Stephanie Santagada, a high school English teacher, wrote this little essay and dedicated it to Governor Andrew Cuomo:
“There is a man in Albany, who I surmise, by his clamorous paroxysms, has an extreme aversion to educators. He sees teachers as curs, or likens them to mangy dogs. Methinks he suffers from a rare form of psychopathology in which he absconds with our dignity by enacting laws counterintuitive to the orthodoxy of educational leadership. We have given him sufferance for far too long. He’s currently taking a circuitous path to DC, but he will no doubt soon find himself in litigious waters. The time has come to bowdlerize his posits, send him many furlongs away, and maroon him there, maybe Cuba?
She added:
I’m not supposed to say this, but all these insanely hard words appeared on the 4,6, and 8th grade tests last week.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Can’t say. but lmao
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Those yahoos don’t understand clarity, because clarity would expose their dirty deals.
Good one!
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I can’t escape the picture in my head of Mr, Fourth Times a Charm sitting with his laptop on http://www.dictionary.com.
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With all due respect, he passed on the FIFTH try.
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I thought it was on the plinth try.
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A wonderful excercise. Do a version that will be generic, useful in all other states that are inflicting these tests on students. Gather in more words, phrases.
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“Bowdlerdash”
School reform is bowdlerdash
Ephemeral nimbus plinths
It’s really an insufferable hash
Enough to make you wince
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Love!
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Great! Glad “plinth” was used.
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I must admit that “plinth” was actually a new word for me (and I’m older than a 6th grader, although it might sometimes seem otherwise) and, as we all know, the best way to commit it to memory is to use it in a sentence, which is why I’ve used it twice already in the last few days
Also in
“A Plinth of Space”
A plinth of space
Is Common Core
An empty base
Of Coleman lore
I hope to use it again some time very soon (so I don’t forget it)
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I definitely had to look up plinth, too. It sounded vaguely familiar, but not something I use everyday or even once a year. “Hey, check out the plinth under that socle. They sure don’t make architraves like they used to.”
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I didn’t learn what a plinth was until I was in college, taking a History of Architecture class.
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Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
“I’m not supposed to say this,” she wrote, “but all these insanely hard words appeared on the 4, 6, and 8th grade (Pearson) tests last week.”
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Reblogged this on Poetic Justice and commented:
Dear Governor Cuomo …. a note from the students who did not opt out of the NYS ELA tests last week.
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I am so glad I am not a kid and have to take these tests. I was shocked that at the beginning of this week in the principal’s agenda she put “Welcome, Pearson” as the students began taking their tests.
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It’s gross how some of the leadership kowtows to the testing. My principal began this weeks by telling everyone to work REALLY hard on the test, because it’s SO important. Made me want to gag.
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Kind of like the movie, Woman in Gold.
Welcome, Pearson, just don’t take all the art out of school. Nevermind, you already effectively did that.
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In New York City, principals get a fat bonus for good scores – I’m talking $30,000-$50,000. Imagine what we could do with that money if it went to the kids.
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Any administrator that would make such a comment should be fired?
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Susan Ohanian will be posting my version.
Here is an example of a story that might work, If we had stories with better context clues, kids might be able to figure them out and still function on an English professor’s Lexile Level.
The Zombie that Would Not Die.
Johnny overheard his parent talking about the Common Core and testing, and how the testing companies are so “avaricious”, making money on hurting kids. This made Johnny become very quiet and withdrawn thinking about the zombie tests. His sister, Madison, walked in the room and asked, “why so taciturn Johnny?”. Madison didn’t want Mr Hershel to “conjecture” that he is a poor student, if he does not do well on the unproven Common Core exams. “Then why not opt out”, said Madison, “mom will give you a note when she returns from her night out playing “whist” with her friends. I found the folks to be very “congenial” and supportive about this. Don’t be so glum, the union will be sending robo-calls to kill the the zombie tests, blow them up, like old time “grenadiers”. My French teacher Monsieur Henri welcomed us to hang out in his classroom and write pen pal letters, if we are opting out. He has some sumptuous cheeses for a taste testing too. He is not so
“straight laced” and understands how kids feel about zombie tests that will not die”, said Madison.”The wits of the curious were fairly puzzled” when they were reading stories so far about their reading level, we told Monsieur Henri”. Johnny decided that he had enough with bad testing all year and would try to encourage his friends and family to help kill the zombie, that would not die. He did not want the testing companies to have “an intimate acquaintance” with how he was thinking.
avaricious, taciturn, conjectures, whist, congenial, grenadier and Monsieur. There were many others that were difficult including sumptuous and valet, which they defined as manservant on Tuesday’s exam, but didn’t on Thursday. The question for this passage was about his relationship with money and how do the words straight laced, & steadfast describe the main character. The turn of phrase in the selection was so difficult that comprehension was nearly impossible. Phrases like ‘the wits of the curious were fairly puzzled’ intimate acquaintances, and itinerant singer, but the absolute best was the reference to Saville Row, as if American 13 year olds would understand that this is a fashionable street in London. There was a sentence in the passage ‘the habits of its occupant were such as to demand little from the sole domestic.’ Honestly this was for 13 year olds.
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The funny thing, is that some of my 8th graders would know Saville Row, because “Annie” is the school musical this year, and that’s in one of the songs.
Several years ago, my sister did a standard-setting for the Praxis. Her score was so high that they threw out her score, because it would have set the score too high. Her secret? Knowledge of old movies and musicals. She said the whole test, which is somehow supposed to show “general knowledge” for elementary teachers, was basically trivia, and she knew the trivia because of her love of musicals.
