Pat’s Polemics

Find your own way to learn

Pat Barrett — Mon, 6 Sep 2010 20:22:06 -0700

A NYT article on study habits

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/health/views/07mind.html?_r=1

brought to our attention by Bob Ponterio, co-moderator of flteach, asks why study skills classes haven't caught on to what researchers have been showing for decades. The old saws and canards repeated ad nauseum will not be jettisoned b/c good study habits are seen as a moral issue, not a practical one. To question them is to be immoral.

Reading through this, I found a number of things I do for myself or do with my students that conform to the research findings. I guess I'm ahead of my times.

You done good

Pat Barrett — Mon, 6 Sep 2010 20:02:33 -0700

On one listserv polemics broke out several times over the adverbial use of "good". One time the phrase that elicited outrage was, "How are you?" "Good". "How's it going?", "How're ya doin'?", etc. all required the response "well" according to a large number of teachers.

Of course, I jumped in by going to the dictionary and finding "good" listed in an adverbial usage, which simply confirmed in the mind of the grammar mavens the reality of a liberal conspiracy to undermine authority in general and God in particular. After all, didn't languag liberals put "ain't" in Webster's Third International in 1963? I was working in a bookstore at the time, a John Birch Society bookstore, no less, and recall with relish the howls of outrage from our conservative customers (yes, there were liberals and Democrats in Goldwater's Arizona).

As I study the grammars of languages related to English, I note a similar slide into Socialistic Communism in grammar usage.

Where are our Rites of Passage?

Pat Barrett — Mon, 6 Sep 2010 13:34:13 -0700

This morning on npr I heard a piece which goes to the heart of my Basics category on this blog. It dealt with a society on an Indian reservation designed for girls entering puberty. It is called the Brave Heart Women's Society. The story is called Four Days, Nights: A Girls' Coming-of-Age Ceremony and is one in a series called The Hidden World of Girls. The Kitchen Sisters produced it.

The society is part of a specific culture, the Yankton Sioux, to use the English names, but is universal in the need for all cultures to have a way to bring girls into adulthood and support them. You can listen for yourself at

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129611281

It almost brought tears to my eyes, not so much b/c these particular girls and this particular culture are in so much danger, danger from outside pressure, from self-destructive behaviors, and lots and lots of exploitation, but b/c their need is so fundamental to making us human.

I think I need to continue on my blog entry about what true conservatism is. This is it.

Meet you at the top....... sucker!

Pat Barrett — Mon, 6 Sep 2010 11:48:02 -0700

We talk about a safe environment for children in our classrooms. By safe, we mean emotionally safe as well as physically safe: safe from bullying, safe from assaults on their ego, safe from gratuitous put-downs, safe from insults to their family and background, etc.

OTOH, we insist on competition in the classroom, pitting one child against another, grading them on a scale from good to bad performance, comparing children, measuring how close or how far they come to meeting a standard set by some committe far away. I always think of that utterly stupid Zig Zigler slogan, "See you at the top!" Moron. The top, by definition in a competitive society, holds only a small number. In a non-competititive society, the top could conceivably be a plateau, a mesa, on which lots of people could fit. But the images projected by the supersalemen and hype-merchants clearly depict a pyramid. Maybe that's why they call them pyramid schemes.

Teachers who want to make all their children successful are praised for their humanity and then fired for not making their class, their school, their district and their state reach the top.

My Dickensian childhood

Pat Barrett — Sat, 4 Sep 2010 16:32:38 -0700

Some years back a very nice man posted frequently to a listserv I was on. He and I disagree greatly about how to teach languages and he often took the conservative view that people shouldn't be cry-babies and he just could not see why students wouldn't go home and do their studies.

In trying to paint a picture of homes where school work might not be the priority, I mentioned a few things in my childhood that interfered with a focus on school. I thought they were pretty mild but he replied that my childhood had been "Dickensian". From then on, I realized he had a white picket-fence view of the world, what we now call a Leave It To Beaver world view. Later, I recounted in some detail the things I had seen as a child, things I made clear were not at all unusual in the world I grew up in.

Before I recount these again,

The U.S. as a colonial society cont'd

Pat Barrett — Sat, 4 Sep 2010 14:14:37 -0700

This is a reply to a thread on the blog Fireside Roundup where education is discussed. A number of posts to the thread used a very broad perspective with which I agreed in principle felt required too much of most people to grasp. I guess that makes me one of those elitists.

This thread leaves me feeling torn. OTOH, if we are trying to reach a wider audience with the notion that discrepanies in educational attainment are due to socio-economic inequalities, we will lose them if we assume on their part the ability to make the connection between the low-performing schools in the poverty-stricken areas of their city and labor policies found in 18th century Brazil. It's just too much of a stretch.

