LEVEL OF EXPECTATIONS

SchoolInfoSystem.org; Madison, Wisconsin
EducationViews.org; Houston, Texas

LEVEL OF EXPECTATIONS

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
25 June 2012


It has become an educational cliché to say that “students will rise to the level of expectations.” But how do we explain the students whose work rises well above our level of expectations? Mostly, we just ignore them. In the local media, coverage of high school sports “blanks” any and all accounts of exemplary academic work by high school students.

In the mid-1980s, when I was teaching (as I thought) United States History to Sophomores at the high school in Concord, Massachusetts, I assigned, following the advice of my colleagues, history papers of just 5-7 pages, but I did tell the students that the title page did not count as one of the pages.

One quiet student, who I did not know at all, turned in a 28-page paper on the current balance of nuclear/thermonuclear weapons between the United States and the USSR. He later graduated summa cum laude from Tufts in economics. Why did he do that paper? He didn’t need to, and he didn’t do it for me. He was “rising” to the level of his own expectations. As Laurence Steinberg wrote in Beyond the Classroom: “Within a system that fails (flunks) very few students, then, only those students who have high standards of their own—who have more stringent criteria for success and failure—will strive to do better than merely to pass and graduate.”

In the last 25 years I have published more than 1,000 history research papers by crazy motivated secondary students like that from 46 states and 38 other countries. (I am happy to provide pdfs of some of these exemplary history research papers on request to fitzhugh@tcr.org).

Since the 1960s, the International Baccalaureate has been expecting students to complete a 4,000-word Extended Essay to qualify for the Diploma. In 2011, I published an 11,000-word (Emerson Prize) paper on the stagnation in science and technology in China for five centuries after 1500, and the student had to cut it down to 4,000 words to meet the expectations for the Extended Essay and the IB Diploma. ACT and the College Board have not yet included an expectation for that sort of academic expository writing.

Often we work to limit what students do academically. Several years ago, when The Concord Review was receiving submissions of high school history research papers of 6,000, 8,000, and 10,000 words, I asked the Executive Director of National History Day, which has as one option for competitors a 2,500-word history paper, if they had considered accepting essays that were longer. She said that no, they didn’t want any paper that took more than 10 minutes to read.

Recently when I published a 108-page (Emerson Prize) paper on the War of Regulation in North Carolina in the 18th century by a student from an independent school west of the Mississippi, I found out that she had to reduce it to 9 pages, without endnotes, to enable her to win first place nationally in the National History Day competition.

One  student whose (Emerson Prize) work I published went to her teacher and said: “My paper is going to be 57 pages, is that all right?” And the teacher (may his tribe increase) said, “Yes.”

Five or six years ago I received a paper (Emerson Prize) on the history of economic reform in China in recent years from a student at a public high school in Ohio. Like high schools generally, hers expected her to complete their requirements in four years. Instead she did most of it in two and spent part of the next two years as a student at The Ohio State University before applying to Harvard as a freshman. She recently graduated from there with high honors in mathematics, with an economics minor.

I should say that, even though Asian students have the highest academic achievement of any group in the United States, not all of the students I have published have been Asian, nor did the high level of expectations for their own academic work all come from the Confucian influence of their parents.

When it comes to academics, we seem to give the vast majority of our attention to, and spend the bulk of our efforts on, students whose efforts fall far below our expectations, those who, if not among the 25-30% who fail to finish high school, may enter community college reading at the fifth-grade level, and more than half of whom will drop out from there. Naturally we want to help those who are doing poorly in school. Still, we do want our most brilliant students to start companies, become scientists, be our judges, diplomats, and elected officials, teach history, write good books, and otherwise work to sustain and advance our civilization. But our basic attitude is—let them manage on their own.

How different it is for our promising young athletes, for whom we have the highest expectations, on whom we keep the most elaborate statistics, and to whom we dedicate the most voluminous local media coverage, as well as nationally-televised high school football and basketball games.

