Daniel S. Katz read the New York Times’ article “Is Your First-Grader College-Ready,” and he was not sure at first whether it was a spoof or for real. Evidently, it was for real. He introduces us to the useful term “Poe’s Law.” Wikipedia describes it thus: “a literary adage which stipulates that without a clear indicator of an author’s intended sarcasm it becomes impossible to tell the difference between an expression of sincere extremism and a parody of extremism.”*
It takes close reading a la Common Core for Katz to figure out that the article was for real, not a parody. Yet it still reads like a parody.
He writes:
So what is almost satirical about some of the approaches described in the Times?
It is one thing to talk to first grade students about what they want to be when they grow up. For students who are growing up without many community models of post-secondary education, I can see potential in the middle school activities described that emphasize recognizing what would be needed to accomplish their ambitions. However, the early elementary discourse transforms from surprising to comical to frustrating in very short order. Six year-olds are not simply talking about what they want to be as grown ups; they are naming specific schools and filling out mock applications for the bulletin board. The first grade teacher is quoted discussing that it is not enough to ask children what they want to be: “We need to ask them, ‘How will you get there?’ Even if I am teaching preschool, the word ‘college’ has to be in there.” The approach is not simply being applied in districts with high concentrations of disadvantage; the article quotes a college planner from Westchester County, New York who compares college preparation to becoming an Olympic skater whose training begins in earnest at age 6.
As a mother and grandmother, I can recall many conversations with young children about what they want to be when they grow up. The answers ranged from “a cowboy.” to “a fireman,” to “a movie star,” to “a baseball player,” to “an astronaut.” Why in the world would six-year-old children fill out mock college applications? Isn’t there plenty of time in high school to think about college, which courses to take to be prepared, which colleges are a good fit for one’s interests, which colleges are affordable, etc.? There ought to be a law that little children are allowed to have a childhood before adult compulsions are forced on them. They should be playing with dolls and building sand castles and making things out of blocks and coloring in coloring books and molding things from clay or Play-Dough; they should dance and sing. Why can’t the grown-ups let them be children? They are NOT global competitors; they are children.
*According to Wikipedia, Poe’s Law is of recent vintage. The article says:
The statement called Poe’s law was formulated in 2005 by Nathan Poe on the website christianforums.com in a debate about creationism. The original sentence read:
Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a creationist in such a way that someone won’t mistake for the genuine article.[4]
The sentiments expressed by Poe date back much earlier – at least to 1983, when Jerry Schwarz, in a post on Usenet, wrote:
8. Avoid sarcasm and facetious remarks.
Without the voice inflection and body language of personal communication these are easily misinterpreted. A sideways smile, :-), has become widely accepted on the net as an indication that “I’m only kidding”. If you submit a satiric item without this symbol, no matter how obvious the satire is to you, do not be surprised if people take it seriously.[5]
Another precedent posted on Usenet dates to 2001. Following the well-known schema of Arthur C. Clarke’s third law, Alan Morgan wrote:
“Any sufficiently advanced troll is indistinguishable from a genuine kook.”[6]
I remember doing collages in the first grade. Lots of fun …
which is exactly what you should have been doing. You received a good education.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
When I was in first grade I would have been labeled Not College Ready.
In fact, due to a bubble test way back then administered by so-called experts—I wonder if they worked for Pearson or were using a Pearson test—-who were not classroom teachers, I was labeled retarded and my mother was told I would never learn to read and write. In addition, I was held back in 1st grade one extra year explaining why I was almost 20 when I graduated late from high school—still Not College Ready.
Imagine in today’s toxic testing Bill Gates environment designed to rank, label and punish children and teachers what would have happened to that child.
It turns out that I had severe dyslexia that my mother overcame with help from one of my classroom teachers who told her what she had to do at home—-it worked!
I also needed glasses. My vision was so bad that I couldn’t read the blurry words on the page and, once again, it was a classroom teacher who told my mother to have my eyes checked. I was age 7 then.
The moment I became Ready to go to College took place in 1966 in Vietnam when a sniper came within a fraction of an inch of taking off the left side of my head. That’s when I decided maybe college was a better choice than staying in the U.S. Marines, and I made a promise to myself that when I left the Marines, I’d go to college on the G.I. Bill.
When I was a young child, my family lived in poverty. Both or our parents never graduated from high school.
What will happen to all the children who are simliar to the child I was back then when those children are labeled Not College Ready in kindergarten or preschool by a bubble test from Pearson?
