Zip a Dee Doo Dah, or Go, Team!

As I work my way through the list of 10 Reasons Why Assessments Make the World a Better Place, I realize that this list is more of a grab bag of opinions festooned here and there by ribbons of fact than an argument resting on a solid platform constructed of actual information. (Not that there's anything wrong with that; what else are most blog posts than someone's opinion? I myself have got lots and lots of opinions.)

Which means I am silly for engaging in intellectual discourse about what is essentially an attempt to look on the bright side from deep in the trenches of a beleaguered and much-maligned profession. 

But once I've begun, I must onward go, silly or not. Let's address Reasons 2 through 10 from 10 Reasons Why Assessments Make the World a Better Place by John Kleeman:

2. Assessments make the world safer. 
Absolutely. No doubt about it. Certification and licensure are very reassuring, whether applied to doctors, nurses, mechanics, electrical engineers or dog trainers.

3. Assessments are the best way to measure knowledge, skills, and attitudes.
They're the only way, aren't they? If by "assessments," we mean "measurements," and assessments may include the use of observation and other tools beyond the isolated pen-and-paper or online experience.

4. Assessments are the cornerstone of learning. 
Not so sure about this one. Remember what Trollope said. How many modes of learning are taken into account? Which work best for which student?

And it would really depend on the assessment, how it was administered, how the results were interpreted and used, and whether instruction were subsequently guided by those results. 

5. Assessments  reduce forgetting. 
I believe I read something about this somewhere, but I didn't take a test on it and now I've quite forgotten what the article said, except for the bit about how you remember more if you are tested on it. 

6. Assessments are one of the few ways to be sure people really understand.
Subset of Reasons #3 and 4, and that is only if the assessments are solidly aligned with the curriculum.

7. Assessments give objective data. 
This is what they are intended to do. If the assessments are sound, constructed according to best practices, and free of obstacles such as cultural and other bias, we hope to obtain objective data after administering assessments.

8. Assessments define standards. 
Not so sure about this one, either. Often item review committees define and redefine standards. Sometimes individual item writers creatively define standards, and their work of a moment forms the template that is followed forever after. Assessments should define standards.

As an assessment content developer, I sometimes find myself stretching my brain until it snaps to find some logical way to target a skill that simply isn't assessable with a multiple-choice question. I know that it is not assessable, and yet I must do it, because that is the assignment. Am I defining the standard? I may very well be, but were I officially responsible for defining the standard, I'd approach it differently, perhaps starting off by working directly with groups of kindergarteners to obtain a baseline for what they actually are capable of doing and then burying myself in the library in order to see what people who spend their lives studying the developing minds of kindergarteners say about it.

9. Passing an assessment makes people feel good about themselves.
That's nice, isn't it.

Although I only feel good about myself when I absolutely and totally crush an assessment. 100% is what makes me feel happy, but we all have different standards, see Reason #8. A quiz will follow.

10. Online assessments give access for all.
I guess so, if a computer is made available to everyone.

And that's a wrap.

As ridiculous as I may seem in taking seriously what we can assume from the unbalanced and cheerleaderly perspective is most likely intended as marketing literature (using the term "literature" loosely because you know I am persnickety and Victorian in my literary aesthetics). But in a world when all of us are duped constantly and relentlessly, there is tremendous value in distinguishing between fact and propaganda.

By the way and just for fun, this blog post aligns to the following Common Core Standards:

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.11-12.5 Analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of the structure an author uses in his or her exposition or argument, including whether the structure makes points clear, convincing, and engaging.

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.11-12.6 Determine an author’s point of view or purpose in a text in which the rhetoric is particularly effective, analyzing how style and content contribute to the power, persuasiveness or beauty of the text.

UPDATE: Corrected a typo, ah me, but that's no guarantee you won't find another.

Measure What Can Be Measured

I'm in DC for a joyous occasion, and even so--even here, in the midst of the joy, even in the thrill of riding the Metro and the suspense of wondering if this be the ride during which I become irretrievably lost in the bowels of the city--I'm thinking about readability.

In assessment publications, readability, or the grade at which we might reasonably expect a student to be able to read a given text, is determined by one or more of these measures:

• a readability formula, such as Flesch-Kincaid, Lexile, or another
• the monitoring of vocabulary according to a graded word list, such as EDL Core Vocabularies (Steck Vaughn) or The Children's Writer's Word Book (Mojilner)
• content area expertise
• teacher review

Because of the Common Core Standards, one can no longer talk about readability without text complexity pulling up a chair to the table. Which is all to the good.

