Beyond School

Second draft:

On Two Ways of Reading: Slavery reads on its knees. Freedom reads on its feet.¹

So a high school teacher’s job: to teach students to find those feet?

I’m just looking for snappy first principles here. Ones within the 15-year-old attention span.

1. I know, I know — wannabee Nietszchean aphorist indulgence. But cut me some slack. Time is slow here on this beach. [↩]

Nothing like seeing a friend from three decades ago, when you were a new and very green adult in the world, to stir up the mind.

John and I also talked a bit about Gilgamesh today. Me talking about Gilgamesh is nothing new. I do that with anybody and everybody who’ll listen. But talking about it to the guy who knew you way back when when you so naively embarked on a conscious search for “Truth” — especially when that same guy joined you, and with exactly the same naivete — that is something new.

It’s like our 20-year old selves were sitting on that beach with us two 47-year-olds all day.

False Starts in the Search for Truth

That 20-year-old me was such a lousy seeker for Truth. He read all the Old Books devotedly — the Greek, the Hebrew, the Vedic, the Christian, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Taoist, the Gnostic, the Transcendental, “Yak yak yak.” He read them all, underlined passages, filled margins with scribbles, exclamation points, interrobangs. He started (and rarely finished) journals devoted to only copying the choicest of those words of Wisdom — quotes only. The Things to Remember. These were the words of Wisdom and Truth, and they were going to teach him Truth and Wisdom, by god. If he read them real closely to be sure he understood, then he’d find Truth and Wisdom. And life would be better because he’d have those things.

All I could do today while thinking about him was laugh at him.

Because I think I know now that that’s exactly the wrong way to read the Old Books.

If I had read Gilgamesh back then, when I was him, I would have been expecting it to teach me too. Another Old Book that was supposed to be Wise. That’s not how I read it now, thank goodness.

How Moderns Read

Anyway, I sat there on that beach wishing I had my iPod so I could record  what I was trying to aphoristically sum up about what I know about reading now — and wish I’d known well before 20, at your age, my students. I didn’t want this little stab at something essential to slip away. It went something like this:

It’s not what we learn from the Old Books. It’s what we see in them.¹

That mental shift in relation to reading, I want to say, comes close to a definition of the modern reader. A traditional reader gives up his authority to the author. A modern reader takes that authority back. Copernicus did it to Aristotle and Ptolemy, for example — he doubted their scientific authority based on his own observations. Voltaire and Nietzsche did it to the religious authority of popes, preachers, and the Bible.

A modern reader, in a nutshell, doesn’t read on his knees.

The scary thing? It seems that a large number of Americans are not modern readers at all.

And the sad thing? They all went to American schools — which doesn’t speak well about American education.

1. And yes, this is probably true of all books. But moreso, I think, for pre-scientific books. [↩]

I wrote recently about how many of my otherwise sharp students were “Google fundamentalists” who argued, to simplify a bit, that “if it’s in Google, it’s valid.” These are often the same students who insist they should be able to use Wikipedia as a source for research.

I’ve been skimming Wikipedia’s own policies for writing and research, and Lo! The Great Wikipedia itself tells its writers the very things I was trying to tell my young fundies. Maybe hearing from the Great Wiki God’s own mouth that Wikipedia and blogs should not be taken on faith, and are not considered reliable sources, will bring them out of Digital Barbarism and into the Enlightenment.

So below, brothers and sisters in Reason, are chapter and verse from the Wikipedia Scriptures themselves, warning the faithful not to rely on Wikipedia, blogs, other wikis, forums, self-published books, or textbooks for research. Nice caveats apply in some cases to spur further discussion.

I share for those who share my pain [emphases added]:

• Wikipedia:Reliable source examples – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

• • –full Wikipedia page

  • Are wikis reliable sources?

  • Wikis, including Wikipedia and other wikis sponsored by the Wikimedia Foundation, are not regarded as reliable sources. However, wikis are excellent places to locate primary and secondary sources.

  • Are weblogs reliable sources? (more below the fold…) Read the rest of this entry »

I’m a 21st Century Education Rip Van Winkle with a twist: I only went to sleep for a single year’s sabbatical, but the changes over that year make 2008 seem like 1808. This post is long, but I hope some of you will plod through it and advise me on what helpful solutions I’ve slept through. I put my pleas along those lines in red.

Feel free to skip to section three for what’s really the meat of this post. I’d love feedback there especially.

I told my students in the just-concluded semester-long Chinese History course that I gave myself a B/B- for the way I taught it this first time out (call it the Beta version). This post will return to my early “teacher think-aloud” habit on this blog to reflect on ways to raise that grade for the second semester

Since a B supposedly signifies “above average” without signifying “excellent,” I’ll justify that grade first by listing what I thought were the course’s strengths and weaknesses. Then I hope I’ll have enough steam left to dump the brainstorm of how to re-figure the course — using Diigo to heighten the academic rigor, and an “in medias res” narrative structure to heighten the engagement and provide the essential purpose for studying Chinese (or any) history at all¹ — that’s been brewing in my mind over the last (typically post-midnight) hour.

Strengths, Weaknesses, and Future Improvements

1. Replaced the textbook

Strengths: A week before the course began, the returning teachers arrived to work and I was finally able to see the resources and scope of the course. The textbook, to put it generously, was great for 12-year-olds, but not my 16-year-olds in this supposedly “rigor”-driven school — so I tossed it and replaced it with the China chapters from an introductory Asian History college textbook (Rhoades Murphey’s excellent A History of Asia).

Weaknesses: Murphey’s text led to an embarrassment of riches: there was simply too much information in it for a brief survey course. I was also concerned that its readability level was too challenging for some students, but I did a Poll-Daddy poll and found 33 of 36 responded from “It’s a bit challenging, but I can handle it” (my definition of the Zone of Proximal Development for reading) to “It’s just right for my reading level” to “It’s easy.” Still, for the three who couldn’t handle it, alternate texts or resources were necessary, and I didn’t have them.

Another weakness was in the photocopied packet I made of the Murphey readings. I didn’t include the Index in the copies, so it was surely difficult for students to be able to locate information from the text for review purposes.