Will their mothers ignore that verdict like my mother did for me or will they do what my mother did for my older brother when she heard the same message about him a decade before she heard it about me—she did NOTHING for my older brother?
My older brother lived in poverty all of his life and died illiterate. He had seven children with two wives and six of those children are illiterate just like he was. Poverty is a trap—it is quicksand and no bubble test is going to become the miracle that saves any of those children. Instead, those bubble tests will probably bury most of those children in a life of programmed failure.
Lloyd Lofthouse: a fine rebuttal to those that employ mathematical intimidation and obfuscation to promote and sell their numerical hazing rituals.
Standardized tests that are statistically validated and produce numbers numbers numbers for every use and misuse under the sun are: Objective! Scientific! Unbiased!
NOT! And if the accountabully underlings of yesteryear and today want to put a number on it: they got you 100% WRONG WRONG WRONG!
The frail human judgments of teachers and others in the classroom are fatally flawed and inherently unreliable and hopelessly diverse and useless in any practical sense.
NOT! And when it came to you, the allegedly “subjective” beat the allegedly “objective” to a…er, I just remembered that the owner of this blog has asked us all to observe a certain decorum so I leave it to the imagination of others how I was going to finish my sentence. *For those accustomed to their CCSS ‘closet’ reading I will give two hints: it involves a customarily reddish liquid that courses through the human body (essential to life) and a word that describes a soft wet shapeless mass of material.*
Before I end, a small reminder: with all the emphasis by self-styled “education reformers” on standardized testing I will remind everyone that much of the assessment that teachers make in their classrooms has many of the same features of the $tudent $ucce$$ kind, to wit:
Everyone is in the same room. Everyone gets the same test. Everyone gets the same instructions. Everyone gets the same amount of time. Everyone is evaluated by the same person. Extra Advantage: 1), if the test is flawed and the teacher notices that s/he has screwed up, the grading can be adjusted to reflect test-maker errors; and 2), the teacher knows the test-takers, so s/he can adjust grading to accommodate, for example, those that come up with technically wrong but creative and thoughtful answers.
To forestall frivolous objections—who am I kidding?—well, to at least temper frivolous objections, yes, I am generalizing and certainly there are exceptions and caveats that can be added. But please apply at least a little creatively disruptive cage busting thinking to what I wrote and try to discern the point I’m making. If you can…
Lloyd Lofthouse: thank you for your comments.
😎
You’re welcome.
I think it’s amazing how our lives seems so normal, so natural—when we are children living life a day at a time—no matter how dysfunctional it might have been, it didn’t feel dysfunctional. It just felt normal or what was normal to that child. It took decades for me to discover my childhood was not considered normal and was very dysfunctional.
Sort of causes me to ponder what normal is to someone like Bill Gates, who grew up attending an exclusive, expensive private school; the Koch brothers, who inherited their wealth from a father who earned it’ Eli Broad, or the Walton, who also inherited their wealth from a father who earned it.
What’s Eli Broad’s excuse? Does he judge everyone based on how he grew up and made it big, and he can’t understand why everyone can’t be like him—all do it yourself billionaires?
I wonder if someone as limited as Eli Broad has ever considered the fact that historically everyone can’t be successful, powerful and rich and that life, like the lottery, is a daily competition for the top slots. Did Eli Broad ever take a Pearson bubble test as a young child to determine if he was college ready?
We are all limited by the life we lived and still live.
And a great story about mothers and teachers, but it raises the question as to who will intervene in this test crazy world. Who will help all those failing the GED, the roughly 500,000 who failed last year but might very well have passed in 2013. And the claimed 60% who supposedly need remediation in the first year of college? But that is another test. How many really need remediation and how many are simply not very good at testing? Maybe sending so many to the discard heap substantiateseliminating support services and it helps fulfill the contractual obligation to fill those prison beds. (Arizona is a good example. The Governor’s budget deemed support services as not pertinent to classroom instruction and found roughly $100 million for more prisons, but virtually nothing for education.)
Lloyd, i would much rather be able tell your story.
Barbara – did you know that the GED is now a Common Core exam, so that very few of the students attempting to pass are successful?
It’s bad enough that they couldn’t get a high school diploma. Now they can’t even get a GED.
How are they going to go to college?
First grade simulations aren’t going to change the reality of Duncan’s world.
