When I started public elementary school in Houston, we learned to write with pens that were dipped in an inkwell. I think it was called a quill pen. This was not easy for me because almost every desk had a wooden arm for right-handed students, and I am left handed. I had to contort myself to dip my pen and write on a desk meant for right-handed students.
Then about the time I was in second grade, we got ball point pens, which was a huge technological step forward. However, they smudged something awful. As I wrote, in my cramped left-handed way, the ink smeared my fingers and my left hand. I came home ink-stained every day.
When ball points were eventually improved so that the ink did not smudge, it was wonderful for us lefties.
But always there was the trusty pencil. We could all count on our #2 pencil, so long as there was a nearby pencil sharpener, or a pocket knife to bring back the point.
This writer joins me in distrusting the exclusive reliance on online testing. I could give many reasons why it is a terrible idea, not only including cost, but emphasizing that it shifts control to outside authority. Someone decides what knowledge is of most worth. It is not teachers or scholars. Chances are it is a committee at Pearson.
A great scholar once said to me: “Let me write a nation’s tests, and I care not who writes its songs.”
Here is a reader, in praise of the pencil:
“It becomes a test to take the test. Where are the content advocates now? Are we really ready to replace the technology of the pencil. Computers will come and go, breakdown, become obsolete. This has never happened to the pencil, a very reliable technology.
Pencils will help our children be career and college ready at less cost. Don’t need to hire technicians; and they are so abundant and available, that they can be found on the floor of any classroom at the end of the day.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Pencils are great but pentils are even better.
The pencil is undoubtly one of the greatest inventions of all time.
Technologically pencils are very complicated. There is the famous story “I, Pencil” which emphasizes that nobody knows how to make a pencil.
An outstanding essay. Really well written and interesting.
And a great argument for not placing U.S. education in the hands of an unelected, centralized, distant, top-down, totalitarian Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth that dictates standards and assessments and evaluation schemes to everyone.
Of course nobody knows how to make a computer either.
For what it’s worth, there are now lefty-friendly fountain pens (including even lefty-friendly CALLIGRAPHY fountain pens!) Left me know if you want suppliers.
😉
Give me pencil and imagination first. Then, use technology to make it happen.
The focus on technology in the classroom is terribly misguided. We need to teach kids to first read and think using old-school methods. The use of technology to should be reserved for older students, perhaps at the high school level.
Most “technology” use in the schools consists of reading on the Internet and word processing. Both skills can be learned very, very quickly.
Early use of technology drains precious resources better spent on the basics.
7th grade teacher, the situation is much worse than you think. The most obscene and baseless fiction the corporatists perpetrate is that the kids are “digital natives” and will somehow be able to construct meaning out of the avalanche of gibberish flung at them on their touch-screens.
You say,
“Most “technology” use in the schools consists of reading on the Internet and word processing.” No, technology is now mostly a proprietary vehicle for mindless accountability and enforced compliance. The emperor is naked.
My building has been trained by Pearson itself to flip our classrooms over to touch-screen-based student input and output. The clueless TFA sales staff chosen to lead the change-over suffer from run-away self-esteem already, and are uncritically thrilled with this natural and glorious advance of their careers. They easily blame the students for not being able to connect with their Schoology and Note-Anytime tablet assignments, and then they self-righteously fail kids for “just sitting there and doing nothing”. Please take note: the triumphant, high-speed advance of proprietary education technology is leaving a trail of wrecked adolescent road-kill behind it.
I have the casualties in my classes now, repeating ninth graders and over-age tenth graders, perfectly nice and functional kids targeted to get transferred out for failure to make academic progress. They’re profoundly grateful for a pencil, and blue-book lab journals, and a glossy non-virtual pocket folder waiting for them every day in their own classroom, with their actual name on it. They are using their old-fashioned pencils to write their own words on real paper, which other people then hold in their actual hands and actually read, with human eyes.
It’s too bad “technology” in education has come to mean iPads and apps.
The true traditionalist would require all students learn using the oral tradition, so little teaching time is wasted on learning how to access paticular learning technologies like the printed book.
That’s pretty much what Socrates said about this. LOL!
Technology Reminds me of the Car.
Now that we have a car, it is of no use for anyone to ride a horse, a bike, walk, or run.
This is forbidden in this new day and age of the motorized wheels.
You must use your vehicles to travel and we are here to warn you now that nothing else is acceptable.
This is the new Drive Generation and everyone must take the same route to town.
Now that we have motorized wheels, we do not expect to see you walking, running, riding a bike or riding a horse. You will be ticketed accordingly.
I hate to say this but the older people who finally figured out how to turn on the computer went wild and decided that tech is the end all.
Trying to remember my 105 passwords is so mentally challenging..
Not to worry about 105passwords. Hackers have them all.
LOL. 🙂
I am sure!
Requiring all kids to take tests on computers is alarming. Little kids often have to sit in large chairs at higher desks and their feet don’t touch the floor, cutting off circulation for such extended periods required. Students are not provided with Keyboarding until middle school. We are assuming kids are born with keyboarding skills. Swiping iPads or phones is not the same.
We used to get hung up on allowing kids to use calculators for tests if they had not used them throughout the semester. Now, we make this giant leap to relying on test scores fed into computers by kids of all ages. What are we testing? Academic skills or computer skills? Who knows? Arne and Gates could care less.
Until computer literacy, logistics and removing computer glitches are at 100%, we are back to: Garbage IN…Garbage OUT! But, that seems to be the driving force for DATA these days. A dot is a dot is a dot!? Only need three of them for a Trend. More dots = more $$$$.
