As usual, I'll post a traditionalists topic on test day. But actually, the reason I haven't had as many traditionalists posts lately isn't music. It's because our primary traditionalist, Barry Garelick, hasn't posted in four weeks -- and that means that his main commenter, SteveH, has been silent as well. Today's post, then, will be a hodgepodge of what other traditionalists besides Garelick and SteveH are currently discussing.
Let's start out with last week's big event -- the Scripps National Spelling Bee. I've written about the Bee several times on the blog before. In particular, I mentioned that every year on the day of the Bee, I like to watch the film Akeelah and the Bee -- one of the four big inspirational school movies.
But this year's Bee was different. The giveaway that this Bee wouldn't be like previous years' Bees was the morning session. Usually, with hundreds of spellers qualifying for the Bee, the first few rounds are written. Fifty spellers qualified for Round 4, the first oral round. The idea is to reduce this to around a dozen for the prime time session, to be televised on ESPN. But after Round 8, there were still 16 spellers left in the competition. So all of them were allowed to advance to prime time.
And then, in Round 9 -- the first prime time round -- no spellers were eliminated. One or two spellers dropped out during each of Rounds 10-15 to cut the remaining field in half. But then no one was eliminated in Rounds 16-17 -- and it was well past 11 PM Eastern time.
The judges then made a sudden unexpected decision -- there would be only three more rounds. Any spellers remaining after Round 20 would be declared co-champions. As it turned out, the last three rounds were also perfect, and thus there were an unprecedented eight co-champions at this year's Bee.
The film Akeelah and the Bee ends with the title character and her main rival, Dylan Chiu, being declared co-champs. But the filmmakers didn't foresee what would happen if such a tie were to occur in the actual Spelling Bee. (Recall that Akeelah is the only one of the four big inspirational school movies that is fictional rather than based on a true story.)
For three straight years -- 2014-2016 -- the spelling bee ended in a tie. Five years ago, many people complained that a national championship should never end in a draw, but that first tie was seen as a rare, freak occurrence. But when the second tie happened, the Bee organizers decided to change the rules to make draws less likely -- instead of 25 words, the final two or three spellers would participate in 25 rounds before co-champs are declared. Yet the third tie still occurred anyway. After the third tie, the organizers devised an extra written round -- not televised -- to be used only as a tiebreaker. (That test was given before the TV portion of the Bee began.) Only if the written scores of the final two or three are equal would co-champs be named.
But then, you might wonder, why was there no mention of the written tiebreaker last week? After all, even if two or three of them had the same written score, it's unlikely that all eight finalists would have had the same score, so maybe there would have been two or three co-champs. Well, the answer is that this year, the Bee organizers decided not to give the written test beforehand. The organizers certainly have egg on their face now, as this would have been the perfect year to have that tiebreaker.
I also notice that the final two or three spellers are supposed to use a special "Championship Word List," but I don't recall hearing any mention of that list, not even for Rounds 18-20. Perhaps the words given during the last three rounds were indeed "Championship Words," but no one bothered to say so on the air.
At the start of the broadcast, it was mentioned that the grand prize for a single winner is now $50,000, but if there were co-champs, they would divide the top prizes (that is, two co-champs would earn the mean of the first and second prizes, and likewise for three co-champs). Yet all eight winners received the full $50K. I assume this was done because Scripps would have appeared cheap if the exact year that it was announced that the prize would be divided, suddenly there are eight co-champs.
I assume that changes will be in store for next year's Bee. At the very least, I figure that the written tiebreaker test for 2017-2018 will be restored in 2020. It will be easy to explain to the spellers why a tiebreaker is needed -- just look at the 2019 Bee.
Let me write a little more about the Bee itself. Of the final 16 spellers, three of them come from my home state of California, including two Southern Californians. Only one of them made the final eight, and it was the Northern Californian, Rishik Gandhasri.
When I watch the Bee, I like to cheer on the spellers from my home state and area, and I also try to spell the words along with the students. Thus I rooted for the two from SoCal until they were gone, and then I cheered for Rishik. Since I took French in high school, sometimes I'm actually able to figure out the spellings of French-derived words.