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The really sad thing is as much as our students could learn through music and musicals, they are part of the Arts which, if not already done away with, are targeted to be done away with in school districts because the time is needed for test prep.
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Actually, it’s “strait-laced” — did Pearson also misspell it?
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/strait-laced
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I am preparing students for the all important English II EOC. In the past week, I have discovered that many students don’t know the meaning of these words, especially my ESL (English as a Second Language) kids: Carelessness, heirloom, obscurity, and limerick. I was teaching analogies. They can’t understand the relationship of the word pairs, if they don’t understand what the individual words mean. There is no way that many of my close to 200 students would know these words.
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You have to wonder what the thinking is behind these vocabulary standards. There has always been an objection to all standards on behalf of struggling learners due to the feelings of failure that comes from falling so conclusively short of what is expected.
But these vocabulary words will surely have the same impact on the general student population, creating doubts in their minds about their learning skills eroding confidence and creating a negative connection to learning.
That’s a tough consequence for vocabulary questions that are far, far away from the real goals of their education, namely developing deep understanding, thinking and self-directed learning skills. Where will this end?
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I love this. Brilliant.
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There is a good argument that there is something wrong with embedding this kind of vocabulary in high stakes tests that must be taken by every public school student in grades 4 or 6. Fine, agreed. But I would distinguish the vocabulary itself from the tests. I would disagree strongly with someone who doesn’t think it’s appropriate for middle-school children to be reading texts that use “adult” vocabulary. I would disagree with someone who thinks that most of the “Pearson vocabulary” in the letter featured in this post are beyond the capabilities of middle-schoolers.
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Maybe they should teach differential equations to all 6th graders.
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he’s probably looking them up right now! Lol
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And now Pearson will be using their “spy tactics” to hack and find that teacher who dared divulge the “top secret” contents of their tests… the author of this article!
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So when will the excrement collide with the abanico? (Spanish is the USA second language now)
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If you try to estimate the reading (grade) level of the teacher’s paragraph using Flesh-Kincaid and other readability metrics, you’ll find find that they all score it at 9th grade level or higher (http://read-able.com/check.php):
Flesch Kincaid Grade Level 10
Gunning Fog Score 13.1
SMOG Index 9.8
Coleman Liau Index 11.5
Automated Readability Index 9
The numbers aren’t based entirely on vocab difficulty, but still — those words are not of appropriate difficulty for young students.
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The 9th grade PARCC included “stultify.” There was also a fair bit of old-fashioned language (because apparently it would just kill Pearson to get anything modern or relatable) and some technical vocabulary about hot-air balloons. (Thank you, The 21 Balloons, for the prior knowledge.) We also had a passage which was entirely about how wonderful anti-intellectualism is, and the questions were completely uncritical of it. (There was no opportunity to write a response, because I didn’t type a word on my EOY test except to puzzle out poorly worded questions in the Notepad / glorified scratch paper and tear Pearson a new one on the survey.)
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What?
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Testing companies commonly use selections that are in the public domain
a) because many authors and publishers will not license their work for such a purpose and
b) because permissions fees are typically based upon the number of copies of the work to be printed, which in the case of these tests, can be millions of copies.
I won’t go into the details, here, of when something goes into the public domain, but most works now in the public domain were published before 1923. Therein lies a problem.
Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century writers used fairly sophisticated vocabulary and syntax. Open almost any nineteenth-century work written for children. Its language will be a lot more sophisticated than the language used, today, in mass-market novels for adults. Here are a few of the words found in the opening chapter of Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, which he specifically states in his preface to have been written for children:
composite
shunned
resurrected
Jimpson weeds
the slack of his roundabout
that truck (in the sense of that garbage)
dander
spile (dialect)
Old Scratch
laws-a-me (dialect)
well-a-well
ruination
revealments
vandity
endowed
diplomacy
cunning
forestalled
vexed
circumstantial
sagacity
enterprises
warble
diligence
unalloyed
citified
sidling
thrash
glowering
ambuscade
adamantine
derision
astride
vulgar (in the sense of common)
resolution (in the sense of determination)
That’s the sort of vocabulary that one finds in nineteenth-century children’s literature. (Longfellow’s “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,” long a staple of fifth-grade literature texts, has a Lexile readability level far beyond high school.) The vocabulary of nineteenth-century adult literature is far more sophisticated.
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This is an excellent point, and thank you for making it. I was recently looking at some public domain children’s materials for a project i was doing and concluded that very little of it would be understandable for my target audience without a great deal of pre-teaching. It wasn’t just the vocabulary and the length of the sentences, but it was the very unfamiliar contexts about which the material was written–the stories themselves wouldn’t make much sense unless you had a lot of background knowledge about how people lived 150-200 years ago.
Yes, this is a teaching opportunity for us and I certainly hope we make an attempt to open the doors to understanding of Twain and Hawthorne because the effort is worth it.
However, we’re talking about an assessment situation–a high-stakes testing situation!–and one would think that the test companies (who are making millions) would write or pay for the rights to use material that is more relevant, familiar, and appropriate for the grade levels that are being assessed.
It’s not that we teachers don’t think vocabulary is important because we know it is! It’s just that we need to select carefully the vocabulary that is taught to choose words that are “generally useful” that students will see again and again and use themselves. I recommend Beck, McKeown, and Kucan’s excellent book “Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction” for suggestions and strategies.
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It should be like those software licenses, if you use something in the public domain for profit, your product becomes public domain.