Thank you Lloyd. Yours is an extremely powerful story and after facing real snipers in battle no mindless bureaucrats are going to faze you! Keep telling it. In fact, have you written this in more extended form elsewhere?
If you’re talking about my story, some of it is in my teacher’s memoir, “Crazy is Normal, a classroom expose”, and there is more in some of the posts on my Crazy Normal Blog.
http://crazynormaltheclassroomexpose.com/
http://www.amazon.com/Crazy-Normal-classroom-Lloyd-Lofthouse-ebook/dp/B00L00EM8A
Lloyd Lofthouse – I have read your story before, & must respond with my family’s story, which reinforces.
I am the eldest of 4; the middle 2 [in retrospect] were dyslexic. My next-youngest sibling (your age) had much difficulty learning to read, & my mom begged the schools to hold him back in 3rd gr (but that was not kosher in the early ’60’s); ultimately he had to repeat 9th gr Meanwhile like many dyslexics he was outrageously talented in other areas; at 13, he wired my playhouse for electricity & put In windows; at 15, he assembled his 1st motorcycle from a box of loose parts
Lucky for him he was precocious socially & coped, but he couldn’t complete h.s. My mother anticipating college was a no-go, arranged an “internship” w/our asst-parish priest (a scientist & Bombay native who was doing parish duties while getting PhD). My bro ended up [during Indian economic crash mid-70’s] spending a year teaching Bombay college freshman how to use lathe et al eqpt to maintain their lab instruments.
My bro went on to decent middle class life as contractor & [gifted]carpenter. Meanwhile his hobby (ballroom-dancing) has become a way into remunerative retirement-age work.
My sister 7 yrs younger had all the same attributes but dyslexia had been discovered, diagnosed ,& some compensatory methods were already in place when she was dg in middle school. She went on to become a SpEd teacher with specialty in dyslexia. These days, she’s a very effective asst-principal in a prestigious high school.
Thank you. Sharing your siblings stories of success proves that the Common Core crap supported and pushed by the likes of a very ignorant Bill Gates—who probably thinks because of his wealth and success that he has the answers to everything in life for everyone—is not what students like them and me need and in fact, will doom children who were like us to utter failure.
“Slipping Standards”
First-grade college-ready?
The standard must have slipped
It may sound kind of petty
But K has now been gypped
We learned to sing “Low Bridge”
“You’ll always know your neighbor, you’ll always know your pal, if you’ve ever navigated on the Erie Canal”
It’s the only thing I remember 🙂
“Get up there Sal, we’ll pass that lot. 15 miles on the Erie Canal.”and we’ll make land before 6:00. . .15 miles on the Erie Canal
we’ve hauled some barges in our day; filled with lumber, coal and hay. . .and we know every inch of the way from Albany to Buffalo. . .”
yes. So they play Low Bridge as a kid, learn the song. and then when they are in high school talking about trade in the northeast of the United States they will recall it. Or when they learn about geography of the northeast. Songs are the channels in our brains we build on later. Both for facts and for emotional health. That’s the way it should work. Absolutely.
More singing please.
“Or when they learn about geography .”
Right! HOMES Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior.
Erie Canal ft. Sal
Now that’s some American common core!
They got a fund source and his name is Bill
Six years now for the Common Core swill
He’s a good old lobby on a good old Hill
Six years now for the Common Core swill
We’ve hauled some bullcrap in our day
Filled with testing, VAM …Oy vey
And we know every block in the way
Of teaching kids to think, you know
Low bridge, everybody scram
Low bridge cuz we’re coming to a VAM
And you’ll always know your Coleman
And you’ll always know your Bill
If you’ve ever tried to teach to the Common Core swill
You have a better memory than I. I remember sitting under a desk to protect me from a nuclear attack from Russia. That was one heck of a desk!
Now, teachers and students have to hide under their desk to protect them from a Dunclear attack (aka Arne Duncan)
I believe they call it “Dunc an Cover”
“Dunc an Cover”
Dunc an Cover
Not a drill
It’s all over
Fetch your will
Arne’s coming
Through the air
Test’s are bombing
Everywhere
VAM is flying
Teachers scream
No denying
Duncan’s scheme
Even middle school students can have ideas about college that will need to be further refined or changed as they develop. The children should be allowed to dream for a good number of years before they must make their final choices and preparations for college and career. The adults should prepare them in a way that does not even make them necessarily aware that they are being prepared for college. Sort of like the dynamics of group instruction or team building. . .you don’t necessarily say “and now we’re going to play a game that increases the energy level in the classroom so you all will begin to involve yourselves with the others in the group, and then we’ll bring it back down a notch so we can focus and collect with that group momentum still going.” You just do it. You lead. You don’t oppress the group you are leading and guiding with the steps you are taking to lead and guide them, per se. It’s TMI for young minds.
