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A Hard Look at a Typical Question on a Standardized Test

19/9/2019

 
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I wrote this post last year and normally don't republish any posts.  But this one is an excellent reminder of the insanity of standardized testing as we begin a new year.

First, you have to read a paragraph: (Note, this is for a grade 6 test)


The modern wood pencil was created by Joseph Dixon, born in Massachusetts in 1799. When he was thirteen years old he made his first pencil in his mother's kitchen. His sea-going father would return from voyages with graphite in the hull of his ship, which was used simply as ballast, or weight, when there was no cargo to transport. This graphite was later dumped overboard to make room for shipments for export. Joseph Dixon got some of this excess graphite, pounded it into powder, mixed it with clay and rolled it into long strips that he baked in his mother's oven to make the "lead" for his pencil. This dried the "lead" and made it firm. He then put a strip of "lead" between two grooved sticks of cedar and glued them together to make a sandwich. He chose cedar because it is soft, can be easily sharpened, and is relatively free of knots. All you had to do was sharpen the pencil with a knife and it was ready to write.

Then you have to answer the following multiple choice questions:

1. You can tell from the passage that it was important for ships to be
a.) heavy enough b.) fast enough c.)wet enough d.) big enough

2. Dixon got some graphite that had been used to replace
a.)cargo b.)powder c.)clay d.) wood

3. What happened to the graphite that Dixon didn't use?
a.)It was thrown away b.)It was used for ballast c.)It was shipped as an export 4.) It was used to build houses

4. Why did Dixon heat the mixture of graphite and clay?
a) To harden it b.) To melt it c.)To turn it into a powder d) To make it dark.

5. Dixon chose cedar because it was
a.) easy to shape b.) firm c.) long d.) cheap

6. How did Dixon get the "lead" inside the pencil?
a.) He glued it between two pieces of wood. b.) He poured it in when it was melted c.) He slide it into a hole he had drilled.) He rolled it in a mixture of sawdust and glue

7. In this passage the word knots refers to
a.) hard spots in wood b.) difficult problems c.) a measure of the speed of ships d.) tying ropes


Now, here are some questions that might interest you about the test questions.
1. Where did I get this information? From a contract asking permission to use the passage from a book I wrote (The Secret Life of School Supplies.)
2. What are the chances that the students read the actual book in their test prep? Nil Ever? Close to nil.
3. Did the students find the passage riveting reading? Probably not. It was taken out of context.
4. Why is it important for students to regurgitate information from the passage in their responses? I have no idea. If they have no real interest in the invention of the pencil, if the story isn't interesting enough to repeat to someone else, it is a manufactured trap to give anxiety to students, parents and teachers. It's the previous paragraph in the book that describes the problem that the invention of Dixon's pencil solved that makes the test paragraph more interesting and memorable.

I would hope that the passages selected by the test creators would be stand-alone attention grabbers. But apparently two paragraphs would be too long. FYI, The pencil happened to be an extremely useful invention for land surveyors. They had to be able to write outside with a permanent dry writing instrument, since at that time, most writing was done with quill and ink, which wasn't suited to noting down critical information in the wind and the rain.

Do you think preparing to answer this kind of question is a good use of your time or your students? I can tell you it's not one of my better paragraphs. Maybe, if they had read more of the book, they wouldn't need test prep to get the answers right.

One other thought.  I wonder how well I and my colleague authors who have also had excerpts from their books used as reading passages would perform on such a test.  Would we ace it?  Somehow I think not.  

Surviving an American Shameful Act with Dignity and Resilience

6/5/2019

 
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Award-winning iNK author, Andrea Warren writes American history as seen through the eyes of a child who is confronted with problems of historic proportions created by grown ups. Her latest book is Enemy Child: the Story of Norman Mineta, A Boy Imprisoned in a Japanese American Internment Camp During World War II.   On December 7, 1941, the date President Roosevelt called "a day that will live in infamy," the Japanese allies of the Axis Powers bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Thus began American involvement in Word War II. Ten-year-old American boy, Norman Mineta, the youngest of five children, was suddenly confronted with hateful bullying at school.  His classmates accused him of perpetrating this dastardly act because he looked like the enemy.

