Is math by hand better than math by keyboard?

Sorting books this afternoon, I came across Tahir Yaqoob's What Can I Do to Help My Child with Math When I Don't Know Any Myself? and found this passage:

The actual process of using your muscles to write something is a powerful long-term memory aid. The more that you write out things (and in different ways), the more your long-term memory will be etched out. It is not good enough simply to read and think (although this is important for reviewing large amounts of material shortly before taking an exam, but only if you have done the long-term ground work). Writing out full solutions to problems in math is especially important compared to other subjects, whether it is part of reviewing for exams or whether you are learning new material.

Writing things out can also help you to understand difficult problems. For example, if you see a fully worked solution to a problem in a textbook, but don't understand one or more of the steps, try simply writing out the solution yourself. You may be surprised that while you are doing that, you suddenly understand something that you didn't before. Sometimes the brain has a strange way of working. Despite its enormous capacity , the. brain can really benefit from an external "scratch pad." When you come across something that you don't understand, sometimes just writing out the steps in a brief form can make a great deal of difference.

What Can I Do to Help My Child with Math When I Don't Know Any Myself? Paperback – February 7, 2011 by Tahir Yaqoob - p133

I've always found this to be true, both for C. and for me. I don't know why. One of these days I'll get around to reading The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture, which I hope will explain the phenomenon.

The OECD report on students and technology (Students, Computers and Learning: Making the Connection) found that using the computer for drill was associated with reduced achievement:

The decline in performance associated with greater frequency of certain activities, such as chatting on line at school and practicing and drilling, is particularly large (Figure 6.6). Students who frequently engage in these activities may be missing out on other more effective learning activities. Students who never or only very rarely engage in these activities have the highest performance.

Given my experience, the "other more effective learning activities" these students are missing may be drilling by hand.

Technology coordinators behaving badly

This is rich.

The staff member who informed on Rafe Esquith was the technology director.

I rue the day every district in the county hired a technology director.

Books are better, part 2

In The Atlantic:

A few years ago, I started having trouble helping my son with his first-grade homework. I’m a data-journalism professor at Temple University, and when my son asked me for help on a worksheet one day, I ran into an epistemological dilemma. My own general knowledge (and the Internet) told me there were many possible “correct” answers. However, only one of these answers would get him full credit on the assignment.

“I need to write down natural resources,” he told me.

“Air, water, oil, gas, coal,” I replied.

“I already put down air and water,” he said. “Oil and gas and coal aren’t natural resources.”

“Of course they are,” I said. “They’re non-renewable natural resources, but they’re still natural resources.”

“But they weren’t on the list the teacher gave in class.”

I knew my son would start taking standardized tests in third grade. If the first-grade homework was this confusing, I was really worried about how he—or any kid—was supposed to figure out the tests. I had been spending time with civic hackers, the kind of people who build software and crunch government data for fun, and I decided to see if I could come up with a beat-the-test strategy derived from a popular SAT prep course I used to teach.

In essence, I tried to game the third-grade Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA), the standardized test for my state. Along with a team of professional developers, I designed artificial-intelligence software to crunch the available data. I talked to teachers. I talked to students. I visited schools and sat through School Reform Commission meetings.

After six months of this, I discovered that the test can be gamed. Not by using a beat-the-test strategy, but by a shockingly low-tech strategy: reading the textbook that contains the answers.

Why Poor Schools Can't Win at Standardized Testing

The entire world has completely lost its mind.

The security mindset

From the site Mark linked to:

[S]ecurity also requires a particular mindset -- one I consider essential for success in this field. I'm not sure it can be taught, but it certainly can be encouraged. "This kind of thinking is not natural for most people. It's not natural for engineers. Good engineering involves thinking about how things can be made to work; the security mindset involves thinking about how things can be made to fail. It involves thinking like an attacker, an adversary or a criminal. You don't have to exploit the vulnerabilities you find, but if you don't see the world that way, you'll never notice most security problems." This is especially true if you want to design security systems and not just implement them. Remember Schneier's Law: "Any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can't think of how to break it." The only way your designs are going to be trusted is if you've made a name for yourself breaking other people's designs.
So You Want to Be a Security Expert

This is pretty much the opposite of the mindset in my district.

Technology and discipline (and help desk)

Parents everywhere should be taking a look at their schools' Codes of Conduct, particularly where "technology" is concerned.

Ours are here.

Our Code specifies that "Electronic Media Crime" will be reported to the police.

