Sometimes our sound-byte-attention-span, this-way-or-that-way culture can yield some quiet amusement. Researchers in California did what looks to me, on a casual skim, like a pretty decent study. Of course it’s correlational, and they’re careful to point out that correlation isn’t causation. They also note some of the limitations inherent in a demographically restricted sample from one state. I find their preliminary report is skimpy on the statistical basis of their conclusions (a single table doesn’t give much detail about a roughly 400 item survey given to 5,500 people at 257 schools), but given how long its been since I really worked over a regression analysis, I should be grateful.

The study, “Similar Students, Different Results: Why Do Some Schools Do Better?” found that some things schools could do (for example, having a coherent curriculum) improved the school’s result on California’s academic performance index, which seems to mean, on a statewide battery of mostly multiple choice questions. (It appears also – hold on to your hat – that teaching to the test improves achievement on the test. Did I say teaching to the test? I’m sorry, the correct phrase is “classroom instruction guided by state academic standards.")

The Washington Post reported on the brouhaha that resulted from one of the study’s conclusions:
Parents’ Effect on Achievement Shaky
Other Factors May Play Greater Role, Study Says.

The article reports “But a new study of low-income public schools in California has concluded that several other factors, including teaching the state’s rigorous academic content and getting experienced teachers, have much more influence on achievement than does parents’ involvement.” Somehow, the “more influence” conclusion has led to “a national debate on the subject, with some parents … saying the study is correct and others saying parental influence should not be so quickly dismissed.” (Did you hear “dismissed” in the study’s conclusions?)

Ironically, the motto of EdSource, who sponsored the study, is “Clarifying Complex Education Issues.” The authors of the study leapt to defend themselves: “The study did not find that parent involvement is not important or not related to student achievement,” but within their sample, some other factors showed more connection to performance on the standardized tests.

Listening carefully to the authors’ protestations, the Post article interviews other experts who assure us that “Building positive relationships … is vital.” “…parent involvement is a key factor in the achievement gap and in improving low achievement.” “Schools should make unequivocal public commitments to involving parents” “there is too much research showing parents playing a significant role to ignore them.”

[Deep sigh]

• When a 23 page initial report gets reduced to a couple sentences, you may lose something.
• Any study needs to be evaluated in terms of its specific purpose, population, and methodology. Its conclusions aren’t general, but specific to the questions asked and how evidence was turned into answers.
• Science builds, assuming it does build, on a slow accretion of such specifics.
• When “The Media” get their hands on your research, run for cover!
• Oversimplifications mislead. Except for the previous sentence.

As Paul says, “Further bulletins as events warrant. Film at 11:00.”

Girl Bullies, a.k.a “Alpha Girls”

In the RiverTown Coffee Shop, several of us have been talking about girl bullies.
Raina asked if any readers were former Alpha Girls. Some of the readings below make it clear that girls may switch roles, and that aside from a few “Queen Bees,” and a few girls who were always targets, many girls have found themselves in both roles – and may bully partly as a defense against being bullied.

Here’s Raina’s request:

I never hear from the alpha-girls themselves, the ones who were on top in junior high. How did they turn out? Do they ever think about it? Did their parents have a clue how nasty they were? Did they approve? How can parents, teachers and other kids deal with this phenomenon? Any alphas (or former alphas) out there willing to talk?

Come join the conversation.

Or, if you’re the studious sort, who always did your homework (and almost certainly got bullied and called a nerdy brown-nose as a result), here’s some background reading:

• Mean Girls: How to Combat Bullying offers a profile of the bullies, who are “often popular, charismatic girls who are already receiving positive attention from adults” as well as examples of exactly the kind of bullying we’re discussing in the Coffee Shop: “Acts of relational aggression are common among girls in American schools. Specific acts can include rumor spreading, secret-divulging, alliance-building, backstabbing, ignoring, excluding from social groups and activities, verbal insults and hostile body language, such as eye-rolling and smirks.”

• GirlsHealth.gov has links to many sites that offer help for both bullies and victims
  for girls,
  for parents,
  for educators.
  Note especially their online quizzes “Are you a bully?” and “Are you being bullied?”

  A quibble about some of the links on this site: Since Columbine, there has been an enormous increase in articles and research on school violence, and bullying has come along for the ride. That leads to articles like
  “Children’s Threats: When are they serious?”: “This article discusses when threats should be taken seriously and how parents, teachers, and other adults can address the threat.” In terms of the theme of school violence, articles like this are useful and, unfortunately, necessary. But that theme is concerned with risk evaluation – “Is my child in danger of being physically harmed?” That is only a first-level inquiry. So far as the kind of Alpha-Girl bullying we’re discussing in the Coffee Shop, the answer is darn well “Yes! Your child is being psychologically assailed when she (or he – sorry, Paul) is the target of Alpha Girl bullying.”