As it turns out, I was able to spell Rishik's winning word, auslaut, even though it's derived from German rather than French. I knew that the two dots above certain vowels in German is an umlaut, and since Rishik was told that his word also had something to do with linguistics, I figured that his word would be spelled similarly. On the other hand, three of the next four spellers had words deriving from French, but I was unable to spell any of them.
In the movie Akeelah and the Bee, three of the final five spellers are Angelenos, with two of them (including the foil Dylan) from Woodland Hills (a suburban neighborhood, used by the filmmakers to contrast with Akeelah's inner-city Crenshaw district). One of the announcers in the movie remarks how well "they're making them at Woodland Hills."
But it's unlikely that we'll ever see so many spellers from L.A. at the real Bee. This is because a new hotbed of spelling has arisen in Dallas, Texas. Either last year or the year before, the announcers on ESPN mentioned that a spelling club (similar to the one in Woodland Hills in the movie) has been formed in North Texas, with coaches and everything. And indeed, three of the Elite Eight spellers hail from the Dallas-Ft. Worth area.
And of course, we can't help but notice that most spelling champs this decade have been of South Asian descent. I've heard it's because in the late 1990's, an Indian-American won the Bee, and his victory inspired others to follow in his footsteps (just as the dominance of Serena Williams has led to many young black girls to play tennis). The current South Asian run started slightly after Akeelah and the Bee was produced -- the Asian speller Dylan is described as being either Chinese or Korean rather than Indian. (But one of the final five looks as if he could be South Asian.)
And indeed, seven of the Elite Eight spellers from last week are of Indian descent. Thus current demographic trends make a real Akeelah and the Bee unlikely, either ethnically or geographically. It's a shame, though, since I like to believe that there's a real Akeelah out there who won the Spelling Bee, just as the students from the other three inspirational movies are actually out there.
Before I leave the Akeelah movie, I like to mention one of my favorite scenes from the film. Javier, the Latino boy from Woodland Hills, stalls for time during the regional bee by asking many questions about his word over and over, such as "Can you use the word in a sentence?" and "Can you use the word in a different sentence?" Finally, he asks, "Can you use the word in a song?" before ultimately spelling the word.
The word he spells then was ratatouille. As it turns out, the year after Akeelah and the Bee was produced, a Pixar movie came out named Ratatouille. (It's about a rat who can cook.) Like most Pixar films, it contains many songs. Thus if Javier had waited long enough, they really could have used the word ratatouille in a song!
(I also like the fact that Dr. Jacques Bailly, the official pronouncer at the Scripps National Spelling Bee, also pronounces the words in the film.)
OK, that's enough about the Spelling Bee movie. I wrote that this is a traditionalists' post, and yes -- I am going to tie the Bee to the traditionalists. I was curious as to whether Joanne Jacobs would make any mention of the Bee and its octet of champions. Well, I found the following article:
https://www.joannejacobs.com/2019/06/octo-champs-win-the-bee/
None of our main traditionalists post in the comment thread. And the two commenters there don't write about there being too many champions -- instead, they discuss whether we are asking students to specialize too soon (whether academically or athletically), as well as how much money is being spent on such specialties.
Here is a comment from "Ann in L.A.":
Ann in L.A.:
The kids who are spending 20+ hours a week specializing are missing out on a lot:
>> In this charming New York Times essay, new dad David Epstein looks at the somewhat pervasive idea that our kids should specialize early in something — anything. But in researching superstars in their fields from physics to tennis, he found that, as kids, they were often allowed to play lots of different sports, or different instruments, or simply tinker with no external reward.
I do notice Joanne's remark here:The winning word in 1984 was “luge.”
This phenomenon appears in other sports as well -- in 1855, the world record in the mile was 4:28, but a high school guy running that time at the State Meet in track last week wasn't fast enough to advance out of the prelims. Improvements in technology, health, and training techniques have made our athletes much faster.