If we matched for them the expectations we have for our students’ academic work, we might be asking them to run just one lap, do two pushups, and spend most of their time helping out in gym classes, or playing video games, instead of practicing their sport. But our young people, being the way they are, would no doubt “cheat,” as some do in academics, by deriving higher standards from their own ambition and from seeing the achievements of their peers, and the athletes for whom we might try to set such low expectations, like the young scholars for whom we do, would continue to rise above them, and to astonish us with their accomplishments. Dumb Lucky us.

EDUCATION INTERRUPTUS

EducationViews.org; Houston, Texas
SchoolInfoSystem.org; Madison, Wisconsin

EDUCATION INTERRUPTUS

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
8 June 2012

Back in the day, it was possible to go to a movie theater and watch the whole movie right through, without having unrelated matter introduced at various times. Now, with 21st Century presentation customs, a movie on television will be broken into a number of times for five or six advertisements for widely unrelated products and services.

This sort of fragmentation is not only present in education, but welcomed as a brave new way of motivating students and trying to retain their attention. A number of experts, seeing the popularity of video games, with their changes in level and constant supply of “rewards,” recommend that the curricula we offer students should benefit from constant interruptions as well. With Milton’s “On His Blindness”—
 
"When I consider how my light is spent    
E're half my days, in this dark world and wide,    
And that one Talent which is death to hide,
Lodg'd with me useless...."

Deep Reading practice suggests that students should often break into their own reading at some point to “interrogate” the material, asking questions about the relationship of text to text, text to world, text to self, and the like. So, for instance, in starting to read Milton’s sonnet, they might pause to inquire, “Do you know anyone who is seeing-impaired?” “Is there a connection in the text between ‘light’ and ‘dark?’” “How do you feel about the services for the blind in your community?”
 
"...Though my Soul more bent To serve therewith my Maker, and present My true account, least he returning chide, Doth God exact day-labour, light deny'd, I fondly ask?"

Here again it would be possible to ask “Have you ever been chided for something?” “How did that change your feelings at the time?” “What sort of community service have you been involved in lately?” “What have you made that you feel most proud of?” “Is there a God?” These interruptions are recommended to help retain the students’ attention and to support their motivation to continue reading, which, it appears, John Milton’s sonnet could no longer do without such modern pedagogical aids.

Similarly, other academic matters may be modernized by introducing frequent scores, levels of difficulty, and, of course, extensive visual and auditory stimulation. Modern students who have watched hundreds of thousands of hours of chopped-up television shows, and played hundreds of thousands of hours of fragmented video games  just cannot be expected to pay attention for any extended periods to any “text” or academic task, without the sort of interruptions on which they have become dependent. Alexander Hamilton, Federalist #1—
 
"...It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved for the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force..."

Deep Reading here might lead the student down the “labyrinthine ways” of questions about the use of force in society or the frequency of accidents on our highways?

Some might argue that this history of shattered attention has led to a kind of addiction to interruption which it should be education’s mission to help students overcome. They would point to the research that shows that multitasking means each task will receive less attention and be done less well, and argue that students, instead of being encouraged (required) to break into their own attention with interrogatories, should be shown ways to sustain a focus on the academic works before them.

However, those who believe that nothing in what civilization has to offer can hold the attention of students today without the regular intrusion of pedagogical gimmicks and process techniques to jolt them with scores, questions, rewards, counts of the # of “reading minutes” and the like, might simply say that fragmented attention is not only a good thing, but it must be rewarded so that students will not drop out of school and sit slumped at home watching various media and playing digital games.

The Kaiser Foundation recently found that the average young person in the United States now spends about 53 hours a week with various electronic entertainment activities, so many educators (and hardware and software sales professionals) have come to the conclusion that unless we bring interrupted education into the newly digital 21st Century classroom, we will not have adapted successfully to the scattered brains of our young people today.

