kitchen table math, the sequel

Debbie and her daughter Daisy are writing a book!

20% discount on Debbie Stier's SAT Critical Reading course for kitchen table math people. Deadline for registering tomorrow night.

Meanwhile I am off to South Jersey to celebrate a bat mitzvah.

I had to write that down to commemorate the fact that I have apparently become a person who says "South Jersey"!

I have never in my life said, or thought, the words South Jersey.

Until this morning.

We've lived here 16 years now, so it's time.

I'm copying the post I put up this morning at the Parents Forum.

So as not to bury the lede:

Discount: 20%
Coupon code: KTM20%off (case sensitive!)
Coupon expires: May 3, 2015

NOTE: Students can take the course whenever they wish. The coupon expires on May 3, but once students have used the coupon, there is no deadline for enrolling in the course.

SAT Critical Reading course

The Coupon Code applies to everything on the page & works the way Coupon Codes work on sites like The Gap & J.Crew.

Debbie's email: debbie@perfectscoreproject.com

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Hi everyone -

Some of you will remember Debbie Stier, whose kids went through our schools, and who is the author of The Perfect Score Project: One Mother's Journey to Uncover the Secrets of the SAT.

(Debbie is one of my closest friends. I did a 'polish' of her book.)

Here's the New Yorker article about Debbie's experience & book.

In January, Debbie finally sat down and wrote a sequence of 28 critical reading lessons (partly because I bugged her to do it!), & so far her results are amazing.

She's also started tutoring via Skype.

Debbie's highest student score gain so far is 260 points.

Her student started with a Critical Reading score of 370. After 5 weeks of tutoring with Debbie, the student has reached 630, and it looks like she's going to improve on that.

The same student has also moved from 400 to 650 on Writing, and from 560 to 690 on Math. (Debbie is handling her math prep as well.)

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These are fantastic results because almost nobody is able to move the needle on reading scores. Test prep & tutors can raise math scores, but not reading. (This is a big issue in charter schools, btw. Good charter schools work wonders in math, but their reading scores are just so-so.)

I have a theory about why Debbie's approach is working.

I think Debbie is teaching students a specific skill I hadn't realized was a specific skill until we started talking about it.

I think she is teaching students how to 'read things they can't read.'

She's teaching students to suss out the meaning of passages that weren't written for them, and for which they don't possess the necessary background knowledge or even the necessary vocabulary in many cases. (She uses essays from the New York Times—entire essays, not excerpts—which have very high vocabulary levels.)

Being able to 'read things you can't read'—articles and books that are over your head—is a major college requirement. In his first semester in college, our son Chris took John Sexton's course on religion and the public schools, for which the assigned reading was Supreme Court cases. Lots of Supreme Court cases.

Supreme Court justices and their clerks are fantastic writers, but still. You don't come out of high school knowing how to read a 100-page Supreme Court opinion.

(Fun fact: there were two students from Irvington in Sexton’s course – ! They both did well.)

Students need to graduate high school able to read well. That goes without saying.

But they also need tools for reading things they aren’t prepared to read, and that’s not really part of most schools’ curriculum.

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One more thought about the SAT (and the ACT).

For me, reading-things-I-can't-read is a job requirement. Here's the kind of sentence I have to parse for the book I'm writing now:

Current models postulate that the basal ganglia modulate cerebral cortex indirectly via an inhibitory output to thalamus, bidirectionally controlled by direct- and indirect-pathway striatal projection neurons (dSPNs and iSPNs, respectively) 2, 3, 4.

If you're a neuroscientist, that sentence is easy to read.

If you're not, it's hard.

Over the years I've figured out ways to read 'hard things,' and I think that's what Debbie is teaching her students to do.

To a 16-year old, a lot of passages on the SAT are as difficult as the sentence above would be for most college graduates.

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Anyway, I think Debbie's course is fantastic. Plus I've seen the results she's had with her own two children, so I know she's doing something right.

So .... 15% discount for Irvington Parents Forum 20% discount for ktm readers and their friends!

This is amazing.

Some of you may remember our discussing why charter schools do so much better raising math scores than reading scores. (Be sure to read the comments thread.)

Ever since my summer at Morningside Academy, I've suspected that, where reading comprehension is concerned, pretty much everyone is on the wrong track. (Everyone but palisadesk, of course.)

More to the point, I don't really buy the argument that good reading comprehension, or good scores on reading comprehension tests, take years and years to develop because good reading scores are a matter of background knowledge that takes years and years to develop.

Having now taught freshman composition for a few years, and having used as many Morningside techniques as I've been able to, my sense is that struggling readers can improve pretty quickly.

But that's just an impression. I don't have before-and-after scores.

Then there's the SAT, where math scores are widely perceived to be moveable, but reading scores are not. Certainly not quickly.

So guess what?

A month ago Debbie finally took the plunge and created a 28-day "intensive"^* course in SAT-type reading ---- and it works!

Students are raising their scores significantly in 28 days.

It's incredible. I thought it would work, and Debbie thought it would work, but then again .... 28 days? That's not a long time, 28 days. I don't think I'm putting words in Debbie's mouth when I say that while we both thought it would work, we were also harboring a sliver of doubt.

But the first batch of scores have come out, and the kids are doing great!

It's incredibly exciting.