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“Testing companies commonly use selections that are in the public domain …most works now in the public domain were published before 1923. Therein lies a problem.
Not necessarily.
If Pearson used Lewis Carroll’s stuff (eg, from Jabberwocky) it would undoubtedly make much more sense to 4th and 6th graders than stuff like “You could say the spaces function as a plinth for the work.” which was on the 6th grade test.
Jabberwocky is downright sensible compared to the latter, which you have to have a plinth sense to understand (or maybe burn or smoke plinthsense)
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Poet,
Most of the selections on standardized tests are not out of copyright, 75 years old. Most are from textbooks, children’s magazines, or are written for the tests. Where do you think the infamous “Pineapple and the Hare” came from? The author Daniel Pinkwater is very much alive. He calls the tests “stupid”:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303513404577356113609677208
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The pedagogue who authored this discourse has been the genesis of much obfuscation and polemics. Does she realize her parsing out the micro-fine nuances of the fair import of the language could precipitate further misconstruction?
I would posit to this female homo sapien that she can ameliorate such dissonance by interlocuting with her audience in a reductionist orthographic system, one that possesses with an abundance of clarity and simplified prose so that the quotidian proletariat may digest comprehend her intentions.
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Correction:
I would posit to this female homo sapien that she can ameliorate such dissonance by interlocuting with her audience in a reductionist orthographic system, one that possesses an abundance of clarity and simplified prose so that the quotidian proletariat may digest and comprehend her intentions. Her affectation will resultantly convey an aura of geniality rather than an esoteric and cryptic persona.
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I have been considering what to buy my grandson for his sixth birthday. He wants some Pokeman cards, but I was thinking, instead, of getting him a book.
What do you think? Being and Nothingness, by Sartre, or Being and Time, by Heidegger?
It’s important, of course, that he master both by Grade 4 so that he will be ready for Derrida’s Of Grammatology.
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Bob…so glad you have you back…worried about not hearing your voice in such a long time. My 5 year old grandson also wants the Pokeman cards…which cost way too much for what they are.
But I would hold off on Sarte and Heiegger for at least one more year. After all, how hard core and jaded do you want him to get? Next thing you will be considering Metamorphosis or Lower Depths as his a bedtime story.
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There is no denying that the tests have been engineered in such a way as to ensure failure, just as our Congress has been engineered to ensure nothing the people need will be legislated.
That said, my 12 year old granddaughter played Petruchio in “The Taming of the Shrew”, and her 9 year old brother, had several roles. She played Prospera when she was 9 and Hamleta when she was 10. You should hear them speak… The literacy component of their home-schooling is a dramatic one,– ImproveEd Shakespeare. Their mother, Andee Kinzy is my daughter-in-law, and she put created this theater, ‘Shakespeare for Kids by Kids’, a few years ago
https://www.facebook.com/ImprovEdShakespeare
I do not know if they could pass the CC tests, but I know that they, and their fellow ‘actors’ can speak the language in ways that would make most high school kids jealous.It just takes practice like all skills….oh and it takes a vision from a brilliant woman who knows how to make learning fun, and to offer real rewards for doing work. This little troupe brought the house down in Austin with their performance of Shrew. Bravo!
Don’t have youtube of that yet, but in the video below, at 0:48, and 1;47 that squeaky voiced kid is my grandson at age 7.
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Almost every 11th-grade teacher in the country assigns Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. I suspect that less than five percent of students assigned the book actually read it. I just opened a copy and copied a paragraph at random:
GOVERNOR BELLINGHAM, in a loose gown and easy cap,—such as elderly gentlemen loved to indue themselves with, in their domestic privacy,—walked foremost, and appeared to be showing off his estate, and expatiating on his projected improvements. The wide circumference of an elaborate ruff, beneath his gray beard, in the antiquated fashion of King James’s reign, caused his head to look not a little like that of John the Baptist in a charger. The impression made by his aspect, so rigid and severe, and frost-bitten with more than autumnal age, was hardly in keeping with the appliances of worldly enjoyment wherewith he had evidently done his utmost to surround himself. But it is an error to suppose that our great forefathers—though accustomed to speak and think of human existence as a state merely of trial and warfare, and though unfeignedly prepared to sacrifice goods and life at the behest of duty—made it a matter of conscience to reject such means of comfort, or even luxury, as lay fairly within their grasp. This creed was never taught, for instance, by the venerable pastor, John Wilson, whose beard, white as a snow-drift, was seen over Governor Bellingham’s shoulders; while its wearer suggested that pears and peaches might yet be naturalized in the New England climate, and that purple grapes might possibly be compelled to flourish, against the sunny garden-wall. The old clergyman, nurtured at the rich bosom of the English Church, had a long established and legitimate taste for all good and comfortable things; and however stern he might show himself in the pulpit, or in his public reproof of such transgressions as that of Hester Prynne, still, the genial benevolence of his private life had won him warmer affection than was accorded to any of his professional contemporaries.
Teachers assign this and, amusingly, actually fancy that their students are reading it. The students, of course, look up plot summaries and lists of characters on the Internet, watch a film of the book, and otherwise fake it.
Millions of kids do this every year.
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This is, of course, exquisite writing, but it’s very, very sophisticated and far beyond the abilities of most readers.
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Bob Shepherd,
I have missed your comments.
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Millions of kids fake reading this every year, and yet it continues to be assigned, and the farce continues to play out, and has done so for many decades now. And no one seems to notice.
