#Common core

[trolley-problem-memes]

this is actually a common core math problem

[mostlysignssomeportents]

American education has all the downsides of standardization, none of the upsides

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

We moved to America in 2015, in time for my kid to start third grade. Now she's a year away from graduating high school (!) and I've had a front-row seat for the US K-12 system in a district rated as one of the best in the country. There were ups and downs, but high school has been a monster.

We're a decade and a half into the "common core" experiment in educational standardization. The majority of the country has now signed up to a standardized and rigid curriculum that treats overworked teachers as untrustworthy slackers who need to be disciplined by measuring their output through standard lessons and evaluations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Core

This system is rigid enough, but it gets even worse at the secondary level, especially when combined with the Advanced Placement (AP) courses, which adds another layer of inflexible benchmarks to the highest-stakes, most anxiety-provoking classes in the system:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Placement

It is a system singularly lacking in grace. Ironically, this unforgiving system was sold as a way of correcting the injustice at the heart of the US public education system, which funds schools based on local taxation. That means that rich neighborhoods have better funded schools. Rather than equalizing public educational funding, the standardizers promised to ensure the quality of instruction at the worst-funded schools by measuring the educational outcomes with standard tools.

But the joke's on the middle-class families who backed standardized instruction over standardized funding. Their own kids need slack as much as anyone's, and a system that promises to put the nation's kids through the same benchmarks on the same timetable is bad for everyone:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/28/give-me-slack-2/

Undoing this is above my pay-grade. I've already got more causes to crusade on than I have time for. But there is a piece of tantalyzingly low-hanging fruit that is dangling right there, and even though I'm not gonna pick it, I can't get it out of my head, so I figured I'd write about it and hope I can lazyweb it into existence.

The thing is, there's a reason that standardization takes hold in so many domains. Agreeing on a common standard enables collaboration by many entities without any need for explicit agreements or coordination. The existence of the ANSI/SAE J563 standard automobile auxiliary power outlet (AKA "car cigarette lighter") didn't just allow many manufacturers to make replacement lighter plugs. The existence of a standardized receptacle delivering standardized voltage to standardized contacts let all kinds of gadgets be designed to fit in that socket.

Standards crystallize the space of all possible ways of solving a problem into a range of solutions. This inevitably has a downside, because the standardized range might not be optimal for all applications. Think of the EU's requirement for USB-C charger tips on all devices. There's a lot of reasons that manufacturers prefer different charger tips for different gadgets. Some of those reasons are bad (gouging you on replacement chargers), but some are good (unique form-factor, specific smart-charging needs). USB-C is a very flexible standard (indeed, it's so flexible that some people complain that it's not a standard at all!) but there are some applications where the optimal solution is outside its parameters.

And still, I think that the standardization on USB-C is a force for good. I have drawers full of gadgets that need proprietary charger tips, and other drawers full of chargers with proprietary tips, and damned if I can make half of them match up. We've continued our pandemic lockdown tradition of my wife cutting my hair in the back yard, and just tracking the three different charger tips for the three clippers she uses is an ongoing source of frustration. I'd happily trade slightly sub-optimal charging for just being able to plug any of those clippers into the same cable I charge my headphones, phone, tablet and laptop on.

The standardization of American education has produced all the downsides of standardization – a rigid, often suboptimal, one-size-fits-all system – without the benefits. With teachers across America teaching in lockstep, often from the same set texts (especially in the AP courses), there's a massive opportunity for a commons to go with the common core.

For example, the AP English and History classes my kid takes use standard texts that are often centuries old and hard to puzzle out. I watched my kid struggle with texts for learning about "persuasive rhetoric" like 17th century pamphlets that inspired anti-indigenous pogroms with fictional accounts of "Indian atrocities."

It's good for American schoolkids to learn about the use of these blood libels to excuse genocide, but these pamphlets are a slog. Even with glossaries in the textbooks, it's a slow, word-by-word matter to parse these out. I can't imagine anyone learning a single thing about how speech persuades people just by reading that text.