A final weakness: It had been four years since I’d used the text, which means I’d forgotten most of it, and spent the semester “two days ahead of the students” in terms of content mastery. (Students seem to think teachers remember everything they’ve ever known, which is interesting, since a brief reflection on their own forgetting of content from courses from prior years should demolish that idea. They seem to think the adult brain is of an entirely different model, some new design inserted in the skull upon college graduation or something. So here’s a dirty teacher secret, kids: Our brains are at least as limited as yours.)

Future Improvements: I’ve ordered The Cambridge Illustrated History of China to be the textbook next year. An Amazon “Reader Reviews” and “Look Inside” perusal satisfied me that this is a reasonably solid high school China history text. (We’re looking at ABC-CLIO database as a possible digital replacement for paper textbooks altogether for next year, when we go 1:1. Anybody know how feasible this is?)

2. Replaced Blackboard with Ning

Strengths: I haven’t written about it yet because I’m waiting for the video to be released, but I gave a keynote speech at the Learning Technologies Conference in Australia last month, and during it I declared a “pox on Blackboard.” I meant it. It made my first month trying to get to know my students’ backgrounds, preferences, and literacy skills utter hell. First I assigned an “About Me” forum that most students put a lot of effort into, apparently….. “Apparently” because I never saw it. Some glitch in Blackboard didn’t save the things, so I never got to read them. That damned me to fogginess about the general skills of my class for the first couple of weeks. Later attempts to use the forums, once the glitches were ironed out, were still clunky due to Blackboard’s horrible user interface (in all fairness, my school is using an old version, and I think later ones have copied enough from Moodle to be more intuitive). Example: answering a forum in Blackboard confused most of my students because of the language of the User Interface. Instead of hitting “reply” after my prompt — no “reply” link existed — they had to somehow just know that to simply reply they had to click on “Start New Thread.” Talk about unintuitive.

Then there was Blackboard’s use of Frames, so cutting-edge in 1995, and its general “why click once when you can click ten times for the same task” workflow. The tool was as schooly as its name. It took way more of my time than necessary on Moodle to deliver a look, feel, and functionality less satisfactory than Moodle’s. A month into the course I’d had it. I left Blackboard for Ning. (I wasn’t about to install and manage my own Moodle. Been there, suffered that. Anybody have solutions along these lines I don’t know about?)

The strengths of Ning: It’s way more straightforward. The Main Page is a one-stop overview and link-list for all necessary tasks and documents for the week. Videos, photo slideshows, forums, blogs, RSS feeds of China News from Google News and from my Diigo China bookmarks in widgets on the sidebars for any advanced student wanting to read more. Hell, even student birthdays announced on the sidebar (it never hurts so sing Happy Birthday in class). So good riddance, Blackboard.

I kept things pretty minimal, as far as assignments went. Rotating groups of four or five students had to blog each week on the prior week’s content — open, whatever idea struck their fancy — and the others had to reply to two that appealed to them (authentic audience response awards students with the best ideas, hopefully stirs those whose posts elicited cricket chirps to reflect on how to do better next time). It was hard for me to participate in the blogs and forums as much as I’d have liked because of the afore-mentioned “two days ahead of the students” reading the textbook.

Weaknesses: Organization. I’m not going to beat myself up for this one, because I had to design the airplane while I was mid-flight in the semester. But I need to set all forums so that replies are threaded under the comments replied to, which isn’t the default, for one thing. Also, having 36 students on a single forum got unwieldy. I didn’t want to use groups because I wanted richer conversations between the two class sections, but this made navigation of forums difficult. I also need to figure out how to instruct students to subscribe to email notifications when somebody replies to their comment or post. I’m not sure this finely-tuned of an option is even available. If not, that means students are getting 40-odd notifications every time somebody replies to the forum they replied to — which means they understandably delete them all, as I do, without looking at them. Clunky. (Help?)

Future Improvements: Frankly, I’m still puzzling over this one. I‘d love to have students use Diigo to comment on other students Ning blogs and forum readings, but since the site is locked and the content is dynamic, I’m not sure Diigo highlights would be visible to other students visiting the pages. Anybody know? [Update: Well that was easy. Diigo told me on Twitter, while I was writing this, that the highlights will indeed show. They also set me up with an Education Account within 20 minutes of my applying for it, which will make class registration much easier. So cool.)

3. Content Organization: From "From the Beginning" to "In Medias Res" (or, "Teaching History Backwards")

Strengths: Covering the 4,000 years of Chinese history from the semi-legendary Xia Dynasty of 2,000 BCE to the present in a semester course was no easy task -- especially since China, unlike Europe, doesn't have any gaping 1,000-year Dark Age through which to conveniently fast-forward, but instead boasts an unbroken string of literate centuries across four millennia. Survey though it was, the students did receive an education in the broad (and with Murphey's text, often impressively deep) flow of Chinese history from the Xia, Shang, Zhou, Qin, Han, Sui, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties, and on into the 20th century's Nationalist and Communist regimes -- right up to the present day. (And though I know they couldn't know how skinny their "education" in Chinese history would have been had I just used the old textbook, and thus didn't have the perspective to appreciate just how superior their introduction to that history was in terms of depth and scope, I'm still pouting over the lack of a single expression of appreciation for the bang they got for their semester's buck. I know, I know: Cry me a river. Then send me to a shrink for expecting gratitude from teenagers.)

Weaknesses: The pacing was too fast. Again, I'm not beating myself up on this one because the textbook was new and I'd never used it as the primary text for teaching Chinese history before.

But more importantly, despite the oomph of knowing the highlights of all of China's major dynasties, at a certain point it starts feeling like a stuck record. Most of China's classical dynasties follow very similar "Dynastic Cycle" patterns in which a new dynasty begins, implements some impressive reforms in its first century or so, and over the next century or two becomes complacent and corrupt, and finally loses "the Mandate of Heaven" in the eyes of its subjects, and falls to whichever rebel or neighbor state emerges triumphant in Ye Olde and Verye Predictable Ende-of-Cycle Civille Warre or Forynne Invasionne. It brings to mind the title of an old Bowie song: "Always Crashing in the Same Car."

