Focus on the SAT at the national college conference

Cyril E. Power The Exam Room

Study of Standardized Admissions Tests Is Big Draw at College Conference - article in Monday’s NYTimes

and

College panel calls for less focus on SAT’s

I’m looking forward to hearing more from the PDS college guidance team who were at the conference in Seattle last week.

“…larnin’.” It’s the key that opens all doors.”

William Woodruff – eminent historian, academic and chronicler of a bygone era- died last week. His is quite the story of a passion for learning found long after childhood.

As a toddler, William stood on an orange crate next to his father to learn about weaving. At 10 he spent more time on paper routes than on school, and he dropped out at 13 to work in a grocer’s store. At 16, he hitched a ride on a truck to London with only a watch, comb, handkerchief and knife — and his first book, “The Wonderland of Knowledge,” a pictorial encyclopedia that he had acquired by saving up Lifebuoy soap coupons. He found work in an iron foundry.

…from the obituary in the NYTimes

He discovered a love of learning as a young adult and found his way to Oxford and a life in academia on three continents. His autobiographical The Road to Nab End was published in 1993 and portrays a long gone past of growing up working class in Lancashire.

Here’s a short extract about learning to read and write and America:

“My debt to grandmother Bridget is even greater than that which I owe to my sister Brenda. Nightly, she taught me to read and write. I think she gave me the attention she should have given my mother when she was my age. Grandmother stood over me while I struggled to link word to word, sentence to sentence on my slate. ‘Practice makes perfect,’ she said as I cleaned my slate. Her wrinkled finger followed mine when I tried to read a children’s English grammar she had borrowed from the Public library. Work done, she would tell me about the library books she had read. She didn’t go in for the classics like the Penny Reader, Mr Peck. She liked to read the novels of the time. She was fond of the books of a writer called Warwick Deeping. I suspect she liked him because he had written a book about an Irish girl called Kitty.

She also talked about America. She believed that America was the largest, richest country in the world. Beyond the packed cities and skyscrapers of the American eastern seaboard, she told me, were endless grasslands reaching to high mountains. Everything was big. ‘One day you will go to America, Billy Boy,’ she said, as if it had all been arranged. As I got older she became more concerned about what was to become of me. ‘You can go a long way’ she would say, shaking her lace cap at me. “That’s if you wish to. But you won’t go without “larnin’.” It’s the key that opens all doors.”

Many Minds: Differentiated teaching

Good introduction to Carol Tomlinson’s work on differentiated teaching – the theory that teachers can work to accommodate, support and build on students’ diverse learning needs – in this issue of Teacher magazine. One size does not fit all.

Slow food, slow mind: John Cleese and the promise of the tortoise brain

There’s a slow food movement so why not a slow mind movement?

Some years ago Guy Claxton wrote Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: How Intelligence Increase When You Think Less. It made a compelling argument that the mind works best when we trust the unconscious – our “undermind” tortoise mind.

The hare brain is the deliberative, logical, conscious thinking we all engage in and prize so highly. It’s when we apply reason to data and draw logical conclusions. The tortoise mind is more leisurely. It takes it’s time. It plays with ideas and explores possibilites. It drifts, daydreams and sleeps on the problem.

We live in fast times and blink our way to decisions. We prize the “hare brain” with its fast, decisive efficiency. We believe in the power of immediacy. Two candidates for president debate for 90 minutes and we must know who won and why and what we think the minute they step down from the podium. We give children timed tests and prize the speed with which they can fill in the blanks and pencil in the circle.

The underlying assumption is that certainty and speed trump ambiguity and contemplation. And yet – hasn’t it always been true that taking time and allowing for ambiguity lead us from knowledge to wisdom? All this much vaunted “rigor” puts a rush to judgment and blind certainty on a wobbly pedestal.

Claxton makes the case for allowing ourselves to be less analytic. And he bases it in cognitive science. Hare-brained problem solving under pressure may not be the best way to find the best solution.

John Cleese wrote an excellent piece in Edutopia picking up on the connection between thinking, teaching and creativity. Here’s how it starts:

I was a history teacher for ten years and I enjoyed it very much indeed. But today’s educational trends, which focus on specific metrics of accountability, represent a fundamental change in mind-set that demands some pretty astounding creativity on the teacher’s part.

I’ve been interested in what makes people creative ever since I started writing forty years ago. My first discovery was that I would frequently go to bed with a problem unsolved, and then find in the morning not only that the solution had mysteriously arrived, but that I couldn’t quite remember what the problem had been in the first place. Very strange.

Then I came across research done at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1970s by Donald W. MacKinnon. He had examined what made people creative, and he found that the professionals rated “most creative” by their colleagues displayed two characteristics: They had a greater facility for play, meaning they would contemplate and play with a problem out of real curiosity, not because they had to, and they were prepared to ponder the problem for much longer before resolving it. The more creative professionals had a “childish capacity” for play — childish in the sense of the total, timeless absorption that children achieve when they’re intrigued.

This is fascinating, but it’s completely countercultural….