The same is true for spelling -- training has improved great in the last 35 years from the point where luge can win the Spelling Bee. We don't know what is the ultimate limit to how fast the mile can be run, but there is a limit to how many words can be known -- the entire dictionary. The final eight spellers have apparently memorized the whole dictionary. And as training continues to improve, expect multiple spellers knowing all the words to be the norm, not the exception. This is another reason why the written tiebreaker will become increasingly important.
Speaking of "Ann in L.A.," I'm curious as to whether she's the same as an "Auntie Ann" whose comments I've quoted on the blog before. (Later in the post, I will quote one of Auntie Ann's old comments in discussing today's final exam.)
Right now, I believe that they are one and the same. Let's follow the trail of evidence. The site where Ann regularly posts as "Auntie Ann" is Darren Miller's Right on the Left Coast blog. (Once again, it's a political site -- "right" = right-wing.)
One of Miller's posts is about his final exam policy -- how timely, since today is my final exam day:
http://rightontheleftcoast.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-most-important-quiz-of-my-high.html
I've taught no new material in my statistics classes this month. I've devoted the month mostly to review, with a lot of emphasis on doing statistics on an advanced calculator. The days of using tables are over for my students, and this month they've honed their skills on the ancient-but-still-useful TI-83 (yes, I'd prefer 84's, but at over $100 apiece...).
I excuse from taking the final those students who have 97% or above going into the final. This student had 97.3% going into this quiz. This quiz was the decider.
And here is Auntie Ann's comment:
Auntie Ann:
My kid took his last graded math test about two weeks ago. School doesn't end for another two weeks. I'm still shaking my head at that one.
It's too bad too, since he bombed one test and could use one more grade to pull it back up.
And another recent post is about the Common Core. Darren Miller writes:
Years ago I anticipated this would be the problem, at least in math:
By high school, “Common Core — in its fullness — does not prepare students even for a full pre-calculus class,” notes Ze’ev Wurman, a former senior education policy advisor under President George W. Bush.It wasn't hard to look at the standards and see the difference.
Here Miller quotes another traditionalist, Ze'ev Wurman. We already know that Common Core math doesn't prepare students for AP Calculus, but Wurman states that it doesn't prepare for Pre-Calc. I've seen that traditionalist accusation before -- the highest Common Core level is "pseudo-Algebra II."
Anyway, Auntie Ann links to another Wurman article, then mentions a Barry Garelick comment. (Oh, so if you thought Garelick's name wasn't going to be mentioned again -- guess again!) Anyway, then she links to her old post from five years ago:
Auntie Ann:
And I wrote this 5 years ago. It's a little out of date with hindsight, but a lot of it still holds. Barry Garelick posted a comment below worth reading as well.
Back then I wrote:
>> I often liken the implementation of the Common Core to the whole country throwing all its educational balls up in the air at the same time. Considering how bad the system has been, you would think that whatever gets reassembled would be an improvement; but, the same people who were in charge before are the ones now catching the balls, and they will do their utmost to try to put them right back where they were. <<
If we follow that link, we see on the left side of her blog that Auntie Ann is in fact an Angeleno -- and this matches up with "Ann in L.A.," which is why I believe they are one and the same. Yes, so maybe there are plenty of Anns in Los Angeles, but how many of those Anns are there who post at all the traditionalist sites?
Now this isn't just Bee season -- it's also the time of year for graduations. And here's something that traditionalists have complained about -- not multiple spelling champs, but multiple valedictorians.
Many schools are now naming multiple valedictorians. The district from which I graduated 20 years ago as a young high school student was such a district. The official policy of my district is that all grades are unweighted, including honors and AP courses. Thus the highest mathematically possible GPA a student can earn is 4.0. In my year there were about two dozen straight-A students (with most of them magnet students), hence there were about two dozen valedictorians.
(Actually, one of Auntie Ann's recent comments at Miller's blog leads to an article on valedictorians, but it's behind a paywall, so I can't access it at all.)
Some people debate whether honors and AP classes should be worth an extra grade point. It's clear, though, that without the extra points, there won't be a unique valedictorian, since multiple students are likely to earn straight A's.
