The idea that every ignorant patois is a priceless antropological marker is a damned disease. Back the idea, and you will rapidly doscover no one of merit will have anything to do with you, because the most lenient and forgiving of the investigative arts requires articulation.

Know where you end up, racing to the bottom, "professor"?

P.S.: I expect this idiot to have the full backing of teachers' unions, currently engaging in such gross exaggeration of their accomplishments as to make used-car salesmen both green with envy and apparent paragons of virtue.

> 'You know what's not "compassionate"? The work world and competing for a job.'

Patience, patience. That'll be fixed later.

“You know what's not "compassionate"? The work world and competing for a job.”

To be fair, in order to achieve their ends, this *competing for jobs* thing has to go too.

The first breakout will "focus on redesigning writing courses' assessment ecologies in ways that reduce the negative effects of a single standard of writing used in conventional grading practices."

Pro tip: If you see a phrase like "assessment ecologies," you can safely assume nonsense will follow.

If we continue to “focus on ‘settled’ phenomena as well as ‘settled’ perspectives and relations to phenomena”, which rely on and reinforce recursive whiteness and settler privilege while simultaneously dismissing, diminishing, and denying other ways-of-living-with-nature, presence, and futurities, it will remain but a tokenistic inclusion which serves to distract from the more unsettling demands of this work and is often primarily an effort to reconceptualize and recenter the subject of dominance.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42330-018-0020-5

UW-Tacoma tuition is $20K/year for instate, and about $50k/year out of state.

https://www.tacoma.uw.edu/admissions/tuition-costs

Tad is also a body-builder. I’d say his ‘roids have affected his brain.
http://www.bodybuildingpro.com/tadinoue.html

The lecturer has a book in review. Do you think the publisher is evaluating it based on "effort"? How do you prove effort? I had a coworker (white woman) who was always telling the boss how hard she was working, but never producing anything. Since the boss was her friend, he fell for it, but I don't recommend this as a work strategy.
The practice of writing coherently also teaches us how to think coherently. If your thoughts are a collage then so will your writing turn out. A business plan is writing. A sales report is writing. A proposal for a new product is writing. Even a trip report is writing. It is not an irrelevant skill. Tell me, who exactly is the racist in this story, this prof or someone demanding that teachers teach?

It's past time for accreditation agencies, including government ones, to crack down on this practice by pulling the plug on schools that tolerate this type of sloppiness -- even from students, much less from instructors or administrators.

That goes even more strongly for the K-12 school system. Anyone who graduates elementary school speaking "ebonics" has been cheated by the system. Teach and expect kids to speak the one and only kind of correct American English, and universities will no longer need to resort to affirmative action to get diverse student bodies. And as a bonus, their black students will begin to actually graduate in significant numbers.

We are no longer an aspirational society. We no longer aspire to be educated, to be seen as educated, to acquire the mannerisms of the educated.

We're happy being tattooed and pierced morons, our upper classes and adults seeking the mimic the look and attitude of angry teenaged refugees.

The main difficulty I see from when I was in school is that there is no one specific English language. From high school I went to a community college and then transferred to a private college. Each one had a different set of rules.

In high school it was a lot punctuation. In the private college they used a minimal punctuation system...except for the Harvard comma I think it is called. The CC was some what in between. I took a philosophy class at the private college and they had a bit different take on language. I mean more than just the formal proof language.

I could certainly see easing up on some of language rules. I think effort should count for something...

A relative of mine is getting a D in high school math instead of an F because he goes in for tutoring twice a week from his teacher and another day from a different teacher.

Why should we expect teachers to enforce articulation, when so many of them cannot pass 10th-grade reading tests already?

"I could certainly see easing up on some of language rules. I think effort should count for something..."

Bullshit. You don't go to college to be told that what you're already doing is OK.

You're angling for participation trophies. Stop it.

Get a comma in the wrong place in law, and somebody goes broke and starves. Get a decimal place wrong in engineering, people die. Spell a chemical wrong, kill a patient or destroy a process.

Details are why your phone, car and TV work.

Do they mean grading based on the depth of the ideas rather than on grammar and punctuation?

I guess my thought on this is... it depends.

Are we taking someone who barely speaks proper English and getting them to write a paper, and measuring their progress and improvement? Are the grades meant to be a reflection of the students' progress, or are they meant to reflect a certain mastery of the material? Who are the grades for... the students themselves or future employers to gauge them by?

Took my kids skiing this morning. The big one went parallel down all the slopes of the mini-area we skied at (we are cheap and went to the free slope because paying for tickets when we're just escorting kiddos down the kiddie slope is something we'd rather not do). The little one went down with me and her Papa. She slipped a bit, fell a lot. But she got as many, probably more, "Wow, you're doing great! That is amazing! Look at you go!"s than her big sister did. Were we being benevolent agists?

