SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

GUEST BLOG BY MARJORIE GANN. MARJORIE HAS TAUGHT IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SCHOOLS IN NEW BRUNSWICK AND ONTARIO, AND IS THE AUTHOR OF A WORKBOOK ON WRITING SKILLS. SHE WROTE THE FOLLOWING LETTER IN RESPONSE TO THE RECENT MACLEAN’S ARTICLE ON FUZZY MATH. HER POINT IS - THE EDUCATION JUGGERNAUT IS STILL RAMPAGING OUT OF CONTROL 14 YEARS ON.

When I saw your March 19 cover (“Why is it your job to teach your kid math?”) I did a double-take. Just fourteen years ago, you ran a photo of me tutoring my eleven-year-old daughter Deborah in math, under the title “The new new math: Long division takes a backseat to creativity” (August 17, 1998).

The frustration I voiced back then (“Deborah just finished Grade 5 and she could not multiply using two-digit multipliers. At school, they had taught her two or three different ways . . . and she was hopelessly confused”) is echoed by the parents in your March story (“I don’t have a problem with alternate strategies,” Stokke says. “But I fear they’re learning so many, that in the end they’re not mastering any.”)

An entire generation of Canadian students has been sacrificed by an educational bureaucracy that prefers its tired mantras about “high-level conceptual work” (Maclean’s, 2012) or “exploration, discovery and teaching students to think” (Maclean’s, 1998) to mastering skills. The parents who can afford private tutoring will ensure that their kids do master those skills outside of school. Meanwhile, children from less advantaged homes will be the losers.

There’s more to full inclusion than meets the eye

On April 7, Educhatter blogged on the education policy “full inclusion” whereby all children, no matter how severe their disabilities, should be integrated into regular classrooms. This story has legs! There is lots of good stuff in the comments, including Educhatter’s report of a public argument in New Brunswick between an advocate for autistic children and the province’s co-chair of the Education Inclusion Review who appears to already have his mind made up in favour of full inclusion.

A full inclusion policy throws a number of balls into the air. Here are a few questions that come to my mind, and I’m sure there are others.

• How can a one-size-fits-all policy like full inclusion be good for every single disabled child?
• Can educational administrators who have never even met individual students be expected to make better decisions than the students’ parents?
• What is the effect on the non-disabled children in classes with disruptive and/or very demanding students?
• What is the effect on the teachers of fully-integrated classes, especially the vast majority of teachers who have no training on how to serve disabled students?
• What are the legal ramifications for school staff when it comes to things like the administration of medication or coping with physical aggression?

While full inclusion advocates mean well and their preferred policy sounds kindly, in fact there are undoubtedly many disabled students who would be better served in segregated settings - and many non-disabled students and teachers who would also be better served.

There are Surveys, Then There are Surveys

There is a twitter message being passed on about an Ontario survey that wants to know what parents, students, and teachers think.  At first I thought it was an effort by the Ontario government to find out what the public actually thought about how they were doing but, when I clicked on the link, lo and behold I see the usual “comrades for edukation” have collaborated:

               A project of the Ontario Student Trustees’ Association. OSTA-AECO has partnered with Student Vote, People for Education, ScholarshipsCanada.com, the Ontario Teachers’ Federation, the Ontario Principals’ Council, the Ontario Public School Boards’ Association and the Ontario Catholic School Trustees Association to ask students, parents, and educators the same ten questions about school and education.

The questions (the same for teachers, parents and students) run the gamut of earth-shattering controversy (sarcasm here) to downright confusing.  Here’s a sample:  Should plastic water bottles be banned from your school? Would students benefit from shorter vacation and more breaks through the year?  Some questions might generate genuinely interesting answers about whether school uniforms or single gender schools are desireable, but one asking whether the school prepares students to vote in elections was, frankly, disturbing.  Huh? Are students being indoctrinated?   There is space to comment, however.  There is no place to respond as a past parent or general member of the public - so you don’t matter to these “stakeholders”. 

There is not ONE question on whether one thinks that children are learning anything, whether math is being taught effectively, whether you want more alternatives, if you worry about your rural school, etc.  I guess the really tough opinion questions are up to SQE to ask.  If readers want to know what some Ontario parents think—a good start is our SQE-sponsored study here.  Still, if you are interested in the survey above, I suggest you fill it out anyways (pick a role) and make plenty of comments!!  They need to hear from more than the usual suspects.

History is Elementary

If you’re a history teacher or enjoy reading about history and history education, here’s a blog you might like. At the time of writing, the front page of this blog contains chatty and informative essays about FDR and his disability, war and democracy, information overload, historical inaccuracies in the movie of Gone with the Wind, and more. There are indexed archives down the lefthand side, many of which look very tantalizing. So much to read, so little time…....

O Brave New World That Has Such People In’t

GUEST BLOG BY NANCY WAGNER, SQE TREASURER

When Lois Burdett was teaching Grade 3 in Stratford Ontario, she wanted to introduce her 8-year-old students to Shakespeare. To make his works more accessible, she re-wrote many of his plays in rhyming couplets using easier language. I purchased several of these books from her series “Shakespeare Can Be Fun”. Each book contains illustrations drawn by her students, as well as written interpretations of the story line.

We started with The Tempest. My 8-year-old grandson sat with me as we took turns reading, and we were soon joined by his 5-year-old brother. Here is a passage re-written by Ms Burdett:

Meanwhile, back at Prospero’s abode,
Ferdinand was toting his heavy load.
Miranda implored, “Do not work so hard!
The orders of my father, you should disregard.
He’s busy for three hours, so do what I suggest.
Put down those logs a while. You really need to rest!”
Ferdinand refused, “The sun will set before I’m done,
I cannot stop, dear mistress. My toil has just begun.”
“Then let me help she argued. I’ll haul them for a while.”
I’d rather break my back,” he answered with a smile.

