by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 16, 2013 | Blog, Issues in Education
Apparently tracking is making a comeback. I was actually unaware that it had disappeared in the first place, but given that I generally try my hardest to remain immune to the latest fads emanating from education schools, that’s not exactly a surprise. As the product of twelve years of tracked classes, however, I find the subject somewhat interesting. Now granted that in my deliberate (and obstinate) ignorance of educational theory leaves me with little to offer beyond personal anecdote, but as someone who got to see tracking from both the top and bottom — and who got to see both the advantages and the disadvantages of that system — I think I can offer a few insights.
I attended a high school that tracked strictly, beginning in ninth grade: all subjects were divided into standard and honors tracks, with some subject further broken down into Basic, Standard, Honors, and AP. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 12, 2013 | Blog, Issues in Education
Stupidity from the New York Times opinion page. According to NY public middle school teacher Claire Needell Hollander:
New teachers may feel so overwhelmed by the itemization of skills in the Common Core that they will depend on prepared materials to ensure their students are getting the proper allotment of practice in answering “common core-aligned” questions like “analyze how a drama’s or poem’s form or structure … contributes to its meaning.” Does good literary analysis even answer such questions or does it pose them?
Excuse me? Studying the relationship between form and meaning is the point of literary analysis. An English teacher who doesn’t understand that has no business teaching English, no matter how “geeky” or enthusiastic she might be about her subject. Talking about feelings is what you do at a book club. Or in therapy. Ms. Hollander’s question calls to mind a teenager’s reaction when faced with a concept she doesn’t quite understand — rather than admit her perplexity, she clumsily tries to suggest that the whole thing never made sense in the first place.
To be fair, I understand her fear that schools will strip the (few) remaining bits of life from classrooms across the United States, but at least in theory, the Core’s emphasis on understanding that texts don’t magically come into existence, that they convey meaning through a series of specific choices about structure, diction, imagery, register, and so on, is one of the things that it gets right! Without understanding how texts are constructed, how things like irony, wordplay, and metaphor work, students have no tools for making literal sense out of challenging works. After years of teachers like Ms. Hollander, they have literally *never* been asked to read a text closely — fiction, non-fiction, nothing. As I’ve heard from so many students staring down baffling Critical Reading passages, “it’s just a bunch of words.”
I would be interested to know what Ms. Hollander proposes to a student doesn’t have an emotional reaction to what she’s reading? What would she suggest? That the student just keep reading until she feels something? Eventually, she’ll just learn to fake it, but she certainly won’t learn anything. Worse yet, what if a student can’t even really understand what he’s reading? (I haven’t met many middle-schoolers — or, for that matter, many high school juniors — who could really “get” The Color Purple, never mind grapple with the issues it raises in anything but the most clichéd manner, but perhaps Ms. Hollander’s students are an exceptionally precocious bunch.) Or what about a student who had the “wrong” kind of emotion (presumably one who didn’t feel sufficiently upset about Celie’s victimhood)? What would Ms. Hollander do then?
To be clear, I’m not advocating an approach that mechanically reduces literature down to a series of dry rhetorical figures in order to avoid any discussion of the actual ideas it contains — when I was studying in Paris, I loathed that aspect of the French system — but rather one that takes into account the fact that understanding how texts say what they say is a crucial part of appreciating what they say. The best teachers I had, both in English and otherwise, were intensely passionate about their subjects, and they conveyed that passion in ways that made what they had to say unforgettable. But they never confused their love for their subjects with the kind of facile touchy-feelyness advocated here.
Thank you to Emory University English professor Mark Bauerlein for pointing out that this kind of “therapeutic” approach is actually quite manipulative. Describing a typical middle-school assignment, he writes:
Most specimens of narrative writing in the [Demonstrating Character] units involve some sort of personal experience, reflection, or opinion. One from a 7th-grade unit on Civil Rights may be the very worst, which asks students to pretend they were witnesses to the horrific bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church and a friend was seriously injured. “What emotions are you feeling?” it proposes. “How will these events affect your future? What will you do to see that justice is served?”
As a college teacher of freshman English, I can see no sense in these assignments. They don’t improve critical aptitude, and they encourage a mode of reading and writing that will likely never happen in a college major or their eventual job. There is a theory behind it, of course, holding that only if students can relate to their subjects will they do their best and most authentic writing, not to mention explore and develop their unique selves.