One traditionalist fear is grade inflation. When they see multiple straight-A students, they fear that the students are receiving A's for very little effort. Even the SAT, usually held in high regard by the traditionalists, wonder whether the test is being watered down. If a school were to give a reward to the student with the top SAT score and multiple students at the school have a 1600, traditionalists would be the first to bring up the 1990's recentering of the SAT -- that at least some of the 1600 students wouldn't have had a perfect score before the recentering.
Ultimately, the biggest traditionalist fear is "everyone receives a trophy." They fear that even something as small as eight spelling bee champs or eight valedictorians are like a slippery slope that leads to students being rewarded for zero knowledge or effort.
This is what I wrote last year about today's test:
This is finals week at the school district whose schedule I'm following on the blog. And so today I am posting my version of the second semester final exam.
As usual, let me give my rationale for choosing these particular questions. When I wrote this final, I wanted it to serve not only as an in-classroom final, but what my vision of an ideal Common Core test, like PARCC or SBAC, should look like.
I've talked several times about the traditionalists who prefer that test questions focus more on content and less on labels. The questions at the end of each chapter of the U of Chicago are divided into four sections, Skills, Properties, Uses, and Representations (SPUR). So we conclude that the traditionalists prefer tests that are heavy on Skills (where most of the content is), and light on Properties (where most of the labels are).
I don't agree completely with the traditionalists here -- especially not in Geometry class. Geometry, after all, is all about proofs, and the reasons that appear in proofs are labels and properties. So if one isn't learning about labels and properties, then one isn't really doing Geometry.
By the way, here is what traditionalist Auntie Ann wrote about Geometry in her old link from four years ago:
5. In the only direct complaint against the actual standards I have seen, supposedly, the high school geometry standards came out of nowhere and embrace an odd view of geometry. I don't know if this is true or not, but I do know that the classic geometry of proofs and theorems and corollaries has been dying for a long time. Geometry was my favorite math class, and I loved the proofs-based course. If it has been dying for a while, it is hard to attribute that to CC.
7. This includes the word-heavy explanations required in K-12 math today, and the belief that if you can’t explain something in words, then you don’t really understand it. Showing your work used to be enough to show understanding: if you could show the steps you took, you already showed your understanding. Now, even simple tasks have to be explained in complete sentences.
Notice that Auntie Ann's #7 seems to contradict her #5 -- the proofs of Geometry really are explanations in words of why a theorem is true. Then again, she proceeds to give arithmetic as an example of what she means by #7. Thus apparently, Ann has no problem with word-heavy explanations (proofs) in Geometry -- only in arithmetic (probably up to Algebra I).
A test that selects from the questions in the U of Chicago text would naturally have mostly Properties and Representation questions, and this is what I started to write. But one traditionalist argument for having more Skills than Properties questions is that with a Skills-based test, students who have the necessary Skills can take the test cold, without having to study for a long time, and still get an excellent grade. But a test that contains many labels and properties would require even the smartest students to spend time learning the particular names of the labels and properties. This is significant considering that one major argument against standardized tests like the Common Core tests is that they require so much time for test prep.
I spent lots of time on this blog preparing for the PARCC test -- not my final exam. Yet I didn't want my test to be just PARCC problems. And so I took questions from the U of Chicago text -- and since I didn't post test review for these question on the blog, they ended up being Skills questions, just as the traditionalists desire.
So here's how I wrote the test. This is a cumulative exam covering the whole text. But it was hard for me to find some good problems for Chapters 1 and 2, and I did just post a review sheet last month for some of the angle theorems from Chapter 3, so I began with Chapter 3. I decided to include numbered questions from the text that were multiples of five, starting with Question 5 and stopping at the end of the Skills section. For Chapter 3, there are six questions that would be included, Questions 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30. But I had to drop Questions 10 and 30 because the particular skill for those questions involve drawing, which isn't easy to do on either a multiple-choice final or a computerized Common Core test.