The reality is if you have a kid who comes in with no skills and you just constantly give them Fs, that's going to be very discouraging for them and make them less likely to improve.

The end goal should be to write well, but what's the best way of getting them there?

Personally, I AM in favour of tracking which was a very unpopular opinion in ed school.

Or maybe have individual goals for them, and grades and comments for that, but a separate rubric for mastery of the material and a certain standard to pass.

This issue is going to be need to be considered in these parts, because in some schools we have so many refugees and immigrants who speak no German or French and aren't even literate in their native language, that it's becoming an issue. Just issuing our equivalent of F, F, F, F, F is not going to be helpful. If you see that in a year someone goes from not speaking the language to learning the alphabet to writing simple stories, that's a fuckload of improvement and shouldn't be discounted.

“The reality is if you have a kid who comes in with no skills and you just constantly give them Fs, that's going to be very discouraging for them and make them less likely to improve.”

That ship sailed about fifty years ago.

Handing these kids A’s and pats on the head does nothing to advance them beyond the prospects of a job where there will be quite easily and effectively replaced by a machine in ten years.

The reason grades have become meaningless is because they are measuring meaningless skills, and subjective criteria.

This was a deliberate plot on the part of the educational establishment, and the teachers unions. Because if you can’t measure student achievement, then you also can’t measure teaching effectiveness or proficiency. Why would the union what that?

Let’s get away from eggshell education not designed to hurt your little darlings feelings, and go to a standardized exit testing system in every subject which will gain you admission to the next level class that the subject area test is a meaningful prerequisite for.

Very cut and dried, and does nothing for the self promoting professional educators whose job seems to be everything these days except for what they should be doing.

Forget about grades, forget about socialization. Just focus on the one thing you can control. Masterly of the material.

Unfortunately I think writing is a very subjective subject, it is a means of communication rather than an end in itself. In these days of word processing and wide spread plageriism, I am not in favor of testing it at all except in the context of proficiency in another more objective subject area.

Also learn to read, and read well first. Poor readers do not make good writers. It can’t be done.

I didn’t really learn to be a good writer until faced with essay exam after essay exam in my history major. Even then, my spelling is still suspect because I am a bit dyslexic and a whole word reader. No, I can’t do phonics. I had to do reverse phonics.

Fortunately I covered a lot of my faults with pretty but rather illegible handwriting. It was a dead giveaway, in what was supposed to be an anonymous grading system, but never was.

This whole business is a response to certain people having trouble meeting universal standards. The world is full of people whom when at home speak some dialect or one of the smaller languages. When you are at home you relax, you speak with your peers in whatever slang/dialect/language you like, everybody does that.

If you want to participate in the bigger world out past where your local habits end, you learn the ways of that bigger world, just like everybody else did when they went out there. It's not really a black/white/Spanish thing, it is how the world works, no matter who you are.

Teaching people to reliably fail when they go out into the big world is not helpful.

I could certainly see easing up on some of language rules. I think effort should count for something... ~ The Former Banker at January 5, 2019 1:16 PM

No.

Which language rules do we "ease up on?" The ones that enable the student to communicate his point with little-to-no ambiguity. Or the ones that enable him come across as a semi-intelligent person with a point to make.

Peruse the Internet for a while -- reading the comments section of any article -- and you'll realize why language rules exist.

"I seen them go into the store...."

"They have drank that before...."

Would you mistake anyone who used those phrases as an educated person? Both phrases were uttered by people with Bachelor's degrees from accredited colleges.

And such poor communication is invading spaces in which it should have been barred at the gate.

I was watching a news report a few years ago and the teaser said "Up Next - Freak Sheik." I was hoping the report was about an eccentric Arab chieftain, but no. It was about how freak shows were becoming chic (and, yes, the announcer pronounced that work, "chick.")

Good points, NicoleK. Though Isab also hinted at a good point; you can't expect people to write well if they never learned to enjoy reading. (Dutifully reading assigned books and writing reports on them, only to forget them, is not the same as reading for FUN at your grade level or higher.)

But you can't force anyone to fall in love with reading - it's not an exact science when you're the teacher or the parent. Also, the 9th-grade teacher who wrote "Parents Who Love Reading; Kids Who Don't" said she's lost track of the number of parents who come to her at the beginning of the school year and say sadly: "I just don't know why he doesn't like to read. We've read to him ever since he was a baby." She said that very often in those cases, the previous teacher was to blame.
___________________________________________

We are no longer an aspirational society. We no longer aspire to be educated, to be seen as educated, to acquire the mannerisms of the educated.