Pencils are great!
“Garbage IN…Garbage OUT!”
You’re a lot more civil than me . Shit in and shit out! is what it is!!
As the story goes, early in the space race, we discovered the problem with pens in zero gravity. Ink pens are gravity powered; the ink does not know which direction is down in free-fall. Astronauts could not take notes in space..
NASA put the problem out to industry via RFP. Proposals came back, committees studied the options, a selection procedure was established, and finally a design was selected.
The specifications were prepared and put out to bid. More committees for bid selection, several lawsuits over the selection process; but finally, we had a zero G pen delivery date. Well, of course there were cost overruns, manufacturing defects to be ironed out, a congressional committee investigating corruption in the contract award; but when Neil Armstrong made that small step; Mike Collins was in the command module taking notes with a 20 million dollar zero g pen.
The Russians used a pencil.
great story
I love that story. Thanks Michael!
I think this is a good place to mention the latest volley from Obama and the wolfs, robber barons and pirates of Sesame Street and public education.
Time Magazine for February 25 (my wife subscribes so we get an early copy before it hits the news stands) has this on the front cover “The Diploma that Words: Inside the six-year high school” by Rana Foroohar.
Op the the index on page 1 and it says “Reinventing High School” Why four years isn’t enough to prepare students for jobs in the new economy”. the piece starts on page 22.
When you turn to page 22, the headline says, “The School that will Get you a Job”
The schools mentioned are in Chicago.
One is the Sarah E. Goode STEM Academy and graduates are promised a $40,000-plus job with IBM, the school’s corporate partner, when they graduate.
After you read the piece, it is obvious that this is a move to not only replace k-12 public schools with private sector schools controlled and run by corporations but they are also going after the two year public community colleges.
Who helped start these schools that will soon start appearing in three states? Stanley Litow, IBM”s vice president of corporate citizenship and corporate affairs.
Later in the piece, it says, “Those reforms have included things like the push for Common Core standards, charter schools and in some cases closer ties between schools and business. …”
“Today, no one can ignore the disconnect between how the U.S. educates its kids and the needs of the U.S. economy.”
There’s a lot more. Gates is mentioned along with others among the wolfs and robber barons who are out to rob public education and subvert Sesame Street to a corporate controlled youth movement.
If you control young minds from the start, you control the way most people think as young adults. Hitler knew this and so did Mao. For instance, during Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1965 – 1976), the children would turn their parents and teachers in to the teenage Red Guard and do this out of love of Mao who planted his Little Red Book in the elementary schools as a text to be rad, loved, worshiped, studied and discussed years before the Cultural Revolution exploded across China leading to the deaths of millions and the torture of hundreds of millions of people and terror visited on all religions. And Mao didn’t have to lift a finger because the kids who learned from his little book did it all for him when they became teenagers. The Red Army didn’t have to do a thing. Instead, they stayed in their camps and kept silent until Mao died. Then they allied with Deng Xiaoping and put a stop to the insanity after more than a decade of decay and destruction leaving China almost in ruins.
The public schools can be directed to become six years schools with a vocational path designed to lead to jobs with local industries. They don’t have to be turned over to the private sector for this. This is nothing new.
When I left teaching, the public high school where I taught in Southern California was already doing this with certificate programs designed to lead to job placement out of high school. These pathway programs included internships with those businesses.
This idea isn’t new and it works without removing it from the public sector.
In fact, you may read about this program at Nogales High School here and with more funding it could be expanded:
http://www.nogaleshs.org/apps/pages/index.jsp?uREC_ID=83726&type=d&pREC_ID=221254&hideMenu=1
Sounds more like a IBM ball-and-chain than liberal arts. Good luck with this. Diane Ravitch is uncharacteristically reticent when it comes to discussing realistic vocational education.
Here’s an idea: Soon we shall be able to run the genomes of fetuses in the womb. These can be emailed to corporations, who can then bid on them on an exchange, and the winners of those bids can have their logos and bar codes embedded in the childrens’ foreheads at birth. Gee, I’m seeing the possibility for a great start-up here–creating that exchange. Time to write a business plan and get it off to those VC firms!
How do you know that the CEO’s and corporations haven’t already figure out how to put those bar codes on people in invincible ink that only a scanner could read.
Maybe they are stamping kids at birth and we don’t know it yet.
I was just online with an AT&T tech who works in Texas to solve a password problem and she didn’t know anything about the robber barons of public education and the wolf of Sesame Street.
I used Bill Gates name as an example of one of the robber barons of public education, and I think she thought I was a conspiracy nut case but she was still nice to this so-called nut case with Lloyd for a name.
I suggested she visit Diane’s Blog to get the facts.
With the Robber Barons controlled most of the traditional media, it seems our main avenue to educate the public will be from Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
That is until the Robber Barons block us because they probably own all those too.
cx: That should be “Now that we are able to run the genomes of fetuses,” of course
Your example from China would seem to argue against your position. It is the monolithic public school system in the US which is brain washing youth into party thinking, i.e. global warming, equity for all, community before individual. An privatized education system fragmented and aligned with businesses would teach a different, and a better ideology. N’est c’est pas?
I have no idea where that came from—that corporations run by CEO’s would teach kids how to think individually.
The public schools in the US—up until G. W. Bush and NCLB, then Obama’s Race to the Top and now this Common Core garbage—were community run schools through democratically elected school boards. Every school district in the US, all 13,600 of them, reflected those communities and most still do.