WORLD LEADER

Interestingly, the United States is home to a program that is, to my knowledge, the world leader in encouraging and assessing the kind of non-fiction writing that is now in greatest demand in the world: The Concord Review, run by Will Fitzhugh. The Concord Review is a quarterly journal of history writing done by high school students all over the world [39 countries so far]. The quality of the thinking and writing in the articles that appear in The Concord Review is nothing short of remarkable....It is telling that Fitzhugh, who operates The Concord Review on a shoestring, cannot attract foundation support, which would be modest, to do what must be done to make sure that the work goes on when he can no longer continue....This does not augur well.

Education Week Blog #7
Marc Tucker
President, National Center on Education and the Economy


On Writing in the Modern Age
 
I vividly recall the first time I visited at the main offices of Cambridge International Examinations at Cambridge University in England. It was somehow a bit daunting to know that Isaac Newton had taught and written on mathematics only steps away. The university is over 800 years old. Cambridge Assessment itself goes back more than 150 years. The largest organization of its kind in the world, its examinations are today used in more than 160 countries worldwide.

But it was not the pedigree of Cambridge International Examinations that impressed me most. It was their attitude toward their work. In the United States, test construction is largely in the hands of testing experts, who are professionally trained in psychometrics. But, at Cambridge, and in much of the rest of the world, test construction is mostly directed by people whose primary expertise is curriculum. Actually, to get persnickety, one should say “test” when we mean to assess what a student knows and can do irrespective of the particular curriculum to which the student is exposed and “examination” when our aim is to find out the degree to which the student has mastered a particular curriculum. In the United States, we mostly build tests. In much of the rest of the world, they mainly do examinations.

This is not a minor difference. Because decisions on curriculum in the United States have been highly localized, often down to the classroom level within a school, we long ago decided that it would be unfair to have standardized examinations based on a particular curriculum. Some students would be highly advantaged if they had happened to have a curriculum that lined up with the assessment, and others would be similarly disadvantaged, we thought.

American testing experts care more about whether a given test item produces a well-shaped curve of student responses than whether it accurately captures some aspect of the subject being assessed. That would never happen in most other countries, where the test of the adequacy of an examination question is the degree to which it captures the essence of the course. That is why curriculum experts, not testing experts, are put in charge of examination construction.

This gets us to the form, not just the purpose, of American tests versus others’ examinations. Cambridge International Examinations does not build tests to be scored by computers. They build examinations to be scored by human beings. They and their customers worldwide know that that is more expensive, but they think the difference in cost is worth it. In this case, as in so many others, form follows function. They want to know how students deal with the kind of complex problems and complex thinking that lie at the heart of their courses. They want to know how good students are at coming up with good answers that the test-constructors never thought of. They want to know how good a student is at making a competent and even compelling oil painting. Or constructing a robot. Or writing a 20-page history research paper. These are not things that multiple-choice, computer-scored tests can measure, but they are important to people who have built curricula intended to enable students to do these things. Allow me to observe that the environment now being created by the epic changes taking place in the global economy will demand exactly the kinds of skills that the Cambridge examinations are designed to measure.

Interestingly, the United States is home to a program that is, to my knowledge, the world leader in encouraging and assessing the kind of non-fiction writing that is now in greatest demand in the world: The Concord Review, run by Will Fitzhugh. The Concord Review is a quarterly journal of history writing done by high school students all over the world [39 countries so far]. The quality of the thinking and writing in the articles that appear in The Concord Review is nothing short of remarkable.

As high stakes standardized testing in the United States took center stage in recent years, serious writing in high school came under siege. Very few high school students are asked to read an entire non-fiction book while in school—not one. Even fewer are asked to write serious research papers. Why? Because they are not assessed for these skills on the high stakes tests, and, that being the case, the students are not assigned this kind of reading or writing. In the name of focusing on the development of a limited set of basic skills, we have set up our testing system so that it has depreciated the more advanced skills on which the future of our nation depends.  Apparently, we cannot talk and chew gum at the same time.