• This Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article, “Girl bullies don’t leave black eyes, just agony” describes the Ophelia Project in Erie, Pa (!), “one of the few anti-bully programs for girls.” The article lists half a dozen books on the topic, and also lists names for the aggressors: “also called the girl-bullies, the queen bees, the RMGs (Really Mean Girls) or the alpha girls.”

• A feature by Minnesota Public Radio’s Dan Gunderson describes what is surely one of the coolest responses to girl bullying: an opera, “One False Move,” by New York City composer Susan Kander.

  “I cry every time I see it,” Kander says. “I find all of that pain to be immediate and awful, and I never get through it.”

  
  Don’t be caught stealing the limelight
  
If the limelight isn’t yours, beware.
  
Don’t admit you have a social conscience
  
If the others think it’s cooler not to care.
  
Never state opinions of your own
  
Never let on who you really are.
  
Never doubt that you could be alone
  
For the rest of your life
  
With an invisible scar
  
From that unplanned, unconscious false move.
  

This, then, is something I know: the thought it takes to do physical work.

Mind vibrant across a range of occupations.

… to appreciate the degree to which powerful techniques and strategies of mind and body are manifest in a wide sweep of work.

In The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker, Mike Rose invites us “to reimagine and unsettle our prevailing vocabulary of work.” His subtitle implies two goals: to find language to talk about the intelligence required by physical work, and through that, to help us value the cognitive complexity of the work and the intelligence required of the worker. I think what he has to say is vital for every parent and teacher.

Through his interviews, observation, and scholarship, we learn to see and hear the “thought that enables” work. Listen to these snippets from the language he uses as he analyzes the skills of a good waitress:

A basic goal, then, is to manage irregularity and create an economy of movement …. visual, spatial, and linguistic techniques to aid memory … the mix of strategies and processes … a powerful affective component to all this, one with economic consequences … combination of motor skill and vigilance …. an apprehension of the “big picture” … and as well, a cueing toward particulars, and a vigilance for aberration …. the intelligence manifest in making choices within constraint.”

(all quotes from Chapter 1, The Working Life of a Waitress, pp 8-30)

Do you hear what he’s doing? In finding a way to talk about these skills in the language of psychology and cognition, he helps us see the depth of skill involved in the job – helps us see the complexity of the work and the intelligence demanded of the worker.

Always striving to develop a vocabulary that can show us the complexity of the work, the early chapters outline the forms of intelligence and the cognitive abilities required of waitresses, hairdressers, carpenters, plumbers, welders. surgeons, and assembly line workers and their supervisors. Rose turns aside frequently to help us see what he’s saying, the separate images of work link, and a picture builds that can reshape how we see the world around us.

Easily my favorite chapter, “A Vocabulary of Carpentry,” visits the wood construction classroom of an extraordinary teacher, Jerry DeVries of John Marshall High School in Northeast Los Angeles. In one of my first posts to RiverTown News, I said about The Mind at Work: “It’s one of the most exciting books I’ve read in recent years: to listen to him describe how a high school carpentry student is learning to think about his work becomes – I don’t exaggerate – thrilling.” This is education as it should be: head, heart, and hand fully committed to a real task. (I’ll let you speculate about the invidious comparison I just excised, but I’ll give you a hint: It has to do with the history class in “Faris Bueller’s Day Off.")

Why The Mind at Work Matters to Grow With the Flow Readers

In Grow With the Flow, I use the analogy of a river to help parents raise children with the practical intelligence they’ll need to meet their personal, real-world goals. I argue that the Intelligence River combines five tributaries: basic cognitive abilities; the many ways we can be smart (multiple intelligences); our executive functions; our deeply felt and focused motivations; and the stored power of knowledge, external intelligence, and information management.

The Mind at Work has helped me see more deeply into some of the themes in Grow With the Flow. Mike Rose’s main goal is to show us the cognitive depth of manual labor. ("Hand work” – have you noticed that the term itself blinds us?) In my framework, he’s showing how the Intelligence River can flow through a wide range of occupations. I think he does a good deal more than that. Here are some of the implications I draw from his analysis.

• As I stress in Grow With the Flow, every job requires a package of skills. No one ability, operating alone, can do much of anything. We want our children to have a whole range of abilities, to have goals that matter to them, and to be able to focus and coordinate their abilities to meet their goals. That’s what the mind at work should be.

