The Geni Project

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Miscommunication

Posted on April 13, 2013 by larrygeni

When I started teaching, we gave students grades four times a year. Of course, everyone knew that only the semester grades really mattered because only they would show up on the students’ transcripts. We would also send out midquarter reports to parents, but those were primarily to communicate (in hand-written words) how a student was doing, especially if there was a chance of her failing.

By the time I retired from teaching, many years later, we gave grades eight times a year, and it seemed to me, at least, that we were emphasizing grades much too much. Today, there is increasing pressure for teachers to enter grades into the computer on a daily basis. I’ve talked to parents who check on their child’s “progress” several times a day. Teachers I talk to struggle to find enough to report – they sometimes translate student behavior or activities into points, knowing that such “data” isn’t particularly meaningful.

We have trained students, parents, and teachers alike that academic success is equal to having excellent grades, or even worse, to having accumulated a lot of points. Every teacher is told that communicating with parents on their child’s progress is important, and so it may be. But making the number of points a student has accumulated, or the percent homework that he has turned in, or the average test score he has at any given moment exactly identical to how well he is performing in school is seriously misguided, and intensely counterproductive.

In fact, that equivalence is the very heart of “doing school”, the often pointless activity that students do to get good grades. It translates into a distorted set of priorities that actively replace learning with something that is much less meaningful or useful in life. Accumulating points ceases to be of any value once a student leaves school, and the skills she acquired in becoming successful at earning points, at being good at doing school, are, in fact, detrimental in most walks of life.

This is not what we should be communicating with parents. We should be teaching them instead that learning is what matters, that student attributes like grit and self-directness, curiosity and self-awareness are much more important than the student’s grade point average. But for that to happen, we must all agree that learning is the central purpose of school, something which often gets lost in the world of daily grade entries in a computer program.

Who’s In Charge?

Posted on April 7, 2013 by larrygeni

A recent New York Times article describes the growing use of computers to grade essay tests. A student submits an essay and immediately gets a fully graded result, with comments. After some initial programming, no humans need to be involved in the process.

The belief that a machine can understand human language well enough to evaluate a student’s writing, implies that either the computer understands the meaning of what is being written, or that on a fundamental level, language is merely a collection of symbols that either obey the algorithms of language correctly or incorrectly.

Isn’t it equally possible that we humans, having created these machines, are now abdicating basic human functions, even communication, to them because we find it more efficient? The central argument for automated essay grading is, as far as I can tell, that we can’t afford to pay people to do it. We don’t seem to have the resources to have humans guiding other humans in learning this most human of skills. On the other hand, we can afford to spend two thousand million dollars a day on our military.

According to a proponent of machine graded assessments, “Learning turns into a game, with students naturally gravitating toward resubmitting the work until they get it right.” But what is right? Isn’t it what the machines have been programmed to measure? Is that the same as what a human thinks is meaningful conversation? As for “naturally gravitating” towards interacting with our machines, staring into screens, I see that every day, everywhere I go, and it looks uncomfortably similar to addiction.

I am reminded of Douglas Adams” story in which all the dolphins on the planet have suddenly, mysteriously vanished, leaving only the message, “So long, and thanks for all the fish.” And we thought we were training them.

Gobbledygook

Posted on March 22, 2013 by larrygeni

“Gobbledygook: Language that is meaningless or is made unintelligible by excessive use of abstruse technical terms; nonsense.”

* * * * * * * *

Here is an excerpt from a recent article in our local newspaper, the Evanston Review, under the headline “ISBE Low-Balls New ISAT Cut Scores, Misalignment With PSAE and ACT College Readiness Continues”.

“ ”To insure that our continuous system of assessments aligns to college- and career-ready benchmarks, Illinois will raise the cut score for the ISAT assessment,” said ISBE in its waiver application. ISBE theorized that the cut scores to “meet standards” on the PSAEs “differed little” from ACT’s college readiness benchmarks, so if cut scores to “meet standards” on the PSAEs, the ISAT cut scores would be aligned to college readiness.”

Got that?

I could, of course, include a translation for all the acronyms, but the paragraph would probably still be meaningless to most people. Now, let’s think about a student who is failing algebra, and is starting to hate school. How can the obtuse language and bizarre thinking behind this paragraph possibly improve his life in any meaningful way?