OTOH, it is clear to me that these discrepancies do go back to the colonial foundations of our society. No one who had studied societies around the world would be surprised to find that a group of people, a caste, that had been held in slavery within living memory (my late father-in-law remembered his grandfather, who had been a slave until 1865), was still operating in the society at a disadvantage. No surprise there.

More wonderment

Pat Barrett — Sat, 4 Sep 2010 08:38:47 -0700

More wonderment.

Recently a teacher of Spanish posted to a listserv that she had a child with selective mutism in her class. One response was "now I have officially heard it all!"

Both elicited comments that were quite appropriate, most of them letting the teacher know in no uncertain terms that she needed the support and direction of qualified persons in setting up this child's education plan.

Attributions of characteristics and opinions

Pat Barrett — Fri, 3 Sep 2010 23:20:36 -0700

I just read a post from a fl teacher who uses a classroom reward. In saying so, she commented as an aside that she "knows" giving rewards is a big no-no but "we all work for something."

Two things about this:

One, she states that we all work for something as a way of validating the whole behavioral theory of learning. I am not sure people who say this sort of thing can understand the objection, that it is not to the idea....... sure, I disagree but have no problem with people who say, "As I understand human motivation......." or "The theory I follow says that........" Those are qualified statements, recognizing that others may disagree. But "we all work for something" is a way of saying it that brooks no disagreement. And I do disagree, strongly. I could probably find in five minutes with this person several things she does for which there is no explicity reward.

Two, the attribution to others of viewpoints that they may or may not share. In this case, the writer attributes to some general "they" the belief that giving out rewards in class is a no-no. In this instance, she may be right, i.e. there are any number of schools of thought that proffer evidence that rewards are counterproductive. However, her attribution of this opinion to "them" reminded me of how often I've seen on posts this sort of attribution.

One of the salient ones was when a stalwart of one of the listservs, a politically conservative person with whom I had had plenty of political battles on the list, made a comment when I reported in a thread that I was a strong supporter of the free enterprise system. It seemed that he was surprised that I would be. Why?

Some things to cover this long weekend

Pat Barrett — Thu, 2 Sep 2010 22:22:41 -0700

Lots of things to cover. This weekend I hope to post a lot of entries to the blog.

Daily activities and lesson plans - an overview of what I've done these first 4 weeks plus some particular lessons.

Personal language learning - mainly Norwegian.

African Diaspora - observations of possession

Politics - origin of intransigence

- authoritarianism from a teacher

- the attribution of characteristics & opinions

A list of definitions from a listserv

Pat Barrett — Wed, 1 Sep 2010 19:59:30 -0700

I think there have been a number of interesting points brought up in this so
far rather unwieldy discussion. I've tried to summarize as best I can.
Perhaps others can further clarify any points that they feel I haven't
captured correctly.

Pacing:

And here we go with the Ebonics thing again.....

Pat Barrett — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 19:35:51 -0700

Temptation

How hard not to respond to this to the Listserv (flteach)! The truth is, I did already. This is what I wrote:

"The correct appellation for this dialect of English is either the technical
African-American Vernacular English or the everyday term, Black English or
Black dialect. It is NOT Ebonics.

Secondly, if this dialect were incomprehensible to DEA agents, then
sportscasters would call for an interpreter every time they interviewed an
athlete speaking this dialect, of which there are many.

Commenting available again

Head Geek — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 12:24:34 -0700

I apologize for the recent inability to comment on Pat’s Polemics. But the problem software has been removed and replaced.

How ACTFL irritates me.

Pat Barrett — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 10:06:50 -0700

I remember so clearly my first ACTFL, in Dallas. I met Marilyn Barrueta, David Stillman, and so many others from flteach. I have never found a better place to eat than that Wyndham hotel we were in in 1999 (right name?).

Generally, I love going to ACTFL and usually do. This year I am going to two other conferences so I'll wait until next year in Denver, closer to me. So when I read things connected to ACTFL that bother me, I will say something about them and hope no one perceives it as carping.

Can Latin save us?

Pat Barrett — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 16:20:20 -0700

http://teach.valdosta.edu/WHuitt/files/latin.html
Efficacy of Latin Studies in the Information Age
Alice K. DeVane
(thanks to Amy Rountree)

If you read over this paper, you will note several difficulties presented by the studies it cites.
One is that Latin is not teased out from foreign languages in general, so you are left with nothing peculiar to Latin in terms of benefits.
The other very serious one is that only one study, as I recall, showed a gain before and after the study of Latin; most simply said Latin students are a cut above, which can just as easily be attributed to their being the sort of people who elect Latin as to anything studying Latin did for them.