Other than special ed and the free or reduced breakfast and lunch programs, the feds didn’t have much say in what went on in each states school districts.
The states ran the schools and that put another spin on them through fifty different state departments of education reflecting each of America’s major regional differences.
Where does this thinking come from that the public schools in America are some sort of socialist Communist system that’s brainwashing our children? And they will be saved by the likes of Bill Gates and the other Robber Barons of public education and the Wolf of Sesame Street?
If this is what you think, what Kool-Aid are you drinking?
For instance, Wal-Mart has indoctrination sessions that are mandatory for their employees to attend. Wal-Mart also offers assistance in filling out Welfare forms for food stamps and rent assistance from the feds teaching these people how to survive off the tax payers who don’t use food stamps to eat.
In the public schools, the kids are individuals who haven’t been brainwashed. If the opposite was true, then this myth that the public schools are dominated by liberals would guarantee that there would be no Republican Party; no conservatives. Everyone in the US would be a progressive or liberal.
But the fact is that a third of the public school teachers are registered Republican and they vote conservative. In addition, about 25% of public school teachers are registered as independent voters who do not belong to either major party. Only about half are registered Democrats and some of them are moderates.
In addition, if the US public schools were dominated with liberal brain washing liberal teachers, how did both Bush’s get elected to President and why does the GOP hold the majority in the House?
Every citizen should be a hard core progressive or liberal after several decades of leftist brainwashing in the US public schools except for the 4% of kids who attend private and religious schools and four percent of voters are not going to carry any elections.
Methinks thou protesteth too much. Isn’t the fundamental philosophy of education in the public schools collectivist? You can argue as much as you want that it shouldn’t be so, given the personnel, but it is. It’s a fact. Bring a copy of ATLAS SHRUGGED into your faculty room, leave it on the table and see how long it lasts. The kids can’t escape the inferior thinking of their teachers and the inferior thinking built into the very system, Diane’s approach exhibit #1. You can see the effects in California especially. The whole public policy establishment there is nuts. The drought isn’t from global warming, it’s from public officialdom shutting down the water pumps. The agricultural drought is Sacremento made. If the escape such thinking it’s by dint of personal effort to overcome the self-contradictory egalitarianism of the general culture, concentrated and distilled in the public school system these days. Obama is Jim Jones, the Democrat party is the members of his cult, and it is they who are drinking poison laced kool aid. Unfortunately, they are destroying not just themselves, but the rest of us as well. Zombies trying to eat our brains.
You sound like you might be a libertarian, Harlan. If so, be aware that there has never been a successful liberation government in history and that there never will be.
Libertarianism—another word for anarchy— will not work the same as pure socialism or communism didn’t work. Human nature will make sure it doesn’t work.
As for collectivism, if you mean an education system designed to support the culture of the country it was built for, then you are correct—long live cultural collectivism that supports the survival of the country for that culture. This way, kids grow up with common cultural beliefs and learn how to treat each others differences with respect. We all can’t be cut from the same cloth as the KKK, for instance.
Lloyd Lofthouse: mention of “China” and “monolithic public school system in the US” suddenly prompted a flashback to something I experienced in the anti-war in Vietnam movement.
At one peaceful mass demonstration in Detroit I met several Maoists with their fingers stuck in their Little Red Books [for those unfamiliar with the genre, please google]. Someone I was with knew one of them, so I listened for a few minutes to true believers.
Yes, they could quote on demand immortal sayings like the one about using all ten fingers to play the piano. And yes, they would walk around and sleep [i.e., 24/7] with a finger stuck in that place in the book where they had stopped [don’t ask me what they did when they had to take a shower or attend to other necessities; I really didn’t—and don’t—want to know]. And best, or worst, of all, I even heard the immortal phrase “You can’t quote the Chairman against the Chairman” when someone pointed out a contradiction between two precepts of the maximum leader.
IMHO, “monolithic public school system in the US” makes as much sense to me as “You can’t quote the Chairman against the Chairman.”
Thank you for your comments here but in this particular case, I leave the heavy lifting to you.
😎
I don’t think we can compare US citizens who were Maoists to the Red Guard in China. US Maoists were idealists who had no idea of what was really going on in China. Many U.S. Maoists—mostly privileged whites—were born to wealthy families. My wife ran into a few of them in the 1980s when she was attending college in America on a student visa.
Once, she had a job at the university art gallery and one of the artists had an American flag as part of his so called cutting edge protest art that was meant to be stepped on.
And here was this foreign Chinese student who had lived through the Mao era who couldn’t stand seeing people walk on the American flag so when no one was around to stop her she picked it up, brushed the dusty footprints off of it and then folded it to store out of site so no one would trample it.
When the artist came the next day and saw that his Maoist goals had been foiled, he was angry but how could he express that anger to someone who have lived through the Cultural Revolution and experienced the horrors first hand as only the Chinese had.
Mao was more of a nationalist than a communist. He never went to Moscow for training as some of the party members had. What he wanted was a China strong enough to stand up to Western imperialism and as a leader he mostly failed there after the failed Great Leap Forward and the disaster of his Cultural Revolution—something most Chinese who were alive then never want to repeat, even most of those who ran with the teenage Red Guard.
As for my politics, I’m all over the place. I’m a moderate who is slightly right of center but far from a raving tea party lunatic. And I’m a registered independent voter. Being in the center, for instance, I accept the right to own and carry firearms but also accept a woman’s right to an abortion.
