kitchen table math, the sequel

This year's math course has been a disaster. Beyond disaster, actually. Where math is concerned, this year has been epically^* bad.

Some kind of emergency repair has to happen this summer - but what?

Any suggestions?

I could conceivably sign C. up for an algebra 2/precalculus course at the local community college - but are the teachers there going to be any better? At this point, we desperately need an actual math teacher: a person who can teach math to a student who doesn't teach math to himself.

We could do ALEKS, but ALEKS is super-slow and overwhelmingly procedural; the 1 1/2 courses I took on ALEKS taught me one disembodied procedure after another. At this point disembodied procedures might be better than nothing -- but then again to the extent C. learned anything this year he learned disembodied procedures.

I could insist that the two of us work through Foerster (I own the teacher's edition).

We could work our way through Saxon.

I could advertise for a math teacher or check out the various tutoring companies....

We also have to do serious SAT prep (though that's not going to be onerous & time-consuming).

I'm thinking this wasn't the summer to sign up for the precision teaching institute at Morningside.

^* My neighbor's son, who is a terrific writer, is constantly inventing words he says ought to exist, and having watched him do this a few times, I think he's right. Epic is an excellent word, and its non-existent cousin epically is the word I need today.

SusanS:

My son's list for incoming freshman (honors and regular) was a choice of three little books. He picked one and we ordered it. When it arrived, he read it in one day, then went back to the other more interesting books he was readiing.

Pathetic.

SusanS

anonymous:

Our high school insists on using the same reading list for honors and regular and there are only 2 tracks. The Honors class simply assigns 1 or 2 more from the same weak list.

They must not teach different material in the Honors classes so they require science fair participation or a research paper (not corrected for grammar) to justify the Honors points.

How unsurprising that the school's stated purpose is to close the achievement gap.

The saddest part is that this focus simply reenforces that what kids can be is coming from the home, not the school. The well educated, attentive parents can buy better math and science textbooks, pick out better books for summer reading, and hire tutors to teach grammar.

In the school's emphasis to obtain "equity" by just assigning work within the grasp of most kids, they perpetuate inequities and take away education as the avenue to move beyond the circumstances you were born into.

Susan S:

Seriously, even the regular English track can handle more than one naval-gazing coming of age mini-book.

The natives are restless.

If you're looking to infuse some history into your child's summer study plans, I have a great recommendation for you. History Odyssey by Pandia Press (the people with the great history timeline) has put together a very nice world history curriculum that brings together literature, history, and geography. The courses are divided into four periods: Ancients, Middle Ages, Early Modern, and Modern.

The best part is that you can download the initial lessons from each of the levels in a new try-before-you-buy feature that you really can't go wrong with.

Here's what you get in the trial PDF absolutely FREE:

• table of contents
• introductions
• applicable worksheets
• applicable maps (for History Odyssey)
• applicable appendices
• first several lessons (enough of the course to keep you busy for several weeks)

Level 1 (1st - 4th grade)
Level 2 (Grades 5 and up)
Level 3 (Grades 9 and up)

If you visit the Pandia Press website, you can review the table of contents/course outlines, lesson samples, and book & supply lists for each of the levels. Many of the literature and reference books should be available in your local library. This is my second year of using History Odyssey with my children and I've not been disappointed yet. My hope is that you won't be either.