Naturally, vocabulary in English will be augmented by the study of Latin due to the large amount of words borrowed into English from Latin. It'd be the same for an Urdu speaker studying Persian and Arabic, it's the source of much of the higher level vocabulary in the language.

The higher cognitive functioning is a dilemma for me. I do not believe people learn languages by studying rules, but I also see that if Latin is presented

People will never let go of the word Ebonics

Pat Barrett — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 18:53:08 -0700

This was elicited by comments on MSNBC by a host commentator, Rattigan.
Again, we have the stupid, racist, uninformed b.s. elicited by the word Ebonics. Ignorant people, too lazy to google African-American Vernacular English or just plain Black English - how hard is that? - continue to make jokes about the speech of Black people as if we were still in an episode of Amos 'n' Andy (note the " 'n' " to denote Black people's inability to speak properly as White people do. We know all White people always fully enunciate the d of 'and').

This crap will continue as long as:
#1 racism toward Blacks exists
#2 people are too lazy to read a book or even a wiki article

So it looks like we are in for a long siege - probably centuries. Even Black people join in the stupidity.

Whither N.O. Black culture?

Pat Barrett — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 10:20:33 -0700

Recently I blogged on a scene from HBO's Treme where a tour bus pulled up to a group of Black New Orleanians initiating a funeral ceremony. The mode of "funeralizing" the man was deeply African. The driver of the bus did not at first recognize what was going on and bulled his way into the gathering from the window of his bus. Once he realized it was a funeral and these people were residents of this ruined neighborhood, he showed respect and pulled away. The scene as the group watched in wonderment and bemusement as the bus trundled off was poignant.

Its poignancy lay in...

TPRS as the dominant paradigm

Pat Barrett — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 22:20:43 -0700

tprs going into a whole district is something I've seen recently on a listserv for fl teachers. Then two Spanish teachers needed, tprs-ready preferred. Also, there is a listserv for teachers teaching Chinese to English-speakers wherein most of the teachers use tprs.

More and more, I think my prediction that tprs may become the dominat paradigm in fl teaching is coming true, much sooner than I thought.

What does this portend? Certainly, as a method it has matured greatly in a very short time. The originator, Blaine Ray, is still giving workshops. Some of the earliest proponents are still around (sorry if I make you sound old, guys), posting to listservs, attending conferences and giving workshops. Yet here we are, with schools and even whole districts requesting that tprs be the method used to teach fl.

Ignoring the loud sound of the gnashing of teeth,

Join me in urging talk shows to put real teachers on

Pat Barrett — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 22:18:26 -0700

For years I have listened to radio talk shows, first the highly right-wing talk shows on AM radio back in the 80s and then npr with its panoply of deservedly famous interviewers. What has maddened me over all these years is the way everyone but classroom teachers is invited on the show to talk about education.

Driving me to distraction is the claim that so-and-so is a classroom teacher......... yes, who is on leave b/c he is heading a major project funded by XXX and whose funding is totally dependent on him saying just the right thing. Most often, we get administrators, usually very high up admins; we get the heads of unions, lobby groups, academics, activists, community organizers, promoters of specific methods, and even authors of books-turned-into-movies who spent one whole year in a classroom.

And all of these people are presented as classroom teachers. Yes, 35 years ago for five years of less. Not only are these people speaking for us classroom teachers - the real ones - but they claim to know more than we do. Someone who quit teaching after three years to get a Ph.D. in ed research and now heads a think-tank is not my idea of a classroom teacher.

The real sadness is that even their couple of years of experience has to be buried lest they say something that does not promote whatever they are promoting. The only time you seem to hear from classroom teachers is when they call in, and then, or so it seems to me, they are given short shrift because, after all, they are "just a teacher".

I hope someone joins me in writing a letter to npr (I hold no hope out for conservative venues) to ask them to please contact someone in their area who can give them the names of five or six real classroom teachers... five or six to offset the chance that they'll find a sycophant and suck-up who's bucking for an administrative slot. This panel could come into the studio and the first thing they could talk about was finding a sub for their classes and devising material the sub could handle.

Please join me in composing such a letter.

Just what is going on?

Pat Barrett — Sat, 7 Aug 2010 21:33:45 -0700

Has anyone done a study on the origins on the school culture of punishment? I have Alfie Kohn's Punished By Rewards but haven't read it. Maybe he'll talk about it in terms of what the behaviorist approach to discipline was reacting againt. Most teachers, though, seem to think that people learn b/c they are rewarded and will do better if they are punished....... everyone except them, that is. THEY learn for the sake of learning, for the love of knowledge; but the rest of us shlubs prefer to screw off, mouth off, shilly-shally and dilly-dally, anything but learn.