“What’s for dinner?” “Well, we’ll start with an organic meat so that your muscle cell group will be enabled to handle the sudden growth spurts you will be experiencing; we’ll follow that with leafy kale that we will measure out on the food scale and you must complete 85% of it to go on to the starch, which will be minimal and only in whole grains. . .and then . . .” Kids don’t want to hear that.
“What’s for dinner?” “Spaghetti.” “Yay, my favorite.”
Killjoys.
In my music classes we start (in K-2) with puppets they draw out of a bag and we do simple songs and vocalizing with the puppets. The children don’t necessarily know they are strengthening their voice or diaphragm (although I do tell them for a science connection), but we focus on the fun of the song or the puppet. They love it. More of that. Less, “you must strengthen your voice and melodic aptitude by singing these simple songs built on the basic melodic pattern, blah blah blah.” I can tell them that. And often I do, but what they hear and what excites them is the puppet and the song that goes with it. Panting in the dog game is fun; AND it builds the breathing muscles needed in singing. But kids know it’s fun and that we’re playing the dog game. Isn’t that all they need to know at age 6?
Those leading the charge for charters/vouchers/privatization can be described in many ways.
Most of the descriptive terms do an adequate job. For example, “corporate education reform” or “edudeform movement” or the like.
You went above and beyond.
“Killjoys.”
You nailed them. To the wall. Regardless of political coloration or label or background or personal characteristics, almost to a person they take the cartoonist Bill Watterson’s remark as an encouragement for, not an admonition against:
“Nothing helps a bad mood like spreading it around.”
Thank you for your comments.
😎
I suspect the rationale for being an official killjoy (even if not meaning to) is that being raised in an environment where college is talked about probably increases the likelihood that you will go there (chance favors the prepared mind sort of thing). So I suppose the idea is that if you don’t know that you’re going there, you’ll probably end up somewhere else. BUT there can be a balance between robbing the joy from an experience and being aware, even focused on and prepared for, college.
I remember in third grade my dad gave me a desk lamp and said it was for college. That was pretty lame. I appreciated that he wanted me to know he expected me to go to college, but the desk lamp as an 8 year old was not cool. (And it was brown—yuk—-I don’t even know what happened to it, but I don’t recall having it in college).
🙂
he gave it to me for Christmas.
Abusive?
If the topic of college comes up (usually in middle or high school) the teacher says, this is a skill you will need WHEN you go to college instead of IF you go to college. Enough said!
College discussions in first grade is like playing house or school – a game, not a destination.
Ellen T Klock
The Kumon near us encourages 5-6 year old attendees to start thinking about the college they hope to attend. They are expected to pick one and have a sort of loyalty toward it as they move through the program. My daughter’s then 6 year old friend who attended Kumon told us about this one evening. She was flabbergasted to hear that I had actually gone to the college she had picked (I didn’t ask her choice criteria.) I don’t think she thought it was a real place til I said something – more like a mythical paradise.
The school in the article is just keeping up with the private prep Joneses.
I think a lot of it has to do with economic insecurity. People here are terrified their kids won’t have the same standard of living they do, and the parents don’t have a lot of economic security themselves, so it’s not like they’re reaching for the stars or anything.
It makes me sad because it’s fear-based. They’re scared. I think it’s rational. They should be scared. They DON’T have any economic security.
I don’t think people who weren’t really affected by the economic crash understand how profound it was for a lot of people. It rattled people, and not in a small way that can be papered over. It called a lot of assumptions into question- I think it’s done some damage as far as the credibility of “leaders”, whether they’re in business or government. There’s a credibility gap, to use the language of ed reform 🙂
I decided I was attending UB (SUNY at Buffalo) when I was in elementary school. It was the only college I had ever heard of (and was near my grandparents house) except for my Dad’s alma mater – Brooklyn College.
I actually would have liked to have attended Cornell, but we were also poor and by the time I graduated from high school we had moved to Buffalo – So with my Regent’s Scholarship (which paid my tuition), I did end up at UB.
If Cuomo wanted to encourage more kids to go to college, he would reinstitute the Regent’s Scholarship – a high stakes exam which actually paid off, if you did well.
