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SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Great wits are sure to madness near allied…
There's a new study out that looks at eight child prodigies from various fields, and found that the only off-the-charts difference common to the eight was their prodigious working memory scores. Click here for an article about this study.
The article explores a possible connection between autism and prodigyism, especially their shared trait of attention to detail. Here's a key paragraph from this article.
- Both prodigies and savants demonstrate extreme attention to detail, exceptional memories, and high ability in rule-based domains. This is probably not a coincidence, as all of these characteristics are associated with talent in these domains. But how? First of all, there's no such thing as "innate talent." No one is born with fully developed traits. That's not how genes work. It is possible, however, that prodigies are born with genetic variants that relate to various tendencies, including an attentional focus on details and a brain-network wiring that supports an enhanced encoding of new memories. This could explain why prodigies and savants frequently report that they were attracted early on to domains that deal with systems, and why many also display -- even in infancy -- an enhanced ability to maintain mental representations (although there's some evidence that the working memory of prodigies is most enhanced in the symbol systems that interest them the most, such as mathematical or linguistic stimuli). After just a few years of obsessive focus, prodigies build up rich long-term memory structures that allow them to assimilate and learn new information faster and faster. This could also explain their enhanced ability to manipulate information in their heads.
As a bonus, the last page of the article embeds an exquisite cello performance by Jacqueline du Pré. H/T KW
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Cue the Black Hats
The Canadian Teachers' Federation is holding its annual conference in Halifax this week. The first two days have been devoted to Perspectives in Quality Education. The full program is here. Readers can follow some of the sessions that are live-streamed here. We are fortunate to have Educhatter's Paul Bennett on location twittering away with some very pointed observations. Read more on this at his Educhatter blog here. (Also of note, in a different session, fellow blogger and teacher, Stephen Hurley, presented on the results of a CTF-CEA survey of teacher attitudes.)
SQE, apparently, was referenced in a power point presentation. Since the Society for QUALITY Education was not invited to speak about quality, what the reference was, I don't know. Maybe we were on a dart board. Seems that we, along with the Fraser Institute, C.D. Howe Institute, the Atlantic Institute or any other organization that publishes provincial test scores and rankings, are the "bad guys." You see we, along with the rest of the black hats, believe that information transparency leads to accountability and that's freaking out the education establishment.
Yesterday I watched one of the sessions on quality. Annie Kidder, of People for Education, presented on "The Core of Quality", in which Paul reports she spoke about the "fight for the hearts and minds of the public" over testing and 'ranking' and termed the Fraser and ilk as 'the bad guys'. Annie noted, correctly, that parents like testing and the Fraser rankings. Although it was conceded that making sure kids can read and do math is important too, the fight is about trying to convince the public that it should be about making sure students are happy and enjoying school first and foremost.
To a certain extent that is certainly true. What parent doesn't want their children to be happy and like school? However, SQE sees far too many students that are struggling and are not happy. Parents are often at their wits' end trying to find ways to help their children.
Meanwhile, now that school is out for the summer, the registrations for our free remedial math and reading programs continue to grow.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Help Yourself
There is a wealth of resources available on the Well-Trained Mind web-site. Here's one example: a list of excellent free on-line resources (our remedial reading program is included).
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Sunday at the Movies (Oliver Sacks)
Everyone has heard of Oliver Sacks (Awakenings), and this video is of interest just because you get to meet Dr. Sacks. His TED talk concerns the visual hallucinations of some blind people and, as such, sheds light on the workings of our brains. Make sure you watch right to the very end, as Dr. Sacks reveals something very interesting about himself. TEDlink
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
See me after class
This video is very funny and cute, offering insights into what it's like to be a teacher - especially a first-year teacher - and plugging a promising book called See Me After Class. Video link.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Path Dependency: Teacher Tenure
Another example of path dependency, a much more harmful one than the QWERTY keyboard, is teacher tenure. When it was invented, the purpose of teacher tenure was to protect teachers from discrimination linked to religion, politics, and personal beliefs (think anti-semitism, the Red Scare, and gay teachers, for example). But times have changed, and today there are lots of laws in place to protect teachers from this kind of discrimination. Here's an excerpt from The Same Thing Over and Over that shows the consequences of sticking with teacher tenure long after its usefulness has ended (pp 156-157).
- More recently, however, tenure has morphed from a sensible protection against dismissal based on political, religious, or personal grounds into an extraordinary, costly blanket of protection against termination - even when the grounds are as prosaic as incompetence, malfeasance, or the pursuit of cost efficiencies. Ray Howe's 'orderly means' have morphed into an extraordinarily expensive, time-consuming process that deters or defeats most efforts to remove the incompetent an the irresponsible.
- Tenure policies, job protection acts, discrimination laws, and contract provisions intended to protect against wrongful termination now too often serve mostly to protect ineffective, low-performing teachers. Tenure makes removing even toxic teachers enormously difficult and expensive. In New York City, for example, the cost to fire one incompetent tenured teacher has been estimated at about $250,000. The exxtreme cost of removing incompetent teachers leads many districts to simply turn a blind eye to even the most egregious offenses. In 2002, a tenured teacher from the Newark Public School System received nine months of pay plus the value of her unused vacation and sick days even after substantial evidence indicated she had used foul language against an elementary-aged students; had 'punch(ed)' the student 'using a closed fist'; and had exhibited 'speech [that] was slurred,' 'an unsteady gait,' and 'behavior [that] was inappropriate and unprofessional.'
