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Taking Note of Note-Taking

15/10/2018

 
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The Sumerians were perhaps the first people to use "wedge-shaped" writing tool on flat mud to keep track of projects. This tablet dates from 3200 BCE.
Ever notice people who scribble constantly while attending a talk?  I do because I don’t take notes well.  In fact I hardly take notes at all.  I find note-taking gets in the way of attentive listening.  I’m afraid I’ll miss something if I divert my attention to writing something down.   Note-taking is a different activity than actively listening.  So when I interview an expert to learn about his/her field for a project I’m working on, I bring along a tape recorder.  The only notes I take are about specifics—the spelling of a name, or a particular recommended reading, or a website I should visit.  Later, when I am synthesizing material in my own writing, I can always double check my memory about what I heard with the tape recorder.  I have come to understand that my memory is quite good. And, as a result, I’ve come to rely on it.  If I’m worried about forgetting some of the details after listening all day, I write my notes in the evening. 

It seems that Socrates also noticed this.  He worried about the technology of his day, the stylus, which allowed people to write in clay.  He was afraid that “[Writing] destroys memory [and] weakens the mind, relieving it of…work that makes it strong. [It] is an inhuman thing.” In other words, if you could easily make notes (now carved in clay), you no longer had to remember what you wrote down and so you could now forget it.  Listening and writing are two different and, perhaps, competing verbal activities. Modern research into multitasking indicates that we really don’t do two or more things at once, but simply shift attention back and forth from different tasks. But in college, we were all encouraged to take notes, not only from lectures but from our readings as well.

For my first term paper when I was in college, I learned from a graduate student that 3”x 5” note cards about the research were the order of the day and I diligently wrote them.  But, today, when I’m reading to learn, I find it disruptive to write notes.  When I’m trying to grasp concepts the best way for me to learn is to read several different sources on the same subject. It is only when you can articulate a concept in your own words that you truly “own” it. So I only make a note when something jumps out at me and I know that I’ll want to revisit it. 

But doesn’t the act of writing also strengthen memory?  The many times I forget to bring along the grocery list I had recently created makes no difference at all in collecting every item on that list into my shopping basket.  We authors are verbally articulate about the material in our books because we’ve thought about it and written about it and, as a result, remember it better.  The many pundits who speak so well on news talk shows are all excellent writers.  Good speaking comes from having written and practicing by engaging in substantive conversations.

The Common Core State Standards  “…..require that students systematically acquire knowledge in literature and other disciplines through reading, writing, speaking, and listening.”  To become an articulate, educated person requires interaction of all four of these activities, which I’ve put in red in this post. I’m not sure where note-taking fits into this process.  I have a hunch that it’s one of those highly individualized, personal quirks that everyone has to discover independently. In other words, we each have to figure out what works best in our personal acquisition of knowledge.  This could be a sub-text of the CCSS—although becoming educated involves all four activities, how you make it work for yourself can be discovered only empirically.  There is no one right way, one size fits all.  It is this process of self-discovery that needs to be communicated to teachers and students.
 


What Can Happen to Learning When There Is No Standardized Testing?

13/6/2018

 
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My brilliant, enthusiastic, physically active, Xposure kids just before we parted for the summer.
A few weeks ago, I pointed out the inanity of a standardized test question that had been created out of a paragraph that I had written.  The company creating the test had paid me for the rights to expose at least 100,000 kids to my words. There are many things wrong with submitting millions of children and thousands of teachers to the taking of the tests and, more importantly, the waste of instructional time spent prepping for the tests. One of the most significant outcomes of all this testing is the impact it has had on  learning.  All the joy is sucked out of classrooms, replaced by anxiety and stress.

But the origins of standardized testing is much more sinister than even the current outcomes.  I  just read a piece, “The Racist Beginnings of Standardized Testing,”  by John Rosales, who writes for the NEA.  Starting at the beginning of the 19th century, with its influx of immigrants, white Anglo-Saxon social scientists became concerned that their hegemony was being threatened.  They wrote about the inferiorities of other races and designed tests, which evolved into SATs, ACT (American College Testing)  PSATS, and Binet’s IQ tests to prove that blacks were not as intelligent as whites and allowed for the military to put black soldiers in segregated groups.  And so it began and continues to this day. 

Rosales cites Gil Troy’s article “The Racist Origins of the SAT,” slamming the originators of these tests: Binet, the Frenchman who created a test that evolved into the IQ test;  Carl Brigham, who developed aptitude tests for the US army; and Lewis Terman from Standford, who adapted Binet’s test for the Stanford-Binet IQ test.  “All-American decency and idealism coexisted uncomfortably with these scientists’ equally American racism and closemindedness.”

