"likely never read well without explicit instruction in sounding out words⁠"

I've been teaching for nearly 20 years now, albeit in some unconventional places and spaces, primarily 12 years teaching ESL in South Korea.  These days I'm a substitute teacher at all grade levels and many subjects (including P.E.!).  Anyhow, the debate over phonics or not-to-phonics kind of escaped me while I was living in South Korea, and this article (while seeming a bit biased) was fascinating to me:

"In first grade, these 'independent reading' hours were torture for my kids, who, I would eventually learn, were among the roughly half of all children who, research shows, will likely never read well without explicit instruction in sounding out words⁠. My kids’ reactions to being expected to sit quietly each day pretending to read ran along stereotypical gender lines. My daughter silently berated herself for not being able to read; my son acted out, once attempting to push over a bookshelf."

The whole thing is downright amazing.  All I have to add is that graduate school education programs struggle to justify their own existence every ten years or so by developing entirely new paradigms and approaches, even when existing ones seem to work pretty well.  That's true for other departments as well, but only Ed Schools use children as guinea pigs.

Anyhow, I teach a fair amount of reading intervention classes and phonics and blending are definitely back.  I guess I didn't realize they'd ever gone away.

Sub!

Substitute teaching is going really well, much better than I expected.  Basically, you're teaching but not having to prep or assess, i.e., grade, which are the two biggest time-sucks in education.

Am I a great big target for student harassment?  Yes!  But as long as the teacher has left behind a reasonably coherent lesson plan I feel confident and have thick enough skin to make it through.

I've worked with a severely autistic kid for entire days.  One day I was basically a glorified study hall monitor.  At the end of last week I taught biology.  In one week I got two different offers to go "long term" with the schools -- this would mean a slight pay-bump, and honestly I think it's a trap.  If you really like the position, that's great.  But that's not nearly enough pay to get back into lesson planning and grading.

The variety is great.  Not forming relationships with students is a downside but honestly not something I'm too worried about.  Right now, it's a paycheck among other things and not a bad one.  I finish the day somewhere between two and four p.m. and take nothing home.

Teacher James

First day of teaching went well!  Granted, it was a pretty low-intensity job for the day but I'll take it.

Varsity Tutors Is A Horrible Company And You Should Not Work For Them

I've lined up full time employment for the first time since my Dad passed away last November.  Good for me!  It was tougher than I thought it would be, but Frederick, Maryland is a very competitive place in no small part because there aren't many big employers here beyond the county and city itself.  (My understanding is that the largest employer in Frederick County is -- wait for it -- Frederick County.)

At one point I took a part time tutor job with Varsity Tutors.  It was decent, but also very scammy.  I remember asking if I should contact the parents of one student who wasn't showing up for Zoom sessions and was basically laughed at.

Long story short, I applied for a position which required a Sexual Abuse background check for any jobs in my past ten years involving minors.  A good policy and not a problem!

Well, Varsity simply refused to sign off on this form.  I understand that I was a contractor, but they still wouldn't lift a finger to help me out.  Not to mention, if you have a situation like this there is no HR department.  They will simply give you a dummy email address, and they won't respond to your issue(s) unless you are very, very lucky and/or raise enough of a stink.

I understand people want to boost their kids' chances, but you're better off finding a local company that will provide you with at the very least a phone number and email to talk to a real person.

But it's over, and soon enough I'll update you folks on my new job.

Mic Drop

Wordle 240 2/6

🟩⬜⬜🟨⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩@Harvard @Yale @Stanford @KenyonCollege

— Piccoli Cherubini James (@wetcasements) February 15, 2022

I mean, I've never claimed that I'm not a genius either.

"standards to be set that are more realistic for the missions expected"

A long, in-depth, and very interesting article on how the U.S. military approaches language training, especially for elite troops who might go into areas where a base-level of language and cultural skills are a must:

"A Green Beret trained in Modern Standard Arabic and deployed to Iraq isn’t going to have many fluent conversations with his counterparts who speak an Iraqi dialect. But he can exchange simple pleasantries, ask about his counterpart’s family, and understand basic military terminology — all while getting a laugh out his new Iraqi friends who might describe his school-taught Modern Standard dialect as 'fancy Arabic.'