Lloyd Lofthouse: I agree with “I don’t think we can compare US citizens who were Maoists to the Red Guard in China” and what follows concerning that opening sentence.
I apologize for not making my point more clearly, which is, that some statements are breathtakingly out of touch with reality. Sometimes such statements strike me as funny, sometimes as tragic, sometimes as both.
And your last paragraph reminds me of quite few people I’ve worked with and gotten to know over the years, including some folks for whom I have a great deal of respect.
Keep commenting. I’ll keep on reading.
😎
The monolithic thinking which you abhor (& who wouldn’t?) is a figment of your imagination.
There is a sort-of shadow-monolith seen in [social studies] textbooks, but they change often, reflecting the vicissitudes of mainstream political thinking in the country. Even this shadow-trend has been undermined by the quicker flow of ideas fomented by the digital age. Already a dozen yrs ago my eldest was being taught social studies from Xeroxed handouts because the textbooks couldn’t keep pace. My town’s hs was praised today by the state’s DOE Innovation in Ed people for their incorporation of tech [ipads etc] into the daily class; one senior remarked, “I’m much more involved in discussions because I can type notes and look up information about current topics of conversation.”
In other word, any sort of statist attempt to control the curriculum in ps classes is constantly modified by the ability to pull up other opinions. Altho you seem to be libertarian, the opinions you express run counter, as though you were promoting that each school teaches a certain opinion & thus one must seek other choices. I think that time has come and gone.
“Today, no one can ignore the disconnect between how the U.S. educates its kids and the needs of the U.S. economy.”
Today, no one should ignore the elitist crap that spews forth from the edudeformers’ pie hole. For to ignore is to be obliterated by the sheer volume of shit spewing from those pie holes.
Please don’t insult pies. LOL
The robber barons of public education and the Wolf of Sesame Street are not talking from their mouths. They are talking from that other hole further down that spews diarrhea.
Duane, that was crass even for you.
Lefty or not, your early mindfulness of the process of writing with a pencil built some important tactile and kinesthetic sensibilities, never lost and not easily tested. Those sensibilities are essential in making anything well and for appreciating the artistry in many, objects, events, and places to say nothing of understanding the root metaphors and the connotations of may words. See for example Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to western thought. NY: Basic Books.
It is sad to see the demise of pencils as a tool for learning and the loss of instruction in cursive writing–means of expression closely associated with drawing. It is hard to have a love affair with a keyboard. It is thus ironic, and also no accident, that Steve Jobs credited the early success of Apple to his studies of calligraphy… which ended the regime of little green pixels as the basis of computer type faces, and enabled all of the proportional fonts now taken for granted. See http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html
Ms. Chapman — the calligraphy that Steve Jobs learned at Reed College is very remote from what most North Americans regard as “cursive.” Like most highly efficient handwriting, the Reed College calligraphy (a style called “italic”) uses print-style letter-shapes and joins only some, not all, alphabet letters — making only the very easiest joins, skipping the rest. When I show Reed College calligraphy (or other italic handwriting) to those who equate good handwriting for cursive, I am usually told: “This is not really handwriting, no matter what may be its documented speed and legibility, because it is not cursive.” As an italic writer myself, I am bemused by this whenever it happens — and would like very much to understand why you are (apparently) equating Steve Jobs’ calligraphy with cursive of a very different structure and character.
To see various forms of italic handwriting — so that you can see what points I am trying to make, and judge for yourself whether they make sense — you may wish to visit these web-sites: http://www.BFHhandwriting.com, http://www.handwritingsuccess.com, http://www.briem.net, http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com, http://www.italic-handwriting.org, http://www.studioarts.net/calligraphy/italic/hwlesson.html (Let me know if, further, you need any web-sites or other sources to verify what I pointed out about the Reed College instruction that Steve Jobs had. Reed College calligraphy models are italic, and are closely similar to what you’ll see at the above sites.)
According to Steve Jobs, his enrollment in a non-credit calligraphy course at Reed left this legacy: “I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating”… and “None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life.” “If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.….” This quote is from http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html
I am not a calligrapher, but I am a long time teacher of the visual arts. I am acquainted with methods of teaching lettering and cursive handwriting in U.S. public schools, and also the frequent association of learning to write with learning to draw as a teaching strategy, especially in the early grades.
Since the late 1800s, lettering and cursive handwriting lessons have been included in art textbooks for children. Many students who learn the rudiments of cursive writing during the early grades soon develop a signature” style in their handwriting. Some take pride in imitating the gestural qualities and visual style they have been taught (e.g., the Palmer method). Others test the limits of legibility. Today, some become interested in calligraphy by being fans of tattoos, others from an interest in graphic design.
I am not sure if I understand your reply. But I have to agree with Laura Chapman as to the “early mindfulness of the process of writing with a pencil built some important tactile and kinesthetic sensibilities, never lost and not easily tested.” As an artist, it disturbs me greatly to see the incursion of keyboarding to ever-younger grades. It is only in working with a pencil or brush in early years that one will become aware of the various ways of holding that tool and creating with it.
My 5th grader is a “digital native” his eldest brother works for a large tech company so he’s been exposed to a basement full of computer parts his entire life, and when he works on the online math program his school had to buy for standardized test prep, he does the work with a paper and pencil and transfers the answer to the program.
The biggest problem he has right now in “math” is errors he makes when he’s moving large numbers to the very expensive computer test prep program. He’s 11 and he sometimes hits the “submit” button before he checks the 7 or 8 digit order he just wrote down.