Most importantly, that almost-never-ending 3,000 years of dynastic cycles becomes, without a purpose for knowing it, an exercise in what Jared Diamond calls "history as one damn fact after another." Diamond insists on what most history buffs would assent to: that there are patterns in history that point towards essential understandings of who and what we are -- and those understandings, of course, separate the naive and ignorant from the educated. More importantly, they separate the citizen who you pray, for the sake of democracy, will not vote, from the one you pray will always vote.

Future Improvements: The course fell into the One Damn Fact Trap because I covered it chronologically: "In the beginning....." Tonight I think I arrived at a better approach.

I'm going to start the next course with the end of the dynastic era in 1911, when the Nationalists threw out the Qing -- more accurately, when the Qing just collapsed due to its own decrepitude -- and went through a painful and practically literal "crash course" in modern governance: nationalism, socialism, dictatorship, fascism, and democracy all in a stew from 1911 until 1949, and then totalitarianism and various shades of communism from 1949 to the present.

But before doing any of that, I'm going to assign the final exam essay questions in the first week of class, and have the students Diigo the hell out of our readings and forums on Ning for the rest of the course in order to arrive at their "answers." Here are the questions:

Essay Questions:

1.  Western Liberal Democracies in Europe and (especially) the USA typically criticize the PRC for its lack of human rights – freedom of speech, religion, and assembly – as well as for its one-party dictatorship. Based on your knowledge of Chinese history in the “long view,” how valid do you think these criticisms are? Give as many specific examples from Chinese history as you can to support your arguments.

2.  Mao Zedong waged the Cultural Revolution as a last-ditch attempt to prevent party Moderates (Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and others) from implementing capitalist reforms to China’s economic system; Mao believed instead that a planned economy relying on the social spirit of the people was the path to prosperity and justice for all.  Based on your understanding of the effects of the Moderates’ reforms from the rise of Deng Xiaoping around 1980 to the present day, to what degree do you think Mao’s resistance was justified? Use as many specific details from the successes and failures of the planned economy during the ‘50s and early ‘60s (the First Five Year Plan, the Great Leap Forward), and from the successes and failures of the Four Modernizations to the present, to support your argument.

Why Diigo highlights and sticky-notes (online, on-site, on specific segments of text annotations) instead of simple forum and blog responses? A discussion on a Diigo forum last year that Cliff Mims started -- see my highlights on it here -- sold me. Diigo's Maggie Tsai said it most succintly:

Fundamentally there is a difference between Diigo's annotation and traditional blog commenting. Diigo in-situ highlight and sticky note allows fine-grained discussion to specific part of a webpage - which opens up the possibility for more meaningful exchanges...

So in a nutshell, as students read, they'll be highlighting and bookmarking the evidence to answer our semester-long "essential questions" that traditionally I would have sprung on them as "surprise" cram-questions at the end of the course. This will very much raise the "rigor" bar, and provide a similar routine for individual research projects. But uh-oh: what about pdf files? How can students highlight, bookmark, annotate those? Any work-arounds, dear teacher-geeks? (Much of our content is in pdf format.) [Update: Re: highlighting and annotating pdf files: http://a.nnotate.com does with pdf’s what Diigo does for websites. A good find. (They tweeted after I called for help on Twitter.)]

The Beauty of a Real Project: Interpreting Modern “Communist” China, from an Historically-Informed Perspective, to China’s Historically Uninformed Western Critics

Wordy, I know, but that says it. China might not have made the finals for George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” award, but I’ve no doubt it made the short-list. Add to that the endless refrain, from at least the days of Ronald Reagan, of the evils of “godless Communism” and the blessings, historical and contemporary evidence aside (Iraq anyone? Or Afghanistan? or or or?) of one-size-fits-all “Democracy” and “Capitalism,” and you’ve got all sorts of articles of Western ideological faith to complicate with those lovely things called facts.

And please notice I said “complicate.” That’s the beauty of the idea: easy answers to the above essay questions, if pursued across a semester, with all evidence nicely aggregated on a simply-tagged Diigo page, will surely give way very quickly to the type of answers our future adults should have when considering modern China: and I mean nuanced answers.

Now my last two questions:

1. Assuming students will be able to offer valuable evidence and insight into the questions above — questions I’m convinced are relevant enough to the real world to deserve an audience — what’s the best way to present their findings to the world via the web?

2. How can I keep the project alive after its first iteration? Different questions for each successive class?

A million thanks for any who took the time to read and respond. If you see any beautiful ways to extend or enhance the idea further — Skypecast interviews from my students in Singapore with American students about their stereotypes of China and its government, for example? More? — please pitch those in the mix too.

1. it reminds me of David Warlick’s occasional pitch to “teach history backwards,” though my approach is a little more complicated [↩]

Just a quick share of some resources I made optional for the “In Google We Trust” students I mentioned last time.  Transparency is all, so enjoy, quibble, supplement, whatever:

Optional Media Literacy Readings:
1. Think Peer Reviewed journals are no better than blogs? “How Stuff Works” gives a good overview that will (I hope) make you think again.
2. Shocked that even peered reviewed journals can can be *gasp* imperfect? (To which I say good, so you should think even more about what you read.) This article might interest you (hint: some peer reviewed journals are better than others, and it’s up to you to know the Big League ones).
3. Still think “popular media” journalists — TIME, Newsweek, NYTimes, etc — are as “expert” as scholars, historians, and academics in respected journals?
–Treat yourself to Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi on mainstream newspaper journalism. (His style is snappy and hilarious.)
–See Bill Moyers’ “Selling the War” (transcript here, or you can watch the documentary online there) on how the mainstream media chose inaccuracy and disinformation due to all sorts of political pressures leading up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

wrote Mark Twain, “have been greatly exaggerated.”

True here as well, but only slightly.

Autopsy

The lines from Nick Cave’s song, “Hallelujah,” sum it up:

My typewriter had turned mute as a tomb
And my piano crouched in the corner of my room
With all its teeth bared

Change “piano” to “Gilgamesh” and there’s not much more to add.

Since moving here to Singapore from Seoul in July I haven’t written a word on this space. This is due to many factors: enervating humidity (we’re about 1 degree from the equator here), an hour-long (and offline) subway commute to and from my new teaching job each day, the time demands of familiarizing myself with a new curriculum and school (the “two days ahead of the students” syndrome), on and on.

