A Stupid Thing I've Seen Today

In the video above, Sargon takes a few minutes to make fun of a social justice warrior's stated desire that teachers countenance language anarchy in their classrooms for the sake of "marginalized populations" who may not feel "comfortable" using received American English. He's right on point when he argues that this proposal is racist; African-Americans are not uniquely incapable of learning the dominant - or correct - grammar and don't need to be molly-coddled by their instructors just because they use AAVE at home. To assert that black students should be granted special dispensation is basically enhancing any stigma that may be attached to AAVE by implicitly suggesting that its users are too stupid to learn something else.

But I'd like to add another point: This "researcher" - and interviewing a few people on your campus is not actually research, cupcake - has no clue what it's like to be white. Like every other social justice cultist, she presumes that white people never have to "code switch" and never deal with any stigmas attached to their manner of speaking. This is just not true. As anyone from the Southern U.S. or the Appalachian region will tell you, there is plenty of negative baggage attached to white dialects that don't fit the broadcast norm. Southerners and mountain folk are assumed to be idiots as a matter of course -- not to mention racist, sexist, homophobic bigots whose laughable idea of high art is a NASCAR race. If you're southern, you could be Doc freakin' Taylor - a bona fide rocket scientist - and yet still have to present your CV to elitist northerners before they'll accept you know what you're talking about. But nobody is talking about giving "hillbillies" and "rednecks" a pass on the whole standard grammar thing. My friends and acquaintances down here just accept "code switching" as a fact of life -- like, for example, my AP US History teacher twenty years ago, who admitted freely in class one day that when he goes back home to West Virginia, his style of speech completely changes on a dime. "I'm not Mike anymore. I'm Maaaaaaaaaike."

TL;DR: Academia is once again rewarding ignorance. White people do "code switch" and do deal with stigma. People suggesting otherwise can kindly sit on a certain finger and rotate. 

Video of Interest: Who Killed the Liberal Arts?

Our universities have pressed the self-destruct button. Let us start promoting alternatives!

Don't Ditch Handwriting!

Computers are now an everyday fact of life, and any modern curriculum worth its salt does have to incorporate keyboarding and digital literacy. But as some researchers are now discovering, it may not be a good idea to scrap traditional paper-and-pencil instruction in favor of a 100% emphasis on technology. See also the following interesting article in the science section of today's New York Times:

What's Lost as Handwriting Fades

Some key quotes:

A 2012 study led by Karin James, a psychologist at Indiana University, lent support to that view. Children who had not yet learned to read and write were presented with a letter or a shape on an index card and asked to reproduce it in one of three ways: trace the image on a page with a dotted outline, draw it on a blank white sheet, or type it on a computer. They were then placed in a brain scanner and shown the image again. 

The researchers found that the initial duplication process mattered a great deal. When children had drawn a letter freehand, they exhibited increased activity in three areas of the brain that are activated in adults when they read and write: the left fusiform gyrus, the inferior frontal gyrus and the posterior parietal cortex. 

By contrast, children who typed or traced the letter or shape showed no such effect. The activation was significantly weaker. 

... 

In a study that followed children in grades two through five, Virginia Berninger, a psychologist at the University of Washington, demonstrated that printing, cursive writing, and typing on a keyboard are all associated with distinct and separate brain patterns — and each results in a distinct end product. When the children composed text by hand, they not only consistently produced more words more quickly than they did on a keyboard, but expressed more ideas. And brain imaging in the oldest subjects suggested that the connection between writing and idea generation went even further. When these children were asked to come up with ideas for a composition, the ones with better handwriting exhibited greater neural activation in areas associated with working memory — and increased overall activation in the reading and writing networks. 

... 

Two psychologists, Pam A. Mueller of Princeton and Daniel M. Oppenheimer of the University of California, Los Angeles, have reported that in both laboratory settings and real-world classrooms, students learn better when they take notes by hand than when they type on a keyboard. Contrary to earlier studies attributing the difference to the distracting effects of computers, the new research suggests that writing by hand allows the student to process a lecture’s contents and reframe it — a process of reflection and manipulation that can lead to better understanding and memory encoding.

