You're on the right track here; I just want to give you some more ammo for when you discuss this with pro-test folks.
High stakes testing causes districts to replace teaching with training, or more cynically, with test prep. Because the tests themselves are not designed as pure recall exercises, you cannot do well on them simply by memorizing facts. Test prep in this case consists of finding a low level way to respond to a question designed for high level thinking. The levels to which I refer come from Bloom's Taxonomy.
So, by clever use of highlighters, and by teaching students to look for certain words or phrases, the "teacher" can get them to successfully choose the correct answer from a list without any of the real work of (say) mathematical problem solving. This is something you can read more about at Dan Meyer's blog. One of his directions for teachers is that we should be "less helpful." High stakes testing leads to district and schoolwide mandates that teachers be as helpful as possible.
At a recent faculty meeting, one of the VPs presented us with data that our state test scores were (markedly) on the rise while our SAT and AP scores were suffering. He was happy about the state test scores and said that we needed to find a way to bring that kind of success to the college-oriented tests. Later, I stopped by his office and said that I thought the AP and SAT scores were suffering not in spite of the state test scores, but because of them. The kind of teaching we do to prepare kids for those tests robs them of critical thinking skills. Namely, what information do I need for this problem? What has been given to me? What can I find out from the information given to me? What parts are irrelevant?
I'm coming from the math perspective. You might hear a different set of complaints from someone who teaches something else. Take all possible complaints across disciplines and you see the scope of what kids are losing.
Your post interests me strangely. I am in the process of gearing up to try and teach Advanced Placement Economics at my school (2 years from now.) I am interested in what exactly I would read to understand your point about rolling the debt versus retiring it. Can you recommend any books for me (and eventually my students) or specific topics? It's high school, and the kids would be 15-17.
I took Macro and Micro in college, and that's about it. However no one else at my school seems to want to undertake this course, and I think the students deserve the opportunity.
Somehow I still think of Microsoft as Bill Gates. I don't know exactly how true that is anymore. If it's pretty much true, I'm not surprised that they couldn't learn from their mistakes.
The Gates Foundation was on a kick for a couple of years where they promoted "small high schools." Small high schools have fewer than 500 students. They took existing schools and broke them into smaller pieces, on the assumption that the smaller communities would lead to better relationships and therefore better achievement. This didn't turn out to be true.
For example, with such a small population, they weren't able to offer advanced classes because there wasn't sufficient interest. If they used to have 1500 kids, and 18 of them wanted AP Spanish, now each school had 6 who wanted it and they couldn't run a class for just 6. Anyway, how did they respond to data that showed student achievement stayed flat or went down? They ignored it.
I was an Indian kid. At least part of my ability to spell comes from me having read a lot when I was younger. And I mean books that have unfamiliar words in them, or unfamiliar usages. My students don't seem to be very big readers. They use spark notes. While Spark notes may do a good job of conveying themes or noting motifs or literary devices, they:
Rob students of the mental exercise of noticing these things themselves
Interpose themselves between the unfamiliar words and usages so that students don't have to deal with them
To be fair, I've never used Sparknotes, but I used to shelve them fairly often when I worked at the library while in high school. I don't have any of the technical spelling training required to win a spelling bee, but I do have a good vocabulary because I read a lot.
Indian here too - I think the Indian outlook is that you don't have to sacrifice higher level thinking when you spend some of your time on rote learning. You can have both.
No, sports teach an us-them mentality where your team deserves to win more than the other team, regardless of how well you or they play. Sports teach you to set meaningless goals and achieve them. The act of goal-setting is somehow valuable. Instead of doing your best in all pursuits, you only need to do enough to beat the other guy. Also, anything you can get away with in pursuit of winning is acceptable and encouraged. I teach high school. This is the substance of my discussions with students about their sports victories. Every time one of my kids tells me that they won a game I ask them how they did it and what would the other team need to work on to beat them next time. 90% of these questions result in blank looks. When they are on the losing side, they seem to learn more. This is ironic in the face of how losing is treated in school sports. Of course, the kids are players and not coaches, so they don't instinctively know these things, but if they're not learning to think like a coach (leadership and teamwork), what's the point?
Also, I would be very happy if all the money currently used for school sports was used to expand the PE department. They are not the same. Everyone has a chance to participate in PE, and only a small handful of students can play on the school teams. That's as it should be in an enterprise where competition is used to form a team, but let's not pretend that school sports benefit the student population as a whole. Except, I guess it makes them more enthusiastic consumers of sports.