The notion sounds properly student-centered, the motives educational, but in practice few 14-year-olds have the intellectual and emotional equipment to respond. Puberty turns them inside out, the tribalisms of middle school confound them, the worlds seems awfully big, the message of youth culture impart fantastical versions of peers, and they’re not sure who they are.
What lurid imaginings do we throw them into when we tell them to witness a bombing? Do we really expect 7th graders to ruminate upon their integrity? Ponder these assignments closely and they start to look less benevolent and more coercive. One of them in an 8th grade unit on “Adolescent identities” mentions a short story involving self-sacrifice, then says,
Think of a time in your life where you have put someone else’s needs or wants, like a family member or friend, ahead of your own desires. Convey to an audience of your peers what the circumstances of that time were, who you sacrificed for and what led you to that decision.
A 14-year-old receiving it must wonder just how self-sacrificing he must appear. If the student doesn’t remember too much and still has to fill more pages, she will fabricate the necessary details. Should he admit to having resented the self-sacrifice? Should she congratulate herself for her good deeds? The whole exercise involves so many tricky expectations that the student wonders what implicit lesson he should take from it. (https://educationnext.org/the-me-curriculum/)
And furthermore:
Without focused training in deep analysis of literary and non-literary texts, students enter college un-ready for its reading demands. Students generally can complete low-grade analytical tasks such as identifying a thesis, charting evidence at different points in an argument, and discovering various biases. But college level assignments ask for more. Students must handle multi-layered statements with shifting undertones and overtones. They must pick up implicit and explicit allusions. They must expand their vocabulary and distinguish metaphors and ironies and other verbal subtleties.
Those capacities come not from contextualist orientations (although “outside” information helps), but from slow, deliberate textual analysis. The more teachers slip away from it, the more remediation we may expect to see on college campuses, a problem already burdening colleges with developing capacities that should have been acquired years earlier. Indeed, when ACT pored over college-readiness data from 2005, it found that “the clearest differentiator in reading between students who are college ready and students who are not is the ability to comprehend complex texts.” More reader response exercises for 9th-11th-graders are only going to exacerbate the problem.(https://educationnext.org/not-just-which-books-teachers-teach-but-how-they-teach-them/)
Amen.
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 18, 2013 | Blog, Issues in Education
Occasionally I inadvertently find myself in the crossfire between what teachers think students know and what students actually know. From this peculiar vantage point, I’m often struck by the way the assumptions on both sides fail to line up — high school teachers often take for granted that their students can “connect the dots” on their own, and high school students assume their teachers know that they need everything explained very explicitly. What looks from one side like teachers failing to teach important information, and from the other side like students being lazy or clueless, is actually a classic case of faulty assumptions.
Let me explain.
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been wrapped up in AP French prep. The AP exam was revised last year ago to include a “synthesis” essay that requires students to read an article, interpret a graph, and listen to an audio clip, then write a thesis-driven essay (all in French) about a given question (e.g. “Should the French language be protected from English?”).
One of the sources always takes the “pro” side, one the “con,” and one is neutral. The audio is usually the most intimidating source because it involves authentic French spoken quickly by a native speaker, and it’s almost impossible for someone who hasn’t lived in a francophone environment to pick up on the nuances. Most kids are just flipped out about whether they’ll be able to figure out what’s going on.
Here’s the thing, though: it’s pretty easy to figure out what sides the article and the graph are taking, and they’re always presented before the audio. So by default, the audio has to take the side that the other two haven’t. Logically, a person can determine the point of the audio before they even begin listening to it.
Incidentally, I didn’t realize this until I had to calm down a panicked junior who was terrified she wasn’t even going to be able to figure out which side the audio was taking. When I inquired about the order in which the sources were presented and she told me that the audio was always last, I realized that she could deduce the position the speaker would take before she even listened to it. When I told her that… let’s just say that it was a proverbial lightbulb moment.