This research is in its early stages, obviously, so it's too early to advance any definitive conclusions. However, said findings should make us wary of any curriculum (such as the CCSS) that downplays the importance of handwriting -- and they certainly strengthen my personal resolve to stay "low-tech" with my own kids until they hit the secondary years.

ETA: And here is some more commentary on the benefits of handwriting notes (this time from Scientific American):

A Learning Secret: Don't Take Notes with a Laptop

Technology offers innovative tools that are shaping educational experiences for students, often in positive and dynamic ways.  The research by Mueller and Oppenheimer serves as a reminder, however, that even when technology allows us to do more in less time, it does not always foster learning.  Learning involves more than the receipt and the regurgitation of information.  If we want students to synthesize material, draw inferences, see new connections, evaluate evidence, and apply concepts in novel situations, we need to encourage the deep, effortful cognitive processes that underlie these abilities.  When it comes to taking notes, students need fewer gigs, more brain power.

Whatever Happened to Kindergarten? (Part Two)

Today, as an addition to my previous post, I'm going to talk about the Common Core standards for kindergarten (which, by the way, can be reviewed here, so you don't need to depend on my word regarding what they say).

To be honest, I don't find much there that's objectionable in the reading or math strands (though I'm sure others might disagree). At the kindergarten level at least, the problems parents are having with so-called "Common Core Math" appear to have more to do with unscrupulous curriculum developers taking advantage of the "Common Core" label than anything in the text of the standards themselves -- and the reading standards include phonics (thank goodness) and seem solid.

The writing strand, on the other hand? Well, that's a different story. Here, the Common Core authors seem to be putting the cart before the horse.

The first thing little ones need to learn, in my experience, is how to correctly and smoothly form their letters. Of course, as adults, we write letters effortlessly. We've drawn, say, a lower-case "b" so often that the order of the strokes has been stored in our long-term muscle memory; we don't have to think about what we're doing and can essentially run on "automatic pilot." A five-year-old, on the other hand, has no such ability. As he writes a "b," his working memory has to train all its focus on how to properly hold the pencil, how to draw the down-stroke so it's straight and touches the top and bottom lines, and how to draw the little bump so it's facing the right direction. That's why b/d confusions happen all the time in this age group even with perfectly normal children. Their processors get overloaded!

Beyond letter formation, five-year-olds also have to put a lot of conscious thought into how to spell very simple, common words. To us, the spelling of "cat" is self-evident, but a five-year-old has to segment the sounds, associate each sound with the appropriate letter, and then put the letters in the right order. Once again, this taxes the working memory, which makes writing even simple sentences incredibly laborious.

Now, keeping all of this in mind, imagine asking a five-year-old to "use a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to compose opinion pieces in which they tell a reader the topic or the name of the book they are writing about and state an opinion or preference about the topic or book (e.g., My favorite book is...)." Kindergartners, in my view, will have a lot of difficulty with this -- unless adults write down what they say and then ask them to copy it. That might be the intention behind this standard, but the wording is pretty vague -- and at any rate, I'm not sure children this young really need to know how to write persuasive, informative, and narrative texts. By all means, teach them what makes a sentence through oral instruction and copy-work -- but wait until they've got some basic English grammar and spelling under their belts before you ask them to compose their own original content.

Another thing kindergartners don't need to do? Peer revising. Standard CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.K.5, however, reads: "With guidance and support from adults, respond to questions and suggestions from peers and add details to strengthen writing as needed." Five-year-olds have neither the knowledge nor the emotional maturity to do this! Hell -- I actually think peer revising is pretty useless even when it's used with older kids. As a private tutor in the state of Virginia, I have seen many a deeply flawed high school research paper draft because my students' "peer editors" were rank amateurs when it came to style and rhetoric. Bottom line? Kids - even in the later grades - are still essentially novices; if they're going to become competent writers, what they really need is the guidance of experts. Asking novices to judge the work of other novices is a recipe for -- well, not learning very much.