As far as I can tell, searching the Code, "Electronic Media Crime" is the only form of misbehavior that automatically triggers a call to the police. Even bringing a gun to school, which carries the same penalty -- a one-year suspension -- doesn't seem to require police involvement.

The Code doesn't say what an "Electronic Media Crime" is, and I'm skeptical anyone explains it to the kids.

The district does require students and staff to sign an agreement called "Acceptable Use Form for Computers," but the form doesn't mention that police will be called if a child logs onto the system and does something he shouldn't. (So far it's always been boys.)

At this point, it's looking to me as if computers in schools are a real and present danger to adolescent boys.

Computers are dangerous because public schools don't seem to have real IT people, so the systems are wide open. At least, our system is open. I'm told, by more than one student, that the password for the WiFi system is the same as the password for the teacher section of the network. Lots of students have the password, and some of the teachers rely on kids as young as age 13 to help them with their computers.

I was talking to my California sister about this, and she pointed out that "Technology Directors" in schools aren't trained in IT. They're just teachers with an interest in computers. They don't know any more about network security than I do. (Is that true elsewhere?)

So we send kids to school in buildings where the network has limited security at best, and in a country where "unauthorized access" to a computer is a federal offense.

While you're checking your district's Code of Conduct, you should take a look at the regulations governing questioning of students. Here in New York, schools don't have to notify parents that they are questioning their child, no matter how serious the infraction.

So far I don't see a limit to the length of time school personnel can question students without parents present, either.

Does anyone know whether there are federal regulations requiring schools to secure their networks?

Or whether the doctrine of "negligent supervision" applies?

Florida Teen Charged With Computer Hacking After Changing Teacher's Computer Background To Gay Kiss Image

"Glued to the screen"

With two dozen third-graders using all these apps and programs, technical glitches are inevitable. One girl discovers that the camera on her device is not activated, something Mercaldi promises to fix.

Working on MobyMax, Angelica Moreira cannot call up the math quiz she wants. Other children try to help her, something the school encourages. “We teach the kids how to troubleshoot,” Jackson Avenue principal Janet Gonzalez says. “Some of the kids are teaching the teacher.”

In the meantime, Angelica selects new backgrounds for her tablet. “I do this a lot while I wait around,” she says. But even after her new wallpaper is in place, the quiz will not load. Eventually someone realizes that MobyMax is preventing Angelica from trying a second quiz too soon after taking the first.

Despite being so-called digital natives, the students vary in how expert they are on the iPads and how much they like them. “Some people know more than other people on the iPad and they get jealous,” says Joshua Parr. Joseph Parrino has had trouble with the iPad’s flat electronic keyboard — “my fingers slip,” he explains — and so has brought a plug-in keyboard from home. And several children say they prefer old-fashioned books to the digital alternative.

Glued to the screen: A third grade class where kids spend 75% of the day on iPads
by GAIL ROBINSON | June 18, 2015

The black magic of "technology"

If you haven't read Education Week's new article on education technology, you should. I'll try to get a post up excerpting it later.

Why Ed Tech Is Not Transforming How Teachers Teach
Subtitle: Student-centered, technology-driven instruction remains elusive for most

"Why Ed Tech Is Not Transforming How Teachers Teach" explains, as clearly as anything I've seen, why constructivists want mobile devices in the classroom.

Constructivists want mobile devices in the classroom because mobile devices create student-centered learning.

That's what they think.

And that's what is happening here.

For the administrators who run my district, aided and abetted by a 3-person board majority, "technology" is magic. Nothing matters more.

Nothing matters more because once you have mobile devices in the classroom, the teacher decamps to the back of the room, from whence she can survey students' Google docs.

In the wake of today's traumas, I've discovered yet another horrific aspect of our administrators'  "passion" for technology.

I've discovered a double standard where disciplinary actions are concerned.

An infraction involving technology is punished far more harshly than the same infraction involving paper.

Swipe a set of teacher notes from the teacher's desk and you get detention.

Swipe the same set of notes from the district computer system after having been given the system password by a district technology advocate and you get two hours of interrogation without your parents present and a year's suspension from school. And the police sent to your house.

Because technology.

And see: help desk

Help desk - & another black mark on "technology"

If you are so inclined, could you and anyone else you know like these two Facebook posts?

"Bullies not bulldogs"

Della Lenz, Irvington, NY

Thanks -- I appreciate it.

These are the 3 posts I've written about this situation:

"Important message from superintendent"

Bullies, not bulldogs

Passwords on Post-its (superseded by next post...)

