutorial?

Students can use this tool to analyze (learn about) their own lexical sophistication. Have them drop their latest essay or story into the profiler, and let them see how many of their word choices are sophisticated enough to fall outside of the top 2000 words.  The colors won’t lie.

Teachers (and students) can create vocab quizzes on Quizlet (better than Mystudiyo, I’ve decided - check it out) or elsewhere using this to help them identify which words to prioritize in vocabulary study. If you don’t know any words in the blue list, by George you should. Ditto the green and yellow.  Beyond that, we’re talking less frequent, thus less crucial words to know by heart.

Corpus linguistics ain’t perfect. Some words - homonyms, for example, but also words with varying meanings depending on context - skew the results in the analysis. But that’s life for now.

Syntax is still important. Knowing vocab isn’t enough. Sentence structure and grammatical functions need attention too (duh - but you’d be amazed how many people think language learning is all about vocab).

Fancy SAT words are well-and-all, but many students don’t know many words in the 2k + AWL, and they’re more important. Teachers can help them fill the gaps in their knowledge of these words with the VP. “Utlilize” is less important (and to my demotic tastes, less elegant) than “use.”  English teachers take note.

This tool is especially helpful for online texts. Copy-paste novel chapters, textbook chapters, etc into the profiler, and your pre-reading activities are instantly enhanced and guided by literacy research.

The Compleat Lexical Tutor is great for making cloze exercises and all sorts of other things.

This post is way too long. Sorry. But it should be a spell more useful than Wordle.

What about you - anything to add?

References:

Nation, P. (2001). Learning vocabulary in another language. New York: Cambridge University Press.

14 Comments

• At July 15, 2008, Arthus Erea wrote:

  Wow! Thanks for sharing this... it looks incredibly useful and far more statistically justifiable than Wordle. There's no point in having a pretty visualization if the underlying statistics aren't useful.

  Also, I'm with you there on Quizlet: I've been using it for a couple of years for all of my low-level-subject quiz testing. However, the one thing it doesn't support is multiple choice questions (which Mystudiyo does).

  Finally, just for kicks I plugged in a few blog posts into the profiler (both by me and others): over 15-20% of words were on the Off-list, but this is skewed by the pervasiveness of buzzwords (Twitter, digital footprint) which the average person doesn't know, but anyone worth their hosting in the Edublogosphere does.

  Arthus Ereas last blog post..The 140 Character Lesson

• At July 15, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  Arthus,

  Glad you see the value. And good point about buzzwords and proper nouns. You can exclude them by entering them in the "exclude" box on the site before submitting to get more valid results, and for purposes of readability level evaluation, maybe should.

  Or you could just count the number of buzzwords, subtract them from the breakdown, and mentally calculate the new ratio of offlist words, I guess. I'd have to ask somebody who can add, subtract, and figure percentages to do that for me, though.

  The really cool thing about Quizlet, as I'm sure you know, is that it was created by a high schooler, not a British Ed. D. candidate. ;-)

• At July 15, 2008, Arthus Erea wrote:

  Clay,

  Yup, I've actually talked with him on quite a few occasions. He might possibly be the only high schooler on the 'net who is smarter than me. :P (just kidding: we all know that is Lindsea)

  Arthus Ereas last blog post..The 140 Character Lesson

• At July 15, 2008, Tod Baker wrote:

  For English language learners and native speakers, this looks like a tool that can help teachers differentiate effectively. I'll look into it further. Thanks.

  Tod

  Tod Bakers last blog post..Layout Frustrations

• At July 16, 2008, Robb McCollum wrote:

  Thanks for the explanation and link (my wife passed on your blog from a twitter feed she got). I've been trying to use corpus research more in my teaching including Mark Davies corpus.byu.edu

  However, it's nice to have a fast and easy-to-use tool so that graduate ESL students can start taking responsibility for their own vocabulary development. WordCruncher is powerful, but web-accessible and perhaps too complex for casual users. Besides, the connection to the AWL and other word lists is very helpful. Great tool!

• At July 16, 2008, Corrie Bergeron wrote:

  Excellent! Sending it along to my English and medical terminology faculty (big nursing/allied health programs here), as well as the manager of the ESL tutors. Good stuff!

• At July 16, 2008, diane wrote:

  A little gift from a long-time admirer ;-)

  http://animoto.com/play/YrgMD4CVkDohywg3QPhV9g?autostart=false

  dianes last blog post..Where in the World? Part 2

• At July 16, 2008, Nate Stearns wrote:

  Interesting. I plopped in Act I, Scenes 1-2 of Macbeth and got a cool little red list (alarum_[1] anon_[1] assault_[1] attendants_[1] bade_, etc.) of vocab words to preteach. Vocabulary has never been my bag, baby, as I was traumatized by stupid lists as a child. Still, I do like the idea of using the Vocab profile to have kids check out vocab list beforehand. Many of the major works we teach are often online in full text form and--theoretically-you could have kids drop in the chapter, do a post on the vocab, do the reading, and then revisit the vocab...Doesn't sound like a total blast, but worth trying.

  Nate Stearnss last blog post..Edu-flash Mobs, why not?