The Common Core authors also over-emphasize technology. Standard CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.K.6 states: "With guidance and support from adults, explore a variety of digital tools to produce and publish writing, including in collaboration with peers." Really? We're doing this in kindergarten? I love computers and tablets as much as the next "connected" American, but devoting class time in the early elementary grades to the use of these devices is probably unnecessary and potentially detrimental. I say unnecessary because, as Peter Gray has reported, a group of unsupervised children is perfectly capable of figuring out how a computer works without any direct instruction whatsoever. And I say detrimental because, as I'll discuss in a future post, there is evidence that the blind, unthinking use of technology before age eight may actually hinder the healthy development of our youngest children. No -- let little ones master the art of writing with pencil and paper before you bring in the word processor. And don't worry -- you really don't need thirteen years to teach a child how to use the net. Waiting until the later grades will not leave kids irreversibly crippled.

What the Common Core authors appear to be doing here is taking what they view to be the typical workplace environment and tracking it back to kindergarten. "We have board meetings and use the Internet," goes the thinking, "so our children should do a simplified version of the same thing." What they're forgetting here are the fundamental dissimilarities between children and adults. To put it simply, you can't teach a beginner to do what an expert does. From the classical Trivium to Piaget, educators have generally been in agreement that cognitive development happens in discreet, distinguishable stages. To use classical terms (since that's the style I will favor once I start homeschooling children of my own), you can't expect a child in the grammar stage to do a task meant for the rhetoric stage. It doesn't work; the young child's brain is different, and it should be taught differently. Further, the Common Core authors' eagerness to embrace the "digital" has not been fully examined and may actually do more harm than good. Before we start putting tablets in every classroom from kindergarten to the twelfth grade, more rigorous research needs to be done regarding these technologies' educational utility and potential adverse impacts.

Children - and Teens - NEED Fiction!

"Most of us know what we should expect to find in a dragon's lair but, as I said before, Eustace had read only the wrong books. They had a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons." 

- C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

I am what you might call a Common Core moderate. Unlike many of Common Core's opponents, I am not wholly opposed to standardized testing; indeed, at my day job, we use standardized tests all the time to track our students' progress, and I have found them to be very useful tools indeed. I am also not concerned about a "corporate takeover" of public education; this thread in the opposition's rhetoric, I feel, is overly paranoid and imputes motives to Bill Gates and his compatriots that probably do not exist. I am concerned about fuzzy math and lousy English textbooks, but those pre-dated the implementation of Common Core and shouldn't necessarily be conflated with the standards themselves.

Still, I do think Common Core gets it wrong in many respects -- and among its missteps is its over-emphasis on informational text.

I understand the intent behind this emphasis. As I've observed in previous posts, children do in fact need to be exposed to a solid foundation of content knowledge in history, science, and math in order to be literate citizens. I'll also grant that the authors of the CCSS wanted the responsibility for the informational text requirements to be spread across the curriculum and not confined to Language Arts. This ideal, however, is turning out to be near impossible to implement. STEM teachers in particular are understandably resistant to the additional demands; who has the time to teach our students how to read Euclid or Newton when we have to, I don't know, actually teach our students some science and math? Thus, in practice, literary fiction is being crowded out of the Language Arts curriculum -- and this could have potentially disastrous results for our students. It's all well and good to be "college and career ready" (whatever that means), but what about being decent-and-functional-human-being ready?

'Tis true that very few are called upon to read fiction at their places of work -- but once again, the purpose of an education is not simply to raise competent employees. There are - and should be - emotional and moral components as well. Children and teens need to learn how to self-regulate, how to delay gratification, and how to muscle on after a set-back. They need to learn temperance, prudence, fortitude, and other important virtues. They need to learn the standards of our civil society, including genuine tolerance, personal responsibility, and the importance of showing charity to one's neighbors. And there is no better way to communicate these critical values than through the medium of the story.

Once upon a time, the power of the story was considered axiomatic; C.S. Lewis certainly displays this understanding in crafting the character of Eustace Clarence Scrubb, whose initial disdain for the imaginative leaves him, in a crucial way, handicapped. Divorce children from fiction and you divorce them from an age-old and profoundly humane means of tackling the world's great ethical and psychological challenges. You can send kids to an anti-bullying assembly and tell them to be kind to others -- or you can invite them to consider the hidden worth of their peers by reading "The Ugly Duckling." You can tell your child that there are no monsters waiting for him under his bed and he has no need to fear -- or you can read him a fanciful tale in which monsters are confronted and defeated. You can tell your teen that other people can be misguided, troubled, or difficult and yet still be worthy of your compassion -- or you can read To Kill a Mockingbird. In each case, the second course is far more likely to be effective than the first. Metaphor and dramatization have a knack for worming into a young heart that no didactic lecture can possibly match. That's why, since the dawn of language itself, human society has been awash in folk tales, legends, and myths.   

