Please open the link and read Anthony Cody’s blog about Kenneth Ye, a high school student in Tennessee who spoke to his local school board in Knox County against Common Core, PARCC testing, Pearson, and standardization. Kenneth pointed out that he has aced all the tests that have come his way. He has extraordinary scores. But he sees no value in making the American system like the test-driven Chinese system.
He begins like this:
I am Kenneth Ye. I stand before you today as someone who has achieved within the mold of standardization. I speak as a student that has taken the tests and jumped through the hoops.
I’ve taken over 12 Honors courses and 18 AP courses so far in my high school career.
I’m a National Merit Semifinalist. A National AP Scholar. I scored a 35 on the ACT composite the first time I took it. And I am a proud product of Knox County Schools.
It’s my teachers that have inspired me to learn and pursue my interests. It’s my teachers that have sent me towards success in academics and extracurriculars. It’s my teachers that have FOSTERED a sense of creativity, inquisitiveness, and individuality that inspires me to learn.
Mr. Ye has no respect for the PARCC assessments of the Common Core standards. He said:
The problems presented on these tests, however, are of justification with no merit, a learning system inherently flawed. These tests are not fair assessments of student’s knowledge. If you look towards the mathematics section of the PARCC website, we see that it “calls for written arguments/justifications, critique of reasoning, or precision in mathematical statements”. As a student who has scored 5s on AP Calculus, AP Statistics, and is preparing to take Calculus 3 at a local college next semester, I can honestly tell you that I cannot answer and justify your First grade Pearson math test question “What is a related Subtraction sentence?”
In concluding his presentation, he said:
As we project towards the future, we must consider the implications of these policies being put into place. What will the standardization be like in 10 years? Shall we be taking the American equivalent of the Chinese entrance exams and Gao Kao? Our public education is striving to parallel the high technical efficiency of the Chinese, and as a student who has learned in both environments, I can clearly say that the increase in standardization and testing, coupled with the pressure that coalesces, will diminish the creative and inquisitive mindset that we seek to foster.
As someone who can perform on the tests you throw at us, I am not satisfied. I’ve taken your tests, aced them, pulled your state averages up, but what I show you on that test is not why I learn. CCSS.ELA-Literacy W.11-12.3e is NOT why I learn. I do not learn to fulfill some SPIs on the board. This is not what fulfills me as a student. I learn to ask questions. To develop opinions. To make a difference. It is with this that I beseech all of you to take a moment to reevaluate what you are doing to our schools. Is it truly in the best interest of the students? Should we be conforming to this ill formed bureaucracy?
After seeing the video of Kenneth Ye’s presentation, Anthony Cody reached out to interview him. In this question, he asked Mr. Ye to compare education in the United States and China:
What were your experiences with the education system in China, and what lessons should we take from this?
In my experience with the Chinese education system, a lot of the teaching and learning style is regimented. Speaking to the students there and even being there, you see that a lot of the teaching and even the thought process is based towards testing. A lot of students are focused completely on schoolwork and seem lost when it comes to personal opinions, because their education has shifted more towards memorization and regurgitation for testing. Students can tell you the precise number of words they need to know to pass an entrance exam, but often times if you ask for a simple opinion, you can expect blank stares.
From the students that I was with at a recent program, I’ve heard about the intensive measures that students will go towards to do well on a test. Whether it’s locking themselves in an isolated room and cramming for days on end or taking medication to reduce any biological influences on testing, I’ve seen that testing has taken over a lot of their lives. I think that we can learn a lot from this. Students in China are striving to attend schools in the US for a reason; we pride ourselves on being a society of free-thinkers. America has become a world power due to our innovative thinking – a thinking that is being oppressed in favor of standardized capability. I believe that if we’re continuing down this spiral of standardization, a lot of the creative mindset that we develop in schools will instead be taken over by sheer memorization and regurgitation.
It is an interesting reflection on the part of the student, because David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core standards, once famously said that “as you grow up in this world, you realize people really don’t give a s–t about what you feel or what you think.”