The Concord Review may be the last bastion of high standards and good sense in this arena. The Review itself provides excellent examples of good non-fiction writing, writing that tells a good story, contains strong analysis, synthesizes relevant material from many quite different sources in a way that no one has done before, makes its points well and supports its argument with relevant detail. Fitzhugh [through the National Writing Board] reviews entries, provides extensive comments and suggestions to the authors, and decides what meets his standards and what does not and communicates the standards and commentary to his teen-age authors. That is real assessment, both formative and summative. His curriculum and his assessment regime are joined at the hip. 

It is telling that Fitzhugh, who operates The Concord Review on a shoestring, cannot attract foundation support, which would be modest, to do what must be done to make sure that the work goes on when he can no longer continue. His work comes closer than any other that I know of in the United States to mirroring the values that infuse the work at Cambridge International Examinations. While Fitzhugh has had to give up the printed version of his extraordinary journal (to go online only), because he can no longer afford to publish it, the nation is spending enormous sums to build tests that are very good at measuring only a small part of the skills and knowledge on which our future depends. This does not augur well.

EDUCATION LITE

EducationViews.org; Houston, Texas

EDUCATION LITE

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
28 May 2012


When I read about education in Finland, where they accept only one of every ten applicants for teacher training, require those to earn a master’s degree in a (content) subject area, and then support them and trust them to do professional work, I have to agree with Diane Ravitch that our practices—of accepting anyone into teacher training, putting them through several years of edubabble on pedagogicalisticalism, and then treat them like untrustworthy assembly line workers whose jobs hang on each year’s student scores on bad tests—are mistaken.

We do mistrust and mistreat the teachers we have, and we have lost sight, in the race to the bottom of “objective” tests, of some very simple facts, such as that classes usually differ in their performance from year to year, even with the same teacher, and that students bear the main responsibility for their own learning.

Our teachers have responded to this dismal situation, on many occasions, by saying that the current punch-card, standardized regimens for curriculum and “assessment” (if you want to dignify it with that label) are limiting the time and opportunity for them to exercise their creativity in teaching.

Now, who, other than Samuel Johnson, who wrote that “The irregular combinations of fanciful invention may delight a-while, by that novelty of which the common satiety of life sends us all in quest, but the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted...,” could be against creativity in teaching?

The question for me, however, is how do so many seem to want to apply that creativity? Too often, in my view, it is in the service of FUN, and “hands-on” (and brains-off?) activities to entertain students in an age-appropriate and “relevant” way, to make everyone feel good about themselves, no matter how little they know and how little academic competence they have achieved.

The Chief Academic Officer of a major educational publisher recently spoke in an interview about all the Summer reading activities that could help students lose less knowledge and skill in that gap. But the emphasis, along with using a stopwatch to keep track of “reading minutes” (shades of industrial management practice), was on digital games to provide FUN.

Education.com has a regular feature of suggested activities for high school students, and for some reason, they never suggest that students read a complete nonfiction book or work on a long serious history research paper, as some of their more diligent peers are doing. Instead, they recommend group games which they hope will provide, above all, relevance to teen lives, and, of course, FUN.

For comparison, think about the approach taken by high school coaches with their athletes. It is true that sometimes they urge their athletes to “have fun out there,” but it is always after hundreds of hours of grueling and un-fun training and practices. They may want their players to be “loose” and upbeat, but they mostly want them to know what they are doing and to be as competent as possible at doing it. One local sports shop where I live sells sweatshirts for high school athletes, which say “Work all Summer, Win all Fall!” And it means training work-outs, not summer employment.

I am not sure where our educators’ obsession with FUN comes from. Where went the old view that “hard work never hurt anyone”? Is it the result of laying aside the time-honored authority and role of “The Old Battleaxe,” who represented to students the goals and hopes of the community, and whose academic expectations and standards were not only high, but remembered for years after graduation, usually with profound gratitude? Perhaps too many now seek to be a good friend to students instead? They should try to remember that friends don’t let friends drive drunk, and they don’t put FUN before a teacher’s job to take academic work seriously practically all the time.