Students were given the teachers' password

More in a second post

Books are better

On NPR this morning:

The book also has fans from other unexpected quarters. David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale, pioneered advances like "parallel computation," yet he admires the brilliant design of the codex. "It's an inspiration of the very first order. ... It's made to fit human hands and human eyes and human laps in the way that computers are not," he says, wondering aloud why some are in such a rush to discard a technology that has endured for centuries. "It's not as if books have lost an argument. The problem is there hasn't been an argument. Technology always gets a free pass. ... [People] take it for granted that if the technology is new it must be better."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

As far as I can tell, the reason inferior technology wins inside schools isn't that "people" take it for granted. 

The reason is that tech companies sell to schools who force iPads and Chromebooks on families and taxpayers.

That's certainly been my experience here.

If your child's curriculum is Google, this may be why

Google 'makes people think they are smarter than they are'

In a series of experiments, participants who had searched for information on the internet believed they were far more knowledgeable about a subject that those who had learned by normal routes, such as reading a book or talking to a tutor. Internet users also believed their brains were sharper.

"The Internet is such a powerful environment, where you can enter any question, and you basically have access to the world's knowledge at your fingertips," said lead researcher Matthew Fisher, a fourth-year doctoral candidate in psychology at Yale University.

"It becomes easier to confuse your own knowledge with this external source. When people are truly on their own, they may be wildly inaccurate about how much they know and how dependent they are on the Internet."

It sometimes feels as if my entire district is now about SEARCH.

And not just SEARCH, but search ON THE INTERNET.

(That can't possibly be right, but that's the way it feels.)

Meanwhile actual books are all but disappearing. The high school kids still have textbooks, but a mom I know tells me that her daughter, who is a good student, never opens hers. She just lugs them back and forth from home to school and back.

Here's my latest intervention on the homefront re: technology: Families looking for technology detox

Station math, part 2

Julie writes:

My 7th grader, who was in an accelerated math class this year (in GA) experienced these same math stations. He said it was like being in elementary school all over again.

This same teacher "flipped" her classroom by making videos of her reading the textbook and examples aloud. He was expected to watch the videos each night before doing homework problems...but he couldn't stand it. He wanted to just read the book to himself and get the homework done.

Same teacher wanted parents and students to follow her on Twitter to keep up with daily assignments...my son has no interest in using Twitter.

Part of what is going on in my district, and I imagine in Julie's district, is that administrators here are focused first and foremost on "infusing technology into the curriculum." This is the prime directive.

Just how to infuse technology into the curriculum remains a mystery, however, so the district has elected to buy a bunch of stuff and have teachers "innovate."

Which reminds me of a funny conversation. (Not funny ha-ha, I'm afraid.)

A fellow dissident here in the district invited me to a meeting she had scheduled with the high school principal re: flipped classrooms. As we sat down, the principal, who is new to the district, told us he "believes in" flipped classrooms.

"I encourage teachers to take risks," he said.

Having spent years of my life chewing over this and related issues, I had a response at the ready: "You're taking risks with other people's children," I said.

"Teachers have tenure and a union, they're not the ones taking the risk. The kids are taking the risk, and they haven't been asked whether they want to take the risk you're forcing them to take."

(I actually said these sentences, out loud. I didn't just think of saying them later on and wish I had. Very satisfying!)

The principal, who seems like a very nice guy, looked horrified. Clearly, it had never crossed his mind that "teachers taking risks" could be construed as anything other than an unalloyed good--let alone a borderline abuse of his authority as head of school, which is pretty much what I was suggesting.

Since then the administration has gotten a bit of an earful on the subject of experimenting with other peoples' children.

But the experiments continue apace.

"Station math" is, I gather, another effort to infuse technology into the curriculum, I guess because one of the stations has movies, and movies are technology.

So....time flies. I'm old enough to remember when SMART Boards were technology.

My district has beaucoup SMART Boards. We had to buy one for every classroom because we had a SMART Board equity gap.

Auntie Ann points out the obvious

Lot of these studies about the problems with reading on screens--including amount absorbed and lack of sleep--need to get through to schools that putting everything on electronic media instead of good old books is a bad idea.

Yes, carrying 3-4 textbooks home every night is like lugging a backpack full of bricks, but there has to be some happy medium out there somewhere.

Thank you!

Can't believe I didn't think of that.

(I did think of it where my own kids are concerned. I've been bugging Chris to get off his laptop in the evening, and I've been asking myself whether I have what it takes to pry Andrew^* from his.)

Put together the finding that e-readers affect circadian rhythms with the fact that teenagers' circadian rhythms are already delayed ....