Mr. Ye does not agree. He thinks that the ability to think for yourself and reach your own conclusion is what makes American education different and valuable as compared to nations that generate higher test scores.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Our public education is striving to parallel the high technical efficiency of the Chinese, and as a student who has learned in both environments, I can clearly say that the increase in standardization and testing, coupled with the pressure that coalesces, will diminish the creative and inquisitive mindset that we seek to foster.”
Some people can learn from advice given. Others, like my godmother used to say, “have to pee on the electric fence”.
I am not sure what being “Chinese American” has to do with much of anything. Nothing from the post indicates that the student grew up in China. It says “In my experience with the Chinese education system, a lot of the teaching and learning style is regimented. Speaking to the students there and even being there. . . [and] From the students that I was with at a recent program, I’ve heard about the intensive measures that students will go towards to do well on a test.
What does “. . . and even being there. . . ” mean?
The question being that whether K. Ye has personal experience, i.e., attending schools in China for X years in a daily living situation or whether that “my experience” is just contact with students and perhaps being part of a short term “foreign” cultural experience.
Not that I disagree with what he has said, however to bring in ethnicity if in fact he was brought up and raised in America seems a tad dishonest, if that truly is the case.
I was at the meeting in which Kenneth spoke so eloquently. Kenneth is Chinese American and his ethnicity was central to his point. He didn’t have to be explicit about his Chinese heritage because he stood out as the one Asian in a crowd of lilly whites (with a scattering of African Americans) and a nearly all white B of Ed.
If you want to watch Kenneth’s extraordinary presentation here is the link. His talk begins at 38:59. http://knoxschools.org/modules/cms/pages.phtml?pageid=297441&sessionid=f2ce2ab32ae34957bd0bcad3f88f2c3f
Notice how the Board Chair refuses his request to speak 1 min longer than the 5 min permitted so he had to race through his presentation.
The speaker immediately after him is Dr Kathy Fitzgerald of UTK’s child & family dept. She spoke on the effects of testing & toxic stress. Two other extraordinary HS students spoke as well and are worth seeing. Adam Hassan begins at 72:22 and Thomas Mitchell begins at 77:10.
Thomas had the entire crowd laughing after related a story about his Kindergarten teacher who gave him a Yellow Card for not listening. He ended his speech by dramatically holding up a yellow card at our Broad trained superintendent Jim McIntyre for not listening. Don’t miss it. McIntyre was not laughing.
Duane,
Diane did not include all of Kenneth Ye’s statement, which included this – which he expanded on in my interview with him:
“I know one of these factories personally. It’s one that we’re trying to compete with. I have been a student of both the American and Chinese systems. We see a technical outperformance by the Chinese in standardized tests. But does this communicate the creativity and inquisitive mindset in our own culture?”
“As we project towards the future, we must consider the implications of these policies being put into place. What will the standardization be like in 10 years? Shall we be taking the American equivalent of the Chinese entrance exams and Gao Kao? Our public education is striving to parallel the high technical efficiency of the Chinese, and as a student who has learned in both environments, I can clearly say that the increase in standardization and testing, coupled with the pressure that coalesces, will diminish the creative and inquisitive mindset that we seek to foster.”
Clearly his experience as a student in both systems makes his country of origin highly relevant.
Thanks for the link!
Anthony,
Thanks for that clarification. I read your post but somehow missed that which you point out!
Again, thanks!
Duane
I love how Kenneth uses the example of the math question from the PARCC test to cast doubt upon the reform project. Anyone who does a “close reading” of the tests should start to have doubts. Opponents of the tests merely have to use the tests themselves to discredit them.
One quibble: Kenneth implies that the new tests call for “regurgitation” of facts. Alas, they do not –if they did, then teaching to them would actually have some value (not that I’m a supporter of a Gao Kao-type high stakes test, but one thing that can be said in support of it is that it does induce Chinese kids to acquire knowledge, and knowledge is valuable). The problem with THESE tests is that they try to be fact-independent; they aim to test skills only. What they really do, in my opinion, is force the mind to perform painful and pointless operations analogous to pulling nails out of a board with your teeth. The test authors will have us believe that these operations are important skills that good teachers can actually teach, but I think they’re neither important nor teachable (they’re largely exercises of functionalities that are built-in to our brains).