And contra the CCSS's claims, the need for literary fiction remains constant as children mature. Older adolescents may no longer be frightened of bedroom beasties, but they are getting ready to enter adult society, where, as responsible citizens, they will have to grapple with the Great Conversation about what makes us human. Even a plumber or an engineer needs to know something about that conversation to make informed decisions in the public square -- and it is in the world's literature that these ruminations and debates can be found, not in technical reports from the Bureau of Land Management.

So yes: Make sure children get a solid grounding of factual knowledge across the domains of history, science, and math, but don't downplay or ignore the very real - and positive - impact the study of literary fiction has on the developing psyche -- and on our society as a whole. 

Making Sure Your Kids WANT to Read - Addendum

Below, my brother brings up a good point that I'd like to address in a quick follow-up.

It is in fact true that while I became an avid, life-long reader, Matt did not -- but Matt, I think, is a special exception. Because he is legally blind, he had to deal with a substantial organic roadblock that made reading less enjoyable. Why should he have embraced reading given the likelihood for eyestrain headaches? If he had had convenient access to large-print editions - or the technology to enlarge standard print - he might've become a habitual reader. But in the 80's, you had to send away to the state organization for the blind and visually impaired for those materials. And while Matt did have magnification machines provided by the school as demanded by his IEP, they were, in my recollection, extremely cumbersome.

The Spike S. Routine for Raising Readers, I am confident, will work with children who are physiologically average (and by the way, other education writers have advanced similar ideas, so Dad is an illustrative example, not a mere anecdote). But for those who, like Matt, have disabilities that make the process of reading difficult, teachers and parents will need to do more. You may, for example, have to enroll a child in a special program - like, for example, one that uses Orton-Gillingham - to overcome dyslexia or sensory processing deficits. You also need to make sure you provide plenty of reading materials that are accessible to the disabled child and written in his correct zone of proximal development (i.e., written at or slightly above the child's current reading level). Fortunately, given recent technological developments, that's a lot easier to do. On tablet readers, you can adjust the font size, which is a great boon for people with poor eyesight or visual processing disorders. Also, I understand some adult dyslexics are working to invent fonts that they find easier to read.

And even with typical children, we need to be on the look-out for instructional practices that hamper proficient reading and may require intervention to correct. Again, I have a number of students who apparently never learned phonics, which no doubt makes reading much more difficult and contributes to their overall reluctance to pick up a book. There are also misguided teachers out there who use reading as a punishment, an approach that has a 100% success rate in discouraging the habit. And then there are the reading/literature textbooks many schools select, which, quite frankly, are usually stupid and dull as dirt. (Ugh, don't even get me started. That topic requires another post -- probably one entitled "Textbook HATE.")

So yes -- Matt is right. In some cases, a more aggressive approach might be needed. But even then, the principles outlined in the previous post are still relevant.     

Making Sure Your Kids WANT to Read

Yesterday, during a lunchtime discussion, my manager asked me a question that has vexed many concerned educators and parents in recent years: How can we encourage kids to read more often?

The importance of this question cannot be overstated. Proficiency in reading, as I highlighted in the previous post, is heavily dependent on the student's ability to link what he reads to what he knows already. And how do we acquire this essential knowledge? In large part, we get it through reading. It may seem rather circular, but the fact remains that habitual readers are exposed to more vocabulary and more cultural capital than are reluctant readers or non-readers, and this in turn leads to more intellectual growth and better test scores. To put it another way, reading is cumulative; the more you read, the more you can read.

