A reply to Anonymous

My "NGSS: Meet the  new boss" post got some responses by several cogent anonymous sources. 
Here's a response to one of them

:

Dear Anonymous,

The "author" has a name (/me waves to Anonymous), Doyle. While a few of your thrusts do indeed carry some truth, I am touched by the care you put into your thoughtful reply, and will take each point in turn.

It seems to me that the main problem is with this author's ignorance, poor reading comprehension, and hubris, not the standards.

I am plenty guilty of ignorance--I think any time spent with any of my hundreds of posts will show I gleefully share how little I know. My reading skills are reasonably OK for a public school teacher, but I do concede I have trouble parsing obtuse committee-speak. I draw the line at "hubris"--perhaps you meant raging egomaniac (for which I plead nolo contendre). Hubris requires more confidence than I can muster.

I don't think the author's evidently short attention span should dictate the level of complexity of the standards for K-12 science education. Did he think it would fit on a postcard?

Not sure what the point is here, but I will say this--give me a small enough font and a fine enough printer, I can fit the NGSS on the back of a postcard. I like postcards. Send me one!

Moreover, several of his comments suggest ignorance or illogical reasoning on his part, not that of the standards.

For example, the author wrote that sponges cannot move. This is incorrect. Sponges have two phases in their life cycles, one stationary and one mobile. Moreover, even stationary adults control their own structural movement.

All true, but I must confess that my point was not well-stated. To be more blunt, the definition of animal does not require the organism to move. A venus fly trap and a moss sperm both move, and neither is an animal.

Even that's not really the point--the point is that elementary school teachers will be using the standards, and as written, the standards will reinforce current biases.

The author also circled a statement about how most animals and plants use aerobic metabolism. He then complained that anaeorbic [sic] metabolism is also possible, which in no way refutes or suggests the insufficiency of the circled standard. He also complains that the standard does not discuss the production of water, but the author again seems not to have read. The standard refers to carbon-based units of energy, such that aerobic metabolism would result in CO2, but not necessarily H2O. For the latter, the input energy source would need to be a hydrocarbon. Read.

Again, I must confess to sloppiness of writing, if not to thought--the standard, as written, may reinforce prior misconceptions. I think the rest of my comment, the part explaining why tying these processes to tangible matter such as water in order to make it more real for a child, was the main point. (I live with a real writer, and she points out that it's my responsibility, not the reader's, to make the point clear, so I will work on that, dear Reader.)

 
Moving down the list, instincts do not require conscious thought. The author's use of a non-cognitive reflex to suggest that "non-cognitive" = "reflex" is suggestive of the author's poor reasoning skills. Then again, perhaps the author is cognitively burdened when appreciating aesthetics.

Again, the thrust of my words is about language, not science--the NGSS folks say "Some responses to information are instinctive--that is, animals' brains are organized so that they do not have to think about how to respond to certain stimuli."

The "that is" refers specifically to the preceding clause, implying that "instinctive" means "not having to think," which is, alas, too broad, and feeds the common misconception that animal responses are mechanistic.

My wife would agree that I am "cognitively burdened when appreciating aesthetics." She's more succinct. She thinks I'm a lout.

And I am. A loud, proud lout at that. But she's been working on it--I even know who Shakespeare is now.

I'm the lout on the right.

This nonsense continues throughout the author's whole review.

He seems not even to understand subject-verb agreement. For example, he cited a standard that reads, "Each distinct gene chiefly controls the production of specific proteins..." and then suggests that means "one gene, one protein." How is it that he doesn't comprehend "each gene" (singular) paired with "proteins" (plural)? The standard CLEARLY does not suggest "one gene, one protein." READ!

Yep, I've already had a trained geneticist from Columbia nail me on that one--I left it up to tame my raging egomania. It's good for the soul to be dead wrong on science now and again. Still, the standard implies that we know what "gene" means now--and that gets murkier as we learn more. Enlighten me.

 Your point on grammar, though, needs a little refinement--I think you meant that I have issues with subject-object agreement. Email privately if you'd like a lesson.

The author might have valid feedback to offer on the draft--which is presumably the point of submitting the drafted standards for public comments--but he fails to demonstrate any such feedback in this article. In fact, I wonder if his reading comprehension is impeded with some pre-existing bias against the standards.

"The author" attempted to give feedback via the NGSS website, and found the process a bit onerous, onerous enough to fire up the ol' amygdala. I don't have a "pre-existing" bias--I have an existing, well-earned bias against Achieve, which managed to waste thousands of hours of student lives with an open-ended exam here in Jersey that was so bad it was never officially scored.