Once it’s accepted that in most cases the purpose of language training isn’t to achieve fluency, it allows standards to be set that are more realistic for the missions expected from today’s Green Berets. The Interagency Language Roundtable scoring scale notes that at a 1+ rating, speakers '[c]an initiate and maintain predictable face-to-face conversations and satisfy limited social demands.' Meanwhile, listeners demonstrate '[s]ufficient comprehension to understand short conversations about all survival needs and limited social demands.' This level of speaking and listening is more than enough for Green Berets to converse with a partner force that speaks the same language, get across basic ideas, and potentially work around a situation where an interpreter or English-speaking member of the partner force isn’t available."

There's a lot more going on in the article that's worth looking at.

I also appreciate an educational model where perfection isn't the goal, but basic communication is.  Maybe it's the military's version of "ELF," or "English as Lingua Franca."

Ability Without Confidence or Enthusiasm?

There's a long-standing stereotype regarding the hard-working but tired, over-stressed Korean student.  According to a test of elementary school students in the country, it's partly true:

"Yet despite Korean students’ high average scores, their level of confidence and interest in their studies were among the lowest in the world.  

Fourth graders’ confidence level in mathematics and science came in second-to-last place, at 57th out of 58 countries, with Filipino students coming in last.  

Only 15 percent of Korean fourth graders answered that they are 'very' confident in mathematics, compared to the global average of 32 percent. Likewise, they also had a very low level of interest in the subjects, placing 57th out of 58 countries in mathematics and 53rd in science."

There's a lot to unpack here, but my first thought is that separating "ability" and "confidence" is probably easier with more objective subjects like math and science.  In the context of English learning, a student who never speaks up is unlikely to improve.  It's possible of course, and that they could excel on written testing.

At the very least, expressions like "lifelong learning" and "love of learning" are not things I hear too much teaching college-level students in Korea, but which were pretty common back in America.  (And frankly  they were often mere boilerplate / lip-service much of the time.)

"truth must be spoken of as it is"

South Korea has a reputation for being a sexually conservative society, but it's also one where secret cameras in women's bathrooms are a rampant social problem, and the drugging and gang-raping of women in a nightclub leads to very little consequence for the (famous, wealthy) perpetrators.  So it's a shame that small steps towards balanced, comprehensive sex education have once again been shot down by the government:

"Contrary to parents’ belief that sex education will lead to their children having more sex, earlier, a survey on the aftereffects that CSE [comprehensive sexuality education] demonstrated on sexual behaviors revealed that 37 percent of 87 countries that were surveyed said its students had delayed initiation of sex after education, 31 percent said the frequency of sex was reduced and the use of condoms increased in 40 percent of the countries. 

 

Rather than lingering on the ministry’s already-made decision, Nam Yoon-jeong, the president of Think Sing Together who led the Nadaum project, hoped that this incident could be turned into an opportunity to talk about sex education and how sex is dealt with in Korea.

 

'Korea had been lacking proper sex education and any discussion on sex or human rights has been shut down whenever it began,' said Nam. 'We are exposed to sexual consumption and imagery everyday and everywhere, but an ironic stoic sentiment forbids us from talking about it publicly or officially. The ambivalent culture leads to children wondering about something they are exposed to, but getting twisted ideas of it because they’re not taught properly about what it is exactly. The truth must be spoken of as it is.'”

Nothing good can come of a hyper-sexualized society that can't talk openly and plainly about sex, contraception, homosexuality, sexual violence, and gender equality.  And if you click through for pictures, you'll notice that these so called "controversial" books are about as tame as can be.

"an incredible step in the right direction"

I am not an optimist by nature, but in a world clogged with so much shit and misery it seems to me that some things -- actually, many things -- are going to have to shift, transform, or simply disappear in global wake of Covid-19.

So here's your ray of sunshine for today -- California (and it's enormous public university system) is getting rid of the SAT (American college entrance exam).

This is very good news:

"Critics of the standardized tests have long argued they disadvantage students of color and those from low-income families because test questions often contain inherent bias that more privileged children are better equipped to answer. Wealthier students are also more likely to have access to expensive prep courses that help boost their scores, which many students can’t afford.

The UC’s governing body, the Board of Regents, voted 23-0 Thursday to approve a proposal by the UC president, Janet Napolitano, that phases the tests out over five years, at which point the UC aims to have developed its own test.

The regents met in a teleconference that lasted several hours Thursday, with expert presentations and lengthy debates that echoed a national conversation about whether the tests discriminate against disadvantaged students or help admissions offices find the most qualified applicants.