Here's another reason why habitual reading is important: It makes you a better writer. I have plenty of students who are basically competent when it comes to constructing grammatically correct sentences but are still lousy writers because 1) they don't have a lot of background knowledge and consequently have nothing to write about, and 2) they are plugging their (limited) ideas into rote formulas and have no instinct for the art of effective rhetoric. Instruction in grammar, mechanics, spelling, and organization are all necessary -- but writing is also dependent on prior exposure to the prose of other expert writers, for without that exposure, what you write will be both empty of content and stylistically unoriginal.

So having established that, yes, Reading is Fundamental, how do we get kids to read? Well, I honestly can't think of a better way to answer this question than to look at someone who successfully raised an avid reader - i.e., my father - and point out what he did right:

• He started early. I wasn't even out of diapers before my dad started sitting me on his knee and reading me articles from Scientific American. Now, of course, as a toddler, I was completely incapable of understanding particle physics -- but the point here is not the content of what Dad read aloud but the fact that he did read aloud and didn't limit himself to "toddler-friendly" texts. If you want your child to be a habitual reader, you need to start reading aloud to them well before they hit school age, and what you read should be quality prose.
• He was a good role model. The only days I didn't see Dad with a book in his hand at least once were the days he was out to sea. In order to encourage kids to read, you have to demonstrate through your own behavior that reading is a worthwhile activity. Thus, let your children see you reading on a regular basis, and let the reading and discussing of books become part of your everyday family routine.
• For the most part, he left me free to choose. Dad would, on occasion, make recommendations - and if I'd ever picked up something that, to his mind, was inappropriate, he probably would've intervened - but beyond that, he essentially turned me loose in the East Lyme Public Library and let me do and read whatever I wanted. As far as transmitting the thought and traditions of our culture, certain books do have to be "assigned" -- but when it comes to free reading, let your child be guided by his own tastes.
• He didn't over-schedule me or seek to keep me entertained every hour of every day.  This is an especially crucial point. These days, many especially conscientious parents feel obligated to shuttle their children to an array of "enriching" extra-curricular programs -- but in actuality, this makes it even more difficult to convince kids to read because, in their minds, they don't have the time. So instead, do what Dad did. My brother and I did participate in a few organized extra-curricular activities - children's theater for both of us, music and therapeutic dance lessons for me, and the occasional team sport for my brother - but the attitude surrounding these activities was always, always casual -- and most of the time, we were still left to our own devices. Never underestimate the benefits of boredom and unattended play!      

Of course, today's parents have to deal with an issue that really wasn't as much of a problem in my childhood: media saturation. We did have a TV, but our viewing choices were fewer; we had game systems, but they were primitive. Dad was also an early adopter when it came to personal computers and the internet, but by the time Usenet and Prodigy became a part of my life, I had already become a frequent reader and was unlikely to be changed by the new distraction. (Whether I got my homework done, on the other hand, was another matter -- but, of course, my parents were proactive and intervened when my grades dropped.) Today's kids? They've always had sophisticated smart phones in their pockets, net-connected game systems with high-res graphics, hundreds of television channels, and the Web, which they can access through lightning-speed internet connections. And don't get me wrong -- these are all wonderful technologies that I enjoy using every single day. They are also technologies that open up a whole host of possibilities that never existed before -- most importantly, the ability to circumvent our elite and produce cultural content on our own. My brother believes that this democratization of creativity will eventually lead to a new renaissance, and I agree. But the fact remains that the multiplicity of "screens" makes it especially difficult to entice kids to pick up a book. Parents tell my manager and me all the time that their children are spending literally hours every day with said "screens." No wonder they're not reading!

Thus, for today's parents, I would also add the following pieces of advice: limit screen time and delay the smart phone until your child demonstrates that he is responsible enough not to overuse it. This should free up some of your child's time and make it more likely that he will choose to read instead (provided you also follow the guidelines mentioned above). Ideally, you should set media limits from the very beginning so your child recognizes these rules as "just something our family does," but better to start late than not at all. To forestall anger and complaining, explain forthrightly to your older child why you have decided to enforce restrictions -- and consider approaching media time as something your child has to earn through good behavior and good grades. At work, we have one parent who has done this, and her thirteen-year-old son earned an A on an Algebra I benchmark after months of getting C's or worse.