But there's nothing in the standardized curriculum that prevents teachers from adding more texts to the unit. We live in an unfortunate golden age for persuasive texts that inspire terrible deeds – for example, kids could also read core Pizzagate texts and connect the guy who shot up the pizza parlor to the racists who formed a 17th century lynchmob.

But teachers are incredibly time-constrained. For one thing, at least a third of the AP classroom time seems to be taken up with detailed instructions for writing stilted, stylized "essays" for the AP tests (these are terrible writing, but they're easy to grade in a standardized way).

That's where standardization could actually deliver some benefits. If just one teacher could produce some supplemental materials and accompanying curriculum, the existence of standards means that every other teacher could use it. What's more, any adaptations that teachers make to that unit to make them suited to their kids would also work for the other teachers in the USA. And because the instruction is so rigidly standardized, all of these materials could be keyed to metadata that precisely identified the units they belonged to.

The closest thing we have to this are "marketplaces" where teachers can sell each other their supplementary materials. As far as I can tell, the only people making real money from these marketplaces are the grifters who built them and convinced teachers to paywall the instructional materials that could otherwise form a commons.

Like I said, I've got a completely overfull plate, but if I found myself at loose ends, trying to find a project to devote the rest of my life to, I'd be pitching funders on building a national, open access portal to build an educational commons.

It may be a lot to expect teachers to master the intricacies of peer-based co-production tools like Git, but there's already a system like this that K-8 teachers across the country have mastered: Scratch. Scratch is a graphic programming environment for kids, and starting with 2019's Scratch 3.0, the primary way to access it is via an in-browser version that's hosted at scratch.mit.edu.

Scratch's online version is basically a kid- (and teacher-)friendly version of Github. Find a project you like, make a copy in your own workspace, and then mod it to suit your own needs. The system keeps track of the lineage of different projects and makes it easy for Scratch users to find, adapt, and share their own projects. The wild popularity of this system tells us that this model for a managed digital commons for an educational audience is eminently achievable.

So when students are being asked to study the rhythm of text by counting the numbers of words in the sentences of important speeches, they could supplement that very boring exercise by listening to and analyzing contemporary election speeches, or rap lyrics, or viral influencer videos. Different teachers could fork these units to swap in locally appropriate comparitors – and so could students!

Students could be given extra credit for identifying additional materials that slot into existing curricular projects – Tiktok videos, new chart-topping songs, passages from hot YA novels. These, too, could go into the commons.

This would enlist students in developing and thinking critically about their curriculum, whereas today, these activities are often off-limits to students. For example, my kid's math teachers don't hand back their quizzes after they're graded. The teachers only have one set of quizzes per unit, and letting the kids hold onto them would leak an answer-key for the next batch of test-takers.

I can't imagine learning math this way. "You got three questions wrong but I won't let you see them" is no way to help a student focus on the right areas to improve their understanding.

But there's no reason that math teachers in a commons built around the (unfortunately) rigid procession of concepts and testing couldn't generate procedural quizzes, specified with a simple programming language. These tests could even be automatically graded, and produce classroom stats on which concepts the whole class is struggling with. Each quiz would be different, but cover the same ground.

When I help my kid with her homework, we often find disorganized and scattered elements of this system – a teacher might post extensive notes on teaching a specific unit. A publisher might produce a classroom guide that connects a book to specific parts of the common core. But these are scattered across the web, and they aren't keyed to the specific, standard components of common core and AP.

This is a standardized system that is all costs, no benefits. It has no "architecture of participation" that lets teachers, students, parents, practitioners and even commercial publishers collaborate to produce a commons that all may share and improve upon.

In an ideal world, we'd get rid of standardization in education, pay teachers well, give them the additional time they needed to prepare exciting and relevant curriculum, and fund all our schools based on need, not parents' income.

But in the meanwhile, we could be making lemonade of out lemons. If we're going to have standardization, we should at least have the collaboration standards enable.

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/16/flexibility-in-the-margins/#a-commons

[sailor-hufflepuff]

My daughter is crying because she can’t do her math homework. I try to help, but she says I’m not doing it the way the teacher said to (which I believe, because the directions make NO SENSE to me).

