I Speak of Dreams

This Cracks Me Up

Remember these people?

Photo from Jumper Girl's graduation:

The fellow on the right (Scholar Man)  and his fiancée (Scholar Woman--not pictured)  are planning their wedding on Facebook.  Not enough time and  brainspace to actually send out invitations.

And how 2008 is this -- I've just sent Scholar Woman a Facebook invitation to be my friend.

I'm still ridiculously excited.

Skeptics' Circle #82 is Up--The Genesis Version

Bing McGhandi, at Happy Jihad's House of Pancakes,  utterth  the word:

In the beginning, there was Saint Nate.

And Saint Nate moved over the waters in the void…Where’d the waters come from, I’d like to know. What, was Creation a “work in progress”? Was God the second contractor? Anyway, I getteth off the point.

And Saint Nate looked upon the face of deep, deep woo and saw that it was bad. And Saint Nate spoke: “Let there be a Skeptics’ Circle,” and Saint Nate separated the woo from the evidence and he called the evidence “Evidence” and called the woo, unsurprisingly, “Woo.”

Screening Kids in the Juvenile Justice System for Disabilities

Orange County (California) is instituting a pilot program to screen offenders new to the system for learning disabilities

Why? Because the earlier we can diagnose problems in children, the earlier we can address them and keep them from becoming permanent impediments to their future. For example, most juvenile court officers agree that at least 15% of the children that enter the juvenile court system suffer from dyslexia. That means that the kids naturally start to think that they are mentally slow, or worse.

Related:

• Texas:  Cost of untreated learning disabilities to the State
• Interview with Peter Leone at Children of the Code on Juvenile Justice and Reading Disability
• Interview with Robert Wedgeworth at Children of the code, touching on illiteracy and incarceration rates
• Interview with James Heckman at Children of the Code, on the economics of investing in 100% literacy.
• Bill Milliken's Communities in Schools

Reuben Navarette Gets It Right on Dyslexia and Teacher Preparation

Reuben Navarette is columnist at the San Diego Tribune -- his column is nationally syndicated.  Earlier this week, he wrote a column that started out

How's this for a brainteaser?

President Bush's top domestic policy achievement is an education reform law that demands no child be left behind by emphasizing early reading.

And yet, public school students with language-based learning disabilities such as dyslexia - disabilities that make it difficult to learn to read - are still being left behind.

He describes dyslexia accurately, and blames the sad lack of remediation directly where it belongs: in the schools of education failing to train teachers to recognize and remediate dyslexia.

If you like what he wrote, send him an e-mail: ruben.navarrette@uniontrib.com

Catching Sparrows Rounds Up The Edublogging Discussion on Classroom Mangement

Here you go:

Anyway, if you haven’t noticed the recent debates/commentaries on classroom management, you don’t get out into the blogosphere enough, so I’ll bring it to you.

dy/dan posted about classroom management,  Dangerously Irrelevant then one-upped with some youtube videos of teachers gone wild (and not in the high-spirited Spring Break fashion, but perhaps with a similar after-thought of “Oh, man, I hope my parents don’t see this.”).  Then Mr. K at Math Stories chimed in with what was a complete “aha!” comment for me:

“What the “good” teachers do:So, at this school at least, discipline is a huge part of being able to teach at all, much less well. Many of the teachers are successful. They have well run organized classrooms, their students are engaged and learning, and succeeding at it. In talking with one of them, we came to the realization that there are a lot of different styles, but they all have at least one thing in common:

The classroom is culturally isolated from the rest of the school.

Go read and tell her I sent you.

The Science of Spelling

I thought I knew the reading remediation literature pretty well, but here is a book published in 2004 that I'd never heard of:

The Science of Spelling by J. Richard Gentry (ISBN 0-325-00717-9)

Table of contents:

Ch. 1 -- Discovery #1: There is a neurological basis for spelling

Ch. 2--  Discovery #2: The emergence of spelling ability and ablilty to spell words correctly and automatically are different

Ch 3 -- Discovery #3:  You can recognize fivle levles of ememrgent writing, match your teaching strategies to the child's level, and greatly improve the quality of your literacy instruction.

Ch 4 -- Discovery #4: You need good quality intstructional resources for teching spelling (The goodness and evils of spelling books and alternative approaches).

Ch 5 -- Discovery #5: There is one best way to teach spelling -- access and teach each individual --hooray for spelling books

Ch 6 -- Discovery #6 The spelling pathway to literacy is powerful and humane.

Ch 7 -- Discovery #7: A good spelling curriculum makes it easier to know your students.

From Chapter 4:

Seven Methods of Teaching Spelling

1. nondifferentiated, explicit word study anchored in word lists (often embedded in basal reading programs)
2. Differentiated, explicity instruction anchored in word lists (in other words, the whole class doesn't get one "spelling list", but the lists are differentiated based on the child's previous performance)
3. Explicit study of common spelling patterns (the "word sorting" approach)
4. Incidental learning of spelling by reading (the whole language approach?)
5. focuing on writing and teaching spelling in use (like the previous, but with "mini-lessons" as needed)
6. Fad programs (such as "teach only high-use words")
7. Teacher choice (typically a smorgasbord of the foregoing six)

The worst is probably #7--teachers in a fog.

This book, together with Louisa Cook Moates' Speech to Print (ISBN-13: 978-1557663870) should be required texts in teacher-preparation programs.

Classroom Management

One of my graduate school classes has an unsatisfactory data transfer rate.  I'm getting about $0.16 on the tuition dollar value.  Last night's class was so bad it was funny.  One of our classmates was rambling on about a tiny point -- we were supposed to spend about 10 minutes on that section; we ended up spending about 35 and did not get to some more important parts of the syllabus.   The thing was, the instructor didn't interrupt, or redirect, the rambler.

Hmmn.  Maybe I have learned some skills from online moderation, after all.

Bad Moms' Coffee

Was, as usual, hilarious.  The Purple-Haired One ranted recently about redshirting 5 year olds from kindergarten, and that got mixed up with the Spitzer mess, which somehow segued into a conversation about some rather extreme practices in Christian marriages, so of course JennyAlice whipped out her web-enabled phone so B. could read all about it.

Then we all decided that no matter how many challenges life throws our way -- and we have all had more than a few -- those challenges pale besides the ones facing Silda Wall Spitzer  and her daughters.

I tried to read Jo's textbook.  Even reading sentences aloud didn't work--it's a journal article bloated into a textbook.  Whole paragraphs could be boiled down to a phrase.

Anyway, I laughed a lot  and then came home and buckled down.

Brain Gym ("Educational Kinesiology") -- Not Effective

LD Blog guided me to a new article at the Skeptic's Dictionary reviewing  Paul and Gail Dennison's creation, Brain Gym,  written by Robert T Carroll.

The article draws on the series of posts on the foolishness that is Brain Gym written by Ben Goldacre, M.D.

If you really want to add to your understanding of "brain-based education", I recommend that you purchase and study Brain Literacy for Educators and Ppsychologists,  by Virginia Berninger and Todd Richards (ISBN 0-12-092871-X).

All You Need to Know About The Anti-Vaccinationist Mindset

This member of a discussion group wrote:

Re: CDC Announcement
Actually, I try to stay away from the "peer reviewed literature" that many people read because all too often it is either fabricated or contains more "half truths" than anything else. Yes, I have studied well-documented cases conducted by unbiased scientists - meaning they don't work directly or indirectly for the vaccine manufacturer. Those are more believable because they don't have a hidden agenda.

Burning stupid.  I've asked her to prove her allegations.  Let's see how she does.