  Many real-world competences must work together to make us effective in the world. It’s coordinated skills, working in unison, we want for our children…..

  I also like the tendency of this way of thinking to point us towards a more dynamic view of effective functioning. When we start to talk about a blending of skills, we’re easing up to the idea that the skills in the package have to work together. We can start to see that effective intelligence is dynamic and interactive, with each part of overall competence interacting with other parts, combining into a skilled real-world output ….

  (Grow With the Flow pp 35 & 38)

• Every job that’s being done well requires skill. Rose focuses some kinds of work, because that work has been devalued, disrespected, dismissed. But in respecting some occupations, he leads us to look at all occupations with new eyes. With a thousand examples, he has helped me see what I had been imagining – how many cognitive elements must work together to make a skilled worker in any field.

  His uncle, Joe Meraglio takes the insight to its end point: “There’s really no such thing as unskilled work.” As I started to believe that, I began to see intelligence expressed all around me. I have to say, it has made the world a slightly more optimistic place for me. “The person behind the counter” often goes unnoticed, but once you begin to look, skill is everywhere.

• Prejudice and habit prevent us from seeing the skill in whole ranges of occupations. Kids who do well at academics aren’t the only ones who are smart. But school can make a bad speller feel like he’s dumb, isn’t good at anything, will never succeed, might as well give up. It will be high school (if he lasts that long), before he discovers that he can see a car as a living system, see why it’s struggling, while others see only a pile of inanimate junk. A good deal of my professional life has been spent simply trying to protect the ego of such kids until they find what they’re good at. Many of us have disrespected a whole variety of occupations, steered “the manually minded” to them with barely concealed contempt, and as good as told them they were being shunted into second-class lives. Their frequent revenge – that they make more money lifetime – doesn’t always heal a lifetime of feeling one down.
• If we see more jobs as worthy, we open more paths for our children, and for our culture. Lots of jobs are good ones, so long as we don’t think they’re bad ones, and make kids who take them feel like they’re losers. And some of our traditional ideas of what’s a “good job” are running athwart the market, while jobs full of opportunities for creativity and intrinsic satisfaction become good economic bets, as Dan Pink has pointed out: “…we may finally be at the point where we can tell freshly minted graduates: Look, it’s a rough world out there. There’s only one way to survive. Do what you love.”

  Doesn’t it seem likely to be good for an economy, a culture, and the people in it to have the widest possible range of occupations respected for the skill they require?

************************

An Interview and Two Other Reviews:

Interview on Marketplace

A review by Marvin Hoffman, in the Houston Chronicle

A review by Manuel Espinoza in
InterActions: the UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies

************************

Mike Rose

The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker

New York: Viking, 2004

Our most casual and unexamined statements reveal our deepest beliefs – and misconceptions. More and more, I think we have a lot wrong about child rearing right now, misconceptions about how kids tick, what they need, and what kind of support will help them best. Good-hearted, hard-working, devoted parents will say things to me that make me wince because I feel how the beliefs behind what they say will hurt their child. The things they say have an “of-course” tone: Of course you and I share this assumption. Of course this is how kids are. Of course this is how Life is.

In homage to Dr. Seuss, let’s call these casual statements Wincelers:

“He must be ADHD, because he avoids his math homework.”

“Honestly, it’s as though she thinks time with her friends is more important than getting to class on time.”

“He has to learn discipline.”

“She’s just lazy.”

“He tries to avoid consequences.”

“If she’d only _______, then I’d be happy.”

“I don’t care about grades, but [fill in any reason that you still have to get good ones].”

“I / He / She / They hate(s) me / us / them.”

And you, Gentle Reader, What sentences are Wincelers for you?

Darn! Now that I’m getting all the news I need from Jon Stewart, should I still read Doonesbury? Well, I guess for the long-range, mature, historical big picture, there’s nothing like Mike, who picked up just about as Pogo left off.

p.s. I’m trying to imagine what Walk Kelly would have to say about The Project on Government Oversight, to be found at www.POGO.org, especially since, with an eye to good semantic sense, it is “A non-partisan non-profit government watchdog whose mission is to investigate, expose, and remedy abuses of power, mismanagement, and government …” Not unlike Pogo.

And now for my favorite outfitter: My sister’s book store!

The Erie Book Store is an independent book store, in business since 1921. The store was founded by Albert Nash – to keep the fledgling store alive during the Depression, he lived in the back, and sold pencils on the corner of State and 8th. My father, Glenn, managed the used book department from the end of WWII until he bought the store when I was fifteen. My sister, Kathleen, and her son, David, keep the tradition alive today.