We're happy being tattooed and pierced morons, our upper classes and adults seeking the mimic the look and attitude of angry teenaged refugees.
_____________________________________

Conan, that reminded me of what I said a while back:

(There was) an article from the early 1990s, maybe, by a high-school teacher.

In it, he told of how a class of teens in a middle-class(?) high school flatly refused to contemplate the idea that one purpose of high school is to expand your vocabulary. Quote (not verbatim) from a student: "If you people (adults) would only talk like everyone else, we wouldn't need all those extra words."

Reminds me of how some people say that nowadays, the purpose of college is to prove you have a high school education.

“But you can't force anyone to fall in love with reading - it's not an exact science when you're the teacher or the parent.”

But you can structure classes so that students must do it, in order to succeed in the class.

I remember quite fondly my sophomore English teacher, who was for some inexplicable reason, one hell of a football coach also. I guess being a good coach and a good teacher may be one and the same thing?

Anyway, back to my point. One of the things that we did, in class and out of it, was directed reading.

We read a classic book, and answered questions about it. The one chosen was a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
Of course, I read it straight through for fun, and then went back and re read to answer the questions.
There was also a test at the end that covered various concepts in the book.
You could not Cliff note your way through this. You had to read the book.

It seems to me that contemporary education and credentialing is all about obscuring poor educational outcomes rather than correcting them. Lots of pretending going on to cover up real differences in educational achievement between groups, individuals, and fad educational theories that seem to be recycled on about a thirty year rotation.

Coincidently it all seems to resemble what goes on with the ballot boxes in democratically controlled cities.

As I see things you can't improve education outcomes without discipline. And since schools have given up on discipline they understandably have little effect on education outcomes. Hence the desire to hide all the poor outcomes as well as the different outcomes different cultures have.

Of course that begs the question what value are the schools? If the quality of the teachers has near zero influence on the outcomes of the students why pay more than minimum wage for teachers?

I'm a big fan of education and a big fan of good teachers. But many US public schools aren't that interested in education.

"Who are the grades for... the students themselves or future employers to gauge them by?" ~NicoleK

That is a big problem with schools today. Just what are they actually doing? Clearly they don't know. Or don't want to admit to it. You've essentially said grades and diplomas from your classes are worthless to anyone but the student. Why should any employer care if one of your students has a diploma? It doesn't signify anything.

How about not everyone has to graduate. How about if you don't pass the class you don't just get passed on to the next year. Why does everyone have to be the same age in the same classroom? Tradition?

Isab, I was actually thinking of something a little different, I've been ruminating this a bit.

And Ben, I've also been ruminating about the age grouping thing .

So there are two issues... learning new skills (from wherever you're at) and being able to prove you've learned said skills (for the employer, next level of educator, etc)

You all are going to think I am idealising the past, but when you read ye old victorian novels you see a VERY different idea of school organisation. You've got all your kids aged 7-17 in one classroom. Then they are divided by ability into groups "First reader" "second reader" etc. So you could be in the first reader but the third math book. You could be faster or slower than the other kids your age, but you'd still be in class with them.

The thing about teaching today is it is separated by age, so if one kid stays back a few years and is the only ten year old with seven year olds, it is weird, and awkward, and doesn't work well. But what if, as Ben says, all the classes were by skill instead? Being a ten year old in a class of a bunch of seven year olds, some eight year olds, and a couple nine year olds wouldn't be as weird or awkward and wouldn't create the same social problems. (And don't underestimate the importance of social problems).

The other thing is teachers are told to differentiate by skill level, and are given classes with lots of skill levels, but the materials they're given don't really have that built in, so it requires a whole lot of innovation that realistically, the teachers don't have time for. It would be much easier if they were given the first reader, second reader, etc. Or if the lessons were designed for level 1, level 2, etc.

So let's say there was a slower kid, who is low skill and so is on the Basic Geometry book. He does well on it. You give him an "A" in "Basic Geometry" and you give the kid who mastered the advanced book an "A" in "Advanced Geometry" . You could also get a B or C or whatever in those subjects.

Grade on specific skills rather than in the age group your are in.

And then when you finish the skills, you finish them, when you've mastered them all you move on.

“You all are going to think I am idealising the past, but when you read ye old victorian novels you see a VERY different idea of school organisation. You've got all your kids aged 7-17 in one classroom. Then they are divided by ability into groups "First reader" "second reader" etc. So you could be in the first reader but the third math book. You could be faster or slower than the other kids your age, but you'd still be in class with them.”

You have to remember that there were no government mandates then, insisting that the unmotivated, and unintelligent be mixed into the group. There were much lower literacy rates, and most students did not proceed beyond the 8th grade. The instruction was reading, writing and simple math.