Why do they change math every generation? I remember my mom not being able to help me with my homework, and telling me that her dad couldn’t help her either, because they KEEP CHANGING it to make it “easier and more logical”.

Which. Even if it IS, if the parents can’t help the kids with homework, how will the kids be able to learn? Because this disproportionally affects disadvantaged kids whose parents don’t have the time to learn it themselves, or the money to hire a tutor, or the socioeconomic status to send their kids to a school where the teacher actually has the time to TEACH everything during the day.

[liquidpaperfoundation1]

I think we can all agree that Common Core math would make Tom Lehrer's head explode.

[uboat53]

Well, I think I accidentally found something interesting. This'll be in two parts because I think both are useful. I'll detail out what I found out about education, but I'm also going to detail out how I did it as a separate TIP FROM A SCIENTIST thing because I think that's useful.

The long and the short of it is, I think I found a pretty solid relationship between Common Core and bringing test scores up, at least in math and reading, in some of the worst states and keeping them up. At the very least, even if it didn't cause the improvement, it's strongly correlated with it.

There's only one nation-wide standardized test, it's called NAEP and it's conducted tests pretty much every two years since 2003 and the data is available online, so that's what I grabbed. After I noticed that, starting around 2011 or so, states that used to be really terrible started trending upward and kept doing so until the most recent test in 2023. The only major change I know of that was implemented largely nation-wide around that time was Common Core.

Now, after a bit more analysis, it turns out that the improvement starts a little earlier, but when I graph the averages of Common Core states to non Common Core states, there's still a marked difference. The graph here shows how the states deviate from the average NAEP combined math and reading score in 4th grade; the blue series is the average score of states that either adopted Common Core or a nearly identical standard, the orange series is the average of states that refused to adopt Common Core, and the grey series is the average of states that adopted Common Core but then dropped it fairly quickly. Now, 2015 is clearly an outlier here, but there is a consistent pattern otherwise.

The same pattern, though a little different, holds when I look at the 8th grade NAEP math and reading scores as you can see in this graph.

Now, 43 of the 50 states are in the blue series, so we'd expect them to be pretty close to the average since they dominate it, but you'll notice that they start going higher above the average starting in 2009 and largely stay there. Meanwhile, the 4 states in the category that never adopted Common Core used to be significantly above average but, starting in the second half of the 00's, they decline pretty badly and stay quite a bit below the average. The 3 states that adopted and then later dropped Common Core started below average and, with some variation, pretty much stayed there.

As I said, the timing doesn't exactly line up to say that the Common Core standards caused the increase we see in scores, but there's clearly something about the willingness to adopt or not adopt Common Core that, at the very least, correlates with stronger educational outcomes.

Anyways, the process I used to get there is almost as interesting as the results and I think it's actually a really good example of how a scientist approaches things. If you're interested in a long form TIP FROM A SCIENTIST, you should check it out here.

[wack-ashimself]

I talk a lot. I know. But I am warning you this is not only probably my longest post ever, at least on here, but it's super hating teachers, so if you're really into teachers or have a loved one that's a teacher, I am definitely going to fucking piss you off.

Vindication! I got the best validation in so fucking long. Probably years. Talking with my boss about how I hate svsu; biggest waste of time and money in my life. I always say I learned more 3 years stuggling in la than any year at svsu. She said went to svsu, but stppped going because the nursing program was awful. I asked her in which ways. She said nearly every fucking teacher bragged about failing a good chunk of the class every semester. She said another class she failed and had to retake, she saw almost half of her same class was there, again. And even another teacher bragged that only a third would pass. Cuz they give high level courses to freshman (she told me something and I didn't know wtf she said, it was that layered). What are we teaching them? Why are we shaming them into not knowing enough? Because this is intro to nursing. And they were throwing some heavy fucking shit at her.