- Administrators and state education leaders have reacted by adopted the rational but unfortunate response of simply leaving mediocre teachers in the classroom. For example, in the fifteen years following the 1986 passage of an Illinois education reform package to increase teacher accountability, an average of only two tenured teachers per year were terminated for poor performance - this in a state with 95,000 tenured teachers. A 2009 study by The New Teaher Project (TNTP) examinated twelve large and mid-sized districts in four states and found that over half had not fired even one tenured teacher for poor performance in the past five years. Of those that had removed even one teacher, none had dismissed more than a handful. This same study also reported that 86 percent of adminstrators admitted that they did not always pursue termination even when warranted, since tenure has resulted in 'lengthy and burdensome requirements, coupled with the low likelihood of successful removals,' and has left 'principals ... reluctant to pursue dismissals.'
- Tenure may have made good sense given the patronage and politicized hiring that characterized late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century America in schooling and other municipal services. It has become less essential as civil service and employment law measures have put in place safeguards that did not exist forty or fifty years ago. The result is that tenure's legitimate benefits have shrunk dramatically, while its costs are now large and omnipresent. We are now at a point where the balance of rights ought to be reassessed.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Path Dependency: One Example
Social scientists have a term for human beings' tendency to keep on doing things the way they've always done them: path dependency. In The Same Thing Over and Over: How school reformers get stuck in yesterday's ideas, Frederick M. Hess gives two interesting examples of path dependency. I'll reproduce one of the examples today (pp 32-34), and the other tomorrow.
- Did you ever glance at your laptop's keyboard and wonder why the keys are arranged that way? Odds are you work on a keyboard in which the first six letters on the top line are QWERTY. This so-called QWERTY keyboard was configured so as to keep the newly invented typewriter from jamming too frequently. While such concerns have receded. QWERTY remains the standard despite the existence of more efficient and user-friendly alternativs. Stanford University economist Paul David wrote in his article "Clio and the Economics of QWERTY" that consumers and producers are 'held fast in the grip of events long forgotten and shaped by circumstances in which neither they nor their interests figured'.
- The original keyboard model, patented in 1867 by Christopher Sholes, was predisposed to key jams, especially when the keys for frequently used letters would collide. Sholes reorganized the keyboard to separate commonly utilized letter pairs, like 'TH', to minimize jamming. In doing so, he shifted the letters from their original alphabetical order to something resembling the modern QWERTY standard. One modification, made at the behest of typewriter salesmen, involved switching the positions of the period mark '.' and the 'R'. This made possible a little gimmick that allowed salesmen demonstrating for potential buyers to type 'TYPE WRITER' while using only the top row of keys.
- Competing designs emerged but never took hold. Ever heard of the Blickensderfer keyboard? Created in 1893, it was termed the 'ideal' because its home row included the letters 'DHIATENSOR', with which one could compose over 70 percent of the words in the English language.. In 1936, educational psychologist August Dvorak created the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, which sensibly shifted the vowels 'AEIOU' and the most commonly used consonants, 'DHTNS' to the home row. By this time the typewriter was in wide use, however. People were used to the familiar keyboard, and the cost of retraining individuals and replacing QWERTY keyboards was deemed prohibitive.
- The QWERTY keyboard, developed to avoid jammed keys in nineteenth-century typewriters, remains, more than a century later, the default design for computer keyboards. When IBM introduced the first personal computer in 1981, one advertised highlight was its inclusion of a QWERTY keyboard. In a world where almost as many Americans have accessed the Internet via their phone as through their laptop, cell phone keyboards have become ubiquitous. Yet while keyboards on these new electronic devices no longer even involve a typing position, they have all adopted the QWERTY format. As August Dvorak wryly observed decades ago, "Changing the keyboard format is like proposing to reverse the Ten Commandments and the Gold Rule, discard every moral principle, and ridicule motherhood!'
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
The knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone…....
I write this with some trepidation, as I am well aware that many Ontario educators believe that anything that happens in the US has no relevance to Canadians. However, I am also aware that nothing happens in a vacuum, and developments in our giant neighbour will inevitably have some impact on us. And so I present four recent Jay Greene posts: New Hampshire, school choice round-up, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina.
American legislators in most states are determined to improve their students' learning, and they are prepared to go to great lengths to bring this about. Not so in Canada, apparently. Yet.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Still no royal road to learning
Two of our readers (GR and MW) sent me this link - it's an op-ed piece in yesterday's National Post on the problems with modern math pedagogy. The piece identifies all the usual suspects, like math-deprived teachers, lousy textbooks, lack of reliable assessment, and flawed ideology, and adds the siren call of technology. Modern education leaders are being beguiled by the false promise of short-cuts - giving kids calculators, for example, so that they don't have to suffer the drudgery of learning their number facts. Never mind that the research has conclusively shown that the drudgery is necessary for advanced performance.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
It’s all Greek to them
You may or may not be aware that Ontario quietly dropped cursive writing instruction from its curriculum about 10 years ago, with no one the wiser really. Here's an article that raises a point that hadn't occurred to me until now - namely, that recent graduates are unlikely to be able to read historical documents such as letters and archives. And there's an little vignette involving famous autographs. H/T Chas