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.
by Erica L. Meltzer | May 5, 2012 | Blog, Issues in Education
I tutored an awful lot of AP comp this year… Somehow, I didn’t quite realize that the exam had been tweaked since I took it in 1999. Although I’ve tutored it before, I think I blocked out the actual experience of taking the exam as soon as it was over, and so I was mildly taken aback when one of my students mentioned how incredibly glad he was that it no longer included anything like the Susan Sontag prompt from 2001 (third question). Granted the 2001 question is very difficult, even by AP standards, but it’s still closer to what I remember (click here to see the 1999 questions from the test I took).
Here, by way of comparison, is the 2012 test (see the third question): the open-ended quote has now been replaced by the presumably more “relevant” synthesis essay.
I was under the mistaken impression that AP exams are intended to test college-level skills. I think it’s fair to say that 2001 fulfills that requirement; 2012 I’m not so sure about.
Not coincidentally, David Coleman, the incoming president of the College Board and champion of the AP program, is concerned about why so many students are unable to achieve passing grades on AP exams.
The obvious solution? Make the exams easier, of course!
That way everyone wins: the College Board can extol the virtues of the Common Core and its curriculum reforms program, and no one ever has to confront the fact that kids aren’t actually learning anything of substance because they’re spending all their time prepping for standardized tests. And since the kids will be totally lacking in critical thinking skills, it won’t occur to them to protest the watered-down excuse for an education they’re being served.
After all, who really cares about Sophocles and the dangers of pride when there’s the United States Post Office to worry about?
by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 14, 2012 | Issues in Education
Catherine Johnson’s recent post over at Kitchen Table Math got me thinking about a relationship that’s I’ve been curious about for a while: namely, that between exposure to phonics and the ability to figure use roots to figure out unfamiliar words on the SAT.
One of the things I’ve begun to notice recently is that I can generally distinguish between kids who were taught to read using a whole language approach and those taught to read using phonics. Almost invariably, the kids who were taught using whole language have considerably more difficult breaking words apart and examining their component parts. I tend to see this much more prominently when I tutor French or Italian — often a student will read the first couple of letters in a word and then simply guess what the rest of it says, which is an absolute disaster in French — but I see it when I tutor the SAT as well, albeit in a more roundabout way. (more…)