So thank you svsu. You wasted somebody else's life, and just proved me right you piece of shit college, and one of the only big regrets in my entire fucking life. Never once in my entire career life has my degree helped me ever. Not a single goddamn time. I used to brag it got me an interview once, but I never got that fucking job. #svsu you money grabbing whores, fuck off forever. Honestly? The only thing teachers offer any more is either Hands-On experience, or personal experience. It sure isn't fucking true and ADAPTING knowledge anymore!

Fine I'm going to say it. I don't respect majority of teachers*. I only remember a few of my life that taught me anything of value, most were bullies, and they're all glorified babysitters. Even the fucking College ones. Why? Because you're forcing young naive kids to pay you for dated information so they will be mindless workers. So in other words you're just watching them get stupider. Like a babysitter watching the kids watching tv. Look into the how the educational system was founded. He wanted cogs in his factory machines; never free thinkers.

*off the top of my head I only can remember 3 great (not just good) teachers i personally had. Ironically? 2 of them were in college... NEITHER AT GD SVSU!

1-My 5th grade teacher, mr reynolds. I was bullied cuz I'm loud and opinionated. He stuck up to my whole class for bullying me. He was a kind old man with a cane. I saw him a few years ago, outside work. He was a frail old man now. So I didn't know if he would remember me. But I told him "hey I don't know if you remember me, but I had you in 5th grade, and you saved me from a lot of bullies. I just want to thank you, and I never forgot that." And I don't know if he was faking it or what, but he swore he remembered me, and it melted my heart. I was so glad I got to thank him. It really made my entire month to just see him and thank him.

2- My Philosophy teacher at delta (I will not remember anybody's name from here on out that was good. I wasn't around them for a long enough duration). He really opened me up to debate with logic, critical thought, and different philosophical Concepts I had never considered. I will have to admit it was the highest grade I ever got in college, I think I was even top of the class, so that definitely was an ego stroke too. But I did not know that till the end of the semester so I can say that much to my credit LOL

3- my world culture studies teacher at delta. He was a mean gruff old man. But he was fair and extremely honest. I got one of my worst grades in college from him. Either a B minus or c plus. I honestly want to say C plus. And I worked my ass off. But he literally opened me up to everything that was going on in the world because he explored it. He made me appreciate more than just my own country. And all of humanity. I mean don't get me wrong, I loved Humanity before, but now I understood it a little bit better, so it was easier to love...

But yeah nearly every other teacher from grade school and high school especially and college that i had, go fuck yourself. You did nothing but take time. To be fair I think there was a psychology teacher I had in high school that was pretty cool too. Can't remember her fucking name. She was a hard ass too, but fair. And smart! I never said this, but I once considered taking psychology because of her. You ever meet a teacher that you're like you could be teaching so many better places? She was one of them. I think that's what I respect most in teachers. They want to teach something real, valuable, meaningful, they're honest, and they don't take bullshit. Oh and miss gonzalez! She was my theater teacher at delta. She gave me a real confidence that I didn't have before in other areas that I didn't usually act in.

Okay so maybe it's like five teachers. I'm only remembering them as I'm spouting them off. I could tell you the worst, but I don't want to tarnish somebody's Legacy cuz they're probably dead.

Except for Mr mindy at western. He totally touched young underage girls all the fucking time; I personally saw it. When I got that 10-year how do you remember High School thing, I specifically said Mr Mindy was a perverted should be fired. No joke, not soon after he retired. And Mr Everson got fired. Mindy had a closed door office in his room, with blinders. Mr Everson had open windows in his office, along main hallway. He was way easier to fucking catch. Mindy was just so well liked, so it was ignored. That should have been my first sign that Epstein's Island was definitely going to be a fucking thing in the future.

But if you leave this post with anything, know you can self teach easily nearly anything through the internet now. Of course you got to use harsh critical analysis, thinking and logic to prevail from being fooled there, too....but no massive student debts for a meaningless degree... that's being fooled even more: debt for life and it doesn't even get you a fucking good paying job? Great Ponzi scheme. The best!