Empathy is not a decision we make. It's an unconscious and automatic reaction to someone else's perceived emotional state. Infants display empathy. Empathy is "I feel what you feel." This is different from sympathy, which is "I know how you feel." If you're thinking rationally about whether to feel empathy or not, it's too late and you don't. This can be broken: if you're bad at perceiving emotional states, you may have no reaction or an incongruous one. If you're a sociopath, you may have an intellectual understanding of someone else's feelings and no capacity to feel them. From the other posts in this thread, the survey seems to be partly about measuring this reaction and partly about measuring your desire to act on it. You can control whether you act on the feelings or not. One poster mentioned tough love. Part of what makes it tough is that you have to ignore your instinct to help in service of a larger goal.
BTW, idli, sambar, and chole get their protein from split peas. So they have that going for them, they're filling. The stir fries and aloo gobi don't have any protein to speak of.
Well, if you can't eliminate, just reduce. I don't know if you know any south indian cooking, but a lot of it is very good (Sambar, idlis, many stir fries) and vegetarian, if not vegan. I can also recommend Aloo Gobi, and Chole from Punjabi cooking.
I agree with this. I promote veganism through making Indian food for people. You also make a good point about PETA's sexist stunts. I don't think that's been brought up elsewhere in the thread. And thank you for the link!
I think my argument boils down to "while the cow may not be able to understand what's being done to it, we can and that's enough." A lot of what you said about cows could be applied to children who lack an understanding of the future or subprime borrowers who lack an understanding of teaser interest rates.
Yes I must have. My gut belief is that the sheer number of factory farmed pounds of meat dwarfs that number for "responsible" "farmers." I'm prepared to be shown as wrong by data. But let's stipulate that the numbers are not heavily skewed towards the factory farm. Your post still doesn't work because your answer to the moral question of killing these animals is an appeal to self interest. If I painlessly kill my neighbor after allowing them to live a nice short life on my timetable, so that I can have their car, I don't think that's morally justifiable. Keep in mind that I already have a car. I don't need their car; I just want it.
I googled that and it seems to be that Tyson has had its hands full investigating claims. You seem to be saying that PETA holds a lot of Tyson stock? I'm not sure where you're going oh wait I think I found it. OK so it looks like PETA is buying stock in companies whose practices it opposes. The goal is to affect change in their role as shareholders. Is there more to this? I'm not going to dig too hard as: a) I don't give any money to PETA and b) it's your argument.
The Center For Consumer Freedom is pretty easily recognizable as industry shills. Their collection of websites has grown beyond petakillsanimals and advocating for transfats into protesting in favor of obesity and Mercury isn't that big a deal. The Saunders piece cancels itself out in light of this, so I don't have to. The Newsweek article is really not damning because I guess Newsweek doesn't have a financial interest in people eating more meat.
My point is that people who have some other axe to grind with PETA can always find something to say about them, and it's also preposterous to give equal weight to factory farming and euthanasia.
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
-Adam Smith
I'm not saying one way or the other, merely that there's no basis other than our gut feelings. I've been teaching for 13 years, and I find that simply demonstrating how neatly math all fits together is enough motivation for almost all the kids. That's at my school, in my classroom. It doesn't generalize. And even then, I have highly motivated students who still struggle for a D. So, not only do I not see the motivation characteristic that you do, but I also don't know if that's what's standing in most students' way.
All this study does is point out the obvious. What it doesn't do is show how to teach students how to find reasons within themselves for getting good grades. As lack of self-motivation is the real problem standing between most kids and realizing their personal potential(both grade-wise and in life) that's where the studies should focus.
I was with you until you said "most." There's no basis for "most." And in fact, this study suggests that there is no reason to get good grades. I can almost get behind that (and I've been teaching for 13 years). More to the point, it suggests that there is no reason for learning. No reason to do it at all unless you get money for it. Which is really just a straighter line to your contention that the reason for learning is "success in real life."
I'm not saying that financial success after school is unimportant. But your anti-government sentiments are obscuring the fact that whether a private organization motivates you by giving you money or the government does that, the effect is the same on your long term motivation.
Isn't this kind of initiative what we decry as schools killing children's innate curiosity? Paying kids for grades is as much as stating that learning has no inherent value.
I do recognize that my supporting philosophical objection results in many children not achieving as much as they could. I am not happy with that. So if these kind of payment schemes increase scores, then I guess I'm for them. I just wonder what we're giving up in exchange. I want a market economy, not a market society.
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You're on the right track here; I just want to give you some more ammo for when you discuss this with pro-test folks.