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Bob, it is such beautiful use of the language that if it taught well to, let’s say 7th or 8th graders, it can be appreciated by the young. Why not front load a lessosn and define/explain all the antiquated terms and advanced vocabulary clearly to students? Provide them with a list of definitions. Ask then to formulate their own sentence witht key words that they choose.
I would not teach this piece to kids who are younger, unless they are precicious and clamoring to learn it.
There are ways to get youth to appreciate and enjoy this genre and epoch of writing. I am fond of Young Goodman Brown . . . .
Did Hawthorne write “Doctor Heidigger’s Experiment?”
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Of course, kids should study the whole piece and not just choice excerpts from it.
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In regards to Robert Rendo’s comment, while the language of TSL could be — with pre-teaching of context and vocabulary, plus that old standby of looking up words one does not know– taught in middle school, the reader does need some experience in life and live and attachment and betrayal to bring to the text. Thus grade 11 is more appropriate.
What I have noticed (re Bob’s comment about “no one seems to notice”) is that my students increasingly lack these life experiences because they’ve been over-protected, not because of some innate difficulty with vocabulary. Hester Prynne is not very much older than a teen!
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Pculliton,
One could also teach some history and cultural studies in their front loading of the lesson: show a brief film of the epoch in which the story takes place, show images of dress, food, furniture, kitchen devices, transportation, dance, song, and art, etc. To give the students a flavor of the epoch is important.
The age and grade of a student learning are debatable. I was taught Hawthorne’s short stories in eighth grade, but I was in an advanced track for English and science then. Also, I was not involved in a high stakes environment the way we are today, granted.
Certainly teaching Hawthorn to kids in higher grades is not objectionable.
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Robert, let’s suppose that it takes an hour to “front load” the vocabulary, cultural context, and allusions and to explicate Hawthorne’s complex periodic sentences. Let’s further suppose that this is an average paragraph in the novel and that there are 450 such paragraphs, none of which can be fathomed by the average reader without such exegesis. There are about 141 hours of classroom time in a typical high-school English class in a year, so it would take THREE YEARS to walk students through a “close reading” of the entire novel, though such a reading is necessary if students are to understand the book, given their level of preparation. What actually happens is that kids watch the film or read the No Fear contemporary English translation or simply pay attention to the plot summaries given, incidentally, in class. And then they and their teacher say that they have “read” the novel.
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Here’s what teachers can do with these very challenging texts: They can provide a lot of initial background information (projects are great for this, but there is no substitute for some explicit instruction), do plot summaries of large portions of the text, and then do close readings of key passages. That’s what teachers and students do, anyway, so why not be honest about it?
In After Babel, George Steiner does a quick run-through, at one point, of the essential background knowledge necessary to comprehension of a short passage (15 or so lines) from Shakespeare (Coriolanus?). His discussion runs to about 20 pages, and it is much abbreviated. Most readers will need an explanation of the explanation. That’s his point. Texts exist in context, and older contexts demand description if comprehension is to occur.
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I suspect, as well, that most people who would say to you, “I read that in high school,” would by stretching the truth.
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cx: “would be stretching the truth.”
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On the other hand, schools like Dalton and Harpeth Hall assign literature on this level to their middle school students, and the students are expected to actually read it. The high stakes testing is one issue, but the idea that the works of Twain or Dickens or Hawthorne are inappropriate for middle school students is not shared by the schools that the elite send their kids to.
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You are completely missing the point of standardized tests meant to establish MINIMUM competencies in reading and writing for ALL CHILDREN. No reasonable person could possibly conclude that these reading passages establish bottom threshold for ALL 12 year old students in NYS.
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No, I get that point. I’m noting the “on the other hand” point.
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Precisely, FLERP!. Alas, comments such as Bob’s regarding TSL actually support reformers’ argument that charter schools, school choice, vouchers and of course CCSS/ PACRC/SBAC are all part of a civil rights movement for equal educational opportunities. It’s very easy for reformers to show that the schools to which the elite send their children have higher expectations and that public school are anti-intellectual if public schools are not demanding the reading of challenging classic texts.
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Yes, FLERP.
One can teach higher level text without it hurting children. It is the high stakes attached to the higher level text that hurts children and society at large, not to mention teachers and administrators.
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This debate is easily resolved. Simply take a lengthy passage from one of these texts and ask a lot of detailed reading comprehension questions about it. I daresay that most adult readers will struggle with those questions.
According to George Miller (The Science of Words), William Nagy and Richard Anderson estimated the size of English word families in a corpus of 227,553 separate word forms (defining word families as including inflected and derivative forms) at 88,533 items (not including technical terms, I assume, which would make the list much, much larger). They estimated that the average high-school grad knows about 45,000 of these, passively, and theirs is one of the largest estimates (other estimates congregate around 15,000 words).
So, people don’t know half the words in their own language, according to one of the most generous estimates of word knowledge.
The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, published in 1989, contains 615,000 words, including technical terms and inflected and derivative forms. A 1995 study by E. B. Zechmeister and others, published in the Journal of Reading Behavior, estimated the active vocabulary of the average college-educated speaker of English at 17,000, a small fraction of the total. There are published concordances of works by many famous authors. Statisticians Brad Efron and Ronald Thisted estimated Shakespeare’s active vocabulary at a little over 31,000 words and his passive, or latent vocabulary, at about 35,000, and Shakespeare is universally acknowledged as having one of the largest vocabularies in the history of world literature. Milton used about 6,500 words in each of two halves of Paradise Lost, and his vocabulary is notoriously demanding.
So, given the enormous size the language, it’s easy to put together passages in English that almost no one can understand.
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like this comment?