< know the number one reason I hate teachers? They never fight curriculum. They just teach it blindly. I mean we taught #CommonCore and that's one of the stupidest fucking things I've ever seen in my life. You added more steps to math? Why? That's just stupid. That's like doubling the ingredients to a cake when you only wanted one fucking cake.>

[xtruss]

The Importance of Handwriting is Becoming Better Understood! Research on Pens and Paper Highlights Their Benefits

— September 14th, 2023

A Person's Hand, Writing with a Pen that has a Lightbulb on the End. Image: Nick Lowndes

Two and a Half Millennia Ago, Socrates complained that writing would harm students. With a way to store ideas permanently and externally, they would no longer need to memorise. It is tempting to dismiss him as an old man complaining about change. Socrates did not have a stack of peer-reviewed science to make his case about the usefulness of learning concepts by heart.

Today a different debate is raging about the dangers of another technology—computers—and the typing people do on them. As primary-school pupils and Ph.D hopefuls return for a new school year in the northern hemisphere, many will do so with a greater-than-ever reliance on computers to take notes and write papers. Some parents of younger students are dismayed that their children are not just encouraged but required to tote laptops to class. University professors complain of rampant distraction in classrooms, with students reading and messaging instead of listening to lectures.

A line of research shows the benefits of an “innovation” that predates computers: handwriting. Studies have found that writing on paper can improve everything from recalling a random series of words to imparting a better conceptual grasp of complicated ideas.

For learning material by rote, from the shapes of letters to the quirks of English spelling, the benefits of using a pen or pencil lie in how the motor and sensory memory of putting words on paper reinforces that material. The arrangement of squiggles on a page feeds into visual memory: people might remember a word they wrote down in French class as being at the bottom-left on a page, par exemple.

One of the best-demonstrated advantages of writing by hand seems to be in superior note-taking. In a study from 2014 by Pam Mueller and Danny Oppenheimer, students typing wrote down almost twice as many words and more passages verbatim from lectures, suggesting they were not understanding so much as rapidly copying the material.

Handwriting—which takes longer for nearly all university-level students—forces note-takers to synthesise ideas into their own words. This aids conceptual understanding at the moment of writing. But those taking notes by hand also perform better on tests when students are later able to study from their notes. The effect even persisted when the students who typed were explicitly instructed to rephrase the material in their own words. The instruction was “completely ineffective” at reducing verbatim note-taking, the researchers note: they did not understand the material so much as parrot it.

Many studies have confirmed handwriting’s benefits, and policymakers have taken note. Though America’s “Common Core” curriculum from 2010 does not require handwriting instruction past first grade (roughly age six), about half the states since then have mandated more teaching of it, thanks to campaigning by researchers and handwriting supporters. In Sweden there is a push for more handwriting and printed books and fewer devices. England’s national curriculum already prescribes teaching the rudiments of cursive by age seven.

However, several school systems in America have gone so far as to ban most laptops. This is too extreme. Some students have disabilities that make handwriting especially hard. Nearly all will eventually need typing skills. And typing can improve the quality of writing: being able to get ideas down quickly, before they are forgotten, can obviously be beneficial. So can slowing down the speed of typing, says Dr. Oppenheimer.

Virginia Berninger, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington, is a longtime advocate of handwriting. But she is not a purist; she says there are research-tested benefits for “manuscript” print-style writing, for cursive (which allows greater speed) but also for typing (which is good practice for composing passages). Since students spend more time on devices as they age, she argues for occasional “tuning up” of handwriting in later school years.

And perhaps even into adulthood. Johnson had not handwritten anything longer than a letter in decades before putting actual pen to paper to write this column’s first draft. Whether it made any difference to the outcome is a question that readers must decide.

Socrates may or may not have had a point about the downsides of writing. But no one would remember, much less care, if his student Plato had not noted it down for the benefit of posterity.■

— This Article Appeared in the Culture Section of the Print Edition Under the Headline "Hand-wringing Over Handwriting"

[faultfalha]

The Margin: GOP debate highlights: Vivek Ramaswamy 'sounds like ChatGPT,' Chris Christie gets stuck with 'the UFO question' and more. The mood was electric at the GOP debate last night, as the candidates sparred and traded barbs. Highlights included Vivek Ramaswamy's comments on ChatGPT, and Chris Christie's unfortunate run-in with 'the UFO question.' Ramaswamy's cutting insight was that ChatGPT "sounds like a really bad idea," while Christie was asked about his thoughts on UFOs. In a stunning display of candor, Christie admitted that he doesn't know what UFOs are, but he's "going to look into it." The other candidates also had their moments, with Jeb Bush delivering a stirring defense of Common Core and Marco Rubio scoring points with his tough stance on immigration. But in the end, it was Ramaswamy and Christie who stole the show.