High stakes testing causes districts to replace teaching with training, or more cynically, with test prep. Because the tests themselves are not designed as pure recall exercises, you cannot do well on them simply by memorizing facts. Test prep in this case consists of finding a low level way to respond to a question designed for high level thinking. The levels to which I refer come from Bloom's Taxonomy.
So, by clever use of highlighters, and by teaching students to look for certain words or phrases, the "teacher" can get them to successfully choose the correct answer from a list without any of the real work of (say) mathematical problem solving. This is something you can read more about at Dan Meyer's blog. One of his directions for teachers is that we should be "less helpful." High stakes testing leads to district and schoolwide mandates that teachers be as helpful as possible.
At a recent faculty meeting, one of the VPs presented us with data that our state test scores were (markedly) on the rise while our SAT and AP scores were suffering. He was happy about the state test scores and said that we needed to find a way to bring that kind of success to the college-oriented tests. Later, I stopped by his office and said that I thought the AP and SAT scores were suffering not in spite of the state test scores, but because of them. The kind of teaching we do to prepare kids for those tests robs them of critical thinking skills. Namely, what information do I need for this problem? What has been given to me? What can I find out from the information given to me? What parts are irrelevant?
I'm coming from the math perspective. You might hear a different set of complaints from someone who teaches something else. Take all possible complaints across disciplines and you see the scope of what kids are losing.
So you can sext your girlfriend and MMS
Especially if you work for BP.
Your post interests me strangely. I am in the process of gearing up to try and teach Advanced Placement Economics at my school (2 years from now.) I am interested in what exactly I would read to understand your point about rolling the debt versus retiring it. Can you recommend any books for me (and eventually my students) or specific topics? It's high school, and the kids would be 15-17.
I took Macro and Micro in college, and that's about it. However no one else at my school seems to want to undertake this course, and I think the students deserve the opportunity.
Whoops I'm years behind. Actually I know he's not CEO anymore but is he still influential there or has he left it completely behind?
Somehow I still think of Microsoft as Bill Gates. I don't know exactly how true that is anymore. If it's pretty much true, I'm not surprised that they couldn't learn from their mistakes.
The Gates Foundation was on a kick for a couple of years where they promoted "small high schools." Small high schools have fewer than 500 students. They took existing schools and broke them into smaller pieces, on the assumption that the smaller communities would lead to better relationships and therefore better achievement. This didn't turn out to be true.
For example, with such a small population, they weren't able to offer advanced classes because there wasn't sufficient interest. If they used to have 1500 kids, and 18 of them wanted AP Spanish, now each school had 6 who wanted it and they couldn't run a class for just 6. Anyway, how did they respond to data that showed student achievement stayed flat or went down? They ignored it.
To be fair, I've never used Sparknotes, but I used to shelve them fairly often when I worked at the library while in high school. I don't have any of the technical spelling training required to win a spelling bee, but I do have a good vocabulary because I read a lot.
Indian here too - I think the Indian outlook is that you don't have to sacrifice higher level thinking when you spend some of your time on rote learning. You can have both.
No, sports teach an us-them mentality where your team deserves to win more than the other team, regardless of how well you or they play. Sports teach you to set meaningless goals and achieve them. The act of goal-setting is somehow valuable. Instead of doing your best in all pursuits, you only need to do enough to beat the other guy. Also, anything you can get away with in pursuit of winning is acceptable and encouraged. I teach high school. This is the substance of my discussions with students about their sports victories. Every time one of my kids tells me that they won a game I ask them how they did it and what would the other team need to work on to beat them next time. 90% of these questions result in blank looks. When they are on the losing side, they seem to learn more. This is ironic in the face of how losing is treated in school sports. Of course, the kids are players and not coaches, so they don't instinctively know these things, but if they're not learning to think like a coach (leadership and teamwork), what's the point?
Also, I would be very happy if all the money currently used for school sports was used to expand the PE department. They are not the same. Everyone has a chance to participate in PE, and only a small handful of students can play on the school teams. That's as it should be in an enterprise where competition is used to form a team, but let's not pretend that school sports benefit the student population as a whole. Except, I guess it makes them more enthusiastic consumers of sports.
Empathy is not a decision we make. It's an unconscious and automatic reaction to someone else's perceived emotional state. Infants display empathy. Empathy is "I feel what you feel." This is different from sympathy, which is "I know how you feel." If you're thinking rationally about whether to feel empathy or not, it's too late and you don't. This can be broken: if you're bad at perceiving emotional states, you may have no reaction or an incongruous one. If you're a sociopath, you may have an intellectual understanding of someone else's feelings and no capacity to feel them. From the other posts in this thread, the survey seems to be partly about measuring this reaction and partly about measuring your desire to act on it. You can control whether you act on the feelings or not. One poster mentioned tough love. Part of what makes it tough is that you have to ignore your instinct to help in service of a larger goal.
