A few days back, he sent me the article linked below.  I’ve grabbed two pull quotes I found interesting:

On why calculus is so often taught devoid of any practical applicability:

Every field has its own version of a derivative.  Whether it goes by “marginal return” or “growth rate” or “velocity” or “slope,” a derivative by any other name still smells as sweet.  Unfortunately, many students seem to come away from calculus with a much narrower interpretation, regarding the derivative as synonymous with the slope of a curve.

On nature, which “somehow knows calculus:”

Snell’s law describes how light rays bend when they pass from air into water, as they do when shining into a swimming pool. Light moves more slowly in water, much like the hiker in the snow, and it bends accordingly to minimize its travel time. Similarly, light also bends when it travels from air into glass or plastic as it refracts through your eyeglass lenses.The eerie point is that light behaves as if it were considering all possible paths and automatically taking the best one. Nature — cue the theme from “The Twilight Zone” — somehow knows calculus.

via Change We Can Believe In – Opinionator Blog – NYTimes.com.

Yay for math tournaments and relatives who work for the Yankees!

Using Hall Ch. 9 and/or Brown & Attardo (esp. Chs 10-14) as a base, comment on the factors that determine how someone learns a second language, or acquires a first one. Consider the following:

Getting to Talk: TV isn’t a good source for active language use, and just sitting in your class and listening isn’t optimal either. What have you been able to do to get the whole class talking, without having chaos?

My response is one that I feel provokes a lot of thought and (not coincidentally given the task presented) discussion:

Jonthon Coulson
ED 500
03/22/08

One of the prompts suggests that television isn’t a good source for active language use, and then relates this to sitting in a classroom and listening to someone speak. While I tend to agree that one-way forms of media such as television breed laziness of the mind and dependence on forcefeeding to learn, I would argue that this is not grounds to disqualify one-to-many speech attempts in educational contexts, such as are seen in intro-level college classes, tedtalks (http://www.ted.com/talks), and lectures such as those disseminated by The Teaching Company. Such forms of communication are ideal for introducing concepts or laying out arguments, and the listening skills required of audience members are teachable and cultivatable. And while most higher-level learning is done as a listener as opposed to active participant, the vast majority of what people learn comes from interpersonal discussion with networked peers. Thus, teaching strategies that enable students to maximize their discourse abilities and to learn through dialoguing are worthy of consideration.
In my classroom, dialogue is ever-present and of great import with regard to transferring knowledge. In no particular order, I will identify some examples of active discussions that occur in my classroom:
-Open-ended questions relating to the reading. This started as a way for me to informally assess who had been reading. However, it quickly became apparent that if the question was worded correctly, and if the right questions were presented, that differences of opinion would occur. In the debates that ensued, facts were drawn upon, connections to the world and student’s own lives were made, and argumentation was used. This high level of cognitive processing is what I seek in class, though I cannot say that test scores increased as a result of this, in part due to the fact that my assessments cannot accurately capture the sort of organically generated knowledge my students produced.
-Reflections on video prompts. On multiple occasions, I have played music videos with overt moral messages. Before doing so, I instructed students to write down any lyrics, visual images, or other details that grabbed them. What followed was always a discussion (as opposed to the aforementioned debate). Students tended to piggyback off of one another’s ideas, citing words or images that built off of whatever information was just cited. With a little teacher guidance, I am usually successful in guiding these discussions unobtrusively so that students identify the major message of the video. They are usually then capable of explaining individually what the video’s message was, and also to cite examples as proof of their convictions.
-The hackey sack. In a less specific sense, sometimes my students become too talkative, and I get out a hackey sack that we use to enforce the one person at once rule. While this rule is not always that important to me, I have found that particularly personal topics prerequisite a high level of order in the discussion. Such was the case, when reading Brave New World, when we discussed the productivity of mentally retarded people and the elderly. Some students decided, of their own accord, to take the position that unproductive groups are a drain on society, and should be eliminated. Other students, who had direct, personal interaction with individuals from these purportedly unproductive groups, become offended and, as a majority, would have succeeded in shouting down the few students brave enough to advocate the devilish argument. In other words, chaos could easily have ensued. With the implementation of the hackey sack, students were forced to obey some basic conversational norms, and doing so provided them with time to pause and to cool off. I eventually drew the discussion to a close, and discussed the value in trying to defend a position that you do not agree with. Then, we discussed the effect of allowing time and courtesy for even purportedly heretical views to be expressed. I cannot imagine how this could not have been done if students had not been allowed to speak.
As a second year teacher with no background in Applied Linguistics, I have found that teaching English at a base level to my ESL students and teaching English at a more advanced level to my ELA classes is not beyond my abilities. I mention this because I was struck by the following passage in Hall’s book:

“In many parts of the world, it’s still the case that anyone who speaks English as a native can get a job teaching the language, despite the efforts of professional organizations like TESOL and university departments of Applied Linguistics. I hope that the chapters so far will have convinced you that this is almost as daft as employing someone as a human biology teacher because they have a healthy working body.”