The point of having this program online is they’re generating massive amounts of “data”, which is supposed to hone in on his weak areas, but it’s like a fire hose with the teacher as a garden hose. She can’t possibly be using all this information, I just have one kid and I can’t use it all, and as I said it’s not reliable. He’s good at numbers. What he isn’t so great at is transcribing large numbers into the answer box, because he’s 11 and he moves too fast.
My eldest son thinks they’re over-selling and over-using this, and although he doesn’t work in “ed tech”, specifically, he’s obviously self-interested in the success and profitability of tech companies because he works for one. Even he thinks it’s a snow job. I guess Arne Duncan would call him a Luddite and a status-quo protector 🙂
There’s a recklessness and following of fads and bandwagon effect in “ed reform” that scares me. I don’t get any sense of caution or prudence, and that scares me in adults.
Chiarra ~
children move, squirm, look around, lose their place, place their hands where they may hit >submit<, young sequencing skills, lack strategies, bump into stuff, have to use bathrooms, stand up, sit on their knees, and still may know how to solve the problem with the right answer! But Ooops they hit the wrong key. Are we testing Math or developmentally inappropriate ways of assessing knowledge?
I think I have an advantage, because he’s my fourth and my children are spread out; they range from 26 to 11. I have quite literally watched ed reform for more than a decade, in one public school system. I don’t get as invested in whatever the new gimmick is, and I try to use my own judgment.
I have some faith in his teachers, and this is also based on experience. I was amused to see that his math teacher has added worksheets to the “ed tech” online program, because she wants to make sure they’re doing the calculations in their own writing- in other words, that their parents aren’t doing it for them. I know its not foolproof (parents could obviously also game the worksheet) but good for her for using her own common sense and ingenuity, for applying some actual THOUGHT this. It’s twice the work, of course. She now has the online program and the paper homework to evaluate for each kid.
Our math tests in Utah require the kids put in a huge number of symbols and not all necessarily in the order that they come in the equation. The younger kids have to drag and drop their information. In the ELA tests, the test makers think that the kids can read three or four “short” passages, create an expository essay, AND keyboard it in 30 minutes. The people who write these tests were obviously never children.
Great initial post, and great responses!
I thought the same Robert…spinning …
“The Power of the Pencil”
Creative Posts..I love it..This is what happens in these classrooms…
Excuse me….This is what used to happen in the classrooms..
My eldest son tells me that we’re missing the point of the online testing. The objective is to take the massive amounts of information they’re collecting with these tests and make it organized and useable to a human being, the teacher.
I have some doubts about investing so much in this because of the “firehose to garden hose” problem that I see. Information is great, but people have to be able to use it.
Also, I’ve watched ed reform for a decade now. I have yet to see problems develop in one of these experiments where any of the ed reformers who pushed it are held accountable or accept responsibility. I have what I believe to be a completely rational lack of trust.
I laughed out loud when I read Bill Gates op ed on how standardized testing is over-used. His IDEA was great, it’s just the dopes in public schools couldn’t put it in right! He wrote an op ed where he aligned with parents against public schools on standardized testing. This is incredible to me, that he gets away with this. He’s evading all responsibility.
I wouldn’t accept that dodge from my 5th grader 🙂
You really take the position that Gates is personally responsible for over reliance on standardized tests? Seems a bit much. If Gates really flip-flopped on this, and I’m not sure he did, shouldn’t you be commending him? What sort of mea culpa do you want?
thufirth, read Mercedes Schneider, who details where the money has come from the fund these initiatives.
This isn’t information. It’s not data. What’s being done here is numerology.
This is “numerology-driven decision-making”
Yep, they numerize everything that they think should be numerized!
Mohammad Ali would call it “rope a dope”
While computers have dethrowned pencils for testing, it has hugely underminded teachers as the most knowledgable person about their students. Teachers, although not in favor of our constant state of testing and looking at our students as a number on the matrix, rely on these test scores–perhaps unconsciously and regrettablly. This has also enable teachers to teach to the test and rely on direct instruction curriculum that confines their innate abilities to become better teachers.
We need to understand that direct instruction programs are designed for a specific group of students which have been researched to be successful for that specific population(students with learning disabilities). EngageNY mimicks direct instruction. Many teachers have fallen for it (my kids are engaged, it spirals, everything is cut out for you, dah da dah…). If teaching is that easy, then we are not developing a pedagogy meant to be an innovative teacher. While kids may be engaged, are they really getting it? How is it possible to differentiate, when those daily lessons are “cut out” and you must move on the next day to another. Differentiating needs to happen regardless of what curriculum is used. Is EngageNY the cure all? Many of my kids are making those math models which “engage” them, but it ends up being too abstract and they don’t get the concept. So what makes EngageNY unique and a cure? I have seen it disabling teachers to differentiate–just my observation.
Back on track to pencils. Teachers need to advocate more about less testing based on the fact that they can give more accurate results, based on their observation and tests that are in their control, qualitatively and quantitatively–not to mention the cost effectiveness of a pencil.
E-mails have replaced personal contact with colleagues and we get overwhelmed by the amount received in one day, which inturn makes us work harder and inhumanely faster. Why do we still have land phones on our desks? For the same reason we need pencils. They are reliable and personable.
Our students have suffered as well. We have more students who hate to write with a pencil, because they get instant gratification plucking away with one finger on the keyboard. Logically, it would takes them less time to write something with a pencil than on the computer as it requires to be efficient at keyboarding using two hands and all 10 fingers.
We can never replace those things that have reliable. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” as they say.