Here is an explanation of Lexile by Jason Turner at MetaMetrics (by posting this, I intend neither to promote nor disparage Lexile, simply to offer information). I'd like to clarify that when Turner identifies Lexile as a measure of text complexity, he means that it is a quantitative measure--there is no readability formula capable of providing a qualitative measure. 

This is such a vital point that I feel compelled to repeat that there is no readability formula capable of providing a qualitative measure. 

Readability formulae cannot interpret nor analyze meaning. No theme, motif, trope, metaphor, symbol--no beauty, no lyricism--can be interpreted nor analyzed by a readability formula, which greatly diminishes the likelihood that such a formula could provide an accurate measure of literary text. Readability formulae can count.

What is counted--word frequency, word length, sentence length--may vary from formula to formula. It doesn't seem to matter much what is counted; like the yellow, green, orange, and blue lines of the DC Metro trains that all pull up to L'Enfant Plaza, the readability formulae tend to arrive at the same conclusions: "No one of the quantitative measures performed significantly differently than the others in predicting student outcomes."

These formulae, therefore, are most useful in evaluating the suitability of informational text for students at a certain grade level, much less useful in evaluating the suitability of literary text, and not at all useful for evaluating the suitability of poetry or drama.

Here is an explanation published by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors' Association:

There will be exceptions to using quantitative measures to identify the grade band; sometimes qualitative considerations will trump quantitative measures in identifying the grade band of a text, particularly with narrative fiction in later grades. Research showed more disagreement among the quantitative measures when applied to narrative fiction in higher complexity bands than with informational text or texts in lower grade bands. Given this, preference should sometimes be given to qualitative measures when evaluating narrative fiction intended for students in grade 6 and above. For example, some widely used quantitative measures rate the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Grapes of Wrath as appropriate for grades 2–3. This counterintuitive result emerges because works such as Grapes often express complex ideas or mature themes in relatively commonplace language (familiar words and simple syntax), especially in the form of dialogue that mimics everyday speech. Such quantitative exceptions for narrative fiction should be carefully considered, and exceptions should be rarely exercised with other kinds of text. It is critical that in every ELA classroom students have adequate practice with literary non-fiction that falls within the quantitative band for that grade level. To maintain overall comparability in expectations and exposure for students, the overwhelming majority of texts that students read in a given year should fall within the quantitative range for that band.

It seems clear, then, that for literary text we must rely on a second opinion. And yet, from what I see, reviewers (content editors at test publishing companies, panels of teachers convened to evaluate test materials) continue to rely primarily on quantitative formulae rather than qualitative considerations when deciding to accept or reject literary passages. Just as we can all agree that Grapes of Wrath is hardly a book for second- and third-graders, I think we can all agree that this is a mistake.

I understand why and how this mistake is made. Unless trained in the study of literature (which is and has been a bona fide field of study for centuries upon centuries), who feels qualified to make decisions about a literary work? And yet, in the immortal words of Galileo, here we must find some way to "make measurable what cannot be measured."

The good news is that there are many people who are so trained. Why not add their voices to the mix? This would surely help us remain true to the goal of creating the best fit possible between reader and text.



 
And now, I'd like to return to the beginning and wish Kia and Roy, the two most brilliant people I know, two who are blessed with every gift of intellect and heart, two who are not just brilliant writers but purely lovely human beings, every possible happiness. The Donne poem is from the ceremony.

THE GOOD-MORROW
by John Donne

I WONDER by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? were we not wean'd till then ?
But suck'd on country pleasures, childishly ?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers' den ?
'Twas so ; but this, all pleasures fancies be;
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.

And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone;
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown;
Let us possess one world; each hath one, and is one.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres 
 Without sharp north, without declining west?
Whatever dies, was not mix'd equally;
If our two loves be one, or thou and I
Love so alike that none can slacken, none can die.

Source:
Donne, John. Poems of John Donne. vol I. E. K. Chambers, ed. London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1896. 

NOTE: Just for fun, here are the Flesch-Kincaid measures for both the John Donne poem and this blog post.
Flesch-Kincaid measure for "The Good-Morrow": 2.1
Flesch-Kincaid measure for "What Can Be Measured": 12.0

NOTE THE SECOND: I listened to this bit with Martha Nussbaum on the value of the humanities and wanted to share.