“The test authors will have us believe that these operations are important skills that good teachers can actually teach, but I think they’re neither important nor teachable.”
So Ponderosa, it looks like we have been set up. The reformers have written subjective and abstract standards with companion tests that measure un-teachable skills using objective MC items.
And they think public schools are failing now.
You’ve identified a very important point that goes overlooked in most discussions about teaching and learning:
“The test authors will have us believe that these operations are important skills that good teachers can actually teach, but I think they’re neither important nor teachable.”
I am convinced that teaching and learning are not the reciprocal processes that they are commonly believed to be. What we and the reformers fail to understand is that learning is neither the reverse of teaching nor the direct result of what is “taught”. What is learned is created in the mind of the learner as the result of the learner’s brain processing that which occurs in its surroundings but is not just the simple absorption of what is being presented. Rather it is the sum total of all of the learner’s experiences.
The differences between the processes are profound, and while good teaching can influence what is learned, it is in fact what happens within the mind of the learner that determines what is actually “learned.”
“…the learner’s brain processing that which occurs in its surroundings but is not just the simple absorption of what is being presented. Rather it is the sum total of all of the learner’s experiences.”
Yes! Thanks for elucidating this.
GE2L2R
“I am convinced that teaching and learning are not the reciprocal processes that they are commonly believed to be.”
The younger the student, the truer this is.
Highly effective teaching certainly doesn’t guarantee highly proficient learning. Our words and actions get passes through many diverse individual filters. It’s like a game of telephone without the need for multiple retellings. Definitely an overlooked aspect of teaching which is impossible to understand if disconnected from the trenches.
Ponderosa,
You stated “The problem with THESE tests. . . ”
To finish that thought “. . . THESE tests are completely invalid and any results gleaned are vain and illusory as proven by Noel Wilson in his never refuted nor rebutted “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
To understand why read and understand what Wilson has proven. For a primer (and that’s all it is as there is so much more in Wilson’s work) see below:
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
” A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality”
A profound insight that should be tattooed across the forehead so that the reformers can read and reread it with every vain glance in the mirror!
The first-grade question K Ye refers to is not from any test created by or released by the PARCC consortium, which starts in third grade. He’s eloquent, to be sure, but just is a little loose with the facts. Having read PARCC items, though, I can assure you, they are NO better than the example cited, which I believe came from a Pearson-produced test prep “test” for first graders. We should strive to reflect the actual work of the consortium accurately in our criticisms, because that will show the entire reform effort associated with the tests to be vacuous.
And that’s why the test questions have been hidden. Not for potential future use, but to keep them from public and teacher view. To hide their faults. To keep us from questioning their relevance.
Reblogged this on Roy F. McCampbell's Blog.
Why don’t we find a student from Finland to make a public statement and compare it to Kenneth Ye’s experiences? That might help to clear misconceptions and to have a preference for our kids.
I have taught students from China and they tell me the same thing. I met a college student in D.C., and we chatted. He told me that he is in the United States to learn how to think OUT OF THE BOX. He also knew who Dr. Yong Zhao is and said that Dr. Zhao is trying to help China become less dependent on high-stakes tests as well as drill, skill, and kill. He thinks China needs to move away from their “dynasty” type of educational system. I have also posted here about a student from Shanghai with whom I worked. He hated going to school in Shanghai. He told me that all he did was take tests. He also said that he is appreciative of his American teachers who taught him English, even though they didn’t know his mother tongue. I have many more examples.
I lived in Asia. Their culture centers around education and getting into the top colleges. They have school on Saturdays. Kids stay up studying until late at night. Students can be seen in subways in their school uniforms. The one thing I admire about their educational beliefs is that they teach their kids English.