Hopefully, you have found the advice above helpful. Again, frequent reading is a habit we must consciously instill in children if we want to raise proficient readers and writers. So go forth and be reading promoters -- and while you're at it, make sure you give children enough space to breathe.

Making Sure Your Kids Can Read (Cross-Post)

I teach a lot of kids who, by Jerry Pournelle's definition, can't read. Oh, they can usually make out most of the common words, which allows them to muddle through their "grade level" reading assignments without much trouble. But if you hit them with a longer word - like, say, "discrimination" - they're instantly stumped and need to ask me for its pronunciation. I also teach a lot of kids who are basically competent readers on the decoding and fluency level but have trouble processing and understanding meaning. These are the kids who will read that a scientist "uses the data she collects to analyze the greenhouse effect" and erroneously conclude that said scientist has somehow fixed the greenhouse effect.

The kids in the first group have a problem that is relatively easy to solve. They are, evidently, victims of incomplete, incompetent, or absent phonics curricula and are consequently unable to break an unfamiliar word down into its component pieces. The cure, quite simply, is to explicitly teach them the word analysis skills they are missing. Beyond "b says buh," students also need to know that "-tion" says "shun," "ph-" says "f-," and "-ough" says "-oh" in some cases and "-uf" in others. They should also learn where these words come from; if a child knows, for example, that a word has a Greek origin, that's a big hint as to how it should be pronounced (and spelled). And they should learn common prefixes, suffixes, and roots, which will allow them to decipher the pronunciations and  meanings of a whole host of more obscure terms.

The kids in the second group, on the other hand, have a more difficult - and, it seems, more common - deficiency. They are prone to making wild, illogical leaps while reading a passage about the greenhouse effect because, quite frankly, they don't know anything about the greenhouse effect -- beyond, perhaps, some vague suspicion that it has something to do with climate change (which, they've dutifully absorbed, is a bad, bad thing). They don't know that, for the most part, it's good that our nice, thick, substantial atmosphere can trap thermal radiation from the sun -- that without the greenhouse effect, the ambient temperatures on Earth's surface would not be so conducive to the development and maintenance of life.

We comprehend best when we can use prior knowledge as a scaffold; this is the solid finding of cognitive science and also a conclusion backed by common sense. I am an expert reader, by and large -- but if I took a test that included, say, my co-author's masters thesis on atmospheric wave packets, my typically high scores would no doubt plunge, as my background in earth science is surely inadequate for such a task.

Now, of course, most of our students aren't going to go into climate research and therefore don't need a masters-level understanding of atmospheric mechanics. But in order to read and apprehend materials published for the general public (as opposed to technical experts), kids do need quite a bit of basic scientific and cultural knowledge. Why? Because most writers assume that basic knowledge. They have to, or their prose would be turgid and, quite frankly, unreadable. Can you imagine what would happen if, instead of simply saying "Tom had the patience of Job" and being immediately understood, a writer had to add "who, by the way, was a person in the Old Testament who lost his livelihood and his good health and yet still maintained his faith in God"? Good Lord! All of our books would be thousands of pages long and would weigh fifty pounds a piece!

Unfortunately, a lot of my students have been inadequately exposed to our cultural patrimony, so the above-mentioned shorthand leaves them completely lost -- even if they can decode every single word in the sentence "Tom had the patience of Job." The reasons for this are legion, but I think one major contributing trend is our education establishment's anxious desire to teach things that are "relevant" to our students. "Kids won't be interested," so the thinking goes, "if the material doesn't somehow apply to their own lives." But this is 180 degrees opposed to reality. In reality, kids are naturally curious about things that go far beyond their everyday experiences. Remember the sixth grader I mentioned a few articles back who went ape over the word "Brobdingnagian"?  He's also recently developed an obsession with Greek mythology, a topic thousands of years removed from his 21st century existence. No -- youth fantasy writers would not be making out like gangbusters if kids weren't looking for ways to expand their horizons. Teach a bunch of seven-year-olds about ancient Egypt and they'll jump all over it -- provided you present it as a story and not as a list of discreet, tedious facts. It also helps to take advantage of innate peaks in student interest. First grade is a good time to introduce biology because children at that age - especially the boys - are endlessly fascinated by critters and beasts -- and the tween years are a good time to do some basic chemistry and physics because kids then become interested in building things (and, in many cases, blowing them up).