Now this is where it gets interesting: her teacher is a good friend of mine, and I mentioned the exchange to her. Now, for the record, my friend is a fabulous teacher with a 100% pass rate on the French AP — a major feat in a huge NYC public school (albeit a very selective one). She’s nothing if not clear. But somehow it had never occurred to her that her students needed to be told explicitly that the audio was taking the position that the other two weren’t. It just seemed too obvious. But after I told her about the student’s realization, she made a point of mentioning it in class.
The next time I saw my student, she proudly announced that Madame had taught the class the “trick” she’d learned from me the previous week. “But,” she sniffed indignantly, “she really should have told us that before.”
That moment threw into sharp relief everything I’ve been thinking about recently. I’m increasingly aware of the disconnects between what teachers and teachers think teenagers know vs. what teenagers actually know, and of the fact that high school students, given 2 + 2, won’t necessarily think to put them together to make 4.
More recently, I was explaining to a friend (a Ph.D. in Classics with years of teaching experience) that my students often have trouble figuring out when an author is discussing their own ideas vs. someone else’s ideas, and she asked me to repeat the statement because she found it so astonishing. She couldn’t even conceive of that a person could have such a problem, never mind the fact that I could be so matter-of-fact about it.
I don’t have any grand solutions for any of this. I do know that I approach the SAT with fewer and fewer assumptions about what people actually know (although every now and then I still get thrown — how exactly can someone make it through life without knowing the meaning of “permanent”?).
I know, for example, that a kid scoring 700 might not consistently be able to identify the topics of SAT passages.
I know that even kids scoring above 700 often have significant trouble figuring out what an author believes when that author spends time considering opposing points of view.
I know that kids often have trouble with tone because they can’t draw a relationship between how the words appear on the page and how the sound. I also know that sometimes they can’t sound out words in the first place because they were never taught phonics.
In short, I’ve learned to start from zero. Better for me to be pleasantly surprised than the contrary.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Apr 5, 2013 | Blog, Issues in Education
From The New York Times:
Imagine taking a college exam, and, instead of handing in a blue book and getting a grade from a professor a few weeks later, clicking the “send” button when you are done and receiving a grade back instantly, your essay scored by a software program.
And then, instead of being done with that exam, imagine that the system would immediately let you rewrite the test to try to improve your grade.
EdX, the nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to offer courses on the Internet, has just introduced such a system and will make its automated software available free on the Web to any institution that wants to use it. The software uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers, freeing professors for other tasks.
Umm…. Exactly what other tasks do professors need to be freed to do? Ok, writing, research, whatever, fine, but call me crazy, isn’t grading student work also supposed to be an integral part of their job? Wait, perhaps this just an excuse to close down writing programs and humanities departments (to have more money to give to STEM fields) in order to save the pittance that would otherwise go toward paying the adjuncts who do the real grunt work of teaching writing? Or maybe it’s really just a dastardly ploy by overpaid aging leftists to outsource their work so that they can go lounge on the beach in Tahiti.
Obviously elite colleges will never actually adopt this technology for their undergrads (can you imagine the howls of protest?), although I can see it being used for some of the online, open-enrollment classes.
The real issue is the possibility that non-elite colleges, not to mention high schools in poor states with poor education systems (the article mentions Utah and Louisiana) will use this technology to replace actual human teachers, thus further exacerbating the gap between the educational “haves” and “have nots.”
As pretty much all 934 Times commenters have pointed out, there are just too many things a computer program cannot read for, like veracity, logic, subtlety, and yes, creativity, both in terms of content and structure. And professors don’t exactly seem eager to be relieved of the drudgery of teaching writing either (guess they’re not nearly as lazy as everyone seems to think).
Not to mention this:
“It allows students to get immediate feedback on their work, so that learning turns into a game, with students naturally gravitating toward resubmitting the work until they get it right,” said Daphne Koller, a computer scientist and a founder of Coursera.
First of all, there’s something seriously wrong when 20 year-olds can’t learn unless “it’s like a game.” Learning to write is hard work — it can certainly be enormously interesting and rewarding, but it also takes a long time to master. It’s the polar opposite of a video game, and any system built around the notion that the process can be circumvented by a few cheap tricks has absolutely no understanding of what learning to write involves.