” The problem with THESE tests is that they try to be fact-independent; they aim to test skills only. What they really do, in my opinion, is force the mind to perform painful and pointless operations analogous to pulling nails out of a board with your teeth. The test authors will have us believe that these operations are important skills that good teachers can actually teach, but I think they’re neither important nor teachable (they’re largely exercises of functionalities that are built-in to our brains).”
Ponderosa,
This is the most brilliant description of what’s wrong with CCSS aligned tests I have ever (or will ever) read. Why more teachers and administrators do not understand this perfectly accurate and insightful point of view is truly mystifying. How and why did the teaching of “facts” become equated with child abuse in the classroom? Treating teaching and knowledge as if they are diametrically opposed.. We are so far down the rabbit hole I’m afraid we will never find our way out.
NY teacher,
“This is the most brilliant description of what’s wrong with CCSS aligned tests I have ever (or will ever) read.”
No, the most brilliant description of what’s wrong with standards and standardized tests of which the CCSS aligned tests are a part of, is Noel Wilson’s work. It absolutely, completely destroys the theoretical and logical, in other words epistemological and ontological bases, upon which these educational malpractices are based.
I ask that you read, and if you have read re-read, Noel Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
See above for a brief summary, that doesn’t do justice to his work. I’ve read it well over a dozen times, just got finished re-reading it again last week, and I get something new everytime I read it.
Yes, Folks, it’s that good of a study. All in education should be required to read and understand what he says.
Remembering, of course, that what the student talks about is intended for the vast majority of young people attending school. For the leading charterites/privatizers, well, the schooling THEIR OWN CHILDREN receive is—
From the U of Chicago Lab Schools website, “ABOUT LAB,” second of three paragraphs:
[start quote] Our mission is focused on students. We are more than just test scores and college admissions statistics. We are about learning well and complementing the work of one of the world’s premier institutions of higher learning, the University of Chicago. Our academic program is rigorous, but we are as interested in the development of character as we are in scholastic achievement. Alumni from all over the world regularly attest that it was at Lab where they learned how to think deeply and thus learned how to learn. In short, we are among the leading independent schools in the nation and pride ourselves on creating conditions for a purposeful search for knowledge and truth. [end quote]
Link: http://www.ucls.uchicago.edu/about-lab/index.aspx
From the Sidwell Friends School [DC] website, “School Philosophy”:
[start quote] Sidwell Friends School is an educational community inspired by the values of the Religious Society of Friends and guided by the Quaker belief in “That of God” in each person. We seek academically talented students of diverse cultural, racial, religious and economic backgrounds. We offer these students a rich and rigorous interdisciplinary curriculum designed to stimulate creative inquiry, intellectual achievement and independent thinking in a world increasingly without borders. We encourage these students to test themselves in athletic competition and to give expression to their artistic abilities. We draw strength from silence—and from the power of individual and collective reflection. We cultivate in all members of our community high personal expectations and integrity, respect for consensus, and an understanding of how diversity enriches us, why stewardship of the natural world matters and why service to others enhances life. Above all, we seek to be a school that nurtures a genuine love of learning and teaches students “to let their lives speak.” [send quote]
Link: http://www.sidwell.edu/about_sfs/school-philosophy/index.aspx
Go to the websites of Harpeth Hall, Lakeside School [Seattle, WA], and Cranbrook [Bloomfield Hills, MI], to name just a few, and ponder what OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN are not receiving.
Thank you, Kenneth Ye.
😎
This student from China needs to go and talk at many school districts in this country and explain and educate our so called Educational Leaders. Please start in Shelbyville Illinois because I can tell by the Superintendent’s recent commons that she does not understand that some math standards need to come prior to others and you cannot just willy-nilly move standards around unless you are like David Coleman and have never taught in a public school and do not have any understanding of grade appropriateness determined by each individual child’s mental development. This new set of standards remind me of when we were kids around the age of 7 and played school. Some of us would be the teachers and we would assign Algebra homework to the other 7 year olds for homework even though we had no idea what Algebra was other than the title on the book we were looking at! We need to tell the Leaders who have not read or do not have the background education necessary to understand the flaws in this, the largest scientific Experimemt in the history of the world to immediately stop wasting valuable limited resources on a system that will fail to do any of the things we are being told. No trials or research has been done to show that this will work! If NY is an example, then we should stop this process today! No new Superintendent should be hired unless they can pass both parts of the NEW Tests and show that they are highly proficient and College Ready!