When you take a flawed starting point (improving a school means raising the standardized test scores of its students) and then let massive bureaucracies take it to its logical conclusion, this paragraph is what you get. The process has caused school reform to shear away from reality. Instead of improving the lives of students and teachers, it has unintentionally made them harder. Instead of increasing learning, it has made schools less meaningful.

The Perils of Rigor

Posted on March 7, 2013 by larrygeni

It’s understandable. Faced with the evidence that many students are failing to learn basic skills in school, the push to “raise the standards” is a natural reaction. After all, no one can argue against having high expectations for all students. However, the emphasis on creating a rigorous curriculum has not only not solved the existing problems, it has created new ones.

For one thing, it confuses making curriculum broader and deeper (more rigorous) with setting high standards for students. In part that’s because pushing a more rigorous curriculum tries to solve the problem from the outside in. Expanding the material students are expected to master has little to do with the lives of students or their ability to learn. Pushing curriculum harder in the vain hope that more of it will stick cannot work if students’ reality is ignored. If a student believes he is “bad at school”, or he is bored, or he is working 20 hours a week and has no time for homework, a more rigorous curriculum is not going to help.

Consider Webster’s definition of rigor: “(1)Harsh inflexibility in opinion, temper, or judgment. (2) The quality of being unyielding or inflexible: (3) a condition that makes life difficult, challenging, or uncomfortable.”

Using more force is not the solution.

We should be starting from the inside, from the reality that so many students face. The solution lies in teaching students to be self-directed learners, in creating classroom cultures that are grounded in genuine learning, in dismantling the hold that “doing school” has on so many students and teachers.

These efforts transform school from the inside out. Starting with learners simply works better than starting with what they should learn. If they are not made part of the solution, the problem will continue to damage their lives, regardless of how rigorous our curriculum is.

Schools and the Pain of Adolescence

Posted on February 24, 2013 by larrygeni

The title of a recent article in New York Magazine says it all: “Why You Truly Never Leave High School: New science on its corrosive, traumatizing effects ”. And the cover subtitle drives the point home: “A new wave of research suggests it may be the worst possible place for the vulnerable 16-year old mind.” Ouch.

The author, Jennifer Senior, describes the research that is just now taking shape. For decades, most developmental researchers have assumed that the period from birth to age 3 is most critical in shaping a child’s personality. But it turns out that adolescence is, in some ways, equally important. That is the time when adult identity is being formed, and it is when experiences are lodged more intensely than at any other time of life.

How you feel about yourself in high school is pivotal to the way the rest of your life develops. For instance, while it’s statistically true that a man’s height is correlated roughly with his earning power, it turns out that if two men are the same height as adults, the one who was taller in high school will on average make more money.

Combine that with the nature of the institution, which is increasingly focussed on curriculum and test scores – the development of the adult identity of students is rarely addressed (except perhaps in terms of compliance and punctuality). As a result, schools are what psychologists describe as a “big empty box”, in which adolescents, with little or no guidance, must figure out their own scheme for establishing the social hierarchy and their place in it.

And here’s where another factor of adolescents comes into play – their brains are simply not yet equipped to recognize emotional cues accurately. They are notoriously inept at seeing the emotional landscape as it is. And so, teenagers invent schemes to sort out their place in the institution that is often based on truly superficial criteria; the types of clothing one wears, or what hairstyle one is wearing, or what music one prefers.

The result is deeply damaging, and not just to the unpopular kids.

So what can be done about it? Cultivate character traits in students that allow them to be better judges of what matters, that give them a framework for understanding their own identity, their strengths and weaknesses, and that give them a new and more accurate self-awareness. In other words, teach them the skills that, as research shows, boosts their academic success and their success in life: grit, metacognitive skills, curiosity, optimism, self-directedness, and compassion.

These traits can be fostered through a wide array of classroom strategies, but the educational philosophy must change first. We have to rethink what schools are for. The notion that the fundamental purpose is to transfer an ever larger and more detailed curriculum into students’ brains with ever increased force is not working and never will. It must be replaced with the goal of preparing students for living a full, rich, satisfying and productive life, whatever direction that may take them. In other words, we have to recognize that what students become in school is at least as important as what they know. Ironically, that posture not only makes school a more meaningful experience, it also causes students to learn more, because they are more fully realized human beings.