I enjoy the exchange, and look forward to more.

Cheers,

Michael "The Author" Doyle

The first illustration is by Banksy, I think, and I believe CC, but will delete if otherwise....

A story about basil

Last August, various bees sniffed among our basil flowers, seeking nectar.

Pollen grains stuck to their fuzzy bodies, which they carried to nearby plants and half the chromosomes of one plant joined with those of another. Not sure if the bees or the basil felt anything special, but these acts of communion give me joy.

The fertilized flowers dropped their show-offy petals, their opulence no longer needed once the union was complete, and the flowers got down to the business of making seeds.

Come fall, after the first hard frost, I stripped the dried flowers from their stalks.

In idle moments, I'd unwrap the seeds from the dried flowers, tiny hard black secrets holding next spring's promise.

I gently blow the chaff away from the seeds, and put them away in a small brown bag, tucked in the pantry, hundreds of living organisms, dormant, waiting for the sunlight.

Back in March, when the sun was just starting to win its battle with the dark, I sprinkled a few seeds on a tray of peat moss. Tiny green leaves erupted.

A week or so ago, we put our seedling in the ground, and they've been busy using the sun's energy to grab carbon dioxide from the air, to make more leaves.

Last night we ate the first of this year's batch, as we will, grace willing, until the next hard frost come November.

I am getting older, as we all are, but not the basil, living a lifetime between frosts.

And if there's a point to the story, to our story, we can find it in the basil.

We just have to look.

No point trying to grasp the intricacies of photosynthesis if you cannot see the flowers.

What we risk losing

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

"The Second Coming," W.B. Yeats

I watched a grackle along the edge of our ocean yesterday.

It gallumphed down the surf's edge like a drunken sandpiper, got smacked with a wave, then fluttered back to the top of the now receding wave.

Over and over again.

I sat on the sand with Leslie, and we chatted about our grackle as it battled the wash. I love grackles, hands down my favorite bird, and this one was being particularly grackly. What would possess a bird to challenge the edge of the sea?

After a few minutes, the grackle answered my question--it nabbed a writhing sand crab, then picked it apart a few feet away. The grackle got its reward, and we got our story.
The sand crab did not fare as well.

***

There is a risk challenging those who hope to transform public education into data farms feeding the intricate morass we still call economics. 


Look at the humorless smiles of those running the show, the lupine grins of Arne Duncan, of Bill Gates, of Eli Broad. They may even believe what they are spewing--it takes a certain lack of humor to get to reign over the destruction of things that matter.

They can hurt you, and will if you pose a threat to their goals.

But that's not the risk I am talking about. As much fun as it is to pretend otherwise, a few words shared among a very small community of teachers poses no threat at all to the ed "reformers" who value power over democracy.

• The risk is falling into their language, into their world, into their ethos. 
• The risk is spending too many hours poring over their dull documents (Next Generation Science Standards, anyone?), trying to parse out meaning of individual phrases when we should be calling out the process that created such a document.
• The risk is weighing an offer to make real money sitting at the table breaking bread with them under the hum of fluorescent lights.
• The risk is not losing the battle--I am not so blind not to see that any remnants of "public" and "democracy" are likely to be crushed for the foreseeable future--the risk is losing ourselves.

I am a happy person, blessed with the grace of a grackle wrestling with the ocean for its food.
I am a mortal person, as doomed as the sand crab picked apart by the grackle.

A grackle will still be wrestling with the ocean long after I am gone. So long as grackles continue to be grackles, our children will have larger stories to learn than the ones foisted on them in the name of the global economy.

It takes little courage to tweet in an echo chamber. 

Live well, be part of your community, grow some food, use your hands, love.

Bill Gates from Seattle Weekly. 

Grackle from Wikipedia via CC 3.0 by mdq

NGSS and Achieve

I have been nipping at the heels of Achieve for a flawed draft attempting to push their corporate world-view into public schools. The board of Achieve is made up of "leading" state governors and high level businessmen.

You can squeeze crap into a platinum tube trimmed with gold, but when you squeeze it out, it still stinks.

I may be unfair. It may be that no committee can create the kind of document a teacher needs to effectively teach to a specific group of kids.

Individual teachers, however, create these sorts of documents daily--we call them lesson plans. We tailor them for our classes, playing to our individual strengths, adapting to the real-time assessments good teachers do every minute of class time.


When you're ready to listen, give one of us a call....