Thinking

The train is rolling into the station on our big passage writing project. As my co-conspirator partner-in-crime colleague cautions, it's too soon to uncork the champagne. There is still work to do, of course, in the immortal words of the Isley Brothers.

We have two other projects we're working on, too, so one train arrives for the disembarkation while another arrives and the passengers load up. And yet, we foresee a time when we'll have completed what we're doing now. Then what? We're thinking. We're big on thinking. In order to think, I always need to go looking for raw material to chip and chop. In that search, I found some items of interest:


SchoolTube: School videos. Who knew.
National Novel Writing Month: Coming up. Sharpen your pencils. And your wits.
First Book: Providing books to children in need.
National Writing Project: Writing prompts, resources, articles about writing and teaching writing.
Best Ever Teen Novels: Vote. Though how anyone could vote for anything else with To Kill a Mockingbird on the list is beyond me.


That's all I got. I'm going back in.

The Habit of Industriousness

All knowledge is of itself of some value. There is nothing so minute or inconsiderable, that I would not rather know it than not. In the same manner, all power, of whatever sort, is of itself desirable. A man would not submit to learn to hem a ruffle, of his wife, or his wife's maid; but if a mere wish could attain it, he would rather wish to be able to hem a ruffle.

Thus spaketh Samuel Johnson, as quoted by James Boswell in Life of Johnson.


Ten years ago, I was late to the inline skating party, but once I was there, I threw myself into it. Once I had taught myself how to fall and how to stop, well, there was no stopping me. I trained for marathons, often skating 70 miles or more a week.

What I never did learn, though, was how to maintain my skates. Having grown up in the company of mechanical geniuses, I believed that the wielding of tools was far beyond my ken. Not to mention the learned helplessness that develops when one is in the habit of allowing others doing for one what one might be capable of doing for oneself if one only took the trouble.


Relying on the kindness of another eventually became an insurmountable obstacle. Doesn't that sound stupid? But I quit skating--something I loved--because of my combined ignorance and unwillingness to learn how to maintain the skates myself: if you don't clean the bearings and rotate the wheels, you slow down, which deceleration drastically decreases the fun and increases the risk (as counter-intuitive as it sounds, the slower you go, the less stable you are).

Last weekend, I persuaded someone to show me how to take the skates apart and clean them and put them back together. Then I did it. The process took hours and hours. I had grime under my fingernails (what was left of them) and a streak of black grease on my face and I was tired. But by the time I was done, I thoroughly knew how to do this thing. There is nothing so minute or inconsiderable, that I would not rather know it than not.


So I learned how to do this task that did not come easily to me, one to which I used to have aversion, because I was highly motivated:

There are certain aspects of tasks that induce greater effort and persistence: a performer’s interest in the task and the level of difficulty of the task. These factors are relevant in creating an environment where an individual is likely to exert more effort and, in turn, become more industrious. Therefore, task interest and task difficulty may both act as moderators in the relationship between effort and industriousness.

Which effort was reinforced:

Learned industriousness theory asserts that reinforcing an individual for achieving a performance standard increases the likelihood of that individual performing those behaviors again. If the individual exerted high levels of effort during the completion of the task, the effort takes on its own reinforcing value. This is because the individual enjoys the sensation of working hard because it is associated with reinforcement. Therefore, this individual is more likely to generalize this high level of effort to other tasks because it is less aversive and is associated with positive results. 

The joy is in the doing.


You understand that this is really about how we can figure out how to help kids access that joy of exerting oneself and developing competence and confidence--in whatever realm.


What is the lever that triggers the engagement?

How to Get Good at It (Whatever It Is)

Maybe this is evidence of brainwashing from my college years, but I hold fast to the belief that the road to happiness is to become really, really good at something. How pleasant if that thing is also something at which one can earn a living. Even if not--even if that thing is carving sculptures out of butter or that strange combination of art, vocation, and drudgery of being a parent or if it is a kind of play--training one's dog, growing orchids (not my area--I'm just now trying to resurrect several that I nearly murdered from neglect followed by equally damaging obsessive attention), or building sculptures out of buttons--it's still not only a worthwhile pursuit but the highway to heaven.

Why?