At first, Norm thought nothing would happen to his family because the Constitution says "No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law."  But gradually the discriminatory rhetoric and behavior towards Japanese Americans escalated,  quickly culminating in Executive Order 9066 by President Roosevelt that led to the interment of 120,000 West Coast Japanese Americans, without a scintilla of "due process." The rationale, born of fear, was  to make certain that they would not "collude" with the country of their ancestry.   Warren is brilliant in interweaving this history with its impact on a boy who loved baseball and cub scouts and his family of seven, as they were ripped from their comfortable home in San Jose and herded  on to long trains with covered windows.  Their journey took them first to a single barrack's room in the middle of the Santa Anita Race Track until they could be dispatched to permanent barrack accommodations behind barbed wire and armed watch towers in the shadow Heart Mountain, Wyoming-- an austere, isolated landscape of high winds, frigid winters and baking summers. It was three years before they returned home to San Jose.

Norman Mineta survived, and in some ways thrived, during this unjust, punitive period, never losing his love for America.  When he grew up,  he ran for elected offices, first becoming the mayor of San Jose, then a congressman for 20 years.  When he retired from congress he was a cabinet member for both Bill Clinton and George  W. Bush. Through the Boy Scouts, Norm had made friends with Alan Simpson of Cody,Wyoming, during joint scouting activity at the internment camp.   Years later they reconnected when Mineta was in the House of Representatives and Simpson was a Senator.  Their friendship was renewed and together they worked to pass the Civil Liberties Act into law, 43 years after the war had ended. In it, America apologized to for the internment of  Japanese American community  and paid a reparation of $20,000 to each living survivor.  

Enemy Child  is an initiation into a dark period of American History.  As a book for young adults, Warren assumes little or no prior knowledge of these events from the reader.  Thus, as the story of Norman Mineta unfolds, so does its historical background.  It is a powerful, poignant page-turning narrative of an American boy who was treated as a prisoner and reviled as an enemy because of his ancestry.  But it is also a story of patriotism, honor, dignity and resilience from a family of immigrants who never, for one second, was disloyal to our country.  

This book is not just for young Americans but for all of us.  It's another important reason for adults to mine the great literature that awaits in the children's room of the library.  


You Can't Make This Up!

18/3/2019

 
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Dolphins have long captured our imagination because of their intelligence and their remoteness.  They are mammals that live mostly underwater.  Laurence Pringle, who knows how to make all forms of nature accessible and fascinating, has turned his attention to Dolphins as his latest offering in his popular Strange and Wonderful  series. This book is beautifully and accurately illustrated by Meryl Henderson.

There are many children who go through a dolphin phase much as they glom on to dinosaurs.  I had a granddaughter like this.  She carried a stuffed dolphin from the Chicago Aquarium everywhere she went for several years, while I fed her dolphin books.  There is a lot to marvel at when it comes to these denizens of the sea, whose lives and habitats are now threatened.

There are quite a few different kinds of dolphins--33 species--but we know the bottlenose the best.   One of the most distinctive features of this dolphin is its bulging forehead.  Called a "melon" [It]"contains fat that helps to focus sounds produced in air tubes and sacs just behind, enabling dolphins to make clicks, chirps, buzzes, whistles, and other sounds.  All  of these sounds are emitted directly from dolphin heads, not through their mouths." (Wow! I didn't know that!)

Here's another strange and wonderful attribute:  "As you read these words, you don't need to think about breathing.  It happens automatically.  A dolphin, on the other hand, decides when to breathe.  But how can it sleep and still keep breathing?  The answer: One side of its brain rests while the other stays awake.  Half-asleep, the dolphin rises to the surface to breathe." (Hmmmm...how does one think with half a brain?)