 

Here's a list of their contributors:

The Battelle Foundation
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
The Boeing Company
Brookhill Foundation
Carnegie Corporation of New York
The Cisco Foundation
The GE Foundation
IBM Corporation
Intel Foundation
JP Morgan Chase Foundation
The Joyce Foundation
Lumina
MetLife Foundation
Nationwide
Noyce Foundation
The Prudential Foundation
Sandler Foundation
State Farm Insurance Companies
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

More NGSS sputter

The Next Generation Science Standards draft has a mindset error.

We all carry myths. We tend to separate the science myths ("facts") from cultural myths ("stories"), but there are lots of basic science ideas most of us get wrong most of the time even when we can easily observe the contrary evidence.

If you read the above without specialized knowledge, it implies at first glance that we need telescopes to see planets. A careful reading dispels this, since obviously the moon can be seen without a scope, but if you're an elementary school teacher without a background in science you may not be aware that several planets are quite obvious in the night sky.

That we can see Saturn easily in this particular part of the world surprises most folks.

That stars are points of light, and remain points of light even in powerful scopes (excepting a few monsters like Betelgeuse), also surprises most folks. Telescopes add little detail to stars (though the color may be more obvious).

How do I know? We have a sidewalk astronomy club at our school--we go outside and look.

***

So how can we do better?

How do we know a star is a star and a planet a planet? Can a young child tell the difference without a telescope? Does this even matter?

Children learn early on that "knowing" certain things matters in class. The NGSS standards, like the current NJCCCS here in Jersey, perpetuate this nonsense.

Knowing how we know things matters far more in science than any particular fact.

***

So back to our stars--what can a child see?

Go out and find Saturn tonight--now compare it to the stars. There's a difference. Stars twinkle. Saturn does not.

That may be all a young child needs to know to fuel her curiosity.


Now maybe in high school, we can prattle on about discs vs. points, refraction, and all kinds of nonsense, but for a young child, learning how to compare and contrast matters far more than creating a Sherman who can recite facts (and no doubt do well on a standardized test).

Sherman was a damaged child

This confusion about what matters is endemic in the New Gen standards.

Noam Chomsky would have a field day with this document--the language, upon close reading, is both factually "correct" yet feeds cultural misconceptions.The NGSS confounds animals with mammals, electromagnetic radiation with visible light, physical change with chemical, creating an oddly worded document that values its own internal structure more than the universe it purports to unveil to our children.

If we're going to get science right in public education, we need to get it right at the early grades. A child needs permission to observe freely. 

Et tu, College Board?

"The College Board was founded with a deep commitment to equity and must play a critical role in helping all students achieve high academic standards to thrive intellectually and to compete in a global economy." 

David Coleman, new CEO for the College Board

We. Are. Screwed.

I am resisting a very obvious, funny caption here--

David Coleman, the "architect" of the Common Core standards, has made a career at pretending that public education is about making careers. He's gotten very rich doing this.

He's never taught in a public school classroom.
He's never "competed in a global economy."
He's never raked clams.

The College Board may well be committed to equity now, but that was not its founding goal. You can read its founding goal on the College Board website:

In 1900, the College Board was created to expand access to higher education. Formed by a handful of colleges, our purpose was to simplify the application process for students and college admission offices.

The SAT replaced it in 1926.

I do not know much about Mr. Coleman, and he knows even less about me. But I know a bit about public ed, and I when someone's fibbing.

Arne Duncan loves him. So does Jeb Bush.

He also said this:

[A]s you grow up in this world you realize people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.”

Maybe that's true in his world. Maybe that's why the College Board needs to pay over $600,000 $1,000,000 for its CEO.

But I do, and so do a lot of others.

Your in my space now, Mr. Coleman, and you're screwing with my kids, kids who currently pay $87 a pop to support your salary.

I suspect you'll be hearing more from me.

There is a very short list of people with whom I'd never break bread, even if I were offered a million dollars for my trouble.. 

A former President is one of them. Mr. Coleman is on the list. 

Cowardice

I proctored our state end of course biology state exam today.

At least somebody's profiting from all this

I watched the passive resignation of young adults who finished a pointless section in less than half the time allotted, then sat there on a mid-May morning.

They were polite--they've been trained to be.
They were silent--they've been coerced to be.
They were compliant--it's what we want them to be.

I felt dirty.
I went home and planted a few moonflower seeds I had soaked overnight.
So it wasn't a totally wasted day.

By KeepOpera, CC 3.0

But I had no right, none of us do, to subject children to a test that does not count for anything, when they, too, could have planted moonflowers.

And in July, as the sun is starting its journey back south, and the fragrance of a blooming moonflower under a full moon makes me brave again, I'll remember this sin, and ask forgiveness.

At least I can fearlessly teach science until the end of the year now.