I was struck by this comment because it goes against what I know about language learning. Most human beings, much less English speakers, are not instructed by individuals with degrees in English or Applied Linguistics. They are taught by their fathers and mothers, by their friends and acquaintances. From imperfect and incomplete input, children are able to derive the rules and particulars of all the worlds’ languages. I mention this because in a discussion of the value of interpersonal discussion, it is important to remember that even observing interpersonal discussion can be an educational experience. Watching television have a social and functional value, because many students are able to observe and experiment with forms of expression that might not have occurred to them otherwise. While I am the first to note that television should be used in moderation (I myself haven’t owned one for over three years), we should draw hasty conclusions about the way that students acquire language. Classrooms discussions are valuable, but so is listening to a teacher who uses words students have not heard before. Being able to interact with peers is important, but it isn’t something that will not happen unless teachers provide time for it. This movement in education toward a workshop model that allows students a majority of class time for group and individual practice is in contrast to the way that I have learned throughout my own life. There is value in allowing teachers to speak, and to be listened to, at durations of longer than 5-7 minutes.
There is a direct connection to be made between the workshop model and television, which is where this paper has been inevitably leading. Television programs tend to display content in 5-7 minute chunks, interrupted here and there by commercial messages. The landscape of American consumerism has been directly and measurably affected in what many say is a bad way because of this. They blame television, but make no effort to educate television viewers or engender a sense of media savvy in them. And yet younger generations of viewers seem to have developed a resistance to traditional advertising nonetheless. Product placement is now the standard-bearer of getting people to buy things they don’t need. In a very similar way, we notice that student attention span seems to have tracked itself to television programming, and models are created and immediately standardized which seem to say that students cannot pay attention effectively for any longer period of time. My attention span as a child was definitely tracked by television, but my teachers were persistent in helping me to extend that with their unwillingness to speak in concise teletalk. I am better off for it.
In long-overdue closing, I feel that the question posed this week was a bit of a leading question. The presumption that more conversation is better seems inarguable, and my attempt here is not to arue it. Rather, my attempt here is to point out that students learn in many ways, and there will be no scripted, universal form of instruction from which they learn best. They will learn from a television, they will learn through out-of-classroom interpersonal discussion, and they will learn from the teacher who talks for all forty minutes of class. Some students will learn better from one-to-many instruction, and other will learn better from groupwork, based on their learning modalities, which for all it is worth may very well change over time. Our focus should not be on what form of knowledge delivery is best, but rather on what combination works best for each child.

The following quote, pulled from the article, captures my sentiments:

“I think they’ll have their hands full,” said Alan B. Krueger, a Princeton professor who studies the economics of education. “Paying teachers above market rate for hard-to-staff schools makes sense, don’t get me wrong. The question is, ‘How much do you want to tilt in that direction?’ ”

via At Charter School, Higher Teacher Pay – NYTimes.com.

(and as I backpost this, on November 27th, 2009, I wonder how this effort is doing now…)

We’re reading MacBeth in class right now.  Too bad we can’t go…

The Pirahã people are an indigenous hunter-gatherer tribe of Amazon natives, who mainly live on the banks of the Maici River in Brazil. They currently number about 360, which is sharply reduced from the numbers recorded in previous decades, and the culture is in danger of extinction. The Pirahã people do not call themselves pirahãs but instead the Hi’aiti’ihi, roughly translated as ‘the straight ones’. Members of the Pirahã can whistle their language, which is how its men communicate when hunting in the jungle.

Piraha is a language of whistles – who knew such a thing even existed? (linguists.) The Piraha example interests me because it seems to indicate that, in the absence of recursion and thus discreet infinity, a language loses a lot of its functionality – which I see as a cultural limitation. Wikipedia notes later in the same entry that “their culture is concerned solely with matters that fall within direct personal experience, and thus there is no history beyond living memory,” presumably because they don’t have enough new terms to have said conversations.

I share a room with three other teachers (welcome to New York City!). The Spanish teacher has the last-period class in my room, and often uses my board, even though there is another in the room. On this particular day, she put up chart paper with instructions for the test, STARTED ERASING MY ART, and then said “I’merasing this” as she was half-done. I was dismayed, even moreso when I realized that she never had any intention of writing anything up there. When I asked her about it later, she said it clashed with her posters, and she thought it would confuse the kids.

So dies beauty.

Apparently STL’s public school system is crumbling so rapidly that there won’t be enough room for veteran teachers, much less TFA.  This is a result of development downtown that has lead to a number of private and charter schools being erected for the “white kids.”  Sadly, that will leave the public schoolers with the veterans who, in my experience, are not always the hardest-working.