My first impulse is to look at the personalities of the teachers. How many of them (notice I've switched to 'them' as opposed to 'us') were goody-goody two-shoes type students, always eager to please the teacher, always ready with the perfect homework? I've noticed the look on the face of teachers when I mention that I was not a good student and really didn't care that much about doing assigned work. Because I loved to read, the work in everything except math and science came pretty easy to me. But their reaction is to my oppositional stance. I think it truly shocks them.

Which makes me think teaching may be an interitance from the medieval guilds or religious orders demanding conformity and obedience. How else explain the huge discrepancy in the time spent on how to teach and the time spent on how to punish? Could it be that they remember the kids who were insouciant in the face of their mighty struggles to satisfy the teachers and they still resent it?

No matter how silly these ramblings may seem, I don't think many people will find my observations that far from reality. Anyone who has sat through the endless department meetings where teaching methods and positive approaches to students are given short shrift while detailed arguments are advanced for how many points to deduct for this or that infraction of teacher expectations can wonder with me just what is going on.

It's the law

Pat Barrett — Sat, 7 Aug 2010 21:30:09 -0700

One of the legal squelchers for these blog sites is the right of employers to come after you if you say something negative about them. If they can cite it as slanderous, you can be in legal trouble. So it behoves us all when writing to an open site like this blog to either be careful in how we word our comments and make them very general or disguised, or not say anything critical at all. That's how entities like agencies, corpoations, military units, schools, and so on pat themselves on the back and figure they don't have anything to change. No criticism from those in a position to know, so-called whistle blowers.

So you'll have to forgive me if I'm a little vague. It's not me; it's the law.

A quick language note

Pat Barrett — Sat, 7 Aug 2010 08:03:50 -0700

A Swedish pop-star was just interviewed on npr and said she does not write songs in Swedish, her native language. She enjoys writing in English, in part b/c it offers a kind of resistance, something to overcome, which, she implied, spurs her creativity. She sang a song in Swedish and I was very happy that I understood the first few lines, having spent the summer studying Norwegian. They are indeed quite close. The singer's name is "Robin".

A Great Response to a Complaint

Pat Barrett — Tue, 3 Aug 2010 07:31:44 -0700

Here's a post written by Bob Patrick to a member of a Latin teacher listserv who complained about discussions on the list being taken over by the same five or six people and about being blasted with research that seemed in opposition to classroom experience.

I appreciate the response, and I think I appreciate your frustration. AS
I've said to someone off list about this thread (that never really made any
progress), if you will go back and look at my initial post to you, it was
not debate at all. It contained questions. I really was trying to
understand where you were coming from.

In a follow up post, you told me more

My Norwegian Summer

Pat Barrett — Sun, 1 Aug 2010 17:17:48 -0700

This summer has proved fruitful in terms of language study. The other night I was lying on the floor near where my wife was sitting reading. I reached for the nearest Russian book on my shelf and began reading, just a few paragraphs. Then I grabbed the nearest Urdu book and did the same - at a much lower level of proficiency. Thereby I assured myself that I had many hours of good reading ahead of me, reading the classics in literature and poetry in those languages and a couple of others - Spanish, French, Latin, less so in Italian.
The languages I'm starting on are Modern Greek, Kweyol, and Dutch. The Greek will give me the most trouble but I am very enthusiastic about it. Dutch less so due in part to the cognate-rich vocabulary and absence of morphological complexity. Kweyol will be the easiest since its vocabulary is based on French for the most part though its grammar is entirely different.

With Spanish,

Kids' syntax

Pat Barrett — Sun, 1 Aug 2010 17:10:19 -0700

My 5 year old grandson hasn't got down the inversion of "be" + subject, so he snuck aka sneaked up on me in disguise and asked me "Who I am?" I replied, "By your syntax, I surmise it's Logan."

A query re tprs

Pat Barrett — Sun, 1 Aug 2010 11:25:26 -0700

This in response to a request on my views re tprs and on staying in the TL:

First of all, thanks for recognizing that I am not a shrill proselytizer for one method or another.

Just between you and me, I have a sneaking suspicion that tprs will become the dominant paradigm for teaching fl in the U.S. (and then be overthrown, of course). The reason is not so much that tprs has a monopoly on good teaching practices. I think of the AVID program out of San Diego which has an excellent fl strand in its training, of PACE as laid out in Shrum & Glisan and detailed by Cherice Montgomery, of VanPattens series out of McGraw-Hill on structured input and structured output, of more idiosyncratic and personalized methods like Rassias, and so on.

What tprs offers is what Americans need: A PROGRAM! It is something......