• At July 16, 2008, OLDaily ~ by Stephen Downes wrote:

  [...] to develop quizzes, among many possible uses. -HJ Clay Burell, Beyond School, July 15, 2008 [Link] [Tags: none] [...]

• At July 16, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  Nate,

  Shakespeare is so close to a foreign language in comparison with contemporary English, it's no wonder you're going to have a massive list of offlist (red) words.

  Couple that with the research on readability, and you have the main factor in kids not loving Shakespeare like we do: far less than 95% lexical familiarity.

  I _always_ pre-teach words like "anon, e'er, soft, aye," and a million other high-frequency Elizabethan words - let's not forget thee, thou, thine, the royal we and our, on and on - before even starting any play. I put them on a word wall and revisit them regularly.

  But think about what would happen if you input the ENTIRE play into the profiler: you'd get a list of the most frequent words in the play, and that should be a valuable guide in helping you identify which words in that sea deserve most emphasis.

  Gotta run.

• At July 16, 2008, Biblical Studies and Technological Tools: Vocabulary Profiling wrote:

  [...] To understand what this tool does, it helps to understand a bit of corpus linguistics, but this blog posting will give you a quick background. I've talked about this kind of stuff before with reference to [...]

• At July 19, 2008, A World History Book for All Ages and Reading Levels: Gombrich’s “A Little History of the World” | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] Like many English language learners, they’re wonderfully bright, but challenged by the readability level of their assigned  high school texts. And like many students generally, all their years of [...]

• At July 21, 2008, PaulV8 wrote:

  Thanks for posting this, Clay. I've enjoyed your blogging. You are an inspiring teacher. I'll have to try this out since I may have 11th and 12th grade remediation English classes this year. Heck, this will help any classes.

  PaulV8s last blog post..iPhone Updates: Prologue and Mdot

• At July 21, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  @Paul,

  Such a nice gesture to receive in a rough week. Thanks for that.

  Clay

[I’m happy to introduce today’s guest-blogger, Adrienne Michetti, a Canadian teaching in Vietnam whose comments on this blog over the past couple of months have constantly given me food for thought and learning.  Adrienne’s response to my “Taking Back Teaching: A Forgotten History” post prompted me to invite this guest-post, and frankly, I suspect Adrienne politely pulled her punches in what follows, and if so, invite her to push back more in the comments.  And FYI, I’m still in transition in my new apartment and more, so expect irregular posting until the dust settles.]

One of the first things I thought of when I saw Clay’s post on grading was the debate happening a few months ago over at The Faculty Room, about “the unthinking habits of grading.”

Clay’s post outlined a (brief and one-sided, but relevant) history of “grading” in the modern world and how it is destroying teaching and learning. His post also characterized how “grading’s evil twin,” over-sized classrooms, devalues learning.  While I agree with much of Clay’s post, I have to start my rebuttal with a strong disclaimer — so strong that it almost feels like a confession:  I hate the word “grading” and all its derivatives.

And that is why I prefer to talk about Assessment.  Yes, Assessment with a capital A.  You see, “grading” is a term that I never used or even really heard until I moved into international education.  I am originally from Canada and where I’m from, we informally call the whole shebang “marks.”  In my more formal discussions with administrators, parents, and colleagues I would use the term I was introduced in my B.Ed. programme:  Assessment.  But then, I moved overseas and my American colleagues started asking me, “So have you finished your grading yet?” 

Huh?

The Word

It took me a while to wrap my head around the idea that teachers viewed giving assessments as some kind of way to “rate” students.  A couple of quick searches reveals some of the reasons why I am uncomfortable with the word “grade.”  First, the definitions.  Note that I am purposely including only the first few definitions provided.

From Dictionary.com Unabridged v 1.1:

grade -noun

1. a degree or step in a scale, as of rank, advancement, quality, value, or intensity
2. a class of persons or things of the same relative rank, quality, etc.
3. a step or stage in a course or process.

There are several more definitions, but these first three give you an idea of why I’m uncomfortable with the term.  According to these first three definitions (and similar ones  on Merriam-Webster and the like), essentially, a grade is a rank or classification. The Online Etymology Dictionary says that “grade” (noun) is from Latin, gradus, meaning “a step or degree,” and is related to gradi, which is “to walk, step, go.”  So why are we using grades — and even the term itself –  to classify students’ abilities?

But wait — here is the bit I am looking for.  If I look carefully at the Dictionary.com definition, and scroll down to definition #7, I will see one that says this:

a letter, number, or other symbol indicating the relative quality of a student’s work in a course, examination, or special assignment; mark.

Ahh, that’s it.  A grade can be used to indicate quality — it can be an informant, so to speak.  This is somewhat similar to Definition #3, which is about steps or stages.  And then back to the Online Etymology Dictionary, where at the very end of the entry for “grade” it tells me the history of the term we are using now in 2008:

that of “letter-mark indicating assessment of a student’s work” is from 1886.

Ok, so I’m not so way-off base.  What I’m wondering is how we evolved, as teachers, from viewing (and using) grades as indicators to using grades as ranks and classifiers.  Something is wrong with this picture.