1. Fun--Fun is absorbing, leads to flow, there are brain wave changes, look it up.


2. Becoming a master of something changes you deeply. You develop the confidence of the expert, which has a salutary deflating effect on the ego, thereby creating room for curiosity. You can afford to admit ignorance and to consider that you have something to learn. When I was studying Iyengar yoga and was admitted to the invitation-only level IV-V class, any pride I might have had was extinguished by the obvious truth that I was the dunce of the class. This was incredibly liberating. I felt freed of any expectations I might have had, any desire to compete (oh, people say yoga isn't competitive--baloney! If humans do it in a group, someone is going to try to dominate or show off, probably many someones) simply because I lacked the ability and experience to be able to compete at that level. Some of the people in the class had themselves been teachers for many years, others had studied in India, some had had a yoga practice for decades.


3. The joy is in the doing--not in feeling special for the doing, not in the attention one might get for the doing, but in the doing itself.

But one only learns this joy if one finds something that one really really loves to do, and then works and works and works and works at it. Malcolm Gladwell says it takes 10,000 hours to achieve mastery.

I think about kids at school. How do they get a chance to find what they love to do and are really really good at? Some maybe just stumble across it. One of the protegees (and I desperately hope she doesn't mind I'm talking about her here) is shockingly good at content development. She's a natural. She just has this way of thinking, this combination of acuity, precision, and creativity that makes her a knockout. With only a few months experience, she's creating work of the quality I'd expect from someone with years of experience. Did she choose a career in assessment content development? No. It was sort of happenstance facilitated by a recommendation of someone who is a friend of mine and was one of my protegee's teachers. Never underestimate the power of a teacher to guide, nudge, encourage.

Maybe sometimes kids are really good at things they don't necessarily love, and maybe sometimes they love things they're terrible at. Then what? We can't all be good at everything. We can't all be suited for everything.

When I was in the sixth grade, I'd been reading all the Black Stallion books for years, and more than anything I wanted to be a jockey. I was 5' 6" and weighed 120 pounds and someone hinted to me that jockeys tend to be built more delicately. I was crushed. (I got over it.)


Last night I was making a list of things I'm not just terrible at, but monumentally and breath-takingly terrible at.


I was the world's worst secretary. When I was 21, I burst into tears at a panel job interview when I learned there would be a timed typing test (what's funny is that I'm now quite speedy on the keyboard, writing having become my life's work). I like to cook but once in a while I stop paying attention and something catches fire (generally a sleeve, although I branch out occasionally and have set fire to two wooden cutting boards and a couple of oven mitts--and I'm not even listing all the times I left a kettle on the stove and then went my way). I like to knit but the highest knitting rank I will ever achieve is that of advanced beginner, as I get confused when I see numbers and letters in the same paragraph, and so find knitting patterns impossible to read and also? Directions are boring. I am bad at sitting through anything that bores me. In fact, I am really bad at sitting still. When I'm on the phone, I have to pace or sketch or file papers or make coffee or snip dead blossoms off the rosebush. Once I did sit still long enough knit a sweater. I read the directions and then congratulated myself on my creativity in not following them. We named the sweater Moby Dick. It was of the shape and dimension of a giant hobbit--or maybe an orangutang: too short in the torso, as wide as three rather hefty people, and with arms that reached nearly to my knees. It had a fetching hood of Medieval appearance. I had to wear the sweater, at least a couple of times, because it took probably 100 hours to knit, and when I did, I looked like a deranged monk. However, the sweater was banished to the Goodwill because it endangered my life when I forgot about the billowing sleeve while making coffee. Yes, it caught fire. TWICE. You couldn't tell after I brushed off the charred yarn. I knitted a skirt, too. The skirt never caught fire, but you'd think it would have spontaneously combusted from sheer hideousness. It looked like a homemade tent fashioned from olive, orange, and purple yarn barf. I just threw it away, although it might have been a serviceable sleeping bag if I'd just sewed the hem together. I GET LOST. Getting lost is so deeply embedded in my life that I have a formula for how much getting lost time to allow depending on the distance I'm traveling: For less than an hour's drive, I allow 30 extra minutes; for more than an hour, 60 minutes; for longer trips, it's another half day. I've gotten lost going to the airport, and to the cello teacher's--where we go once a week and have done for the last two years. I've been late for planes and for job interviews (before the formula). I'm always late to doctor appointments (I've gotten lost going there, too, even though it is 15 minutes away and I think I know where the office is, but my doctor kindly tells me she never minds because it gives her a chance to catch up on her file notes.