I like the idea of testing the Superintendents with the tests that they are going to superintend. Likewise the teachers. BUT by the law of the normal curve, most would not pass.
Testing the administration or teachers wouldn’t prove anything as any results of a standardized test are as Wilson states “vain and illusory”.
So much mental masturbation spent on so much bovine excrement! AY AY AY!
Bravo!
The only argument that can convince many thinkers.
When I was 6, 7, 8, I was lucky — I cared none at all about tests, and then after that they were a game, but I still didn’t bother to pay attention to boring stuff at school. I learned anyway, simply by reading constantly what I wanted, and liking math. But if I imagined school itself was my source of learning, all this test-driven stuff would have been crippling.
This reminds me so much of a program when Bill Moyers interviewed in his series of programs: “A World of Idea”. . C. N. Yang, Chinese physicist, Nobel prize winner, who made the following remarks, along with MANY other interesting ones concerning Chinese students. “there is a tendency for them to automatically, subconsciously say ‘I have to follow the rules’. The rules have already been given. They don’t want to contradict previous authors” … “So there’s a tradeoff They get a more disciplined, determined student who’s willing to work hard for the payoff a long time from now. But they don’t get the creative daring of the individual spirit that soars beyond the accepted boundary”. There is much more VERY interesting interview. A World of Ideas was copyrighted in 1989 so the “debate” has been going on for some time.
And yet I can’t help remembering back to the late ’80’s, when the US was first realizing that the Asians had all over us in math, the results of an exchange (I think it was Chinese teachers), whose main critique of US math-teaching methods, was: the US teaches math concepts by rote, & emphasizes the application of the rote concept to a set of data. In China, a class is divided into groups, which are given a set of data, and a question; they are asked to find a way to answer the question; students derive ways to answer the question; methods are compared, and concepts are developed.
Two telling quotes from David Coleman and the CCCS…
“It is an interesting reflection on the part of the student, because David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core standards, once famously said that “as you grow up in this world, you realize people really don’t give a s–t about what you feel or what you think.”
“What Must Be Done in the Next Two Years 2011 Ifl Senior Leadership Meeting December 8-9, 2011
David Coleman, Keynote Speaker:
148 Student Achievement Partners, all you need to know about us are a couple
149 things. One is we‟re composed of that collection of unqualified people who were
150 involved in developing the common standards. And our only qualification was
151 our attention to and command of the evidence behind them. That is, it was our
152 insistence in the standards process that it was not enough to say you wanted to
153 or thought that kids should know these things, that you had to have evidence to
154 support it, frankly because it was our conviction that the only way to get an
155 eraser into the standards writing room was with evidence behind it, „cause
156 otherwise the way standards are written you get all the adults into the room about
157 what kids should know, and the only way to end the meeting is to include
158 everything. That‟s how we‟ve gotten to the typical state standards we have
159 today.
160 The notion of evidence was a way to do two things: was to focus on what
161 mattered most, and to erase much of which surrounded it. I think that core
162 principle will be the most important single one for you to take away tonight. If you
163 see these standards as an addition to your current tasks, as one more burden on
164 an overburdened cart, you will fail. If after my remarks it is not absolutely clear
165 how much you can stop doing and what you can focus on instead doing, we‟re
166 nowhere. We do not have the resources, leisure, or time to invest in a whole
167 new set of initiatives around these Common Core standards. Is that clear? We
168 have to clearly understand what is removed. Teachers need to understand what
169 is removed. What is removed to make way for the work that matters? Does that
170 make sense? Otherwise it is simply an impossible task. So I‟m gonna talk a lot
171 about what goes as well as what stays. Clear enough so far?”
David Coleman scares me.
He scares me with his ignorance.