The Erie Book Store is my idea of what a book store should be. It’s small by today’s mega-libro-lith standards, which means you can find your way around without a GPS unit. It’s big enough to have something for everyone. Every book in the store has been hand selected since it opened 84 years ago.

The children’s section has always been a source of special pride. Call the store and ask for Kathleen. She’ll get you to the right books for your child.

And a suggestion from my own childhood, spent in the company of old, sometimes rare, books: Kids, at least by the age of 12, can relish the feel and smell of antiquarian books. (It doesn’t have to be a Gutenberg!) Holding a palpable link to the past teaches more history than any lecture ever will.

You can contact The Erie Book Store

• By toll-free phone: 1-800-252-3354
• By e-mail: eriebook at velocity dot net
• By Mail:
The Erie Book Store
137 E. 13th Street
Erie, PA 16503

Dude, Tempus fuget!

Mom’s memory of Armistice Day was direct. She was six, and she remembered the operator calling everyone on the party line with the great news that World War I had ended. The message came along a wire her father had strung himself when no neighbor saw the point of a telephone. The Great War had been real to her: She always felt that the reason she couldn’t bear to hear Schubert’s Ave Maria was that it had been playing on the Victrola when word came that Aunt Helena’s beau had died in France.

For me, “Armistice Day” is about my mother – there’s one degree of separation. Always loving an opportunity to teach a bit of history, she never let a year go by without reminding me that the armistice that ended The War to End All Wars went into effect at the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month,” Anno Domino 1918. I suspect most grade-school kids would assume I was around for that event, probably watching it on TV, but for me, “Armistice Day” is a memory of Mom, not the event.

Yesterday, I asked a sixth-grader if he knew what Veteran’s Day was about. He thought for a moment that it meant we should “support our troops,” then remembered it was to honor veterans. I asked him if he knew why Veteran’s Day was on November 11. Nope. Had he ever heard of “Armistice Day"? Nope. “I never even heard of ‘armistice’ before.” So I told him about Mom.

Requiscant in pace.

When I was a kid, time was infinite. Summers lasted forever; so did the school years. (Most of them were also good times, but I seem to remember that the last week before Memorial Day lasted a really long time.

When Paul and Andy arrived, I was shocked to see how quickly they grew up. My childhood had lasted forever. Theirs lasted only a few short decades!

They’re with us, really with us most of their hours, for only a few of our years. It’s a shame to waste that time on worry, anger, blame….

Let me tell you a favorite story about my buddy, Rick Price. When the kids were young, the Prices and the Cantrells spent a weekend in two adjacent cottages at the Colorado State Forest. The cabins are primitive, and when we woke up Sunday morning, I had to break ice in our water supply. I hadn’t slept, the wood stove fought me, and desperate as I was for even a cup of instant hot chocolate, the thought of the miles between me and a cup of decent coffee had me in a mood.

A knock at the door and voilà! Here’s Rick, looking for all the world like Santa Claus in a lumberjack shirt, his beard already tinged with frost from the 30-second walk from his cabin, and in his hand, a fully charged Italian espresso caffettiera! Two minutes later, I’m pouring a shot of fresh espresso into my hot chocolate, the cabin is magically warming, Santa has gone on to other duties, and I’m feeling like it may be a good day after all.

Can any single experience enrich a child like travel? And how about travel to some of the world’s great cultural centers, with the kind of thoughtful anticipation and planning that rescued me that far-ago morning?

That’s the Prices’ company, ExperiencePlus! I wrote Rick to ask him how old a child needs to be to really profit from a trip with them. He says:

We’ve had families with teens tell us that our trip gave them the “best vacation"  they’d ever had, namely because we handled all the details, removing anyone in the family from the role of decision maker or authority figure.  Indeed, though, it is best for kids over 12.
 
Read about one family’s experience here.

How’s that for a spectacular holiday gift for your kids and your family? (And by the way, some great recipes on the site.)

I was praising Raven Maps. I would be grossly amiss not to mention Erwin Raisz. His hand-drawn maps are detailed almost beyond imagining. They seem to lie at the intersection of art and science. When I look at his Landform outline map of the United States with adjacent parts of Canada and Mexico, I feel that I see the skeleton of the nation explained – the essence of how we’re put together.

Raisz Landform Maps is maintained in good part as a memorial to an extraordinary man. The web site is worth a visit to read his story, and for the links.