There’s also quite a lot to be said for not getting instant feedback. One of my high school English teachers would return essays covered in reams of meticulous red scrawl; sometimes his notes were almost as long as our papers. Needless to say, he took a lot longer than a few minutes to grade our essays. Those comments could be very harsh, but they showed that he took our work very, very seriously — probably a lot more seriously than most us took it. I probably wouldn’t be able to do what I do now if not for that class.
Besides, the primary thing this technology will teach kids is how to write something that can game the system — regardless of whether it makes sense. The SAT essay, which is still (presumably) scored by human beings, is evidence enough for the kind of gag-inducing jumbled prose that a computerized grader would likely reward.
But who of course cares a whit about whether students actually learn to write as long as the test scores are good? After all, technology is the solution for everything, and test scores are what education is really about. Right?
by Erica L. Meltzer | Sep 8, 2012 | Blog, Issues in Education
From “Child-Centered Learning Has Let My Pupils Down” by Matthew Hunter, Standpoint Magazine
Nowadays, child-centred learning is an article of faith in the state sector. Whenever I question it at work I am met with bemusement at best, but usually righteous anger. Its principles pervade everything a new teacher hears about “best practice”: avoid chalk-and-talk; don’t point out a child’s mistakes (it will harm his self-esteem); never teach anything pupils may find boring; and never, on any account, organise the pupils’ desks in rows. Islands of desks where the pupils can “group learn” are dogmatically promoted. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 22, 2012 | Blog, Issues in Education
I realize that this post might seem like a bit of a contradiction, given my railing against the dumbing down of AP exams (or at least AP Comp) in my previous post, but even assuming that some of the exams are easier than they were, say, ten or fifteen years ago, they’re still not all that easy.
The more time I spend tutoring AP exams — or, should I say, the more time I spend tutoring people who are seriously underprepared for AP exams — the more I wonder why everyone (read: the College Board) is so obsessed with promoting AP exams, and worse, why schools are being ranked according to a formula that weights the number of AP exams taken by students more heavily than the students’ actual grades on those exams.
Part of the answer is of course economic: at $87 a pop, those exams are a virtual gold-mine. Sure there a fee-waivers, but most of the kids taking those tests in the first place are middle- to upper-middle class. The number of kids who get granted waivers is minuscule in proportion. Furthermore, the College Board does not pay outside proctors to administer the exams. Teachers themselves are responsible for administering them during school hours (and for dealing with all the ensuing hassles). The College Board sits back, does nothing, and collects the cash. It’s a pretty good deal.
On a less cynical note, I understand the argument that students achieve at a higher level just by being exposed to AP-level material, even if they don’t achieve passing grades, but unfortunately, that’s not what I observe. What I do observe is kids who don’t yet possess the necessary intellectual maturity being forced to cram huge amounts of information down their throats and regurgitate it back without any true understanding or ability to analyze it, then forgetting it the instant the exam is over.
I would go so far as to argue that sometimes they actually learn less in some AP classes than they would in a regular class. Just sticking the “AP” level on a class does not mean that it’s anything of the sort, and simply taking an AP class does not indicate that someone is even remotely ready to do college-level work. When a student who’s taken a year of “AP English” at a top-ranked public school tells you that she’s not really sure what rhetoric is, that’s not a good sign. One sophomore who told me she was praying for a 2 (!) on the AP World History exam told me that more than anything, she was sorry that she hadn’t learned anything the entire year. Her review sheets consisted of pages and pages of terms and definitions, grouped by very general era but otherwise entirely unrelated — not exactly an ideal way to achieve a coherent understanding of anything.
Yes, I understand that presenting a couple of personal anecdotes does not a comprehensive critique make, but at this point I’ve spent enough time with drilling basics that should be a given for an AP student, not to mention encountering students (over and over again) who just don’t have enough academic experience or cultural context to really understand what they’re being asked, to wonder how beneficial the push for everyone to take AP classes is.
Don’t get me wrong — I’m not trying to suggest that the program doesn’t have a good deal of merit when students are genuinely prepared to tackle the work, and when their teachers are not pressured by their administrations too spend all their time on test-prep. But fifteen year-olds are, well, fifteen, not eighteen or nineteen, and that in the long run, they’ll be better served by mastering the fundamentals of English and History and everything else before they try to tackle more advanced work. Presumably, that’s the whole point of high school.