Oddly enough, the Advanced Placement tests are still pencil and pen. It’s good enough for the advanced kids, but not for everyone else?
Excellent post, Jon!
“While computers have dethrowned pencils for testing, it has [seemed to] hugely underminded teachers as the most knowledgable person about their students. Teachers, although not in favor of our constant state of testing and looking at our students as a number on the matrix, rely on these test scores–perhaps unconsciously and regrettablly. This has also enable teachers to teach to the test and rely on direct instruction curriculum that confines their innate abilities to become better teachers.
Unfortunately what you say is quite true because most teacher and administrators are of the GAGA type. By definition they have no cojones.
Going Along to Get Along (GAGA): Nefarious practice of most educators who implement the edudeformers agenda even though the educators know that those educational malpractices will cause harm to the students and defile the teaching and learning process. The members of the GAGA gang are destined to be greeted by the Karmic Gods of Retribution upon their passing from this realm.
Karmic Gods of Retribution: Those ethereal beings specifically evolved to construct the 21st level in Dante’s Hell. The 21st level signifies the combination of the 4th (greed), 8th (fraud) and 9th (treachery) levels into one mega level reserved especially for the edudeformers and those, who, knowing the negative consequences of the edudeformers agenda, willing implemented it so as to go along to get along. The Karmic Gods of Retribution also personally escort these poor souls, upon their physical death, to the 21st level unless they enlighten themselves, a la one D. Ravitch, to the evil and harm they have caused so many innocent children, and repent and fight against their former fellow deformers. There the edudeformers and GAGAers will lie down on a floor of smashed and broken ipads and ebooks curled in a fetal position alternately sucking their thumbs to the bones while listening to two words-Educational Excellence-repeated without pause for eternity.
Was it not Albert Einstein that said something to the effect, give me a pencil and a sheet of paper? Is not education about developing the mind among other things? In Amadeus Mozart says that it is all here – pointing to his head. The rest is just scribbling.
The search for ultimate values: good, truth, beauty and the strong desire to “KNOW”. Who; are we as HUMAN BEINGS etc etc, said by people far more knowledgeable and intellectual than I. Somewhere in this contemporary morass we have lost sight of what education in its best sense is all about. People have let the little minds with less integrity usurp the values which humankind’s best minds have talked about through thousands of years. Now, there are so very many areas of life which pose a humongous problem even for life on earth to exist and in my view it is because our basic premise of what education is about, things mentioned above. People with dollar bills where there brains are supposed to be located supplant humankind’s best minds. There is much much more to be sure but most will get the point.
Business minds may be part of the problem, but small-minded, ideologically driven, collectivist education majors are surely equally culpable for the philosophical evisceration of education.
“collectivist education majors”
For your information, teachers graduate from all fields. math majors often teach math; science teaches science; English teaches English, PE teaches PE, etc. The law requires that each teacher has earned a BA in the field they teach and only a few exceptions may be made with special permission because one of the 13,600 democratically run and operated school districts in the US couldn’t find a fully complaint teacher to teach drama or Spanish.
Teaching credentials are not a college degree except for the few who do major in education (that’s usually for people planning to go into administration) but most teachers don’t major in education. My BA was in journalism. My MFA is in writing. It took an entire year as a full time, paid intern while taking classes in the late afternoons to earn my teaching credential after I earned my BA. Between my BA and teaching credential I worked for several years for one of the biggest private sector truck companies in America in middle management.
And I want to repeat what I said in another reply to your far right, indoctrinated thinking. Teachers are not all liberals. They are progressives, moderates and conservatives. Almost a third of teachers are registered Republicans and conservatives (some are even libertarians but vote for GOP candidates) About 25% are registered independent like me. About half are registered Democrats.
Quibble away, LL. It doesn’t change the dominant ethos of the so called profession. Oh, by the way, the GOP is not much less socialist than the Dems. After Obama, Bush is perhaps the 2nd most destructive president in American history. His brother is preparing to run against Hilary. It’s a contest between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
Harlan, like I said, the more I hear from you the more I hear a liberation who prefers anarchy to civil order.
Unless you are a billionaire who can afford a private army to protect your family, better start saving your money for bullet proof glass; two foot thick concrete reinforced walls and lots of automatic weapons. If the libertarian Koch brothers have their way, the wild west will return in all of its bloody glory and only the brutal and strong will survive—that is until someone worse takes them out.
Harlan, it is very, very clear that what is happening right now is a takeover of U.S. education by a business cabal.
Yes, idiot educrats, with their support for adoption “standards” and state “standards,” and state usurpation of local autonomy over schools, created the conditions that made the current deforms possible, but what is happening is entirely funded by a small group of corporate conspirators. This whole deform is a strategic plan or, rather, a couple of strategic plans that happen to represent a confluence of interest–business interests.
Tyranny is tyranny, and it doesn’t matter whether the rhetoric being used to support it is leftist (as it was in the Soviet Union) or rightest (as it is in the current case in which some are arguing, weirdly, that centralizing our educational system in a few hands is somehow a free market innovation). The totally bizarre thing about all this is that the American Enterprise Institute, the Business Roundtable, the Chamber of Commerce, the Heritage Foundation, ALEC, and other organizations the ordinarily would be the first to oppose top-down, centralized regulation and control are 100 percent behind what’s happening. Totally, freaking bizarre. Setting aside the Tea Party, among the movers and shakers usually opposed to such centralized control, only CATO and the Koch Brothers have consistently held to their anti-regulatory principles regarding this.