A mixed age classroom works fine when any discipline problem can be kicked out of the group. But when the law says the disrupters and the uneducatable have to be there the instruction falls apart quickly.

My mother taught these sorts of classes in rural Wyoming in the fifties. They are exactly as good as the quality of the teacher. Something in short supply out of Ed schools these days.

For most motivated students now, individual work on a computer proceeding at their own pace would be far superior. Especially for subjects like foreign languages.

I don’t think mixed grade simple instruction can hold most children’s attentions. Too much competition from electronics.

We can do mixed age education. After all we've done it before. The problem is the transition from a purely age based system to a skill based one. I think it would be a good direction to go but I admit there will be costs both financial as well as social in making the change.

That said even in a skill based system you will find the majority are still moving on at the same age. You just free up the outliers to move more naturally. And just because someone is slow at one point doesn't mean they can't accelerate at another. Essentially you are adding a bit more flexibility into the system so teachers don't have to fight biology for the sake of conformity.

But the truly key point is discipline. If you can't kick out disruptive students they can prevent everyone else from learning. If there are consequences for poor behavior people change to not act poorly. When the only discipline tools a teacher has are poor grades for a student who doesn't care or complaints to parents who also don't care the teacher is essentially powerless. Without discipline the skill based thing doesn't matter.

Isab, the distraction stuff from electronics is nothing new. Yes the electronics are new but there have been distractions for thousands of years.

Isab, the distraction stuff from electronics is nothing new. Yes the electronics are new but there have been distractions for thousands of years.

Ben at January 7, 2019 7:30 AM

I kind of agree with you, but at the same time I don’t. Kind of like welfare, and open borders.

In any traditional model education system, with a teacher up front, and students in a group, you can have mandatory classroom attendance in which case, most of your instructional time will be taken up by babysitting and discipline issues or you can have quality instruction. And that quality of instruction will be very dependent on the specialized skills of the instructor above a very basic level.

The only way to get away from the distractor of easily available entertainment almost everywhere is to have education largely computer based and self paced. You need structured rewards to keep the children on task. And you need to let those children go who can’t learn or won’t learn in the system you have set up.

Kids who can’t read or do math cannot be advanced on to classes where they pretend to participate in material that they are not ready for.

Back in the Victorian age, the wealthy hired tutors for their kids for a reason. They knew that many children and one teacher was a sub par experience. The wealthy still do this, for the obvious reasons.

Like piano lessons, and tennis instruction, the optimum configuration is one on one. Every parent and educator inherently understands this, but the government likes to pretend that the product they are offering, group instruction, and minimal amounts of time on task, with a unionized instructor, and an emphasis on group dynamics, is an education. It simply isn’t. It never can be. It is a pretense.

"grading ain't just grading."

When I was a child, growing up in the South, we got punished for using the word "ain't". It was widely viewed as ignorant. To this day, I only use "ain't" when I'm being sarcastic about something.

"When I was a child, growing up in the South, we got punished for using the word "ain't". It was widely viewed as ignorant. To this day, I only use "ain't" when I'm being sarcastic about something."

The power of early - very early - social pressure...

"Ain't" was used in genteel England as a contraction of "am not". Its shunning was and is an example of virtue signalling.

There is one group in the US, who in 300 years, has not been able to assimilate and learn standard English; instead they speak generation after generation an argot that is short on conditional tenses, complex structure and logical organization.
Perhaps, this group in the distant pre-historical past, never inherited a version of the FOXP2 gene, associated with language, and microcephalin D gene, associated with brain development, that allow complex expression and ideation, this this genetically underprivileged group is forever condemned to a childhood of the mind, and in order to maintain PCness and enforce the doctrine of equality of outcome, the un-endowed majority must be taught down and dumbed down.
Anyone want to lay odds on when Evolution is going to be removed from the US curriculum at all levels, and Human origins research is going to be de-funded, because the results are anti-PC?

There is one group in the US, who in 300 years, has not been able to assimilate and learn standard English; instead they speak generation after generation an argot that is short on conditional tenses, complex structure and logical organization.
Perhaps, this group in the distant pre-historical past, never inherited a version of the FOXP2 gene, associated with language, and microcephalin D gene, associated with brain development, that allow complex expression and ideation, this this genetically underprivileged group is forever condemned to a childhood of the mind, and in order to maintain PCness and enforce the doctrine of equality of outcome, the gene endowed majority must be taught down and dumbed down.
Anyone want to lay odds on when Evolution is going to be removed from the US curriculum at all levels, and Human origins research is going to be de-funded, because the results are anti-PC?

See also...