If I still had a teenager at home, I would definitely sign him up. (Maybe Andrew, once we get through Katie Beal's GrammarTrainer ---- boy, I would love that ---)

28-day critical reading intensive

^* I love "intensive"! I would never have thought of using that word myself & nor would Debbie -- a marketing person told her to call what she was doing "intensive." Brilliant. "28-day intensive" makes me want to take the course.
#28-dayintensive

Steven Pinker, Atul Gawande, and ..... Perfect Score Project!

Fantastic.

I did the polish.

(I have to say that!)

I edited! (So I'm bemoaning a couple of too-long-for-onscreen-reading sentences...

Seeking the Top Score (Part I)
By Helen Yoshida on March 25, 2014 5:34 PM

From Debbie:

I'll be speaking/q & a'ing tomorrow (March 1 at 11 a.m.) at RJ Julia in Madison, CT. Come say hello if you are in the area.

Big Score: When Mom Takes the SAT by Elizabeth Kolbert 

What a day!

Debbie's pub date is coming up, and things are getting exciting. She's had incredible response to the book; the blurbs are incredible. So I'm expecting good things.

The biggest news so far is that Debbie and Ethan will be on the Today Show on February 25.

And, on February 12 Debbie will be doing a "Spreecast." (Actually, it's the 2 of us; I'm the interviewer/sidekick).

You can sign up here, and I hope lots of you will---!

I love this letter from Debbie Stier to a friend of hers whose daughter has "started the SAT gauntlet." (Debbie never thinks of SAT prep as a "gauntlet," by the way. Not a gauntlet: that is a first principle of doing SAT prep with your child.)

My favorite part:

Vocabulary is the biggest part of the Critical Reading. The entire reading section (passages included) is a vocabulary based reasoning test; vocab is MORE than just those fill in those blank questions. The more vocab she knows (as in the "I can use it in a sentence and define it for you and tell you the 2nd and third def's" sort of way), the better.

The New York Times is a GREAT way to learn vocab IN CONTEXT. I've been reading the newspaper every morning with Daisy and we get at least 10 words per day that she can't define. We started with a half hour every morning and her mission was to find ONE article that she wanted to read in it's entirety and tell me about it and pick out a few vocab words.

She is now up to an hour and often reads 3-4 full articles and LOVES it.

She asks me vocabulary as we go along and I define the words and she writes them down with a little memory jogger. And as I read the paper next to her and I find words, I ask her the def's and she adds them to her list if she doesn't know them.

I'd say she's up to about 100 words now just from the NY times for the last 5 months.

Then, whenever doing anything (e.g. cleaning the kitchen, driving, etc.), I have her break out "the list" (it's handwritten plus on our phones), and she uses them in sentences and I tweak them for her.

This exercise will help with the speed of the reading passages too. A large part of the challenge in that section is the sophisticated vocabulary. They are college level reading passages (i.e. not what high schoolers are used to reading).

That's why the "as long as they read it doesn't matter WHAT they read" line of thought doesn't stand up in this context.

My other favorite part, from the P.S.:

3) Don't ask her, "Are there any words you don't know?" because she will say "No. I know them all." They all do. After she tells you the 1-2 words she thinks doesn't know, look through the article yourself and ask her words. You'll add another 3-4.

People don't know what they don't know -- especially teenagers.

4) If she rejects this whole idea at fist, ignore. They ALL say they don't want to do "SAT Work" -- especially with a parent. That will change very very quickly.

Beautiful!

These are great, too:

• Letter From a Friend
• The Curb Appeal of a Testing Location
• The One Thing You Should Know

Book is out in February!

That's what PWNtheSAT told me after I screamed on the top of my lungs for the umpteenth time because I'd fallen again for some deception in the "Math Section" that wasn't even "math."

"Does that make you mad?" he asked.

"YES," I screamed.

"Good, then don't let them do that to you again."

And then he told me to think of the Math Section like shrimp flavored Ramen Noodles: there could be some shrimp in there, but really it's a lot of other "stuff." "That doesn't mean it's any less hard," he clarified, "Just different."

Not sure if those were the words that inspired my unplanned, last second, impulsive shift in strategy -- but I took SAT #5 in 2011, all in first-serves. I was aggressive. There was not one iota of perseveration in my game that day.

Last Saturday morning, at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, NY -- I discovered my inner "don't mess with me" self.

No idea what this means for my score, and thank god this doesn't really count for anything. I am very curious though, as to how this "backwards-Debbie" plan worked out, and I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I woke up the next day just a little bit scared.

Here's what I know for sure:

I had a blast and enjoyed every second of the experience. I distinctly remember thinking as I colored in those first bubbles with that deliciously soft and perfectly sharpened #2 pencil, "This feels soooooo good."

I will also say this: Every day I'm less sure about what, exactly, the SAT is testing. More and more it feels like a test of how not to be messed with -- especially the math (and least of all the writing).

And if that be the case (and I do believe that be the case), I'm going to highly recommend a book that I've highly recommended before: PWN the SAT Math Guide.

From the introduction:

"The SAT is not a math test........it's full of booby-traps, misleading diagrams, and intentionally difficult phrasing. Even questions that look a lot like straightforward algebra questions are put there not to see if you can do the algebra, but to see if you can spot the shortcut that lets you avoid the algebra.

.....Taking the SAT like you'd take a regular math test is like bringing a knife to a gun fight......

.....The SAT is a test, above all, of how good you are at taking the SAT......

Illustrations by Jennifer Orkin Lewis

Cross-posted on Perfect Score Project