UPDATE: Fixed typo & formatting. Same as it ever was.

Just Because

The Secret Service was formed not to protect the president, but to protect the economy. During and after the Civil War, the sun shone brightly on counterfeiters, and they made plenty of hay. The bills were so crude then and counterfeiting was easy to do and difficult to detect. The economy tottered.


Hence the Secret Service. (Maybe there should be a new branch to protect the economy from banks.)


How do I know? Reading.


A few days ago, I read one of the best and funniest short stories I've read in ages, "The Revolt of Mother," by a writer of whom I'd never heard: Mary Wilkins Freeman. (Yes, I am an ignoramus. Though I read a lot and have been so doing for many years, I never made much of a study of American literature. Except the exceptions: Flannery O'Connor. Eudora Welty. The modernists. Charles Bukowski and John Fante. Some others.)


Anyone who's ever been married for a long time will understand this: 

“I wish you'd go into the house, mother, an' 'tend to your own affairs,” the old man said then. He ran his words together, and his speech was almost as inarticulate as a growl.

But the woman understood; it was her most native tongue. “I ain't goin' into the house till you tell me what them men are doin' over there in the field,” said she.

I won't tell you what happens.


It was in a volume of great American short stories, which volume included all the usual suspects: Hawthorne, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, great storytellers all.


What else am I reading? Marianne Moore's Complete Poems and I'm rereading Stet: An Editor's Life by Diana Athill.


What I really want to be reading, too, but I loaned it out or misplaced it: Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald. That book is just a lovely afternoon.

Rejection: A Love Letter

A few years ago, when I was about to move from one state to another, I was talking with a moving company sales representative whose job it was to estimate the cost of transporting my household. We got to talking, and I asked how he'd ended up in that line of work. In the course of telling that story, he told another, about his first job in sales. The owner of the business had directed him to go home, stand in front of a mirror, and say "No" a hundred different ways.


When I laughed, he gave a demonstration:
Heck, no!
Are you crazy?
No way!
That's insane.
No can do.
Nope.
Not on your life.
That's a negative.
That ain't happening.


He said it was the best career advice he'd ever gotten. How did it help him? He didn't say. I imagine it probably plucked some of the sting from the waspish word (in the immortal words of Henry Taylor). After all, a basic tenet of social psychology is that people tend to seek acceptance and avoid rejection. To be free of the need to avoid rejection means--to be free to take risks. And the bigger the risk, the bigger the payoff. Courting "no" allows for unexpected yeses.


When first I started submitting stories and poems to literary journals, I was felled by rejection as is a redwood by a chainsaw. Then I read an article in some writer's magazine about the rule of 12. The writer tracked all his submissions, and found that every piece he wrote ended up getting accepted, on average, the twelfth time out. I started tracking my rejections and found that my average was four times out the gate. (Maybe I chose less demanding markets. Certainly the markets counted on those who wrote for love, as the payment was frequently just a nice note from the editor, along with two complimentary copies of the journal.) Rejection lost its sting in that context. (Most of it. I still remember that one letter, in which an editor schooled me about the construction of plot: "A story has a beginning (sets the background), a middle (something happens) and an ending (the problem is solved)." I sure didn't like reading that letter at the time, but I think it's funny now.)


A story of mine was rejected recently. I didn't write it intentionally to take risks, nor to get rejected -- but I did take risks in the writing. Did the rejection bother me? Not at all. I can use the story elsewhere. And even if I couldn't--it was fun to write.


Let's say that I aspire to this degree of equanimity in every circumstance.

The Ritual of Reading

I've been slow to embrace e-books. My first exposure came late: it was the textbooks I received as pdfs when, in 2009, I enrolled in prerequisite classes for sommelier certification. (I can't say I greeted the innovation with enthusiasm. Nor did the other students, all of whom printed out the whole dang thing to put in a 3-ring binder. There's something ludicrous about the sight of cloth-covered tables bearing wine glasses, spit buckets, and 3-ring binders.)

For someone who doesn't read e-books much, I sure do have a bunch of them. I blame the free section at Amazon's Kindle store.

My disinclination to read e-books isn't based in Luddite ideology; I love the concept. Whatever brings good is good, to my way of thinking. E-books make it easy for people to acquire and carry books. That I could carry my entire stock on an iPad is a great and wonderful thing.