The sad thing is that usually Education Lite, with its digital games, etc. turns out not to be much FUN, and, in the end, students really do want to grow up and gain a good deal of knowledge and competence, in academics as well as in sports.

If educators labor to keep it Lite, they will rightfully earn, not the friendship of their students, but their contempt, for laying down their responsibilities, and they lose the respect of the community, as well. In Finland, a Lower Education teacher is held in high regard by the society, just a bit behind that for doctors. In the United States, it is otherwise. Where I taught, in Concord, Massachusetts, it was quite clear that while parents and others in the town thought “the world” of their teachers, they would definitely not want their son or daughter to be one, or to marry one.

Keep in mind the Disney version of Pinocchio, where he is led off to a place where he could have nothing but FUN, and was turned into a jackass. It would be nice if our teachers used their creativity on serious academic work with students, and let somebody else do the “friendly and FUN” work of turning our students into jackasses.

TYRANNY OF THE PRESENT

“Bertrand Russell, after his first disastrous experiment in organizing a school, 
observed that the first task of education is to destroy the tyranny of the local and immediate over the child’s imagination.”


 
Kieran Egan
“Social Studies and the Erosion of Education”
Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Children’s Minds, Talking Rabbits & Clockwork Oranges
Teachers College Press, 1999, pp. 131-146

==================================

 
“Cicero remarked that the purpose of education is to free the student from the tyranny of the present.”

 

Neil Postman
Amusing Ourselves to Death
New York: Penguin, 1985, p. 146

 

SPEED KILLS

SchoolInfoSystem.org; Madison, Wisconsin

SPEED KILLS
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
16 May 2012


Modern man (and woman?) is very interested in speed, on land and sea and in the air, but also in “scoring” student writing, it appears. Educational Testing Service recently praised its computer program’s ability to score 16,000 samples of writing in 20 seconds.

I should probably explain my bias against too much speed, and not just where it helps to kill thousands of people on the highway.  Several decades ago, I took a speed reading course from Xerox Learning Systems. They gave a pre-test on reading and comprehension, and the tests after the course showed that I had doubled my reading speed and cut my comprehension in half.

The arguments in favor of grading student writing by computer program are that it saves money and time and allows huge volumes of student responses-to-a-prompt to be “addressed,” as they would say.

I am not sure whether Abraham Lincoln wrote The Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope on the train to Pennsylvania or not, but if he had taken one of the new bullet trains, no doubt the speech would have been shorter and quite possibly less immortal.

Other writers have found inspiration watching the land pass by their train windows, but that again has become less common, no doubt, as the speed of travel has increased. The Dreamliner may make it easier to sleep during the flight, but there is not much to see out the window.

E.T.S. may be able to make some serious money in “assessing” student writing at 21st century speeds, but the comprehension of that work will have been cut to zero, I am quite sure, because, as you understand, the computer program, and perhaps some of those who are promoting this scoring by machine, have no idea what the student is saying in any case.

Assessing short writing samples at blinded speeds may lead to encouraging more teachers to assign such brief pieces to their students, thus saving them from having to take the time in coaching and evaluating writing that could be spent on watching videos and talking about the Twilight series or The Hunger Games in class. Thus, students’ greatest writing efforts in high school could be devoted to their 500-word “college essay,” instead of, for example, a 4,000-word Extended Essay such as they would need to do for the International Baccalaureate Diploma.

It should be noted that the College Board has recently announced a new Capstone Writing Initiative, by which they plan to begin to introduce academic expository writing, over a three-year Pilot program into a select few of our high schools. At first, papers will be produced by groups on limited topics, but perhaps in a few more years, students of this new AP program will be allowed to attempt the sort of serious exemplary history research paper that The Concord Review has published by more than 1,000 diligent secondary students from 39 countries over the last 25 years.

