Teaching

Public school teachers seem to be enduring a lot of vocal criticism these days, as politicians and “reformers” call for measures that tie student performance to teacher job security.

While genuine public discourse about educational policy and philosophy should be a good thing for us all, it’s all too easy to lay the “accountability” at the feet of teachers and ignore the many other factors that contribute to student “performance”, some of which may be even more fundamental to student success.

For example, it turns out that if we provide students with healthier, more nutritious meals, they will perform better and miss less school.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/apr/10/school-dinners-jamie-oliver

Test scores up.  Absenteeism down.  Lifetime income substantially raised.  All by replacing industrial, highly-processed cafeteria food with the real thing.

I always liked Jamie Oliver.

I will be presenting today at the 2012 TEDxNYED conference at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York.

http://tedxnyed.com/2012/speakers/patrick-honner/

I will be giving a short presentation on creativity and mathematics.  I am very excited to be a part of the event, and to see other presenters like Christopher Emdin, Frank Noschese,  Bre Pettis, and many others!

The event will be live-streamed.  More information can be found at the TEDxNYED website.

An absurd reading passage from the New York State 8th-grade English exam was published in a local paper, along with the inscrutable questions that followed it.  The passage, described as “a non-sense story” by its original author, is about a talking pineapple racing a hare.

The passage is bizarre, and the questions that follow (“The animals ate the pineapple most likely because they were …”) are virtually meaningless.  You can catch up on all the details in this story from the NY Daily News.

This is yet another public embarrassment for those in charge of creating, screening, and overseeing standardized testing.  The outcry in the wake of this episode has elicited a predictable response from the NYS testing commissioner:  the associated questions will not be counted because of their “ambiguous nature”.  (Here is the official statement.)

I call this predictable because we’ve seen this type of response in the past.  When inexcusably erroneous math questions appeared on a NYS Regents exam, an embarrassing sequence of events ultimately led to removing the question because of variations in usage.  There was no real admission that an error had been made, and the test (and indeed, the question itself) were both steadfastly defended.

Such issues seem to be remarkably common.  In studying NYS Math Regents Exams, we routinely see erroneous, poorly-constructed, ambiguous, and meaningless questions, but such incidents rarely garner much attention.  What’s different here is the publicity this particular story is getting.

In this era of high-stakes testing, hopefully this incident will get more people thinking about the question, “Are these tests any good?”