Here is the chapter breakdown: for Chapter 3, I included four questions, but for Chapter 4, I included just one question. For Chapter 5, I included four questions, but for Chapter 6, I included just one question again. We notice that Chapters 4 and 6, where the transformations are taught, have very few Skills questions, since the main skill in both chapters is drawing the images, and I've already decided to drop all drawing questions. This is in accord with the traditionalist distaste for the Common Core transformations like reflections and translations. But Chapter 7 has just two included questions -- for questions on SSS, SAS, and ASA are also just Property questions.
Chapter 8 has the most included questions, with a whopping ten of them. Seven of these questions are from the Skills section. But after I wrote this test, I've having second thoughts about these. Many of these questions are not straightforward. For example, students are asked to find the perimeter of a square given its area or vice versa, as opposed to finding either of them given the side length. Now traditionalists like these types of problems because they require students to think deeply about the problem -- and I agree, but only up to a point. I have no problem with some of the questions requiring students to think outside the box, but when every question is this difficult, students will eventually become frustrated. But unfortunately, I ended up choosing the multiples of five, and these just happen to be the more difficult problems.
No matter what anyone else says, I want to include some problems from the Uses section, since I still want to demonstrate how math can be applied to the real world. So this means that I include questions 50, 55 and 60 from the Uses section of Chapter 8.
Chapter 9 is a tough chapter, since we covered Chapter 9 only briefly so we could get to Chapter 10. I included three questions (one from Uses) for Chapter 9. Chapter 10 is, of course, a big chapter, and so I included six questions (two from Uses) for this chapter.
Chapter 11, on coordinate geometry contains no Skills problems at all. Dr. David Joyce criticizes coordinate geometry, and so I include only two Uses questions from this chapter. From Chapter 12 I included five questions, with two of them from the Uses section.
Chapter 13 contains very few Skills or Uses questions -- it's a chapter focusing mainly on Properties, just like Chapter 2. So I included no questions from this chapter -- and recall that Chapter 13 will be broken up for my curriculum next year. From Chapter 14 I included six questions, with one of them from the Uses section. Since I covered Chapter 15 only briefly, I was only able to include one question from this chapter -- otherwise Chapter 15 would be a great Skills-based chapter.
This leaves five questions from the PARCC Practice test. I decided to continue the pattern and stick to multiples of five, so I included questions 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30. As we expect for PARCC questions, of course these are mostly Properties questions. These are already set up to be multiple choice -- still I had to set up the questions from the U of Chicago text so that they could be multiple choice as well.
Of course, I set up the questions to be multiple-choice for the purposes of the final. If this really were a computer-based exam, then I would have more free-response questions -- especially those requiring students to enter only a numerical answer.
Notice that Representations has been completely shut out of this test -- and Representations includes graphs and coordinate geometry. One problem with graphing questions on the computer is that they often require students to drag the graph to the correct location -- and this confuses them. I believe that there should be more graphing questions, but it's not clear to me how to make them so that more students can draw them on the computer easily. The only question that involves a graph is officially a Skills-based question from Chapter 8 -- students are to estimate the area of an irregular region.
I still like the idea of a computer-based test, though. Many people say that they oppose Common Core because it's "one size fits all." But the whole point of a computer-adaptive test like the SBAC is to avoid being "one size fits all" -- the same test for every student. I can easily imagine a computerized test asking a question such as to find the area of a square given its perimeter. A student who answers this incorrectly (say, by simply squaring the perimeter). can get an easier question such as to find the area of a square given its side length. Those who answer correctly, on the other hand, can get more difficult questions such as to find the area of a circle given its diameter or circumference, then move on to difficult volume questions, and so on.
Indeed, students who get many questions right could move on to some above-grade-level questions, if time allows. Unfortunately, I doubt that the actual SBAC does this. So SBAC fails to use the full power of having a computer-adaptive test. I wonder whether more traditionalists would be in favor of a computer-adaptive test like the SBAC if students could jump to above-grade-level questions.
Here are the answers to my posted final exam:
CAADA ACDDD ABADB ADCAC ABCBC BAADC ACACB ADBDA ADBCD ACCDC
Once again, I don't post a Form B for this exam.
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