I would caution the AP, however, that if they are going to ask teachers and students to work on serious academic papers, they may very well have to slow down the assessments, unless, of course, computers have advanced enough in the next three or four years so that they can not only “evaluate” such papers at a rapid pace, but also begin to understand the very first thing of what the students are writing about (i.e. the subject matter). After all, Deep Blue did well at Jeopardy, didn’t it? So a future program, with hundreds of thousands of history books in its memory banks, may be able to make connections to allow it to at least seem to understand some of the history that the student has derived from their own reading and thinking.

These advances could make it easier at last to assign and assess serious student academic expository writing at the secondary level, at least enough to satisfy the College Board and those who buy the Capstone Project, but I am sorry to say that, for the student, the process of reading history and writing about it will be just as slow, and just as valuable, as it was for Thucydides and Tacitus and Edward Gibbon back in the day, and for David McCullough in our own day.

At a recent conference, David McCullough, who spent 10 years writing Truman, said that he is often asked how he divides his time between research and writing. He said no one every asks him how much time he spends thinking. The new computer scoring programs don’t waste any time thinking about the content of the work they are evaluating, and, in their rush to do a lot of writing “assessments” real fast and very cheaply, perhaps those promoting those programs don’t spend a lot of time on that part either.

QUICK AND DIRTY ROBOSCORING

An Interview with Will Fitzhugh: Robot Graders Behaving Badly?

Posted by Michael Shaughnessy EducationViews Senior Columnist

EducationViews.org; Houston, Texas, on May 1, 2012

Robo-Graders

Michael F. Shaughnessy



1) Will, I understand that some of these testing corporations are using robots to grade real live human writing. Can you briefly tell us what this is all about?

Mike Winerip reports in the New York Times that “The automated reader developed by the Educational Testing Service, e-Rater, can grade 16,000 essays in 20 seconds, according to David Williamson, a research director for E.T.S.” In Concord, Massachusetts, there was a print shop that had a sign: Good, Fast, Cheap: CHOOSE TWO, the point being you could not have all three.

It seems clear to me that the Deeper Learning Project of the Hewlett Foundation is looking for writing assessment that is fast and cheap. It is hard to beat 16,000 “scores” in 20 seconds. The National Writing Board, which provides a unique assessment for high school student history research papers, takes three hours on each paper to provide a four-page report. I doubt if we could do even one of those assessments in 20 seconds, no matter how much foundation funding we were offered.


2) I guess the first thing that comes to mind is creativity—are these R2D2 graders going to be able to recognize a real creative writing sample?

As you know, my primary interest is in academic expository writing, but when it comes to creative writing, these programs don’t care if you are writing an “Ode to a Grecian Urn” or an Ode to an iPhone. The content is of no interest to the robo-graders. They are programmed only to “worry” about a small circumscribed set of writing skills, and the subject of your composition counts for nothing. You can write a dull composition which amply displays ignorance, and still get a good score from the computers.


3) Let’s move on to grammar—or better grandma. Here are two sentences: Let’s eat, Grandma. Lets eat grandma. In the first sentence, we have an apparently hungry kid ready to gobble some apple pie. In the second sentence, it sounds like the kid is a cannibal, plotting to have a tasty repast. What is the computer going to think?

Or in the old example, “It’s not what you think you are, but what you think, you are.” Again, the computer is not “interested” in the meaning of anything it is scoring. At the New York World’s Fair years ago they showed a computer translator that took English and turned it into Russian and then back into English. One example was “The Spirit is Willing but the Flesh is Weak.” After going into Russian, it came back into English as “The Ghost is Ready, but the Meat is Bad.”


4) I know a bit about how these testing services work. Here is an example of a question: Discuss three books that you have recently read and how they impacted you. Now, how will the computer differentiate between one response listing Harry Potter, Twilight and The Hunger Games, and another response listing Great Expectations, The Three Musketeers and Don Quixote?