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Teachers need to ask close-reading questions and ask for specific textual support for student responses. Providing e study guides asking these questions and pointing students to specific passages in the text. is a pretty basic technique for HS “ELA,” which consists of both language (such as that in Hawthorne) and literature that teaches us how to live (and die). The Scarlet Letter is s great book with timeless messages about character, honesty and relationships. Hawthorne’s insight into human nature is astonishing.
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It’s amazing to me how many English teachers will say that they “taught The Scarlet Letter” when, in fact, their students did not read any significant portion of it. Yes, It’s a good book. But most adult Americans can’t read it. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that it might as well be in Yoruba or Kiowa.
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It’s extremely important for English teachers not to underestimate the complexity of texts (based on many factors, including background knowledge, syntactic complexity, vocabulary, and conceptual complexity and density. Dylan Thomas’s line “Time held me green and dying” has a Lexile level of Grade 2, but it is quite complex. His “the twelve triangles of the cherub wind” requires background knowledge that most readers do not have.
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In the first sentence, shouldn’t it be, “There is a man in Albany, whom I surmise . . .?” Just kidding! Love the letter, and more so the point.
Common core was originally supposed be about getting back to basics, and adding technology. Ideally, it was also supposed to help kids learn in a cooperative environment – helping and engaging one another. Some of the CA schools are doing an excellent job with cooperative learning in their classrooms.
It’s not beneficial for anyone to spend all of these hours teaching to the test, instead of teaching kids the love of learning. In order to teach students to prepare for the test it’s taking so much time, it’s stifling their creativity and curiosity.
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Anyone find that controversial poem that was on the test?
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I have been an SAT tutor for nearly 30 years. In all this time I never encountered the word plinth. Mr. Cuomo, all I can say is that no one will ever raise an effigy for you that will be posited on a plinth. People, read this sentence to a sixth grader and see if the student can use clues to figure out its meaning.
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At least your sentence uses the word in a meaningful context.
The author of the passage (from Smithsonian magazine) that was put on the 6th grade test used plinth in a totally nonsensical way making it virtually impossible for anyone to figure it out from the context.
In fact, the usage was so goofy (as first pointed out by Carrol Burris) that it would have confused even people who actually knew what a plinth was.
“As a result, the location of the cloud is an important aspect, as it is the setting for his creation and part of the artwork. In his favorite piece, Nimbus D’Aspremont, the architecture of the D’Aspremont-Lynden Castle in Rekem, Belgium, plays a significant role in the feel of the picture. “The contrast between the original castle and its former use as a military hospital and mental institution is still visible,” he writes. “You could say the spaces function as a plinth for the work.”” — passage on 6th grade test taken from Smithsonian magazine
What a load of gibberish. (even Alan Sokal would probably be impressed) Anyone who finds that anything less should be forced to stand on a plinth and reread that passage until they believe otherwise — which would not be any more torturous than what they put sixth graders through trying to figure out such nonsense.
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“Plinth” is an everyday word for Trim Carpenters, go figure.
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Reblogged this on stopcommoncorenys.
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This is perfect! And why can’t we say anything – if we can’t explain how ridiliciois all this is – we are not protecting the kids! Thank you for writing this!!!
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Well done! Pearson in line to run the world? They are sure running public ed into the terra firma
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Reblogged this on Nelly Explores…. and commented:
I’m just going to leave this right here….
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This is both amazing and accurate! Thank you. For my fellow educators, stand strong. While our passion for this career may seem to be underestimated, misunderstood and blatantly made a mockery of, by this cold & heartless bureaucracy- Let not your light be dimmed. Summer is coming and our voices WILL be heard! Pray, believe, rally whatever you can do to find peaceful strength in this journey!
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I showed this to my 6th and 8th grader. There was only one word that they didn’t know, but they got the gist by the context. I guess that’s why our school embraces these changes, as their students are already prepared for them.
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Anyone know the source of this? I keep seeing the author referred to as “a teacher”.
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Len Adams:
“The poem is by Stephanie Santagada, High School English Teacher in NYS :)”
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Her name was added to the post. She is not afraid.
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Love it!
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These are not “insanely hard” words but are useful terms for expressing ideas and emotions. It is a pity that our knowledge and vocabulary has shrunk so much.
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They may not be “insanely hard” words for an adult; however, many 4, 6 and 8th graders have not been exposed to them, nor should they first experience them on a “high stakes” test.
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if students have not been exposed that is a problem with the teacher NOT with the CCSS
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4, 6 and 8th graders should these words before the test! If not specifically, at least taught to see the construct of the words and use their minds to construct the meaning.
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Sighing over today’s lack of a good vocabulary misses the point. This is a standardized *reading* test, administered to every single child. It’s supposed to define a baseline of competency in *reading.* It’s not supposed to be an enriching experience.
Yes, of course, children should have a serious vocabulary paraded before them. And actually, yes, I’ll concede that students get a lot of crappy books with crappy vocabulary. (Diane Ravitch has herself written beautifully about the curse of the crap textbook.) And of course, there’s no such thing as a “hard” word. How can a word be hard? And yes, children should read good books with real words. Someone here mentions Agatha Christie – you know, pitch your sights up a little – what about Charles Dickens? I read “Great Expectations” to my ten-year-old and she loves it. I watched “Love’s Labours Lost” with her yesterday. She liked it too. (She got a bit fed up with my repeating the line about Hercules still climbing trees in the Hesperides.)
BUT – this is a standardized TEST – not a LESSON. It’s like finding out that teachers are going to be evaluated based on whether or not an eleven year old can answer questions on Iago’s monologue in Othello I.3.
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I agree! Just read some Agatha Christie which is perfectly do-able for fourth graders…and all those”insanely hard”words will be included.
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but not for 4th, 6th and 8th graders!
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Yes, I am sure these words were spoken by you on a regular basis while in the 4th, 6th and 8th grades. How brilliant you must be!
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Hear, here! Brava Stephanie.
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They are most definitely “insanely hard” words, especially for the grades that had them on their tests. Our knowledge and vocabulary has not “shrunk so much.” It is just that some choose to live life and enjoy it.
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You present a false dichotomy. Why can’t living life and enjoying it include increasing one’s vocabulary through challenging reading? I still remember the first time I picked up a book of short stories by EA Poe, at the tiny town library, in 4th grade. I had to use a dictionary to read it, but the effort was well worth it. (I also had found an author whose family background was eerily close to my own.) I kept this up this sort of reading for another 7 years and eventually achieved verbal SAT scores high enough to help qualify me for full scholarships at competitive colleges and universities. That mattered when it came time to get a job. I snagged one and was able to support myself. Much has happened between then and now, over 30 years later. I think I’ve chosen to live life as well as most who started out where I did, and I’m happier than I ever expected as a child.
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Not for 4th and 6th graders!
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When was the last time you used bowdlerize, Methinks, absconds, or posits while ‘expressing your ideas and emotions’?
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“These are not “insanely hard” words…”
said René Descartes
“Certainly not any harder than ‘Cogito Ergo Sum’ “
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If these are useful terms for expressing ideas and emotions for kids, then you obviously don’t know kids.
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Has strunken
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I’m going to give the paragraph to my 10th and 12th grade English students and see if they can paraphrase it, or even summarize what it means (without using a dictionary…).
I’d love to photograph their looks of confusion as they work…
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I’m graduating from a reputable private university with my bachelor’s in biology and moving on to graduate school to another very reputable private university that is extremely hard to gain acceptance to and I still find difficulty in these words.. what a shame!
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Brilliant response to the unresponsive and irresponsible, anti-public-education governor of New York. Andrew Cuomo has lost my vote and my respect.
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If these words are expected to be known by everyone, then why weren’t they on the grade 5 and 7 tests? Makes you wonder (well you really don’t have to wonder, since it’s glaringly obvious) what the motive of using these vocabulary words truly is. No one on earth speaks like this, so why would anyone torture children with these words?
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Exactly. Well we all know Cuomo’s agenda and it has NOTHING to do with what’s best for kids.
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“No one on earth speaks like this,”
Only on planet Tisch
Tisch to Meryl
Tisch to Meryl
Phone home, Meryl
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Exactly, Lisa.
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a) The words are dated
b) The vocabulary is needlessly obtuse
C) Cuomo won’t understand them
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D. All of the above
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exactly. 🙂
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Don’t just limit these responses to the far Northeast, but thanks to our dear Good Old Boys Republican Network in Texas, last headed by Rick Perry, now we have to deal with his equally ignorant Greg Abbott and his cronies. So we continue to abuse our next generation with these ridiculous standardized tests so the legislature can continue to do their damnedest to destroy public education.
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OPT OUT. Right now it’s the only way to fight back. Don’t feed the monster!
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“There is a man in Albany, who I surmise, by his clamorous paroxysms, has an extreme aversion to educators. He sees teachers as curs, or likens them to mangy dogs. Methinks he suffers from a rare form of psychopathology in which he absconds with our dignity by enacting laws counterintuitive to the orthodoxy of educational leadership. We have given him sufferance for far too long. He’s currently taking a circuitous path to DC, but he will no doubt soon find himself in litigious waters. The time has come to bowdlerize his posits, send him many furlongs away, and maroon him there, maybe Cuba?
4th grade most of these words are not. I probably knew some of these words in the 8th grade but i was reading penguins in grade school. My theory of vocabulary is to teach high frequency words first. These word would be OK for the lowest level of the CAHSEE or California High School Exist exam. These readers would pass but not be considered proficient or at grade level 1) mangy dog 2) surmise 3)aversion 4) certainly the root psycho- and probably -ology so pathology by word analysis they should understand it by context. 5) Methinks is archaic but anyone who has come into contact with Shakesspeare should recognize it 6) dignity 7) enacting 8)orthodoxy 9) circuitous (like curcuit) 10 ) to maroon and perhaps intuitive and counterintuitive certainly intuition. But 1) cur 2) asbscond 3) sufferance 4) itigioious 5) bowlderize 6) furlongs (unless they are chronic gamblers) I would consider “bonus” words. Archaic units of measurement “leagues” “fathoms” “hands” or nautical terms (knots) they may recognize but not know exactly. But most of these words would not be for 4th graders, certainly or even early ELL/ELD learners.
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8th graders should know most of these words or be able to figure them out in context. Some would be known if the student had studied Shakespeare, but that is usually around 9th grade. (or if one reads the King James version of the Bible). I probably knew all these words by 8th grade, but I was a prodigious reader, including Shakespeare, which I started reading when I was 11 with special permission from the public librarian. Definitely not all these words for 4th and 6th graders.
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While the vast majority of states have standardized testing they (the tests) necessitate educators to spend countless hours force feeding the elements of these tests to students. Hours that would otherwise be used to teach, not conform. Testing should at the very least be pertinent to what is in the current curriculum.
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Cuba is too pleasant a place to send Cuomo! How about Katmandu?
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I’m thinking Guantonomo Bay? (sp)
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Cuomo had tutors in order to pass his classes ( so a colleague, AFT rep. told me) therefore he is unable to comprehend this letter.
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NY Cuomo is even worse than his father was !!!
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Santagada’s response to the vocabulary required for 4th, 6th, and 8th graders seems quite clever. Even well-educated adults would likely not understand all of the vocabulary in the essay. Although they may have been required to memorize these words at one point, the vocabulary is not in common use.
On one hand, it is important for students to learn complex vocabulary in order to understand high-level texts and engage in academic and professional discourse. On the other, seems more useful to work with students on critical thinking and writing skills than to teach them vocabulary they will not use or remember. This essay suggests that although teaching vocabulary is important, schools ought to reevaluate what vocabulary they consider valuable for students.
I agree with Mr. Munro that some of the words are reasonable for students to learn or be able to figure out by context, but, as he points out, when would a fourth grader ever need to know ‘bowdlerize’? It seems much more useful to teach the students vocabulary that they will find useful and place more emphasis on writing skills instead of memorizing vocabulary they will rarely need.
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With the amount of “editing” (aka censorship/verbal cleansing) that goes on in school literary anthologies, we’d all better learn “bowdlerize” PDQ and let our students know it’s happening.
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Pculliton,
Read my 2003 “The Language Police” to understand the grip of bowdlerizing in textbooks and on tests
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Oh, I have, Diane. Loved it!
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I have read it, (and everyone should) and it is a wonder that any topic of substance regarding human behaviors or events could be included. What gets me, is that television has lost all its restrictions. Click channels for a night, and see how often you come-on violence, blood, sadistic , cruel behavior , or dumb and dumber behaving badly. it is too ironic of rm.
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Love the comments! Bottom line…..Nice words, not necessary to a full education,..over most of their heads…..its not a Trivial Pursuit game! Stop the childish, “showing off” of the test makers.
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Go read Winston Churchill’s letters home from boarding school when he was 6 years old, then tell me we don’t set the bar too low today.
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Are all children the equal of Winston Churchill or John Stuart Mill? Shall we fail the 99% who are not?
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It is the Winstons and the John Mills that the public schools are missing, too. If a brilliant mind is impoverished and will never be exposed to techniques and information that allow his emerging intelligence to blossom, then it is our nation’s loss.
I vetted the John Taylor Gatto* transcript for Rob, and I remember what Gatto said about the teacher’s mission “back then’ when we “identified the ‘genius’ in every child”… his words.
* https://antioligarch.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/john-taylor-gatto-weapons-of-mass-instruction.pdf
Any teacher who has faced classes of 6 or 16 year old kids, knows by October, who has the potential to be a Winston, and it is that teacher’s ‘job’ to enable him, too.
It is not that hard to facilitate learning to a variety learners, IF the classes are small enough. Class size matters when it comes to ENABLING all learners! (right Leonie?)
All our schools needed was an infusion of money to build new schools and money to hire more teachers and support staff , so that classes ran smoothly, and special needs children received the attention and services that let them keep up, as kids who could run fast were encouraged to go farther.
They starved the schools, fired teachers and when the institution deprived of cash flow and personnel failed, they privatized education…. it is that simple.
Public schools worked for decades and would have continued to work. They were targeted not just so the corporate entities could profit, but so an ignorant citizenry could be fed lies and outright propaganda, and ‘their’ version of democracy, their version of ‘free speech’ their version of the Constitution would be the ONLY version, and democracy which depends on shared knowledge would end, and knowledge would not be shared equally by Winston, John, Diego, Jennifer, Tupin, Yasser, Amshula and Shaequa can all be the best that they can be, because a real PROFESSIONAL showed them HOW TO DO work, how to LEARN skills, as well as facts.
Don’t get me started… cause I remember the forties and fifties when I has great teachers, the sixties and seventies when my kids had great teachers, and the eighties and a bit of the nineties when teachers could still do what they were hired to do… enable kiddies to LEARN!
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Winston Churchill did not do well in school, as I recall.
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I’m an orthopedic surgeon, and still barely understood what was said
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I wouldn’t classify them as ‘hard’ words, just words that are not currently found in common verbal exchange. If one if fairly well-read though, they should be understandable.
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I challenge the Governor to take these tests ( unaided ) and see how well or badly his results are. Especially since he did not do well on his Bar exams (reportedly ). I had to look up one of them myself and I am 67 yrs. old. Who makes up these tests?
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He can’t take the tests. He is not allowed to see them. It would be a security breach for anyone other than the children they were designed to abuse to see them. And even if he DID get to take them, he couldn’t see his results. Just a score of 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4. He would never get to know what earned him the score because no one gets to know that! That is why these tests, or at least the way they are used, need to change!
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Sadly, many of the words are probably common in England where the test is made!
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That’s a very good point. I knew most of those words by the time I was in junior high, but I was a weird kid with an English mother. We use the word abscond all the time, along with gormless–one of our family’s favorites.
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We should all be gormless.
http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/30058508/
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Hello folks, Thank you, Diane. Let us remember, you may be able to comprehend this story because the words are in a fairly obvious context. My original intended audience which was the Board of Ed where I work, as are all of you, is well aware of the governor’s actions. However this is not the original way they appeared on the students’ tests; then the words were in passages in most cases from at least a hundred years ago, on timed tests (not much time for strategies), and with no way to prepare for which words they may see. This is purposeful. I’ve taught high school English for twenty years, hold a Master’s in Secondary Ed and a Bachelor’s degree in elementary education with an English major. These words do NOT belong on a test for those grade levels (not before, during or after Common Core) that will determine the fate of their teachers and the success of their schools. I could not even find definitions for a couple of them in Microsoft Word when I went to double check because they are pretty much GONE from the language. I am the absolute last person who would ever promote the dumbing-down of our vocabulary. If you were reading Agatha Christie in 4th grade, then you thank your lucky stars that you would be in the 30% of students that will pass these exams. But most children are not so fortunate. WHY should 70% be failing (rhetorical question)? Learning should be and can be a joyous process of discovery. This, methinks (that one was not on the test), is a tragedy. By the way, I compiled the words from hearsay in anonymous posts. I proctored nothing and signed no agreements. …In the governor’s own words, “These tests are meaningless to students!” Enough said.
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These tests should determine on-grade-level proficiency. Completely off base. What are we not testing that would be much more appropriate? And why not?
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I thank my teachers who were great. I loved the vocabulary page the Readers Digest had. I graduated high in 1947.
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They aren’t common words for children in England either, and it is the same here from what I can see. I am a retired teacher with much experience teaching mainstream special needs. I was Deputy Head in England for 13 years then went to Italy to an International School as Headteacher. I go into schools to do supply teaching as I missed the children and like a little extra money to my actuarially reduced pension. What I see is teachers frantic on finding time to tick boxes, rather than having the energy to prepare exciting lessons to give the children experience of learning in a fun way. I know smart boards have their place but not for majority of lessons. Learning should be fun- some things can’t be but just learning things for exams is counterproductive and does not show a good school in my opinion. They are even talking about examining them younger and making them resit if not passed required level. I think it is very sad! I actually think that they change the curriculum and impose things on teacher to get them so tired they do not have time to complain. Teachers have always been busy preparing good and interesting things for their children , but now why bother just find a lesson on the internet and do that. It might not enthuse the children and make them thirst for knowledge but will allow tick boxes to be filled in to cover backs. Not the profession I went into 40 years ago! Am going to find a joke which was on facebook and iwll post that in a minute.
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I am thrilled that parents in New York and Colorado are standing up for their children and teachers. They are refusing to have their children take the standardized end of the year tests! They are also stating that these tests are not fair or true indicators of their children and teacher’s performance. So, parents, you vote for these politicians who are forcing these dreadful education policies. Speak up and say you are mad as hell and you aren’t going to take it anymore. Refuse to send your kids to school and refuse to support these politicians who are destroying our educational system!
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I meant to say “refuse to take the tests” because I don’t want kids to miss school. I just get so frustrated with this testing and especially Pearson who creates these tests.
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Susan Lee Swartz wrote: They starved the schools, fired teachers and when the institution deprived of cash flow and personnel failed, they privatized education…. it is that simple.
Public schools worked for decades and would have continued to work. They were targeted not just so the corporate entities could profit, but so an ignorant citizenry could be fed lies and outright propaganda, and ‘their’ version of democracy, their version of ‘free speech’ their version of the Constitution would be the ONLY version, and democracy which depends on shared knowledge would end, and knowledge would not be shared equally by Winston, John, Diego, Jennifer, Tupin, Yasser, Amshula and Shaequa can all be the best that they can be, because a real PROFESSIONAL showed them HOW TO DO work, how to LEARN skills, as well as facts.
She was absolutely correct. I’ve been in the public school business for over forty years, and have observed excellent schools be “starved to death” by lack of funding. I’ve even wondered if there is a grand scheme by politicians to “dumb down” the population so that the general public won’t understand what they are up to. Think of the 1% and how they have created their own comfortable “bed” while the masses weren’t watching, or were too busy working to support their families that they didn’t have time to keep up with politics. When the power is in the hands of greedy people, then the best way to keep their life style safe is to keep others in the dark. A democracy cannot survive without an educated populous. Is there a plan here to dismantle democracy by limiting educational opportunities for the masses so that only the wealthy will be educated thus perpetuating the position of the 1%? When the only functional schools are the private schools, only the wealthy will be able to have an education. Scary thought isn’t it?
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Thank you Molly, for writing this.
Sometimes, I think no one is reading what I say. More important is your take-away which is SPOT ON!
This is a huge conspiracy, and the reason that people are so late in recognizing this, is that these puppet masters succeeded in the nineties– with the complicity of the UFT in NYC (the largest district in the nation) ,– to demonize and remove the voice of the professional teacher… and NOT A MEDIA OUTLET, TO THIS DAY, TELLS THE STORY of what they did to teachers.
http://www.perdaily.com/2011/01/lausd-et-al-a-national-scandal-of-enormous-proportions-by-susan-lee-schwartz-part-1.html
They took the process to LAUSD (the 2nd largest district int he nation)
http://citywatchla.com/8box-left/6666-lausd-and-utla-complicity-kills-collective-bargaining-and-civil-rights-for-la-s-teachers
It’s out there, how they did it, but these billionaires OWN all the media… It has been out there for almost 2 decades, how they took out the first hundred thousand teachers!
I have linked to it dozens of times here, but I link again at OEN, in a comment at the end of an article on the media’s complicity in slanting news until the wrong conclusion is reached… which is tantamount to lying.
This is a great article and my comment links to Diane’s blog and others.
http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/How-The-Media-Can-Stop-Emb-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Journalism_Media_Media-Complicity_Media-Distortion-150502-42.html#comment543523
Also if you want to email me, leave a message at OEN, at my author’s page, and give me your email.
http://www.opednews.com/author/author40790.html
best Susan Lee SCHwartz
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