And here is the interpretation of this passage by Courtney Vandersleen, age 8:

Dearest Ferdinand,
Oh stop that my love bud.
Put down those logs and rest for a minute. You are going to pull a muscle for heaven’s sake.
Oh Ferdinand, your smile sends shivers down my spine. I desperately want you!
Miranda

Ms Burdett has not only re-written these plays for her students, she has had the children stage them as well. What I find so impressive is that this teacher at an ordinary public school in small-town Ontario believed that 8- year-olds, with guidance, were capable of understanding and enjoying great literature. And she didn’t do this with just one class. She taught Shakespeare to her Grade 3 classes for more than 20 years. I call this ” the art of the possible”. And this is why truly great teachers make such a tremendous difference in the lives of their students.

Sunday at the Movies (Creativity)

This very-watchable video casts doubt on the wisdom of educators’ desire to instill creativity in their students.

It’s That Time of Year Again

Ah Spring!—birds singing sweetly, trees making new leaves, tulips and daffodils blooming, teachers’ unions threatening…  Around the country the various teachers’ unions have cranked up the rhetoric as contracts and provincial budgets are on a collision course. 

In Nova Scotia, the NSTU has called for the resignation of the education minister. The union there is ticked off with proposed budget cuts. This couldn’t be more laughable considering Minister Jennex was a 30-year veteran teacher AND a NSTU executive committee member herself before entering politics and becoming the NDP government’s education minister.  Talk about killing your own!

The BC Teachers’ Federation has yet to vote on next steps in their ongoing work-to-rule actions which has seen teachers in the province refuse to issue report cards or hold parent teacher interviews.   That action is now before the BC Labour Relations Board, which will decide if it constitutes an illegal strike.  One thing you can be sure, parents are getting fed up.  But hey, it’s all about the kids. isn’t it?

In Alberta, the ATU is stirring the pot as well.  With their agreement due to expire soon and a huge provincial election happening right now, there must be some handwringing going on considering their opposition to standardized provincial testing and school choice—strongly supported by the Wildrose Party.

In Ontario the Elementary Teachers Federation has walked out of provincial framework negotiations claiming that Education Minister Broten is bullying them.  On top of that, the union’s MALE president, Sam Hammond, claims that the FEMALE minister is attacking women.  This union leader replaced the last GUY who missed out on the 12.55% that all the other unions got last time in 2008, in addition to the 12.5% they got in the previous 2004 agreement.  The EFTO, 80% of whom are women, only got 10.4% in the last round because they wanted more than 12.55%.   The Ontario government, now facing huge deficits after spending it on all those wage increases, wants to freeze salaries and the grid.  They have been advised by the Drummond Report to go after benefits and pensions as well, but we shall see.

Time to go out and smell the flowers.

Maybe They Should Use Systematic Explicit Phonics

The Science of Reading: "This is Dan, Dan is a Baboon. Read Dan Read" (Some fun for Friday 13th)

While the researchers used whole words for this French study, reported upon here in the National Post, they might have been more successful if they used explicit phonics to teach these baboons to read. 

Robbing Peter to pay Paul

As threatened, the Toronto District School Board (Tedious Board) is sacking 430 of 493.5 education assistants as it "struggles to cope with a large projected deficit and the costs of full-day kindergarten", according to this Globe and Mail report. At the same time, the board will be "hiring 406 early childhood educators who are required to staff full-day kindergarten classrooms". 

Combined with the province's class size caps in the primary grades and the new provincial anti-Victory lap measures, the Tedious Board's new policy shows that Peter (the older kids) is being robbed to pay Paul (the younger kids). While we do agree that it's very important to give young kids a good foundation, we note that many young kids still aren't getting the necessary good foundation (but that's another story). And we wonder how much further the province and school boards are prepared to go in their favouritism towards younger children. After all, you can rob Peter only so much - eventually, he will be totally broke!

Computer tutoring has come a long way, baby

You know how new inventions are always kind of clunky at first - think telephones, think automobiles - but then, once people see the potential and start tweaking them, they get better and better? Well, this process has been at work in the sphere of computer tutoring. I suspect that many of us are still thinking of machine tutoring in terms of its early Model T versions, but in fact these programs have got better and better. This blog posting discusses a recent study that suggests that certain types of computer programs are now approaching human tutoring effectiveness. 

The study categorizes tutoring as follows: "[The study] splits machine and human tutoring research along a spectrum of “grain-size” for the interaction.Answer-based tutors provide feedback and guidance after a student has worked through a problem and selected an answer, based on that answer. Step-based tutors break a solution to a problem or task into steps, and follow those steps with students, providing feedback around each step in the problem.Substep based tutors work within the steps – e.g., checking if students are familiar with the concepts or actions that make up a step before they get started working on that step, and intervening if they don't.Human tutoring is the most finely-grain sized approach of all, of course."

The study finds that "it looks like typical answer-based tutoring systems average an effect size of around 0.35 standard deviation units (real progress by itself), while all three of step-based, substep-based, and human tutoring seem to cluster around an effect size of 0.75 standard deviation units".

The article mentions two good computer-tutoring systems that I hadn't heard of: Carnegie Learning and ALEX.

To me, the most exciting aspect of these technological advances is summed up here: "Machine-tutoring systems change the economics for student help.  While there's a lot more up-front cost involved, the delivery cost per student goes way down.  This can shift investment in people resources (which do not have to go down unless you want/need it to go down) to other parts of the learning puzzle – the most intractable learning situations, motivation issues, diagnostic and group activities (where evidence shows those latter to pay off well), etc."