Yikes.


^* For passersby, Andrew is 20 years old and autistic.

Back to books

I've decided to start turning off my laptop and my iPad at 6pm.

Hmm.

I see it is currently 6:28 pm.

So I'm going to post this, eat dinner, and pick up a book!

Light-emitting e-readers before bedtime can adversely impact sleep

Open the Book, Put Down the Tablet at Bedtime (behind pay wall)

Reading on electronic devices before bedtime can disrupt the body’s circadian clock, making it harder to fall asleep and become alert in the morning, according to a study from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Evening use of light-emitting eReaders negatively affects sleep, circadian timing, and next-morning alertness

I've been reading bad reports on eReaders and sleep for a while now, but it was the finding on next-morning alertness that finally got to me. Before I owned a laptop and an iPad, I never had trouble waking up in the morning.

Now I do.

I may have to re-up my subscription to the paper version of The New Yorker.

Devices in boxes

New York City Comptroller Scott M. Stringer said Monday the city school system has poor inventory controls and inaccurate records, leaving thousands of computers and tablets either missing or unused.

[snip]

The comptroller said his team investigated computers and tablets bought from Apple Inc. and Lenovo Group for nine schools and department headquarters from July 2011 through June 2013.

The report said the department was unable to name the whereabouts of 1,817 laptop and desk computers at these sites, and auditors found 394 devices sitting in unopened boxes, some for years.

Mr. Stringer said he believed this was probably “just the tip of the iceberg” of lost or unused goods among city schools.

Audit: Thousands of New York City School Computers Are Missing or Unused
Report by City Comptroller Says School System Has Poor Inventory Controls
By LESLIE BRODY
Dec. 2, 2014 12:10 a.m. ET

Are there recall elections for 2-billion dollar technology bonds?

Hope so.

Speaking of agency

Speaking of agency .....

Giving a student control over their learning has theoretical and intuitive appeal, but its effects are neither powerful nor consistent in the empirical literature base. This meta-analysis updated previous meta-analytic research by Niemiec, Sikorski, and Walberg by studying the overall effectiveness of providing learner control within educational technology, the characteristics of instruction along the continuum of learner control, and elements of the instructional environments that may play a role in the effectiveness of educational technology. The search terms identified 85 distinct articles, 18 of which met the inclusion criteria (29 effects were computed). The overall effect of including learner control within educational technology was almost zero (g = 0.05), and were also near zero when examining most characteristics of control and classroom contextual factors. Moderate effects were reported for providing learner control within social studies/history courses and for comprehensive technology instructional programs. The effects were larger for behavioral outcomes than academic outcomes, but both were small.

Updated Meta-Analysis of Learner Control Within Educational Technology
Abbey C. Karich, Matthew K. Burns, and Kathrin E. Maki
Review of Educational Research
September 2014, Vol. 84, No. 3, pp. 392–410

Yet another fruitless attempt to transfer adult authority to children.

Proposition 3 sails through...

Post at the Parents Forum. (I borrowed Terri W's line about the number of kitchen tables $2B will buy!)

I realized recently that "technology" has three constituencies:

1. Education reformers who believe in technological "disruption" 
2. Technology companies (for obvious reasons)
3. Constructivists - students look at the device, not the teacher

Mobile devices in the classroom may finally accomplish what progressive education has been trying and failing to accomplish for over 100 years.

A line for the ages

"Binge-spending on technology has a poor track record."

Vote No on New York State Propositions 1 and 3, No on Both Suffolk County Propositions

Stop making sense

From Andrew Cuomo's campaign ad:

I want to invest $2 billion dollars to build the new technology classrooms of tomorrow. And I still believe the best education equipment is the kitchen table, and the best teacher is the parent.
-Andrew Cuomo

Needless to say, I will be voting 'No' on Proposition 3.

Success desk in a library without books

I'm looking through my queue, trying to remember my favorites of the many things I've wanted to post over the past month .... pretty sure this is one of them.

Without stacks to organize, librarians staffing the main reference desk, which is called a success desk, will steer students to tutoring resources and train them in managing digital materials.

While the library is not paperless, students are discouraged from using its printers too much, Miller said. They can buy traditional textbooks in the bookstore, or digital texts when available.

Old-fashioned books can be requested on loan from libraries at Florida's 11 other public universities.

Only in a library with no books will you see a reference desk called a Success Desk.

Ed-tech quiz

Ed-Tech Company or Made-Up Word?

I got 7 out of 9.

Very fun!