BTW, idli, sambar, and chole get their protein from split peas. So they have that going for them, they're filling. The stir fries and aloo gobi don't have any protein to speak of.
Well, if you can't eliminate, just reduce. I don't know if you know any south indian cooking, but a lot of it is very good (Sambar, idlis, many stir fries) and vegetarian, if not vegan. I can also recommend Aloo Gobi, and Chole from Punjabi cooking.
I think the rest of the debate is between you and your sig.
I agree with this. I promote veganism through making Indian food for people. You also make a good point about PETA's sexist stunts. I don't think that's been brought up elsewhere in the thread. And thank you for the link!
I think my argument boils down to "while the cow may not be able to understand what's being done to it, we can and that's enough." A lot of what you said about cows could be applied to children who lack an understanding of the future or subprime borrowers who lack an understanding of teaser interest rates.
Yes I must have. My gut belief is that the sheer number of factory farmed pounds of meat dwarfs that number for "responsible" "farmers." I'm prepared to be shown as wrong by data. But let's stipulate that the numbers are not heavily skewed towards the factory farm. Your post still doesn't work because your answer to the moral question of killing these animals is an appeal to self interest. If I painlessly kill my neighbor after allowing them to live a nice short life on my timetable, so that I can have their car, I don't think that's morally justifiable. Keep in mind that I already have a car. I don't need their car; I just want it.
I googled that and it seems to be that Tyson has had its hands full investigating claims. You seem to be saying that PETA holds a lot of Tyson stock? I'm not sure where you're going oh wait I think I found it. OK so it looks like PETA is buying stock in companies whose practices it opposes. The goal is to affect change in their role as shareholders. Is there more to this? I'm not going to dig too hard as: a) I don't give any money to PETA and b) it's your argument.
I think your signature works pretty well here.
The Center For Consumer Freedom is pretty easily recognizable as industry shills. Their collection of websites has grown beyond petakillsanimals and advocating for transfats into protesting in favor of obesity and Mercury isn't that big a deal. The Saunders piece cancels itself out in light of this, so I don't have to. The Newsweek article is really not damning because I guess Newsweek doesn't have a financial interest in people eating more meat.
My point is that people who have some other axe to grind with PETA can always find something to say about them, and it's also preposterous to give equal weight to factory farming and euthanasia.
Your arguments almost work except factory farming.
Please don't call this TX school board (or any school board for that matter) "educators."
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” -Adam Smith
There's a game called "Need For Speed, I'm Looking At You"? Oh I see what you did. Well there probably soon will be.
I'm not saying one way or the other, merely that there's no basis other than our gut feelings. I've been teaching for 13 years, and I find that simply demonstrating how neatly math all fits together is enough motivation for almost all the kids. That's at my school, in my classroom. It doesn't generalize. And even then, I have highly motivated students who still struggle for a D. So, not only do I not see the motivation characteristic that you do, but I also don't know if that's what's standing in most students' way.
I think you and I agree about the entitlement problem. I kind of got my reaction to your post confused with my reaction to the article.
And it's the Chinese students in school who want to excel. They're self selected, or at least selected by someone. We don't have that here.
All this study does is point out the obvious. What it doesn't do is show how to teach students how to find reasons within themselves for getting good grades. As lack of self-motivation is the real problem standing between most kids and realizing their personal potential(both grade-wise and in life) that's where the studies should focus.
I was with you until you said "most." There's no basis for "most." And in fact, this study suggests that there is no reason to get good grades. I can almost get behind that (and I've been teaching for 13 years). More to the point, it suggests that there is no reason for learning. No reason to do it at all unless you get money for it. Which is really just a straighter line to your contention that the reason for learning is "success in real life."
I'm not saying that financial success after school is unimportant. But your anti-government sentiments are obscuring the fact that whether a private organization motivates you by giving you money or the government does that, the effect is the same on your long term motivation.
Isn't this kind of initiative what we decry as schools killing children's innate curiosity? Paying kids for grades is as much as stating that learning has no inherent value.
I do recognize that my supporting philosophical objection results in many children not achieving as much as they could. I am not happy with that. So if these kind of payment schemes increase scores, then I guess I'm for them. I just wonder what we're giving up in exchange. I want a market economy, not a market society.