We often don’t know where we get our ideas from, but it certainly isn’t from our laptops. They just pop into our heads somehow, from out of the blue. They’re not the result of fast, purposeful, logical thinking.

We all understand that the slower kind of thinking regularly works for us. Yet, for some reason, we don’t quite trust it.

Cleese continues to tell of his delight in discovering Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind.

He speculates on why the hare brain dominates and why the tortoise brain has been neglected. “… the hare brain is articulate. It can explain its thoughts and solutions because it’s consciously aware of its own activity. As the math teacher says, you can show your figuring as you go along. The hare brain can always justify itself.”

The tortoise mind finds expression over time and often in new and unexpected ways

Trusting the tortoise mind and connecting the conversation to the hare brain seems the way to go. After all, even though the hare was faster but lost its way speed, efficiency, critical thinking and analysis are useful. The tortoise was slower but stuck to it and won in the end. Giving ideas time to marinate and allowing them room to find expression is also invaluable. Get the flow going. Working together perhaps hare and tortoise could have come up with something better to do that compete just for the sake of it.

Cleese concludes with this promise:

When we’re stuck, when we see we’re just digging the same hole deeper, that’s when we need to use our tortoise mind. … it will always produce new ideas.

Warning: Reading level alert

Proceed with caution. According to this readability analysis this blog may be below your reading level. Click the pic to enter your url and get your level.

Keep calm. And carry on

In a time of crisis and turmoil it is sometimes valuable to turn to the past for reassurance. So:

– worse things happen at sea
- we’re in it together
- nobody died
- we all have to do our bit
- if it’s got your number on it
- keep smiling through
- and – that great bromide and cure-all for problems big and small -- never mind, put the kettle on for a nice cup of tea

And remember – some things are always valuable and a world class education is one of them. So let’s concentrate on what matters – our children, their future. And that of course means our future too.

And remember – as my mother always said- worse things happened in the blitz. And google took off as the dot.com bubble burst.

(We did consider suspending school so we could focus on Wall Street and Washington but decided that education need not grind to a standstill. Education, like democracy, requires active engagement. Being there, showing up and getting into things matters.)

Drink your tea before it gets cold.

An amazing new periodic table

Take a look at this fantastic tool.

How many of these skills do you have at your mousetip?

Since 1996 I’ve worked in schools where laptops are ubiquitous for older students. Back in that day we had lots of conversations about visual literacy. I think we may have had in mind an illustration here, a graph there and lots of photographs.

It’s now a whole new world. The ability to evaluate, apply, or create conceptual visual representations is a key skill. Just take a look at this “periodic table” of presentation possibilities from Visual Literacy.org

How many of these skills do you have at your mousetip? And which ones are suited to which projects and presentations? Click on the picture and roll your mouse over the “elements” to get a sample image of that visualization method.

And to answer the question of how many for myself…very few.

PDS for Peace

It was International Day of Peace last Sunday and today the middle school assembled on the soccer pitch and formed a human peace symbol The idea for this event came from a 5th grader who wanted to send a symbolic message about the school’s support for International Peace Day. After assembling as a peace symbol, students and their teachers enjoyed a moment of silence to reflect upon global conflict and the individual role they might play in making the world a more peaceful place. The event ended with the singing of Give Peace a Chance led – spontaneously – by a 6th grader.

What counts

From the colorful and personalized counting books of the pre-k to the calculations of trigonometry via an intriguing problem on the SmartBoard in the 5th grade classroom. (There’s more than one answer.)

Kind Words

When you write a blog for the world to see you can never be sure who reads it nor what they think. Keeping site statistics is one thing. Stats tell me how often, and how long and where from but not whether it mattered.

Comments are always appreciated and thank-you to everyone who has taken the time to write. This weekend I discovered two responses to The Compass Point.

My April 2007 story about the flying cats of Borneo has consistently drawn more visitors than any other. It’s the true story of the 20 or so cats parachuted by the RAF to tackle the rats after a chain of unintended consequences connecting malaria, DDT, and bubonic plague. The RAF also dropped”two cases of stout” – presumably Guinness – for an “ailing chieftain”. The story as told all over the internet also suggested a need for a corrective dose of critical thinking and factual research. It was picked up in a number of places and now by the Plexus Institute – ” a not-for-profit organization that was formed in 2001 by a small group of people from diverse backgrounds who shared a vision of discovering the most beneficial uses for the insights from complexity science….”.

And then this recommendation from Jonathan Martin’s The Good High School Project. (I love the title description: Welcome to The Good High School blog. In part an homage to Lawrence-Lightfoot’s seminal book of the same name, and in the spirit of the student shadowing in Thompson’s Pressured Child, this blog intends to offer an ongoing reflection upon, and conversation about, secondary school best practices in the 21st century. As Thompson says about his project shadowing students: “A critical part of our job as educators is to understand a child’s daily experience in school… Let’s go back to school.”) .

I am glad to have discovered what is already a very helpful and interesting blog and a selective repository and synthesis of what matters most.