Like a bat, a dolphin uses echolocation to find food. And, like wolves, they work together as a team to catch prey.  They talk to each other in their own mysterious language.  They are playful as they leap above the water, often doing so to communicate to us.  (I saw this happen from a boat  off the coast of Alaska.  They put on quite a show!)

In Dolphins! Strange and Wonderful, Laurence Pringle feeds the appetite for knowledge while sustaining curiosity to know more.  If this is the fist book a child reads about dolphins, there's a good chance it will not be the last.  



The New Era of  Children's Author-Driven Nonfiction

4/3/2019

 
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When it comes to awards, recognition, and a decent pay day, good children's fiction authors are rewarded by the system. Their names on the covers of their books become brands.  If a child enjoys a book and asks for "another one like this one," a librarian automatically delivers a book by the same author. 

For many years, children's nonfiction authors who write on topics where "nothing is made up,"  have been in the shadows.  First, our books are not cataloged and shelved by our names but by the topics we write about.  Thus, our books are scattered throughout the Dewey Decimal System. Second, the spaces on the nonfiction library shelves were traditionally filled by the yard with survey books-- collections of facts and information that had no particular conceptual architecture, thus there was often no narrative to make sense of the information.  Editors were trained to make these works as impersonal as possible, as if the material in the book had never interacted with a human mind.  Journalists had style sheets that told them never, never use the perpendicular pronoun "I".  If they had to impose themselves in a story as eyewitnesses they were to speak of themselves in the third personal as in"this reporter" or use the "editorial we." Mark Twain disdained this idea.   He said, " Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial 'we.'"  My guess is that the thinking behind this stilted styling was that a work had less authority if it came from the mind of a person and had more authority if it seemed to come from God.  

Slowly, we are coming to understand that an author's point of view is part of the truth of nonfiction.   We don't do invented dialog without a disclaimer that lets the reader know that the author is imagining what happened. But if that doesn't happen, we categorize such a book as "historical fiction."  But often, in history, there are primary source documents where we know what a person actually said.  Currently, the best nonfiction authors write with point of view that has solid premises decorated with facts.   These books are not supposed to be read the same way one reads a novel.  They are often meant to be digested in small bites, so pithy are their concepts the reader can only grasp the big ideas by thinking about them and giving them time to sink in.  We write for the uninitiated so that they acquire the background knowledge that they will need later in their education.  

Recently, there was a segment on CBS This Morning on the "Golden Age" of Documentary Film Making.  I immediately saw the parallel to what is happening in my genre.  We are using techniques of fiction writing-- riveting narratives, foreshadowing, atmospherics, to bring to life our stories of the real world.  We connect our big ideas to everyday knowledge we assume children already have.  In science, I try and make them think extraordinary things about air, water, energy--the most common and almost forgotten aspects of our shared environment.  Each author has a distinctive voice that makes material accessible.  Even if the concepts are difficult, we know how to speak "child" so that leveled reading is not necessary. 

​ It is not as important  for our readers  to know the facts as it is for them to see how the facts relate to the big ideas that make meaning of our world and to help them create their individual conceptual frameworks to further understand how the world works. 


What Generates Passion?

7/12/2018

 
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credit: careersingovernment.com
  “The notion of emptiness generates passion,” wrote the great poet, Theodore Roethke (1908-1963). When I first came across this line, many years ago, it occurred to me that the word “notion” is most significant. “Notion” means that you’ve had a taste, a vision, an inkling, a snippet of something—enough to alert you to its possibilities and whet your appetite for more.  My passions started when I was very young.

I was one of those fortunate children whose parents read to me.  The stories were not what hooked me.  I saw that books were full of possibilities, a portal to other worlds.  I also saw the the only way to access these worlds for myself was to learn how to read.  I remember being four years old and looking out a high-rise window over the myriad signs that decorated New York City rooftops. My companion was an eight year old girl named Brucia.  “Can you read everything you see?” I asked her wistfully. When she assured me she could, I remember wondering if I would ever reach that point where I could read everything I saw. (Here is the “emptiness” of Roethke’s line.) Then I could get into books anytime I wanted without being dependent on my parents. So in my determined way, I pestered adults for help and taught myself to read.