I don't, though. Instead, I have stacks. Because, like probably everyone who loves to read, I have too many books for my bookshelves. How appetite often exceeds capacity, eh.

I like books. I like to look at the covers. I like pages, and I like how books are printed in different type. And even though the weight of books can become a burden, I like that weight.

And there's a ritual in reading an actual book.

Last night (or very early this morning), the dog and I made our rounds of the house. We checked on the sleeping girls and the sleeping lovebird, and we made sure the windows were locked and drapes drawn. During the rounds, I picked up a book I'd been meaning to start. We turned off all the lights except the lamp by my bed, and then the dog curled up at the foot of the bed and I got under the covers. It was dark, and the moon was high and bright, and the lamplight golden, and I read a few pages, then turned off the light and went to sleep.

More on this topic of How We Will Read here. Some really wonderful interviews.

Topical Applications

We're (I've been using the editorial "we" freely this past week, not to be confused with the majestic plural, which I also quite like) launching a passage-writing project, which means, among other things, that the coffee cup is never empty and the day is never done.


A new passage project also means a marshaling of the brain cells and assorted Inner Resources for my favorite of all possible types of work: thinking of topics. In the past week I've offered up 35+ topics for reading passages. It's a barrel of monkeys.


I'm working with a few veterans, some intermediates, and some writers so new to assessment they are a bit dazed by the change in the atmosphere. And in working with new writers, I'm answering the kinds of questions new writers would have--which is all to the good. The best of all possible worlds, in the immortal words of Voltaire.






A question that should come up, at least in the writers' minds, is "What makes a good topic?"


The writers on this project are fortunate because rather than simply saying no when we reject a topic, we're explaining our decisions, thus providing a level of training that isn't typically offered in this business. We're also letting them see all of the topics that are approved by the client: even more training, especially for those possessing a willingness to perform a tiny bit of pattern analysis.


So if the writers do wonder about what makes a good topic (and I hope they do), they can look at the list, see everything that's been approved by our client, and then draw conclusions.


Some basic criteria used to evaluate topics include (but not necessarily in this order)

• relevance and/or practical use
• interest level to students at grade level
• content value
• general alignment to academic subject(s), if applicable
• heft--I can't think of another way to say this, but I mean whether the topic is big enough to carry a work of writing in its entirety

There's also the glitter factor. Some topics are just so perfect that you can't believe someone thought that angle up all by his or her own self.


And then there is the most wonderful surprise of all, when you give a writer a topic that is all right, you think, but nothing to throw a party for, and she writes a passage that she must have dipped in glue and rolled in crushed diamonds before she sent it in.


Sometimes the topic itself is secondary to the skill of the writer. A great writer can write about almost anything in an interesting way.

Poetry Poker

Another diversion during the week of festivities was a round or three of poetry poker. I believe the idea came from Kenneth Koch. Or so I was told. So you take a pack of cards, write words or phrases on them, and then deal 5 to each player. (We tend to be lax on rules, so we let players replace cards that seemed impossible.)


Here's one round:

• I didn't mean
• tarnished
• tiny
• little box with monsters inside
• mangoes

And here's the poem:


I didn't mean 
to give you a tarnished tiny
little box with monsters inside.
I meant to give you 
mangoes.




And here's another:

• two quiet lines
• peanuts
• sea
• boiled over
• who wanted most

And here's the poem:


Two quiet lines at the bar
we ate peanuts while we waited
the peanuts tasted like
the sea boiled over.
Who wanted most
to go to the beach, then:
you or I?


It's fun. More fun than it sounds like, especially after an evening of swimming and pizza, when you're sitting in a large bright kitchen with a dear friend. My daughters like it, too. We agreed that it's more fun the more decks you have in play. We've got two now, but we think it's not enough.


There never are enough words, are there.

Life Is Art

We are accustomed to understand art to be only what we hear and see in theaters, concerts, and exhibitions, together with buildings, statues, poems, novels. . . . But all this is but the smallest part of the art by which we communicate with each other in life. All human life is filled with works of art of every kind - from cradlesong, jest, mimicry, the ornamentation of houses, dress, and utensils, up to church services, buildings, monuments, and triumphal processions. It is all artistic activity. So that by art, in the limited sense of the word, we do not mean all human activity transmitting feelings, but only that part which we for some reason select from it and to which we attach special importance.   Tolstoy, "What Is Art?"

We clipped the clothespins to an egg carton to dry. Whence camest this beautifully colored egg carton, you ask? Farmers market. From the chicken lady.

The festivities went on for some time. Last night was the concluding soiree. We had friends over to make art and drink champagne.


We all brought out boxes and bins of supplies from our art closets.


You see some results above: wooden clothespins, which we painted gold, and embellished with glitter or metallic confetti or fake gems or those waxy sticks that are fun to make shapes out of.

A close-up:

My favorite is that created by Stephanie: the one with the yellow sprigs.

There were also lantern-makers among us:

Heather made these. Are they not gorgeous?

And Matisse made an appearance in Caroline's collage:

I just love this.

And therefore the activity of art is a most important one, as important as the activity of speech itself and as generally diffused.-- Tolstoy, again, "What Is Art?"

Cool Friday

It's Friday. Feeling kind of festive round my way. I'm looking at a bit of blue ocean. Went to a dance class this morning. Going to swim in a friend's pool and eat pizza (not simultaneously) tonight.


Some fun things:
Radiolab: From one of the protégées, God bless her. (Did I get those accents right? Who cares! It's Friday! Ima go a little crazy and not even look it up!)
Grammar Revolution: I love that a Bright Young Thing is diagramming sentences!
Math4Love: I know, I'm an ELA person through and through. You know how I be with the numbers. But I'm charmed by this blog. I mean!
Jessica Hagy at Forbes: (Also linked to in previous.) From partner-in-crime co-conspirator colleague and publisher Frank. Because I'm late to this party--but just in time for the fun.
"Stop Working More than Forty Hours a Week": File under: Do as I Say, Not as I Do. Something to think about.
Howcast: How to do pretty much anything, including a lot of stuff you probably don't want to do.
Freerice: Been liking this for many years now. Bringing together word geeks and do-gooders. (From TIME's 2011 Best of list.)
Khan Academy:Since we began our home-schooling, four or five or twenty people have told me about this site. (From TIME's 2011 Best of list.)


That's what I got. Go have some fun.

Mi Flow

. . . en las palabras inmortales de Baby Ranks.


As discussed previously, flow is that state of optimal creativity, focus, and absorption. As described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.


Cows are pastured where my dog and I walk in the mornings. Our schedule and that of the cows don't usually coincide (those cows must have many big busy doings, for they are more often absent than present), but when they do, it's a thrill.

My dog was bred to tend and guard grazing animals. (On both sides; she's a mix of Belgian Tervuren and chow chow.) She is no slouch at guarding, as anyone who's ever walked past my car or been to my house can attest. I wouldn't want to be our mail carrier. As to her herding skills--let's just say her opportunities to prove her mettle are limited. I don't let her herd me, and my daughters just push her out of the way when she tries to herd them.


So when she catches sight of those cows--it's deep calling to deep. One can see that she feels inspired to the depths of her soul to go and herd those cows.

Everyone should feel that calling, right? It's a great feeling.




UPDATE: 4/2/12--Today the dog got loose and herded the cows up the hills and through the brush down to the pasture. When you get close to a cow, you are shocked by how big they are. They make a lot of noise crashing through the brush. The dog had a wonderful time, but when she turned her attention to a calf, I was worried the mother would kick her. She was back on the leash before anyone--bovine or canine--got hurt. When we passed by later, the cows seemed none the worse for the exercise. The dog is exhausted. I think it was the best day of her life. So far.

Getting Our House in Order

What is fun about homeschooling is a lot. All those lectures in the car to a captive audience? (Parents, you know what I'm talking about.) I get to make my kids take notes while I'm talking. Heheheheheheheh.


The regime schedule includes vocabulary study, a subject about which I hold strong opinions. For proficient readers, I believe vocabulary study best takes place in context, so one required activity is that the girls keep a notebook in which they write down every unfamiliar word.


Yesterday we were reading together (I was reading "The Law of Genre" by Derrida, don't ask, because anyone who knows me knows how I feel about deconstruction, but more on that in another post; Naomi was finishing Rebecca), and I came across an unfamiliar word ("liminal") and looked up the definition, and in so doing, we talked about what we thought it meant, both from the context and prior knowledge ("subliminal"). (In the same essay, I stumbled upon "invaginate." Diction is so telling, is it not. Talk about subliminal. Although my French is so poor that I'm unable to tell whether the choice of "invaginate" was necessary or creative license on the part of the translator.) And yes, "liminal" meant exactly what we thought.


In addition to keeping a record of unfamiliar words, the girls must find a definition and then write a sentence with each word, a sentence that provides enough context that would allow the reader to determine the meaning of the word.


Which meant that the topic of one of our commuting lectures was context clues, and specifically how context clues provide information about word meaning:

• restatement/definition--In which a synonym or paraphrase is provided:

All compromise is based on give and take, but there can be no give and take on fundamentals. Any compromise on mere fundamentals is a surrender. For it is all give and no take. --Mahatma Gandi [This example also uses contrast, which is described below.]

Restatement and definition cues are sometimes cued by punctuation, such as commas or parentheses:

A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true. -- Socrates 

• example--In which one or more illustrative examples are provided. The use of example may also be cued by punctuation: 

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science. -- Charles Darwin

• contrast--In which the opposite is provided:

There exists a kind of laughter which is worthy to be ranked with the higher lyric emotions and is infinitely different from the twitchings of a mean merrymaker.--Nikolai Gogol 

He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things he has not, but rejoices for those which he has. -- Epictetus 

As far as I'm concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue. -- Albert Einstein

• restriction--In which the use of other words in the sentence limits the possible meaning of a word (some like to call this the use of key words, to which I say "tomato, tomahto"):

A high station in life is earned  by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace. -- Tennessee Williams 

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the species that is the most adaptable to change. -- Charles Darwin

Of these basic categories, infinite variety may exist. That is, restriction clues may indicate relationship, such as cause and effect:

As in nature, as in art, so in grace: it is rough treatment that gives souls, as well as stones, their luster. -- Thomas Guthrie

And examples may be given as part of a system of classification:

Raptors, such as hawks, eagles, kites, and falcons, are known to be diurnal.

This is a foundational concept to ELA content development, both in terms of passage and item development. Writers of passages must build in context clues for difficult words, particularly words that are above grade level or words that have specific technical meanings; item writers must be sure to select target vocabulary words for which there are sufficient clues in the text for the reader to determine meanings.


Once this is explained, it probably seems fairly basic. You may already know all of this. But given the lack of training and lack of experience (because believe me, all you have to do in order to have the importance of this concept seared into your soul is to attend one item review committee meeting attended by master teachers with a solid grasp of the underlying principles of vocabulary acquisition) we see nowadays in content developers (already deplored previously), many item writers have no clue idea about context clues. They have no understanding of what real context clues look like, how context clues are created, nor of how readers rely on context clues -- these inexperienced or untrained item writers have no understanding that reading is a systematic process that relies on a variety of extremely complex skills, of which this is one, and even this one is very complex and employs different processes. Which means that the work they do is going to be fundamentally unsound.


When you go to build a house, you first make sure to lay a solid foundation. Make sure that house is built upon a rock.


More on vocabulary another time. I'm also big on word structure and derivatives, as you might have guessed.


P.S. Just for fun: a word frequency analyzer. You can see how language usage changes over time. Another way to while away the minutes.


UPDATE: Fixed a typo.
UDATE THE SECOND: And two others. Goodness gracious.

Big News!

Such wonderful news here. I've got 3 cover designs for my book The Hidden Market for Children's Literature: Getting Paid to Write for Reading Tests. My publisher, Frank Brockmann of Paceline Publishing (you may know him from Center Point Assessment Solutions), and I haven't been able to decide which we like best.*


Help!


If you feel inspired, please leave a comment with a vote for Cover A, Cover B, or Cover C. Let's give it a week, and then tally up the votes and see which cover is the winner.






COVER A: The cool, minimalist approach:

COVER B: The retro, old-school style:

COVER C: A bit of whimsy:

Design concepts by Chris Di Natale of Di Natale Design, to whom I owe a debt of gratitude, though we have never met nor spoken nary a word. However, when I see these designs, it's clear to me that Chris listened carefully to Frank and me as we talked about our aesthetics and what was important to us. There is nothing I appreciate more than being listened to. Thanks, Chris.




* Um. I actually do have money down on one a favorite. Frank also has a favorite, but his favorite is not the same as my favorite. I'll reveal all when the votes are in.


UPDATE: I hear from someone that sometimes Blogger eats the comments and they don't appear. If you have any problem with that, just find me on Facebook and you can vote there.