I can’t believe this. You are telling me this lady the gall to teach children to dream and to teach them about developing actionable list and imagery. This is ludicrous, how could this be. And to think furry of all those parents raising couch potatoes when they get wind of this.
We went through this brainwashing exercise in New York when we were on the “all roads lead to the Regents and college” campaign. This move was an attempt to raise standards. The reality is that some students will never be “college ready.” They would be better off in a quality vocational program. Welders, pipe fitters and wind turbine assembling along with electrician and plumbing will out earn most liberal arts majors’ earning capacities. These careers are more likely to be chosen by males, which is maybe explains why there are more females in college now.
While I don’t think it is a good idea to pressure young children into being college ready, I think it is a good idea to be somewhat aspirational. I taught ELLs for many years. Most of my students were Haitian or Hispanic. In the real world my Haitian students have done better than my Hispanic students, even though there were many capable students in both groups. My Haitian students were far more likely to attend college. For the same reason I think Jews and Asians tend to value education more than others as a cultural norm. Maybe there is something to be said about the notion, “If you can dream it, you can do it.”
I do think that if we don’t get money out of politics, aspirations won’t matter anymore. The oligarchs will continue to rig the system to their benefit. That is why we must save public schools, the best avenue for working people’s aspirations!
Reality is overtaking satire
wgersen: “Reality is overtaking satire”?
I take it you didn’t get the memo…
The self-proclaimed “education reform” movement has booked the vast majority of us on a bullet train to Bizarro World.
¿? I can see you haven’t done your Superman homework.
From Wikipedia:
“In the Bizarro world of “Htrae” (“Earth” spelled backwards), society is ruled by the Bizarro Code which states “Us do opposite of all Earthly things! Us hate beauty! Us love ugliness! Is big crime to make anything perfect on Bizarro World!” In one episode, for example, a salesman is doing a brisk trade selling Bizarro bonds: “Guaranteed to lose money for you”. Later, the mayor appoints Bizarro No. 1 to investigate a crime, “Because you are stupider than the entire Bizarro police force put together”. This is intended and taken as a great compliment.”
Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bizarro_World
More specifically, when it comes to how rheephorm “choice” is actually “choice but no voice,” and Eva Moskowitz (10,000 students) makes almost three times what Carmen Fariña (1million+ students) makes but for $ucce$$ Academy disciples the former is the selfless Saint Eva and the latter is greed incarnate, and stated charter graduation rates of 100% are actually as low as 50% and so on—
“In popular culture ‘Bizarro World’ has come to mean a situation or setting which is weirdly inverted or opposite of expectations.” [see Wikipedia link above]
I think for the “thought leaders” of the killjoy rheephorm movement like Arne Duncan and Bill Gates and John King and Wendy Kopp and Chris Christie and their peers satire IS reality!
Rheeally! And in the most Johnsonally of ways too…
But, to be honest, not really.
They simply suffer from inflicting Rheeality Distortion Fields on themselves.
Thank you for your pithy comment.
😎
“stated charter graduation rates of 100% are actually as low as 50%”
Well, yes, but you must admit that100% of those 50% did indeed graduate.
Otherwise, it would be even less than 50% now wouldn’t it?
Get with the program, KrazyTA.
This is just very basic CC math designed and built by a Zimbot in a garage on weekends for a small fee of several hundred thousand dollars (who knew that bots had to be paid for their “hard work” [the bot’s words, not mine] ?)
All first graders should be able to name the Ivy leagues, their athletic mascot, and their 2014 endowment from memory.
I recall always knowing I would be going to college. My parents hid from me their not knowing how it could be afforded. My spouse, on the other hand did not decide to do so until he graduated high school and watched his peers go off to school. My brother absolutely did not want to be in school. He was drafted, fought, and became a successful plumber. Why people are adamant about college has always befuddled me. College should be about education for education’s sake. The craft classes–business, technology, teacher training, etc.–are add ons. For many, the add ons are the only concerns. (I do believe that teachers must have a liberal arts education. If they do not believe in education for education’s sake who will energize the curiosity of the young?)
Why not assume every child wants to follow his/her interests? Then provide an education that can take them anywhere? And while the nation is at it, why not consider it patriotic to see that everyone can afford an education of their choice.
Which college should my first graders apply to inorder to become IronMan? This is the current desire in my classroom. Children in this age group do not have the maturity to make a career choice. They just don’t have a clear understanding of how the world works yet.