Teach Effectively!

Deb Andrews of Oak Grove (OR, US) was a candidate for state superintendent of instruction in Oregon. Altough she was not elected, one of her campaign issues was effective instruction. Although I don’t know enough to consider endorsing her candidacy, I thought it was iintriguing to think of a candidate for such an office taking such a bold stance. Here’s a link to her Web site.

The Fordham Insitute, a non-partisan think-tank in Washington (DC, US) that affiliates with the right-leaning Manhattan Institute, has released a report entitled Whole-Language High Jinks that exposes the misrepresentations of some reading programs which claim to have a firm evidencary base, but actually do not. The report was written Louisa Moats and provides school officials, parents, and teachers advice about how to spot instructional programs that Professor Moats says are only pretenders to the status of being “scientifically based.”
Continue reading ‘Balanced literacy phonies’

Today’s the day that chapter 2, Project Follow Through Begins, of Zig Engelmann’s book, The Outrage of Project Follow Through: 5 million failed kids later, becomes available at http://zigsite.com. To secure your free copy, you need to download it within the next two weeks.

From connecting some dots on David Klein’s efforts and Instructivist, I came upon another valuable video from the folks at Where’s the Math. They hosted a “Community Math Forum” 26 October 2006 in which Professor Klein and Professor James Milgram (Stanford University) examine education in arithmetic and mathematics. There is a streaming video of the presentations that is maintained on TVW, Washington (US) state’s public affairs network.

(Careful observers will see one of Teach Effectively’s highly admired people, Marcy Stein, in the background right at the beginning of the video.)

For a much better illustration of what students are expected to know and be able to do in arithmetic and mathematics, take a look at Practice Problems for the California Mathematics put together by David Klein and others. It’s far less simplistic and sensational than the “test” I posted under the title, “Whew.”

Warning, this links to an advertizing site; it get’s traffic from dumbos such as I who paste the code into their Web sites.

It does give me that chance to sound off about the phony personality tests and such that sites somewhat similar to this one perpetuate. I know both of you readers don’t fall for nonsense such as “What is your MBTI?” (This one has some lighter type inventories, such as “What Muppet charcter are you?”)
Continue reading ‘Whew!’

Today’s the day that chapter 1, Before Project Follow Through, of Zig Engelmann’s book, The Outrage of Project Follow Through: 5 million failed kids later, becomes available at http://zigsite.com. To secure your free copy, you need to download it within the next two weeks.

Over on YouTube there is a video illustrating some of the problems with widely adopted curricula for arithmetic. The video “Math Education: An Inconvenient Truth” is presented by M. J. McDermott, who is a TV meterologist in Seattle (WA; US), and it skewers Everyday Mathematics and Investigations in Number, Data, and Space®.

The focus of the video, which is promoted by a Washington-based group named “Where’s the Math” and is aimed at informing parents, focuses on the teaching of algorithms (strategies of systems for solving problems) in arithmetic. Teaching problemsome algorithms is only one of the problems in faulty arithmetic (and other) curricula; other problems include inadequate demonstrations of the algorigthms, insufficient practice of them, weak choices of the examples used in teaching, and etc. Beyond the problems with algorithms, there are similar problems with teaching fundamental concepts, promoting numbersence, and on and on.

So, check the video. If you want, visit Where’s the Math’s Web site.