I highly recommend you download the free trial PDFs and think about how you might use this to enrich your child's summer study plans. If you like it like I think you might, you'll be back for more.

http://www.pandiapress.com/

Today, schools are rated poorly if their students do not score well on state-mandated tests, regardless of whether children’s learning has been helped or hindered by the school environment. By the same token, schools serving affluent families in a resource-rich community are assumed to be good schools on the basis of children’s higher test scores, which may be high even in the face of a mediocre education. Downey and his colleagues [17, 34] have developed a new approach to measuring school performance that accounts for seasonal differences in learning, wherein the portion of student performance that can be attributed to the school is separated from the portion due to nonschool learning periods, including both during the period before a child enters school and over the summers as they progress through school. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS), they find striking differences in school impact with this approach:

[O]ur analyses of reading suggest that 70 percent of currently labeled “failing” schools are not really failing…Many teachers and administrators working in schools serving disadvantaged children face a variety of challenges including scarce resources, large classes, and little parent involvement. Despite these conditions, a surprising number of professionals serving disadvantaged students appear to be doing a good job, much better than previously thought.
[17 p. 24]

Using this measure of “school impact,” in recent analyses of data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS), the researchers find that many schools considered “failing”—due to the low test performance of their students—are actually doing a better job of education than schools with much-higher-performing students.

from The Learning Season: (pdf file)

from The Learning Season: (pdf file)

The phenomenon of summer undoing school-year learning has come to be known as
“summer learning loss.” It was first commented on in 1906 [29], followed some decades later by the 1978 book Summer Learning and the Effects of Schooling, by Barbara Heyns, which was based on her study of New Jersey students. More recently, a number of researchers [17, 30–37] have found that nearly all the differences in achievement between poor and middleclass children can be attributed to changes in learning that take place over class the summer. This finding is particularly surprising—and important—given that the vast majority of public and philanthropic resources are dedicated to school-year education, and that relatively scant resources are earmarked for summer programs.

While summer learning loss has operated mostly “under the radar,” the effects of early childhood experiences on racial, ethnic, and class test-score achievement gaps have received a great deal of media and research attention. Evidence from a set of longitudinal studies demonstrating that preschool children benefit significantly—and permanently—from early learning experiences [10–12], along with new understandings from neuroscience [4, 38], has formed the foundation for a national movement: public preschool is fast becoming a norm across the country, and public funding for early-childhood care and education is growing.

Despite these growing gaps, research on seasonal learning shows that children in all socioeconomic groups are actually progressing at the same rate during the school year. Yet during the summer middle-class children generally continue to learn, or hold steady, especially in reading, while poor children lose knowledge and skills [42]. These findings are especially surprising, given the well-documented disparities in facilities, teacher quality, curriculum, safety, and materials between schools serving poor children and those in affluent communities [9, 43–46]. Research on seasonal learning demonstrates that even struggling schools provide some support for children’s learning, at least compared with a summer devoid of educational experiences [34, 36, 47].

Of course there are two ways of looking at this, aren't there?

"Even struggling schools provide some support for children's learning".... or struggling schools don't "provide" much "support" for children's learning and there's not too much learning going on anywhere.

It's pretty horrifying that even policy reports on the subject of the achievement gap are now talking about "support" for children's learning.

We seem to have an entire K-12 philosophy of public education built upon the concept of incidental learning. Kids just naturally learn stuff, the same way they just naturally grow taller every year; the school's job is to "support" them while they learn (and grow).

Which is one of the reasons I particularly dislike the expression "academic growth."

note: the race gap in scores is different from the income gap

Fordham posts a link to a new study & report arguing that much of the achievement gap can be attributed to summer learning loss in poor kids:

Miller presents past research showing that, during the school year, low- and high-SES students make similar progress on standardized tests. Between spring and fall, however, the scores of low-SES students either level off or decline, while those of high-SES students continue to rise. Research by Alexander and colleagues confirms this trend. Tracking 325 Baltimore students, they found that high-SES students gained a cumulative 47 points on reading test scores during the summer, while their low-SES counterparts lost 2 points.

We talked about "summer regression" at the old site (summer brain drain, summer reading question, time costs of spiralling curricula)

Reading Fordham's summary of the new research, I feel I'm watching a re-run. Maybe that's unfair, but isn't this the usual correlation equals cause-type reasoning that leads to busing and 5 gazillion initiatives to increase parental involvement in the schools?

Or am I missing something?