By the way, I just read Great Expectations for the second time a month ago, and I was surprised to find how much wonderful stuff there is about friendship in it. I had not noticed that the first time around. Again, the computer doesn’t care whether you are talking about Peter the Great or Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater, By removing any interest in knowledge or meaning, they can really speed up the scoring process to a very remarkable level—and save a lot of money, too. That is, after they finish paying out all the $100,000 grants and paying for all the new consultants, professional developers, computers, software, etc.


5) There are these two words, that seem to have been forgotten—quality and quantity. Certainly, the robo-evaluator can count the number of words. However, how can they ascertain the veridicality of the robust statements in the student’s rhetoric?

Back in the day, many courses in college taught us that it was important to try to find truth, to separate appearance from reality, to avoid being misled by the surface of things, but to go deeper to find lasting meaning and value. All of this is of no interest to the computer, or perhaps to those who fund these robo-scoring studies either. Otherwise they could not be satisfied with and even proud of so much speed at so little cost, with so much absence of quality or meaning.


6) Will, you have published, QUALITY high school papers for years. I put QUALITY in capital letters, but I am not sure if the robo-graders would understand the concept. Can you tell us a little about The Concord Review, and the consistent quality that you have recognized?

In the last 25 years, I have found nearly one thousand high school students from 46 states and 38 other countries who were willing to write exemplary–average 6,000-word––history research papers on a huge variety of topics that computers have no interest in. The longest paper was 22,000 words on the Mountain Meadows Massacre, but I have published a 15,000-word paper on the Soviet-Afghan War, a 13,000-word paper on the Needham Question by a student from Hong Kong, and so on. I have found that many HS students, presented with the challenge of the exemplary work of their peers, will rise to the challenge and write longer and more serious papers than I thought possible when I started The Concord Review in 1987. I am happy to send examples to anyone who sends me an email at fitzhugh@tcr.org, and there are a number of them on our website at www.tcr.org.


7) Will, you and I used to use typewriters, and probably white out when we made a mistake, and often re-typed our high school and college papers. Nowadays, they have these word processors that automatically correct and identify grammar and spelling errors. Yet, high school kids seem to write less and less. What’s going on?

Most teachers in high schools now either do not have, or are unwilling to take, the time to read serious academic papers by students in the high school, so they do not assign them, and with the exception of the few students who seek out the opportunity of The Concord Review, and the ones who must write an Extended Essay for the IB Diploma, students do not do much academic expository writing. Even some elite private schools are cutting back the academic expository writing they ask students to do.

Most writing competitions ask for very short personal stories, or very short pieces on set topics, or what is called “creative nonfiction” which is a form of self-centered diary writing. If nobody is asking students to do writing that requires reading of nonfiction books, or knowledge of history, or which is the length of an IB Extended Essay, then they won’t do it. So they don’t write. Everyone complains about their writing, and students still aren’t asked to write much in high school.


 8) Sadly, the Spell check machine, like the robo graders, probably does not recognize the difference between to, two, and too as well as there and their. Or can they?

I am not sure. It is possible that computers can be programmed to look for the probable correct position of various parts of speech, but again, they have been designed to have no interest in, or understanding of, what the student is writing about. Writing for a computer may yield a “score”of some sort, but as far as meaning goes, the student might as well be talking into a dead phone. After all, coming to understand the meaning of what someone is saying takes time, and that would mess up the path to polishing off 16,000 writing “samples” in 20 seconds, right?

Marc Bousquet of The Chronicle of Higher Education makes the excellent point that: “It’s reasonable to say that the forms of writing successfully scored by machines are already—mechanized forms—writing designed to be mechanically produced by students…”


9) What have I neglected to ask?

It is a great enduring puzzle to me why we when we know that nearly 90% of college professors say their new students are not very well prepared in reading, doing research or academic writing, and yet we continue to give our high school students mostly fiction to read and ask them to do only personal writing, the five-paragraph essay and/or the 500-word “college essay.” In general I feel sure we don’t hate our students and we are not determined to have them fail, but when 47% of Freshmen in the California State College System need to enroll in remedial Reading courses, it is hard to see how we could serve them much worse if we did hate them.



------------------------

“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog