Month: February 2005

St. Martin’s Press guy and all-around good computers and writing sort Nick Carbone sent me a piece from the subscription only version of The Chronicle of Higher Education called “Test Scores Do Not Predict Happiness” by Theodore A. O’Neill. I actually get the print version of the CHE (temporarily), so I should look this one up.

A lot of what O’Neill is talking about in this essay is the general complaints about the SAT and how it presents some huge problems for admissions offices (O’Neill is the dean of admissions at the University of Chicago). At the end of his essay, he writes:

Admissions officers could, of course, ask students to write for the
college application rather than for the SAT, could pose questions
interesting enough to capture the attention of smart kids and then
read the responses with care and sensitivity — but that takes time
and skill. We could sit and talk to students about their thoughts,
reading, lives, dreams, and whatever else they feel is important to an
understanding of who they are, but that takes time and skill.
Schoolteachers could teach and evaluate without relying on Advanced
Placement examinations and SAT-II’s to direct their teaching and
validate their successes, but that would take time and skill.

Even if the skill is available — and a lot of skillful and devoted
people work as teachers and admissions counselors — the time so
frequently is not.

Incidentally, if a place like the University of Chicago doesn’t have the resources to do what most people would consider to be “the right thing,” what chance does a place like EMU have?

Anyway, as troubling as all that might be, the thing that really got me in this piece is the reminder that the written part of the test will be written out by hand, and, as a result, penmanship is going to count, even if it is on the basic level of legibility or on some more hard to measure/impressionistic/unconscious level .

Let me tell ya, I am so lucky I don’t have to take this test.

Here is a “real and undoctored” version of my handwriting:

I will admit that I didn’t try to be especially neat when I wrote this, but I didn’t try to be messy either, and I do think this is a more or less “real” writing sample. When I got done reading the article that Nick sent me, I sat down with a pen and tried to write out a response. My first problem was actually using a pen– I much prefer to do my “writing” on a computer keyboard. But beyond that, here’s what I noticed:

• I used a pen on white unlined paper. I assume students taking the test will have to use the classic #2 pencils, which (for me, at least) would make it even more illegible.
• Writing this much took me about 15-20 minutes. I could have typed four times as much in the same amount of time.
• I couldn’t revise anything really, which really frustrated me.
• I think my handwriting (and again, this is pretty typical) “looks” dumb, which, in turn, makes me look dumb. Which is why I type.
• Oh yeah, these are all reactions based on writing something in a not very difficult situation– that is, I wasn’t taking a test in a room with a bunch of other people.

I guess what I’m saying is if I were in the same situation as perspective college students having to take this test, I’m not sure I could do it.

I wonder how many of the test developers would be willing to do it?

I’m sitting in Bombadill’s Coffee Shop in downtown Ypsi right now, working away. Or trying to work away. There are people talking all around me, there’s music playing in the background, the sun is coming in at an odd angle and making it difficult for me to see the computer screen, and the espresso machine is screaming away. And despite all this, all I can hear is this woman next to me eating soup and licking her fingers like a wild animal. Jeesh.

I suspect that my wife will have a unique appreciation for this short film, “238 Miles.” It’s a “documentary” of sorts where a guy listens to ABBA’s song “Dancing Queen” over and over and over and OVER again on his four or five hour drive from Iowa City, IA to Chicago, IL. Funny stuff, and the other movies at the site are good, too.

See http://www.error10.net/. I cannot believe that all of these are actually “real,” though as good as the Apple and OSX interface is, there are still plenty of weird things that pop up once in a while.

Yeah, that’s pretty much my grocery list for tomorrow, but because it’s a typed subject line on my unofficial blog and not a handwritten note, I don’t think it’s the sort of thing that is going to show up on grocerylist.org anytime soon.

I don’t know the whole story with this site, but I do know two things. First, the site, which consists of 700 or so (!) grocery lists scanned in or sent to the site’s creator and organizer Bill Keaggy. This is a site which he claims does not take too much of his time. Yeah, right.

Second, he linked to a post I had back in September about my enjoyment of grocery shopping with the title line “LOVE: The pleasures of grocery shopping.” It closely follows a post titled “HATE: I hate grocery shopping.” (I would have linked back to the grocerylist site, but the archive didn’t seem to be working.) A nice juxtaposition there, Bill.

Anyway, I’ll have to keep track of this site. And scan my grocery lists and send them to him via email again and again and again.

This morning I read what I thought was about the smartest critique of the SAT writing test I’ve stumbled across to date: “New SAT writing section scores low,” by Mark Franek (who is an English teacher and Dean of Students at the William Penn Charter School in Philadelphia), in the February 15 Christian Science Monitor. This article was linked on the blog Number 2 Pencil.

You should read the article for yourself, but Franek carefully points out the problems of both the writing portion of the test and the grammar portion. And, in my reading, he does it without dismissing all standardized testing out of hand.

Let me quote from two portions of Franek’s article:

Second, the slew of multiple-choice questions about grammar that the College Board calls “improving sentences and paragraphs” is not what Shakespeare had in mind when he dipped his quill in the inkwell before sitting down to edit a draft.

From the board’s official Prep Booklet, here’s the first example of what to expect (possible errors appear in italics): “The students (a) have discovered that (b) they can address issues more effectively (c) through letter-writing campaigns (d) and not through public demonstrations. (e) No error.”

This sentence appears OK to me, even if it is a little clunky. According to the College Board, however, the error occurs at (d) because: “When a comparison is introduced by the adverb ‘more,’ as in ‘more effectively,’ the second part of the comparison must be introduced by the conjunction ‘than’ rather than ‘and not.’ “

Got that?

I’ve been writing and teaching English for a long time, and this question is pretty appalling to me, too. As Franek points out, the answer is not “d” per se; rather, the answer is a more complete rewrite of the sentence. And, as I think someone on the WPA mailing list pointed out, that might be an interesting way to go with the test: give students some passages like this to revise and then holistically score those revisions.

Of course, we’re not liable to get that or anything a whole lot better than what we’ve got for a while, and the reasons for that are crystal clear. To quote Franek again:

If the goal is to improve education, then I propose a portfolio-assessment approach where students are allowed to gradually generate (over the course of the year) multiple writing samples in various genres (the kinds of things found in any real library or bookstore) and then submit them by some agreed-upon due date.

Critics of this approach will say that portfolios are unreliable and that there is no way to guarantee student authenticity. But we teachers know the truth. The College Board would much prefer that their test remain mostly multiple-choice, which is cost-effective to score. Portfolios would require the Board to hire thousands of English teachers each year to read and assess over a million pages of student writing, much of it demonstrating genuine literacy learning. Now that would be a revolution.

Right on the money, IMO.

It begs the question: will Christo come to the Ypsi-Arbor area?

Probably not.

In the meantime though, I thought this link at the blog Curbed which links to a ton of other pages with pictures of the Central Park Gates is enough to do the trick.

I’ve been too busy and/or distracted with a host of other things (school and life both) to write anything new or original here lately. But I still have been reading some other blogs and I thought I mention a few items of interest:

• “Let the carnival commence.” Collin has started the long promised discussion of Wayne Booth’s book The Rhetoric of Rhetoric: The Quest for Effective Communication. I think I’m going to try to read it at the gym while riding the stationary bike– it will give me a break from the treadmill anyway.
• “Teaching Writing, Collaboration, and Engagement in Global Contexts: The Drupal Alternative to Proprietary Courseware.” These are the slides from a presentation by Charlie Lowe, Samantha Blackmon, and David Blakesley at a conference at Purdue. I don’t know if Drupal (or open source software, for that matter) is always “the best” solution. But I do think that when universities adopt one “course in a box” platform, especially the CMS software that aren’t particularly flexible (things like WebCT), they paint themselves into a corner.
• Clancy “CultureCat” Ratliff has a post where she ponders what texts she would pick for a first-year rhetoric or composition course. She writes about the distinction between “composition” and “rhetoric” (which I sometimes agree with, and which I sometimes think is a pretty artificial one), and contemplates what texts she would use if she could use anything. Personally, I’d use the book I’m writing. And along those lines, one other thing left out of the formula here are textbook companies and the weird relationship that scholars in the field have with them.
• From Johndan “datacloud” Johnson-Eilolia, I learned that Hunter S. Thompson killed himself and that the Powerbook 100 was named the “#1 gadget of all time.” Like many undergraduates (including Johndan), I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a book that was actually passed around on my dorm floor. I also saw a “talk” that Thompson gave at the University of Iowa when I was an undergraduate there; really, it was more of a drunken press conference than a speech. RIP, Hunter.

  And my first laptop was a PB 100. I think I’ll have to see if it’s still in the basement or not…

In one of the more amusing postings I’ve seen on a blog I read which is regularly amusing, the writer of Ann Arbor is Overrated notes that in upstate New York, they serve a style of hot dog referred to as a “michigan.” Let me attempt to explain.

There are a few “unique foods” in Michigan– lots of cherries up north, and way up north, you’ve got pasties, the meat pies served with gravy oh so popular in the “U.P.” But in southeast Michigan, I don’t think there really is a distinctive food product. Oh sure, I suppose there’s a lot of good Polish and Middle Eastern food in this area, and Detroit does make a big deal out of the Polish jelly doughnut called a “Paczki,” but hey, when all is said and done, a doughnut is a doughnut. Unless, of course, it’s a Krispy Kreme, but that’s a whole different discussion.

The Detroit area does have these places called “koney islands” (or, sometimes, “coney islands”). “Koney islands” the places, are diners, and they almost always serve a food product called a “koney island,” which is a chili dog. No, I don’t have any idea why they call diners koney islands and chili dogs koney islands.

Anyway, AAO discovered this link to what he (I presume “he,” but I don’t really know) calls a “bizarro-world” in New York where they sell these “michigan” (with a small M?) hot dogs. Be sure to visit the comments– they’re more than half the fun.

All of this inspired a “Daddy-Will” dining experience on Friday at a Koney Island. Will didn’t have school, so we went to Briarwood Mall in Ann Arbor and lunched at Kerby’s Koney Island, which is a local chain. I suppose we could have gone to a more “authentic” koney island, like Abe’s Coney Island in downtown Ypsilanti, but that’s a bit too skanky and smoky for a seven year old, let alone me. We took the more white bread approach. Incidentally, across from the Kerby’s Koney Island in the mall is a California Pizza Kitchen, and down the way two stores is a sushi place. That seems so Ann Arbor to me.

Will had the chicken fingers (where did they ever come up with that name, anyway? it always inspires a vision of mutant birds for me) and I, of course, had the coney (or koney) island. How was it? Well, it was fried chicken breast and a chili dog. We ate it, it tasted like food (more or less), and I, er, “remembered” my chili dog pretty much for the rest of the day. I don’t think I would not go back, but I also don’t think it will become my regular place.

But at least I’ve been once.

I thought this was very amusing and a lot of fun to play with:

http://www.googlefight.com/