It seems to me that the common theme running throughout these studies is that middle class parents are doing a very large amount of incidental and not-so-incidental teaching of their kids - and that schools are failing to "disaggregate the data" concerning the parent contribution.

I think I've mentioned that this was a bit of a moment when we met with the new assistant superintendent who, as I've also mentioned, intends to use classroom and test data to drive instructional decisionmaking. ["drive instructional decisionmaking"?? I may be reading slightly too much Ed Week....]

I like most-to-all of her ideas, but she has a blind spot on the subject of tutoring. She herself hired a math tutor for her son when he was in high school, and she sees this as normal.

Of course, hiring math tutors - hiring tutors of all kinds in all subjects - has certainly become normal. It's the new normal. But that's the problem.

Even if you decide that you're going to have a public school system in which parents do a great deal of preteaching, reteaching, and tutor-hiring, you need to know what parents are doing if you're going to have data-driven decisionmaking.

Data is useless if you leave out major variables.

If an English teacher sends home a writing assignment that's over the students' heads, but a mostly-OK set of papers results because parents have walked their kids through the composition step by step, teachers aren't getting correct feedback on the assignment.

The data is going to tell you the assignment worked, when what worked was parents breaking the assignment down into component parts and teaching each part separately.

..................................


Beyond this, why am I reading about summer camp?

Miller quotes an NCES study, for instance, which found that "42.5 percent of children in high-income households attended camp the summer after kindergarten, compared with just 5.4 percent of children in low-income" families.

Are these researchers suggesting that middle class kids routinely gain 47 points on reading tests at camp?

(How much is 47 points, anyway? How many points did kids gain during the school year? I may have to see if Ed can get a copy of the article...)

If summer camps run by distracted teenagers are producing major gains in reading, maybe we need some studies of the super-effective teaching methods known only to 18 year old, untrained college kids.

..................................

Speaking of camp, C. and I played hooky Wednesday (though, as C. pointed out, you can't really play hooky from camp) and went to the city to see Summercamp!

You must see it.

Summercamp! is a laugh-cry-embrace-life sort of movie; I don't think I've cried so much in a movie theater since seeing Forrest Gump two weeks after giving birth to twins. [for newbies: my oldest son Jimmy, who was then age 7, is autistic]

An incredible movie - beautiful. There's no crying 'til the very end, and even then it's good crying. I promise.

from the NY Sun review:

In the summer of 2003, filmmakers Bradley Beesley and Sarah Price joined forces to tackle a documentary subject of almost unbearably powerful emotions and compulsively watchable conflict: a season at a Midwestern sleepover camp.

[snip]

The film's two stars are Holly, a charismatically energetic and wistful girl, and Cameron, an overweight kid with an unusual flair for challenging counselors' patience and making enemies among his peers.

[snip]

Holly and Cameron "are our main characters because they related more to adults and adult-type issues and they didn't have a whole lot of friends within their cabins," Mr. Beesley said.

[snip]

Something else the filmmakers discovered was how much prescription medication has permeated children's lives. "There was this group of kids going to the nurse's office every night," Ms. Price said. "It took us a few days to catch on to what was going on." Per their parent's wishes, campers diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and other behavioral maladies were reporting to receive their prescribed meds. Images in "Summercamp!" of what appear to be perfectly healthy children lining up to swallow pills like the mental patients in "One Flew Over the Cuckcoo's Nest" are disturbing; at the same time, a scene in which one boy flirts with a girl by bragging about the magnitude of his ADD is hilarious.

[snip]

"Summercamp!" also doggedly follows Cameron down a road of trials littered with obstacles of the boy's own devising. Cameron has an unfortunate genius for clumsily rebellious behavior; witnessing his steady failures and occasional triumphs will likely empower the inner outcast in anyone. "We're watching two kids go through growing pains and be open enough about it to sort of let us discover and experience it while they do," Ms. Price said.

Pure pleasure.