When I was eight, we made papier maché finger puppets in class.  Mine was of my father, featuring short lengths of yarn pasted vertically around his head as a frame for his bald pate.   I received a lot of praise for my cleverness. Over the weekend a mouse in the classroom came and ate the nose off my puppet leaving behind a disfiguring hole.  (The paste was an edible (tasty to a mouse?) mixture of flour and water.) My teacher was worried about my reaction. How would I feel about having my work so unforgivingly destroyed? Much to her surprise, for me it was no big deal.   Even at that tender age I realized that the puppet itself didn’t matter. I could always make another and no one could take that ability away from me. That same year my favorite doll fell off the bed on to her nose and it, too, was irrevocably marred.  I was inconsolable and vowed to myself that I would never invest so much emotional energy into a possession. The loss was too hard to bear. Acquiring skills and creating new things thus became my passions.

    Passion can be described as a feeling but it manifests itself in the world as behavior, strong behavior that recurs frequently despite obstacles, setbacks, and long periods without obvious feedback.  Passionate people are often unreasonable; they persist in spite of off-putting events or lack of approbation and support that might make others quit.


 “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world around him.  The unreasonable man persists in his attempts to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” (George Bernard Shaw, 1903 play “Man and Superman.”) [GBS was a misogynist so he was not about to include women in such a profound statement.] 

Behaviorists know that strength of behavior is built with payoffs that are highly intermittent and might only be perceived as a reward by the individual exhibiting the behavior.  The well-struck tennis ball becomes its own reward and is a first step in the steep learning curve of a potential champion. Hitting the ball in a racket’s “sweet spot” feels good. But the pursuit of a world-class trophy requires a commitment and a faith in one’s own abilities that defies the inevitable (reasonable) naysayers who know that the odds of reaching this pinnacle are extremely long.

"
Invictus" is one of my favorite films.   It depicts an unreasonable Nelson Mandela, played brilliantly by Morgan Freeman, who believed that he could unite his post-apartheid nation if only the rugby team, the Springboks, could do the impossible and win the World Cup.  He had formidable strikes against pulling this off—the team itself was an underdog that didn’t believe itself capable of such a feat and the freshly empowered black citizens of the “newly christened Rainbow Nation, South Africa” hated everything that stood for their former Afrikaner oppressors, especially this team. They were certainly not about to root for it.  Mandela said, “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”

Addiction is not passion.  Dr. Gabor Mat
é, a family physician with a special interest in child development says: 

"
The difference between passion and addiction is that between a divine spark and a flame that incinerates.." [For more on Dr. Maté watch his Ted Talk.]

Passion motivates learning, exploring, becoming a part of and interacting with something larger than oneself.  It is sometimes interpreted as "grit."  There are passionate teachers out there.  They are the ones that change lives.   I'll be you can think of one right now.  

Passion for writing nonfiction for children is experienced by the authors of iNK Think Tank. 
We authors work against all odds, creating works of literature to engage, inform and inspire children about the real world. You can get a delicious sampling of our work and our passionate voices in our Nonfiction Minutes.   If we want kids to learn and think about the real world and foster a passion for learning, why not give them great reading material?  One issue is that our books are not used in most classrooms where they can do the most good.

Our problem?  What can we do to change this small part of the educational landscape?
The answer:  Whatever it takes.  



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     Vicki Cobb

    *Award-winning author of more than 90 nonfiction books for children, mostly in science.
    *Former Contributor to the Huffington Post
    *Founder/President of iNK Think Tank, Inc.
    *Passionate advocate for the joy of learning for every child and teacher.


    Disclaimer: All opinions, typos, and grammatical errors are my own,  especially small word omissions which I often don't notice in my fervor.  

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