And then there’s the burn-out from the writing job last year, when two posts a day on US education policy taught me that mandatory writing on a prescribed topic grows toxic — a lesson that has informed my classroom blogging policy this year, which is so minimal as to be almost non-existent.

Also — and students, skip this part — I’ve been suffering a health issue that reminds me, to compare a worm to a dragon, of Keats being told by his physician not to write any more poetry because his health was too fragile to withstand the excitement. For Keats, tuberculosis was the issue. For me, it’s merely smoking. Since college, coffee and tobacco have been my study-and-writing enablers, and successfully kicking the habit months ago coincided with an inability to sit still, focus, and write. I can’t help but suspect Keats was tempted to decide, “Screw it, life without writing is no life at all,” and I’ve fallen to that temptation myself. To push the Keats trope further, my own

…fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain

have prompted me to choose an early death with a higher word-count, if that’s the choice. I’m hoping I’ll be as lucky as my Scots-Irish grandmother, who puffed her corncob pipe well into her eighties, thus having her vices and beating them too. Sure, those last few emphysemic years were no fun, but a life should be judged by more than its feeble final years. So yes, I’m enjoying this writing because I’m enjoying a smoldering clove-stick and cup of coffee as I write. Let the bodies fall where they may. (And though I know the logic is flawed, I’m still compelled to add that yes, I smoke, but I’m constitutionally and philosophically disinclined to those just-as-deadly but socially-sanctioned killers known as alcohol and junk food, so before you condemn my lungs, dear moralists, check your livers and your waist sizes.)

Then there’s this blog itself.

First, my RSS feed was, and may still be, broken because of a WordPress plugin I was using. I couldn’t fix it, and the plugin developer’s offer to fix it for me may or may not have been carried through on, I’m not sure. (If any kind soul out there can reply and tell me if they got this post in their feed-reader, I’d appreciate it.)

Second, I’ve been conflicted over the evolution of this blog from teacher-geek stuff to personal narrative writings to “unsucky” literary lectures. It’s become such a hodgepodge I’m probably going to make a couple of new sites: one for the unsucky lectures, one for the personal narrative, and keep this one as the ramblings of a teacher-geek. I don’t know.

So that’s the dreary side.

“The Bright Side of Life”

(Yes, that’s Monty Python’s Life of Brian on the right. My Wordpress captions aren’t working, blast it.)

1. Rediscovering the Book

On the upside, my hiatus from the web has turned me on to the beauties of something I’d almost forgotten: books. My reading habits before my web-hiatus were almost totally dominated by my Google Reader. And while the subscriptions to blogs and newspapers and magazines and journals and whatnot were certainly enjoyable, I can’t say I’ve missed them as I’ve enjoyed the flow through hundreds of physically-bound pages of this writer or that: Gwendolyn Leick’s fascinating study of the first Sumerian and Babylonian cities in Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City (yes, dear Unsucky readers, I’m burrowing into the scholarship of the worlds of Gilgamesh), Richard E. Rubenstein’s Aristotle’s Children, a magnificent story of the rebirth of Aristotelian philosophy and natural science in the theology and liberal arts departments of late Medieval universities, and, currently, John Gribbin’s gripping Science: A History: 1534-2001, which picks up admirably where Aristotle’s Children leaves off.

2. The Mental Party of Teaching Chinese and European History

I’ve also had the intellectual joy-ride of my life this semester in my teaching duties, where I teach a survey of Western Civilization on one day, and a survey of Chinese Civilization on the alternating day. Since I began both courses where all histories of civilization should start — with Adam and Eve dropping from the sky (–oops, wrong century) Ardi and Lucy evolving from earlier forms, and their descendants migrating out of Africa and into Eurasia — each course stayed pretty much in sync, chronologically, with the other. This means that Monday would pull my head into the Roman Empire, and Tuesday into the roughly contemporaneous Han Dynasty. I can’t tell you how hilariously this mental tour pricked European pretensions to “high civilization” compared to China — particularly in the thousand years between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance, when Europe was a disgrace fully deserving the “barbarian” label the Chinese affixed to it. (In fairness, though, while China wins the “long view” award, Europe wins the Palm for the brief miracle from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. That China couldn’t discover over its 3,000 years of fairly stable and unbroken civilization what Europe did discover in a mere couple of centuries says something precious, its Mephistophelian implications aside, about Western culture.)

3. Notes on the New School (and a Teacher-Geek Heresy)

Teaching itself has been somewhat interesting. The students at my new school are generally the most literate of any school in which I’ve taught. The ninth-graders (14 and 15 years old) write uncommonly well, and the boys are especially delightful for being, in general, more mature and mentally turned-on than the girls (it’s usually the other way around at this age, in my experience). The school is going mandatory laptop for each student next year, but this year it’s only optional, requiring laptop cart check-out and other aversions. So I’ve avoided any ambitious digital projects, for the most part. (I’ll be sharing a couple of exceptions soon enough, and launching a new website I’m very excited about that bubbled up with the help of my best students.) Some of you will cringe to hear that I’m leaning toward traditional teaching anyway, simply because I don’t have the energy to try to de-program students who want school to remain traditional, and can’t be bothered to notice their future won’t be the paper-based world of their school — in other words, I’m tired of casting digital pearls before the lovable young piglets who just want worksheets, and to heck with all this Diigo nonsense. Maybe that will change next year, when they all bring laptops to school. Right now, the web is too beautiful to waste on the young. (Go ahead, teacher-geeks, set up your stakes, gather your faggots, and send your Inquisitors for this heretic. Ecce homo! But I’m using Ning for both classes, if that will soften your ire at all.)

Shocking Crisis of Classroom Faith: “Google is Dead!”

(or, “No, Virginia, There is no Santa Claus”)

Speaking of Ning and my “minimal classroom blogging,” I may as well add this tidbit. To ameliorate the misery of having to grade millions of heartlessly perfunctory blogposts by students only doing it for the grade, another teacher and I worked out a rotating “four bloggers per week” routine. All the other students not blogging that week only have to reply a couple of times to the posts of the week that caught their fancy. Long story short, one very bright student decided he would investigate the glowing characterization of Mao Zedong during the Long March in a PBS documentary we’re watching in class. He wrote a post with all sorts of questionable claims and characterizations that made Mao out to be far less impressive than even Western historians and academics admit him to have been in this period. And he didn’t cite or link to his source.

I found the source easily enough, and was aghast at its quality: riddled with weasel-words, blazing with bias belying its “FactsandDetails.com” title, a train-wrecked “Works Cited”, red-stained with cherry-picking the bads and omitting the goods. It would take a page to count the ways this site failed as a credible source. Turns out it was written by a guy with no authority, either academic or algorithmic (have you seen Shirky’s latest on this?). So I assigned all the students to read and reply to two student posts: one, a good exemplar that would play Trojan Horse for the second one, the uncited Mao smear piece. I wanted to see how many students would read the smear and reply skeptically.

Almost none did. Even the best students, with very few exceptions, swallowed it whole: “Wow! Your post shows how biased the PBS documentary we’re watching in class, and the textbook, are! Now I realize what a monster Mao was.” Et cetera and ad infinitum. A perfect “teachable moment” about media literacy.

Or so I thought.

Long story short, when I showed this class everything dubious about this site, they pushed back something fierce: the “A” students fiercest of all. I opened it up for debate on a Ning forum, saying “persuade me this source is valid for academic research,” and the push-back continued.

Discussing that second debate in class, I was gob-smacked to hear, again, the “A” students draw conclusions that if this site was not credible, it logically followed that no site was. “Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.” One student pushed back against my example of peer reviewed academic journals with an alleged case of the tobacco industry publishing “smoking is healthy” research in peer-reviewed journals, and seemed to glower at my request that she substantiate that claim — I had no doubt that the tobacco industry funded and published “scientific” studies of this sort, but did doubt whether she was correct about them being published in peer-reviewed journals — and also at my response that she was only confirming, if correct, my position that several evaluative criteria must be satisfied in order to judge a website credible.

I can only hope the quick demo of the “link:url” Google search, which showed that no site linked to this page but other pages on the same site, by the same author, brought home to some students that there’s something to be learned. But they’re at that dangerous age, and due to the imperative to cover the content, I can’t spend time taking this lesson any further. I can only hope the seed was planted and they’ll remember it differently in the future — hopefully not after a professor reams them for using a website written by a dog in its underwear.

Anyway, the take-away: students shouldn’t reach age 16 or 17 and still be shocked that Google can be wrong. It seems to have hit them worse than the news that there is no Santa Claus.

Piano image by poportis
Life of Brian image by tnarik

Contents:
1) Dry but necessary (and interesting, really) background to computer-assisted “corpus linguistics”;
2) Application of Vocab Profiler to a little “Scribe 2.0″ medieval satire I had fun writing way back when;
3) Tutorial on some uses of Vocab Profiler to aid in scaffolding classroom reading comprehension;
4) Caveats and Take-Aways

Dan Meyer just posted a refreshing little jeremiad against Wordle and Animoto, with which I largely agree – they’re fun, sure, but require all the mental and creative activity of slipping some coins into a Coke machine and then pulling the can from the tray.

Anyway, that post spurred me to share an old tool I’ve used since teaching ESL in Shanghai a few years ago.  It’s one of a muscular suite of tools made freely available at the Université du Québec à Montréal’s “Compleat Lexical Tutor” called VocabProfiler.

To appreciate what the VP does, it helps to have a bit of background in corpus linguistics, the computer-assisted analysis of word frequency in the English language.

OVERVIEW OF CORPUS LINGUISTICS FOR VOCABULARY TEACHING:

By scanning millions of words from a broad representative sample of English texts – newspapers, textbooks, novels, and more – and then counting the frequency of both words and word families (like Latinate words and their derivations), linguists could identify which words in the English language are necessary to know in order to comprehend an average adult text.

ESL research posits that for a text to be suitable for a reader (at the reader’s “instructional level”), that reader should know 95% of the words in the text. In other words, if the reader is unfamiliar with more than 1 out of 20 words in the text on average, comprehension breaks down, and the reader is cursed with a text at “frustration level.”

Corpus linguistics helps us figure out which words and word families are necessary to know to reach that golden 95% of lexical knowledge that enables reading comprehension. What it shows is that learning the 1,000 most frequent words and word families in the English language allows a reader to comprehend around 74% of words in an academic text (and the percentage is higher for  newspapers, fiction, and conversational English).

While 74% lexical comprehension is a powerful payoff for learning those first 1,000 words (the “1k list”), you’ll note that it still leaves us 21% short of the magic 95%.

Learning the second most frequent 1,000 words and word families, though (the “2k list”), covers an average of 5% more (in academic texts). So knowing the the first 2,000 most frequent word families in the language brings us up to 79% lexical familiarity with academic texts. That’s powerful and efficient vocab work, but it still leaves us 16% short, still doomed to frustration-level reading – “barking at text” without comprehending the meaning.

And here’s where things get interesting. Logically, you’d think learning the 2,001st-3,000th most frequent words would be the sensible thing to do after learning the first 2k, but that’s not true. You only gain a percentage point or two. (Think of the Long Tail applied to English vocabulary: we all use the top 2k, but after that, the hundreds of thousands of other words in the language flatten out.)  Instead, your next big vocab-learning investment should be in a group of 570 word families that, once learned, add another whopping 8.5% of lexical comprehension to academic texts.  This group is called the Academic Word List (AWL).

The AWL is that group of words that show up frequently across the entire range of academic disciplines – words like this list from a text of my own I just crunched: “accurate, achieve, conclude, conduct, create, deny, error, final, focus, ignorant, instance, labour, normal, plus, task, tradition.” [Update: An excellent set of online quizzes for all 570 of these AWL word families, arranged in sublists from easier to harder, can be found at this University of Victoria site.]

So let’s recap the math:

Lexical Coverage of Average Academic Text from Learning the 2,000 Most Frequent Word families + the 570 Academic Word List:

1k list ≈ 73.5%
+2k list ≈  4.6%
+AWL    ≈  8.5%
total comp:  86.6%

(Here’s a nice graphic (source) showing the coverage of those word/word families for conversational English, fiction, and newspapers, respectively:

Before moving on to the tool I promise to show you, let’s deal with the question: How do we know what words to teach to bridge the gap from 87% to 95%?

The short answer: we don’t (or I don’t, anyway).  One helpful approach is to focus on the specialized academic language specific to any discipline.  Words like metaphor, simile, paradox, hyberbole, and so forth, for example, are not on the AWL because they’re specialized literary vocabulary, so if you’re a literature teacher, you know the specialized literary words that are high-frequency to your content area.  Teachers in math, science, social studies, art, music, and so forth similarly know the high-frequency vocabulary of their disciplines.  Those specialized subject-area lists are an obvious first step to bridging that gap.  BUT HERE’S THE BEAUTY (cue segue music): you can use the vocabulary profiler to identify any words not in the 2k and AWL that are in your course readings, and pre-teach them to enable 95% comprehension of your specific class texts. (You can use it for much more, but one thing at a time.)

So let’s move on to the Vocabulary Profiler.

Let’s pretend that you are assigning my post “Adventures of Scribe 2.0” – a bit of satiric fiction I abandoned after that post in the second month of this space, when only Diane Cordell, Patrick Higgins, and Christopher Watson were reading me .

Here’s the text:

Monk Expelled for Creating “Devil’s Workshop”

29 December, Anno Domini 1527
Wittenberg, Saxony
The Catholic Press

Visionius Neocogitus, a 21-year-old neophyte in the hallowed Benedictine Monastery in Wittenberg, was expelled from the Order yesterday for disobeying the Abbot, dishonoring the time-honored traditions of the ancient Order, and “making pacts with the Devil.”

The young neophyte was charged by his Abbot, Father Orthodoxius Paleologus, with shirking his sacred duties in the scriptorium, malingering, and spreading heretical ideas.

“Young Neocogitus is not suited to holy work,” said Paleologus. “From the moment he entered the Brotherhood, he was a force of discord and disobedience. Not an hour passed without Neocogitus doing something to disrupt the solemn traditions of the Order. After much soul-searching, fasting, and praying over the problems caused by this wayward youth, the Holy Spirit finally spoke to me, and said, ‘For the good of the Order, Neocogitus must go’.”

A Promising Beginning

The trouble began on the first day the young neophyte was brought for training in the scriptorium, the vast chamber in which monks of the Order have been hand-copying the Holy Writ for the last 600 years.

According to Friar Heironymous Tuck, the monk charged with training young Neocogitus in the science of holy transcription, the neophyte was arrogant, sarcastic, and insubordinate within a minute of entering the hall.

“Neocogitus beheld the glorious sight of these dozens of God’s servants, backs bowed and heads down in pious, meditative labor, dutifully performing God’s work,” said Tuck. “And he had the audacity to snicker. I smelt a whiff of sulfur, and knew we had a heretic in our ranks.”

But Neocogitus mastered his spleen, said Tuck, and went on to prove himself an unusually able apprentice.

“There’s no denying the young man was uncommonly quick to learn,” Tuck continued. “All of the finer points of the book-copying arts–copying in neat script, in straight lines, spelling correctly, and above all, staying awake and alert–Neocogitus mastered within a day.”

Indeed, by the end of his first eight-hour duty, the young man had produced a flawless reproduction of the Book of Genesis–a task that took three times as long for far more experienced scribes.

More remarkable still, by the end of his first month as an apprentice scribe, Neocogitus achieved what had never been done before: he had produced an entire copy of the Bible–all 66 books, plus the Apocrypha.

“It was a miracle,” said Tuck. “It had never been done before. And it was perfect, flawless: I personally checked each and every line for errors–and there were none.”

Abbe Paleologus heard the news with joy. “It seemed a sign from heaven,” Paleologus said. “There were so many heathens living in the darkness, helpless to see the light without God’s word. Yet, because there were so many more heathens than there were monks to copy the Holy Writ–and because it normally took six months for a scribe to produce one correct copy–it seemed we would never be able to rescue all the heathens from their ignorance.”

“But this young monk, Neocogitus,” the Abbot continued, “seemed sent to improve our chances. I had heard that his conduct was often troublesome, irreverent, and lacking in humility. But at the time, I thought this was one more instance of God’s mysterious ways. This whelp would help us spread God’s word with godspeed.”

“Little did I know,” he concluded, “that this was not God’s work at all–but the Devil’s.”

The Devil’s Work

Neocogitus’ first Bible aroused curiosity throughout the monastery. The Order was abuzz with talk about its inerrancy, legibility, elegant script. Above all, however, the talk focused on this question: how had the young man produced it so fast? Was it really possible to produce an accurate copy of the entirety of the scripture in one short month?

To get to the bottom of this mystery, Father Paleologus summoned Neocogitus to his chambers for a private interview.

[WHAT is the secret to Neocogitus’ miraculous powers? LEARN THIS, and more, in the NEXT EPISODE! ON SALE AT BLOGSTANDS SOON!!!]

–There’s a lot of specialized vocabulary here from Medieval history, religious studies, and more, so you know your students won’t be familiar with much of it.  Solution: crunch it through the Vocabulary Profiler.  After copy/paste/submit, this is what you get on top of the screen: an overall breakdown of the percentages of words from the lexical bands relative to the entire text, as you see here (click this and all further images for larger view):

How is this helpful?  Several ways, primary among which is the simple breakdown it gives you of the percentage of words not in the high frequency bands. If that percentage is high, then maybe it’s simply not a text suitable for the readability level of your class’s age group. This is a common problem in high school, where content teachers untrained in literacy research go overboard by assigning college-level texts to students incapable of comprehending their lexical (and syntactic, but that’s a different beast) complexity.

Scrolling down that same screen, the next thing you see is a color-coded breakdown of where each word in the text falls in the word frequency range from corpus linguistics.  (Blue = 1k, Green = 2k, Yellow = AWL, Red = Lower-frequency “off-list” words) (click image for larger view):

While it ain’t as pretty as Wordle, it’s much more useful for teaching (and learning, as I’ll show later).  You can simply have students scan the red words themselves to look them up before reading, or you can prep the pre-teaching vocab lesson yourself.