'I think this is an incredible step in the right direction,' said the Regents chairman, John Perez."

Yes, the SAT is racist.  Rich folks can send their kids to prep courses, and poor folks can't.  And those courses are primarily how to game the test -- more specifically, when should you guess and when should you leave an answer blank?  This alone can significantly increase your score, and it has nothing to do with an improved command of vocabulary or math.

Next, let's kill the GRE (graduate school entrance exam).  It's absurd to think an MA or PhD program can't judge your potential based off of a 20 page writing sample and two letters from your college professors.

Better Safe Than Sorry

No surprise here, but my college is joining almost every other college and university in South Korea by delaying our opening by two weeks due to coronavirus.

There will be some definite scheduling headaches but it sounds like we can mostly get by just going an extra week into June.

FYI, the Korean spring semester is when the school year starts in Korea, as opposed to September.

Teacher Of The Year

My final grades have been in the college computer system for over a week now, but this week students get to call me up and plead for mercy.  Granted, sometimes I do make stupid data entry mistakes and need to update their final score.  But usually it's just a handful of students who either a) know they fucked up royally by missing the maximum number of classes, and regale me with stories of emergency hospital visits or dead grandma funerals (why not tell me a month ago when it actually happened?) or b) grade-grubbers who want their A- kicked up to an A (hey, at least these students seem to care).

Anyhow, if you ever teach English at a Korean college or university this is our version of "desk-warming."  There are far worse fates but I'm also reduced to sitting in my office waiting for students to bring me phantom letters from phantom hospitals regarding phantom medical conditions.

Good times.

Just Ask Susan Sarandon To Write You A Check?

I’m guessing there’s no small number of pro-Stein / pro-Bernie / anti-HRC folks currently in graduate school for an M.A. or Ph.D.  And soon, thanks to the GOP / Trump tax plan, none of them will be able to afford their programs (tuition wavers will be taxed as regular income).

It sucks that anybody can’t go as far as they want, academically speaking, but at the same time I sort of don’t fucking care if you got on the Stein-train to crazy?  Because, like, you literally voted for this?

Anyhow, November 2018 is coming fast – if you’re a USian, register to vote and try to undo just a bit of all the damage Trump is inflicting on higher education.

It Comes As No Surprise

A majority of Republicans now think universities have a "negative effect" on the U.S.:

"A majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (58%) now say that colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country, up from 45% last year. By contrast, most Democrats and Democratic leaners (72%) say colleges and universities have a positive effect, which is little changed from recent years."

George W. Bush went to Yale and Harvard.  Mitt Romney?  Harvard.  For fuck's sake, even Cheeto Hitler went to Penn.  Not just four year degrees, but four year and graduate Ivy degrees.

As others have noted, this major shift has happened within the past two years.

America is truly in a race to the bottom, and 35 percent of the country is actively cheering on our collapse into a third-world plutocracy.

"Dumbfuckistan" indeed.

The New Old Math

In South Korea, technology and education trends tend to come in the most fast and furious of fashions.  But these days, some parents have decided they want their children to go "analog" with activities like abacus math, baduk (Korean word for the Japanese game go), and the intensive study of Chinese characters:

"There are at least 100 private academies offering abacus classes in Seoul, according to the National Abacus Mathematics Education Association.

'I couldn’t find one near us so my husband and I are looking to hire a private tutor to teach abacus math to our 8-year-old daughter,' said a 42-year-old resident of Gwacheon, Gyeonggi. 

'I’m hoping to improve my son’s attention span and help him become a better person by learning Go,' said Cho Eun-joo, a 36-year-old resident of Munrae-dong, western Seoul. Her son, 10, attends a Go class at his school.

'Some people don’t understand parents who send their kids to afterschool programs for more traditional education instead of to private academies for English,' said Nam Ji-seon, a 40-year-old mother. 'My son, 12, has been learning hanja for seven years now. No matter how much the world changes, there are things that children must learn from traditions.'

She added, 'We often discuss the traditional analects of Korea written in hanja, and I know that this kind of education will give him an edge in the future.'”

While I doubt the demand for private English academies will subside that much, it's nice to think Korean parents are finding other paths for study and success for their children.  Reading ancient Korean philosophy in its original form?  Not too shabby.