Of course, the Obama government, like the Bush government before it, is simply a tool for a few oligarchs. Duncan’s technology blueprint for U.S. education was basically the inBloom strategic plan.
We are talking about the original creation of the public school system. That was its purpose, now it is on steroids with the Common Core, as there is no longer a middle class or a supporting economy, and cable viewing is diminishing, all of which held down the proles.
Well, the prole control system is shaping up quite rapidly, so no worries there.
Thanks for my “Ode to the Pencil”.
Was wondering why we can’t use the Sherman Anti Trust Act against Pearson. It is being mentioned re: the Comcast// Time Warner merger.
I am a lefty too, old enough to have experienced several ink-stained years with quill pens and ink wells designed for righties. Thanks!
Pencil is great!
I wonder if we try Satyagraha method of Mahatma Gandhi it would work?
Replace computer with pencil! Like Gandhi made a campaign to use hand-span clothes instead of factory made ones!
Mahatma Gandhi called to all the Indians who wanted their freedom from the English occupation to stop buying clothes from the occupants and use hand-span clothes instead. Can we somehown GET RID OF COMPUTERS in the similar way? Use age-old methods of teaching instead.The computer makers will go away then. You could tell me that computers are very useful. English fine clothes were also very nice. But they used hand-span. And English left India. Will Pearson also leave back to UK? If he can’t run his tests on Computers?
Preeti, this is a fascinating idea!!!
The pencil could be our salt, our home-spun.
I remember the rallying cry of The English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381:
“When Adam delved and Eve span
Who was then the gentleman?”
delved: plowed
span: used a wheel to spin thread
But how could this be accomplished without giving the impression that we are Luddites instead of simply people who have the discernment to tell smart uses of technology from stupid ones?
Time for some lessons, around the country, about what the Great Soul, for that he was, accomplished, and with what simple but powerful tools.
A Gandhi-style movement to GET RID OF COMPUTERS is a wonderful idea!
Michael weston – I wasn’t aware that the Russians ever got to the moon.
But irrelevant to the point that Michael was making. Yes, research into how to make a pen work in space was probably productive in many other ways, and that sort of productivity might be indicative of a general approach that was more effective overall. But I suspect that a much bigger factor was that the Russians had a stupidly top-down, centralized system–like that being instituted in this country today by the de facto Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth (C^4 MiniTru).
I heard people were afraid to visit Stalin on his death bed. He could still order their deaths even in that state.
I met a young woman a couple of weeks ago who teaches GED prep courses for adults. She was very upset,she said, because now all GED tests MUST be taken on a computer. Many of her students have lived in poverty all their lives, and they have NEVER had one minute of experience with a computer. This barrier alone keeps many, many people from even attempting the test, she said.
Nope Russia was better, despite all, the intelligence was always respected in Russia that is in math and science (except biology). This is a part of culture.
They had even scientists excused from gulag, if they were capable.
Common Core is from China. Cultural revolution, that is. Compare – you will see. In China they used to have 7 day school week and other common core things.
If the Russians are so smart why do they still tolerate tyranny?
The same reason that we do.
One answer: fear
A Russian friend of mine had a best friend who’s father worked for Stalin. He tells the story of how at one Party event, Stalin took the stage, and everyone stood and started clapping. This went on and on and on and on and on . . . a half hour passed, and people’s hands were hurting. Finally, one guy sat down. The next day, he was hauled off to a work camp.
In case I repeat myself, I was writing a comment when I hit a wrong key and it vanished. I have no idea if it’s here or gone.
Anyway, lets not forget those recent principals in New York or New Jersey who were all fired for speaking out publicly against Common Core. I know that a few got their jobs back, but being fired for speaking in opposition is sure to spread fear for any other administrators who are tempted to speak out against corporate reform in states where the reformers seem to be in control.
yikes! cx: whose, of course!
I did not say they were smart, just so happened they so far excused mathematicians and physicists as military and manufacturing depended on those skills. And New Math was not ever welcome there. Transformations were for 10 years. Tyranny is always bad, but it hits each country in different ways.
Thank you for your wonderful comments on my “Ode To The Pencil”
Seems the pencil goes back to the English Renaissance.
Perhaps it facilitated the writings of William Shakespeare.
“Alas, poor pencil, I knew thee well”
Some time prior to about 1560, graphite was discovered near Borrowdale, England, supposedly when a large tree was uprooted in a storm, exposing a black substance beneath its roots. The usefulness of graphite as a marking substance was quickly realized. Though the exact date is not known for certain, the year 1565 marks the first record of a pencil consisting of a piece of graphite inserted into a wood shaft, making the first ancestor of today’s pencil.
The group of people working on the Common Core College and Career Ready Assessment Program (C.C.C.C.R.A.P.) have realized that, duh, the 3rd graders can’t do their crap on computers, so they have just awarded to big contract to Pearson to develop software and a program to train toddlers to take online tests. Your tax dollars are being spent on this child abuse.
I really hope that this is satire. It is, isn’t it? Please?
These people are making decisions for you about how your kids will be taught and tested. You have no say whatsoever in this. Again, these decisions are being made for you. Do not attempt to resist. Repeat, do not attempt to resist. Resistance is futile.
All your base are belong to us.
One of the big U.S. tycoons of the twentieth century was a fellow named Armand Hammer. His parents were Socialists and named him after the arm and hammer symbol of the Soviet Union. Hammer made a fortune selling pencils to the Russians. Hammer came to be a well-known figure in right-wing politics in the U.S. He was convicted of making an illegal campaign contribution to Richard Nixon and then pardoned for this by the first President Bush.