But once again, I digress. Here's the bottom line: If you are a parent (or a future parent) who wants to raise a proficient reader, there are two principal things you must do. First, you must teach your child phonics! Phonics is an indispensable first step for beginning readers; without it, they will always depend on others to sound out unfamiliar words and will never become self-sufficient. Secondly - and even more importantly - you must provide your child with a knowledge-rich and word-rich environment. Leave plenty of time open during the day for free reading -- and reading aloud. Go on nature hikes. Go to the library. Go to museums (most of which are free or pay-what-you-can). Watch high quality educational programs. Don't hothouse your children and drill them with flashcards (unless you're going over the arithmetic tables); do take advantage of their built-in tendency to ask questions about the world and how it works.

Literacy, in my experience, requires cultural capital. Provide that capital, and your children will do well.  

In Defense of "SAT Words" (Cross-Post)

Brobdingnagian.

If your reaction upon reading the above word is to scratch your head, that's okay! "Brobdingnagian" is not commonly used and certainly isn't "career relevant." It is, however, a word that delighted one of my sixth grade students when he heard it. When I explained what it meant - gigantic - and where it came from - Jonathan Swift - said student immediately recorded it on his smart phone and declared that he planned to use it in school the following day. (And hopefully, once he's older and a more confident reader, the joy of discovery he found in "Brobdingnagian" will inspire him to read Gulliver's Travels.)

This post is not a full analysis of the upcoming changes to the SAT. I'm reserving my final judgment until I see the framework the College Board is scheduled to roll out in mid-April. But I want to address something I'm seeing in articles touting the aforementioned revisions that I personally find troubling. Over and over again, I'm seeing variations on the following theme: "Hooray! Students will no longer be expected to study tedious flashcards covering words they will never use in real life and will probably forget once the test is over!" In my view, that attitude is profoundly misguided. 

Granted, flashcards don't foster long-term retention of new vocabulary. That requires multiple exposures in helpful contexts. Students often ask me how I happen to know so many "SAT words," and the answer is really quite simple: I read. I read all the time -- and what's more, I read in a variety of genres. I read my mother's Merck Manual, worked out that "hep" means liver and "cardio" means heart, and consequently discovered that other big, technical terms could be deciphered if broken down into their prefixes, suffixes and roots. I read fiction and learned multiple ways to describe a summer day. I pursued historical knowledge and, as a result, learned the meaning of "forge" and "churn." At no point did I ever pick up a flashcard. I didn't need to. My environment was saturated with words.

Unfortunately, while I do my best to build my students vocabulary through context rather than dry lists of words, when they prepare for the SAT, they are often forced by time constraints to rely on brute short-term memorization. But that's not the fault of the SAT. If your seventeenth year was spent anxiously cramming, the people who educated you for the first sixteen years did it wrong -- and changing the test is not going to change what isfundamentally broken in public education. It's not going to get rid of the teachers who use reading as a punishment. It's not going to get rid of curricula that deemphasize factual and cultural knowledge in favor of "critical thinking" and content-poor "skills." 

Honestly, it makes me sad to think that so many were not taught to appreciate the complexities of our language because five dollar "SAT words" are actually not as pointless as their detractors claim. English has multiple words to express, say, the concept of anger because those words are necessary to describe the many facets of that emotion -- and the same goes for any other deceptively simple idea you can name. Remove the more "obscure" terms and what you have is Newspeak -- a language devoid of humanity and nuance.  Further, as illustrated by the anecdote above, bizarre, grandiloquent words can excite children if they're presented in the right way -- as passports to a vast universe of knowledge.

And at any rate, what message are you sending to our kids when you imply that certain words are "irrelevant'? That education is a mercenary enterprise? That if it won't make you "career and college ready," it's pointless? Folks, basic competency is important, but it's only the start of education, not the end. The end should be to raise creative, curious, and (hopefully) morally-centered adults -- and that won't happen so long as we have Eustace Clarence Scrubb waiting in the wings to tell my sixth grader that a word that fires his imagination has no practical purpose and he should read a report from the EPA instead.