As a long-time associate of my alma mater, Columbia’s Teachers College, I have attended meetings and conferences with lots of hand-wringing on the “Achievement Gap.”  Isn't it possible that test results demonstrating the under-achievement of African and Hispanic Americans is an artifact of racially biased tests that are still being used today?  FairTest, the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, has won a lawsuit against the Texas TAAS test for its racist bias.  

My new stand for education is to throw out all the testing and bring the joy of learning back to the classroom.  I don’t have hard evidence about how this can be transformative but I just finished working with a group of boys (4th, 5th, and 6th graders) at an Xposure Foundation after school program.  (Dog whistle—no tests.) Originally, I had planned on having the kids make videos of science tricks from my book We Dare You!.  But then we decided to settle upon one interesting trick involving air pressure. 

The trick in question is called “A Really BIG Sucker” and it asks the question, “What is the length of the longest straw you can suck through and still get something to drink?”  I had a very intense first session with the kids, invoking Socrates by asking  them question after question until they came to  realize that it was the force of air pressure on the surface of their drink that pushed the drink up the straw.  Suddenly, there was that wonderful light in their eyes.  Instead of making a video of the trick, the boys were fascinated by the science! They began asking questions that led us to new experiments (ones I hadn't thought of) on subsequent days.   They discovered that they could get a some fluid through an 8.5 -foot piece of aquarium tubing used as a straw.  This led to experimenting with a 25-foot length of tubing, with the drinker in a stairwell,  sucking from a glass of juice two stories down!  

At our last meeting at the end of the school year,  I gave each boy a copy of my new STEM Award book How Could We Harness a Hurricane?, which includes yet another discussion of the many powers of air pressure.  It’s a challenging book, but I have no doubt it will be a highlight of their summer vacation.  This is this kind of learning experience that changes lives. One boy said to me, "It's an honor to have met you."  I feel it was my honor to have met them.

I’m not sure how you could measure their experience on a standardized test. But I saw no evidence of an achievement gap.  There was no agenda here except inherent joy of learning. 

Challenging Questions

8/2/2018

 
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Socrates (born c. 470 bce- died 399 bce) Athens philosopher--considered the father of modern western philosophy. He taught by inquiry-driven lessons to effect student-driven discoveries. Please note that he's carved in stone.
One of the outcomes of standardized testing is the establishment of an answer-driven culture in schools where getting the right answer becomes all-important.  Kids bombard teachers constantly with questions.  What happens when you give an answer? Does the inquiry stop?

Socrates gave us the key to powerful education more than 2,000 years ago. Questions, challenging questions, should drive learning. Creativity in science, history, journalism, and math comes from asking insightful questions. I love to tell kids the story of Isador Isaac Rabi (1898-1988) who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1944 for his discovery of magnetic resonance, the science behind the mri scan. He claimed in his Nobel lecture that he owed his success in science to his mother. Every day, when he came home from school she would ask him, “What good question did you ask today?” So, I’m going to give you a few good questions for you to ask in assessing the learning of your children and the effectiveness of your schools:

Here’s a question I’ve been asking my grandchildren and other school-age kids: Who among your teachers do you think is having fun teaching you? By “fun,” I mean that you can tell that the teacher wants to be in the room with you, is engaged in the subject and cares that you are also engaged.

My grandson, Jonny, had to think a long time before he came up with his sixth grade Language Arts teacher. (He was in seventh grade at the time.) A tenth grader could only think of his young technology teacher. When I asked him why he accepted this status quo, he shrugged and said, “It is what it is.” He goes to a highly rated high school in an upscale neighborhood.

A follow-up to this question is: How do you know that a teacher isn’t having any fun teaching you? Jonny had an instant reply to this one: “Because I’m not learning very much.”
​
Here’s a question for teachers: What would it take for you to be the teacher you always dreamed of being? Their answers may be a better assessment than the “value-added” measures attached to student scores.

Not to ignore administrators: How can you expect teachers to teach critical thinking if they are not allowed to ask challenging questions about executing their jobs in a school system?

And while we’re at it, here’s one for the test creators: Since you’re using our work as the basis for your tests, why don’t you let us children’s nonfiction authors take them? We should be able to ace them with flying colors, right? What would it mean if we flunked? I have absolutely no way of knowing how I’d do.
​
I’m just asking........​

     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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iNK Think Tank, Inc. is a nonprofit with the mission of using nonfiction children's literature in classrooms

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