“But wait a minute,” you say. “What if it’s a long text – say, a 20 page chapter from a novel?”  Good question, and VP helps you with the following breakdown as you scroll down the screen (click image for larger view):

–what you see in this “type list” (“types” are the individual words in the text) is an alphabetized list of each word, grouped in the four frequency bands, and followed by the number of appearances each word makes in the text.  This is key . In the above example, we can see that the words neophyte, monk, heretic, and abbot in the red “off-list” (low-frequency) range show up several times in this short text, and thus decide to give them more emphasis in pre-teaching the text’s vocabulary.  (If this were a longer text, this frequency count of off-list words would serve the same purpose.)  You’ll also note it gives you a handy list of the general purpose academic vocabulary from the AWL that will benefit all students across the curriculum.

TAKE-AWAYS, CAVEATS, and REQUEST FOR CAVILS:

What are some other take-aways from this little tutorial?

Students can use this tool to analyze (learn about) their own lexical sophistication. Have them drop their latest essay or story into the profiler, and let them see how many of their word choices are sophisticated enough to fall outside of the top 2000 words.  The colors won’t lie.

Teachers (and students) can create vocab quizzes on Quizlet (better than Mystudiyo, I’ve decided – check it out) or elsewhere using this to help them identify which words to prioritize in vocabulary study. If you don’t know any words in the blue list, by George you should. Ditto the green and yellow.  Beyond that, we’re talking less frequent, thus less crucial words to know by heart.

Corpus linguistics ain’t perfect. Some words – homonyms, for example, but also words with varying meanings depending on context – skew the results in the analysis. But that’s life for now.

Syntax is still important. Knowing vocab isn’t enough. Sentence structure and grammatical functions need attention too (duh – but you’d be amazed how many people think language learning is all about vocab).

Fancy SAT words are well-and-all, but many students don’t know many words in the 2k + AWL, and they’re more important. Teachers can help them fill the gaps in their knowledge of these words with the VP. “Utlilize” is less important (and to my demotic tastes, less elegant) than “use.”  English teachers take note.

This tool is especially helpful for online texts. Copy-paste novel chapters, textbook chapters, etc into the profiler, and your pre-reading activities are instantly enhanced and guided by literacy research.

The Compleat Lexical Tutor is great for making cloze exercises and all sorts of other things.

This post is way too long. Sorry. But it should be a spell more useful than Wordle.

What about you – anything to add?

References:

Nation, P. (2001). Learning vocabulary in another language. New York: Cambridge University Press.

I’ve wanted to help this happen for the last five months. And I need your help to launch it with quality and good aim. Just a thoughtful comment consisting of a short list is all we ask.

First, a recap. Why re-write what was already obsessively written since May? So:

What would happen if we educators encouraged volunteer students to create a niche of learner edubloggers? That could be enlightening indeed.
– post from 6 May 2007

[Giving student presentations at education conferences] means less (next to nothing, I would guess) to students compared to their daily school experience, and their participation in the larger world generally. They should be participating in our edublogger conversations on an equal footing, as equal partners.
– post from 7 July 2007

[L]et the star student-writers with forward-thinking parents be the first members of the type of “LearnerVoices” [blog] Scott Schwister is envisioning. And make it pay off, for both the students and the edublogosphere, by inviting those young writers into our dialogue, and not only commenting on their blogs, but asking them to comment on ours. That’s a reality check worth inviting. . . . Because we need to get beyond this stage of adult-centered edutalk. It’s time to bring in the silent – and silenced – majority: our students.
– post from 8 July 2007

[W]e seem to be seeing a new milestone in the edublogosphere: the beginnings of democracy with the inclusion of our student Silent Majority. How freakin’ cool is that.
– post from 5 August 2007

The URL is bought, the WordPress is installed, and several student bloggers from different countries have agreed to contribute and serve as editors (feel free to pass an invitation along to any student edublogger you know to contact me here, by the way). We’re going to Skype this weekend to clarify the approach.

And that’s where you adult edubloggers can help. Since you’re the intended audience, it would be great if you could take a minute to look at this wonderfully tight list of categories from the aptly named A List Apart blog, and distill a list of the six categories you’d most like to read about in a collective student edublog.

Again, we’ll be laying the foundations this Saturday. You can help assure those foundations will be solid by leaving a thoughtful “list apart” of your own.

Comments beyond that list, of course, are welcome. If you were me, what other concerns would you have, what policies (if any) would you insist upon?

The target launch date is December 1. They’ll be reading you. I’m sure they hope you’ll be reading them too.
–

A special thanks to Scott Schwister and Scott McLeod here, by the way. His offer to support this idea back in August was somehow a tipping point for me.

(Apologies for the style. I’m overdue some sleep, but wanted to put the request out as soon as possible.)

–Image credit: “Megaphone Tank on a Barcode” by lyers on Flickr

Last week, I mentioned reading Jeff Wasserman’s post about how schools teach bad writing (the 5-Paragraph Essay and other abominations). I mentioned how it made me “want to make my AP Lit class Ning public. We’re having forum discussions about Organic Form v. Mechanical.”

The more I thought about atomizing those Ning walls and welcoming the world of people who like to talk about reading, writing, and how schooliness creates lifelong non-readers and non-writers, the more attractive the idea became.

So whoever you are, if conversations such as the one below entice you to share your thoughts with my students about literacy in schools versus the literacy so many of us adults managed to grow into despite them (okay, maybe you were lucky and had good teachers, which would be interesting to hear about), then come on in. My students gave me permission to invite you.

Here’s just a taste from one forum on how practicing the organic essay form for five weeks improved (or didn’t) these students’ writing – I hope you don’t take it as self-congratulatory, because that’s not the point:

Reply by Shim Sep 17:

Well, when I first came into the classroom, I really didn’t know if I belonged in this class or not. After my first mock exam I realized that it was really different from what I expected, it was HARD. But after a couple of classes and more mock exams I guess I found my own way of writing and letting out my thoughts, unlike the schooly ways that education has locked us up in. So far I believe that I’ve started to write faster and think faster, as we practice more and more, and realize more and more. I’ve also found out that, rather thinking to the “educational” way that I’ve been living up with for the past 17 years, just letting out my ideas felt more better and more reasonable (which I guess is organic writing).