And let’s not forget where the millions came from that was the foundation of the Koch brothers fortune. The Koch father earned his first millions in the Soviet Union working for Stalin to help them develop an oil industry. Then he came home with those millions and bought up oil leases.
I agree! This blog should abandon the use of computers and return to the pencil! All this connecting by people from across the country to build a movement comes at the cost of the pencil!!
Michelle Rhee was caught manipulating her test scores with pencil “erasures”. We would never have known if the testing was on computers. Pencils can bring accountability, too. Computers for testing can be manipulated in secret, just as our recent voting machines.
No, Joseph. The investigation did not go that far. In the U.S., as was always the case in banana republics, whether an investigation gets pushed or dropped depends on who your friends are.
We all know this. We all understand this. We seem to be willing to live with it, to accept it. No one seems to think that it’s possible to do anything about it.
It’s interesting to look at the portrayal of our political institutions in popular media like TV shoes and Hollywood films. These are pretty good barometers.
There are basically two varieties. In one, the patriotic feel-good variety, there are U.S. good guys and foreign bad guys, and everything is very black and white. There are a couple of blockbuster films of this kind other year. In the other–and this sorthas become really common; one might even call it the default–there’s simply an assumption that the fix is in, that the government is totally corrupt, that surveillance of citizens is absolute, that political people are simply wind-up toys for wealthy deal-makers. These treat backroom deals and grand conspiracies and, typically, some hapless victim or whistleblower or brave, ordinary person who pierces the veil and takes on the evil monolith. Those sorts of films seem to me a lot like the Japanese sci-fi films about enormous, city-destroying monsters that appeared in the 1950s and ’60s. Godzilla films were about Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Same sort of thing–the popular culture reflecting the Zeitgeist.
TV shows and Hollywood films are constructed to mirror the beliefs of their audiences. Americans today have lost all faith in their elected leaders and in their political institutions. They no longer believe that these exist to serve and protect. Congress now has the lowest approval rating in history, and “politician” and “official” in everyone’s lexicon, mean “liar.” It’s a sad state of affairs.
cx: shows, not shoes, of course. 🙂
The point was that the pencil erasures caught the fraud and pointed to the culprit. That’s what we need to know and we won’t get it from the computers.
What government officials do as a result, we can not have great expectations, after what happened to our economy. Michelle Rhee and her minions were just to big to fail.
yes, good point, Joseph!
Working for Stalin?
He was lucky to come back home then.
I feel the same way about books. Words and pictures on paper engage one with the content and not the technology.
Yes books are the best, for kids and adult alike.
As regards to computers I though we were moving away from keyboard when there were tools introduced to capture handwriting and voice and translate it into typed text.
Then I don’t understand how keyboard typing is now a required thing? For 3rd graders.. K and pre- K and toddlers….Everybody already getting sick with carpal tunnel..
Preeti Ratnam – Both quantum mechanics and relativistic physics were regarded as contrary to “dialectical materialism” under both Lenin and Stalin. Lenin himself wrote an article attacking modern physics. About 1950 Kapitsa tested the waters by writing a physics article openly using quantum mechanics. When he was not shot then the other physicists knew that modern physics was now no longer forbidden.
Dee Dee – Accounts of Stalin’s death rely on various stories from the people around him which are difficult to confirm. According to these stories Stalin attendants and bodyguards had strict orders never to disturb him in his private quarters. When he failed to appear nobody had the courage to enter his quarters until the middle of the afternoon when he was found unconscious. He apparently never regained consciousness before his death within a day or so.
Stalin’s death was undoubtedly suspicious but it will probably never be known what killed him. There are many stories that after his death Beria boasted to the others that he had killed Stalin with rat poison. But Beria was not exactly known for always telling the truth. If Beria was trying to ingratiate himself with the others it didn’t work since not long after Stalin’s death Beria was killed by Zhukov with the approval of the Politburo.
Unbelievable what One Little Reliable Pencil can do on a computerized Blog.
“The Power of the Pencil”
Technology is a vehicle to get us to places for us to then acquire resources.
Technology does not replace the Human Brain.
It should be used for enhancement of our knowledge base ,to organize., and to communicate.
I can “Leave on any Jet Plane” but it is me that has to determine
1. Where I am going?
2. How long am I going to stay?
3. What I will do when I get there?
Oh..here it is…my itinerary is on my IPAD…….but “I ” was the one who put it there.
from the notes I took with my pencil.
Proof..For every thought .. A Pencil works just as well as an IPAD
Now about this post.
I tried the PARCC…or better described as the C-C-R-A-P test and I could not work the problems without my reliable pencil, graph paper and a few sheets of notebook paper.
Once I had the answers I could transfer then but I hated every minute of transferring the answers except for the graph.
I hated it and it took me 30 minutes longer than solving them on paper using a couple of Dixon Pencils!!
oopps. comma after graph paper…
it was correct as is.
Joseph
I’m inviting to dinner my parents, the Pope and Mother Theresa.
MAny of my students do not like to sue the Ipad . I let them use a paper though I am. to suppose to In ten years, it will all be back to paper, pen, pencil and call road? my vision….
Isaac Asimov, “The Feeling of Power”
http://www.themathlab.com/writings/short%20stories/feeling.htm
Or even more germane (and also by Asimov) — “Someday” at http://www.bestlibrary.net/ScienceFiction/Asimov41/27337.html