[theriu]

"They don't deserve mercy" that's the point. Mercy means sparing someone from the consequences they deserve.

"They don't deserve grace" that's the point. Grace means showing someone kindness and love that they don't deserve.

[bennetsbonnet]

If Mrs Bennet was indeed the only one 'doing something about the situation' like I often see argued when Pride and Prejudice is discussed... surely she would have spent frugally to ensure her daughters had substantial dowries? Surely she would have employed governesses to educate her daughters to ensure they had the accomplishments necessary to enable them make a successful marriage? Surely she would not have relied on desperate schemes to throw her daughters in front of eligible men and instead allowed them to be judged on their merits?

And yet...

We are told in Chapter 50 that Mrs Bennet has 'no turn for economy,' and only Mr Bennet (a waste of space himself, mind you) prevents them from exceeding their income,

Elizabeth tells Lady Catherine in Chapter 29 that 'we never had any governess' and that 'those who chose to be idle, certainly might.' So even in the absence of having someone around at Longbourn who was entirely dedicated to the girls' education, no pressure was exerted upon them to study... and Elizabeth smilingly reassures Lady Catherine that Mrs Bennet was not a slave to their education,

In Chapter 18, thanks to 'a manoeuvre of Mrs. Bennet,' the party are the last to depart after the Netherfield ball and 'had to wait for their carriage a quarter of an hour after everybody else was gone.' Which is not only rude but highly embarrassing... but she really wanted Bingley and Jane to spend a few extra minutes together, just to make sure...

As you see, there were plenty of opportunities for Mrs Bennet to ensure her daughters were better prepared to find husbands. Yes, in marrying Mr Bennet, she married 'up,' and so might not have had these advantages herself (and Mr Bennet does share some of the blame).

But it's honestly somewhat of a miracle that Jane and Elizabeth turned out so well and were able to make such good marriages, even in spite of such a calamitous upbringing...

[kheldarson]

Depending on your state, you probably had a basic American history class or a world history class in 6th grade and were lucky to get Civics before 12th grade. Civics honestly should be part of every grade level at this point though, regardless of basic topic.

Saw someone reblog my post (they've blocked me but I saw a reblog of said reblog) claiming that Biden somehow was failing on trans rights because of the state level rollbacks.

You know, the ones done by state governments.

You know, the ones the President has zero power over.

Or how the Republican controlled congress wasn't passing his agenda.

Like, hate the guy all you want -- but, like, do it for shit that's actually his fault, y'know? I swear, do folks not actually know how our government works? Did y'all fail sixth grade social studies that hard?

[yourlittlettoy]

Something about.. how t-wording causes your body to betray you.

How no matter who you are (how dignified, tough, professional, serious, etc), getting t-worded will force you into a vulnerable and helpless state.

How embarrassing that is, to always have a weakness that makes you lose all of your dignity, reducing you to squirming and begging and makes you feel weak and out of control.

How much having this weakness you can’t get rid of means there’s always something that can be used against you, used to control you, used to humble you.

Just the inherent .. invasiveness of it all? The idea of having this weakness at all, that’s literally always gonna be so accessible to exploit if someone really wanted to. Being so afraid that someone might find out. How it always tears down every mental defence you’ve ever steeled within yourself and forces you to act in such an involuntary way which makes you burn hot with embarrassment?? How easy it is to control you with this.

Damn. I think that’s maybe a core reason this kink appeals to me 👀

[assassin1513]

🖤⚜️🖤Raven Home🖤⚜️🖤

[tokumei1ka]

Natural Neighborhood #5

[front-facing-pokemon]