Reply by Clay Burell Sep 30:

Jeez, that was nice to read. Schools try, but for some reason, usually fail, to make students love reading great stuff and trying to write great stuff about their own responses. You give me hope that maybe I’m not failing.

Reply by Shim Oct 1:

Yeah, I mean I never knew that I was able to “ENJOY” literature, because of the ideas that schools all over the world put into students like me. Literature is HARD, “Do it this way that way”, “great interpretation, but WRONG”.

I really hope some of you will browse and add your thoughts to those of my students. They’re really interesting people.

I’ve been up all night catching up on my reading, which these days means feed-reading, more than anything.

Two that struck a chord:

1. That LearnerBlogosphere Idea

Sylvia Martinez on the red-hot GenYES blog writes several posts about getting teens to use Web 2.0 independently – like we adult edubloggers do – to develop their literacy skills in ways that classrooms typically cannot match.

One reason I love Sylvia’s posts is that she references reports and data that I don’t have the will or temperament to seek out, but which speak almost always to my own priorities as an educator. A case in point: the goal of creating a “LearnerTalk” (but that sounds schooly) of student edubloggers to give us teachers lessons on how our Classroom 2.0 attempts measure up. Sylvia writes that this is already happening spontaneously, which encourages me to seek ways to harness and shepherd that trend into this arena. Here’s Sylvia:

Students report that one of the most common topics of conversation on the social networking scene is education. Nearly 60 percent of online students report discussing education-related topics such as college or college planning, learning outside of school, and careers. And 50 percent of online students say they talk specifically about schoolwork. (Read her “Web 2.0 – share the adventure with students” post as well)

Does anybody else read into this that the students are stuck, like we adults are, in their own separate echo-chamber? And that combining the student and teacher discourses in one truly universal “edublogosphere” has the potential to steer our shared enterprise into fertile territory sooner than the current “parallel echo-chambers” situation we seem to have right now?

Scott McCleod’s offer to host a “LearnerTalk” type thing a month or so ago has not been forgotten.* Life and work have been too fast to focus on generating interest in that. Last week, before we began our week-long Chusok holiday, I pitched blogging to my Web 2.0 activity club, and many of my students seemed to get a glimmer from that sermon of the power of real-world blogging. I think a few will bite.

2. The War on Teaching Bad Writing

Anybody who’s taught high school English should know why most students hate to write in schools. It’s because they’re taught to write badly.

If I assigned any of you to write about ideas that aren’t self-selected, in forms that aren’t self-expressive, for an over-worked audience of one that puts two or three words, random red hieroglyphs, and a permanently-branded number into a ledger that threatens to determine your fate, face it: you would learn to hate writing (and school) too.

Like Sylvia, Jeff Wasserman of When the Hurly-Burly’s Done shares some hard data and classroom anecdotes to help us teachers of real writing wage the war against teachers of the poisonously schooly 5-Paragraph Essay [*jeers and hisses*]. I replied to Jeff’s post,

Jeff, this makes me want to make my AP Lit class Ning public. We’re having forum discussions about Organic Form v. Mechanical (5PE and all that garbage).

I’ve been making them write timed essays without outlining, trusting that an organic form will come from simply responding to the prompt and writing from there.

I modeled it for them by writing an old AP Lit exam essay about a poem, under timed conditions, in a screencast here, for what it’s worth. Interesting to be able to let them into my interior writer’s monologue as I read, annotate, and write a response, recording voiceover all the while, to the same exercise they did.

My best student responded to watching it by saying, among other things, “I didn’t think you could make a one-sentence paragraph in the body of an essay.”

One last tidbit: I took an AP Lit workshop from UCLA this summer – a waste of time, mostly – but got this from the College Board/APL celebrity who taught it: AP Lit exam graders appreciate organic form, “as long as it has a beginning, middle, and end.”

I like that: beginning, middle, end. None of this “introductory paragraph, body, conclusion paragraph” drivel.

Then, instead of sleeping as I’d intended, my mind shifted into overdrive. Sylvia’s and Jeff’s post led to these fantasies of how we can teach real writing (based on real reading in this “infinite book” we call the internet) with web 2.0:

First, students would write self-directed blogs. No homework assignments allowed in terms of subject matter, though standards of style and conventions would be set;

Second, assessment would be based on readership, comments, subscriptions, visitor stats, Technorati authority ranking (with safeguards against fraudulent links, which are easy enough to spot), self-assessment, and other non-authoritarian, teacher-gives-grades assessment styles. (And yes, as usual, it’s the institutional but otherwise counter-educational imperative to grade everything that presents the biggest obstacle to this approach to learning.)

–Wait, you say. That’s not fair. Some students who are not blessed with verbal intelligence will not attract subscribers, visitors, comments, and so forth. But not so fast: the art of compensation with other intelligences is so much more possible on blogs. Not a great writer? Then compensate by communicating through images (see Diane Cordell’s blog), podcasts (see Wes Fryer), films (see Marco Torres and Mabry Middle School), graphic novels and comic strips (see ToonDo). Carve out a niche doing Google Earth productions (see Google Lit Trips) as your blog’s specialty. Find some skill you have, or some passion you want to extend, and adapt your blog to exploit that.

Really: What form of multiple intelligences does blogging exclude?

Third, grades would be weighted toward the end of the year or term, to allow for experiment, dead ends, learning – through – failure, and other writerly discoveries afforded by real-world blogging. (I’m more and more fascinated by the fact that my own blogging has been a real-world case of what we call “project-based learning” in school, and more and more convinced it’s the way to engage young writers to naturally want to hone their skills and excel.)

I shouldn’t have tried to write this right now. Too tired. But these holidays are short, and I love them for allowing this type of reflection.

–

*I’ll probably just buy the domain and host it alongside the Project Global Cooling site anyway, since I’m already adminstering WordPress MU for my school – and soon will train students to administer these sites themselves. It’s so hard to let go of the reins and give them to the young, and so easy to forget that they’re more than capable. But I will ask Scott to boost, support, read, seed, reply

Photo credits:
Writing by oskay
Borg Drones by Dunechaser
Bible 2.0 by jeff w brooktree
Looking by eskimoblood
Fusion Festival 2005 by Udo Herzog