Glorious lingustic imperfection

Last night I had one of my epiphanies. It came to me in the privacy of the commode.

Language is gloriously imperfect. It is a marvelous achievement of our species but it isn't perfect. Though it is rule governed virtually every rule has its exceptions.Why in every language does the same word  have many meanings and why are there many ways of saying the same thing? Why are there homophones, homographs and homonyms,? Language is constantly changing but as language communities become more sophisticated, knowlegeable and educated shouldn't that change be toward a more perfect form? Shouldn't language become more regular and simpler as it matures and changes? Why do strange phenomena such ass the many different forms of be- is am,was were, be, been, being persist? Why do some languages lose future tense  or second person plural. If alphabetic writing is the end product of evolution why do non-alphabetic forms of writing continue in use?

And why is language perception so clearly based on illusion?

 I want to argue that language is imperfect because:

1. It needs to be. If it were perfect it would not serve our needs. It has to be dynamic and easily changed because our need for it is always changing.

2. It can be. By that I mean that our brains are comfortable with all this imperfection. Not only can they make sense of imperfect language, they thrive on it. Our brains are equiped with a set for ambiguity. They thrive on redundancy. Something in the way the human brain uses language requires it to be imperfect, to be malleable, flexible , and recursive.

It is easier to argue my first point than the second because the manner in which the brains represents meaning to itself is not well understood. We all have the experience of knowing what we want to say but not finding the right way of expressing it. I'm avoiding talkng about how the brain "stores " meaning, or ideas or words because I'm not convinced that's what it does. There seems to be some way the brain constructs and organizes what it "knows".

This is not to say that there is no need for language to be consistent in the way it is used. It wouldn't work if we didn't share in the way we used it- if we didn't "play by the rules" But it wouldn't also work if it required each of us to use it precisely and perfectly either. 

I'll have more to say about imperfection. What do you think?

Yetta was a keynote speaker at Central Connecticutt University. last week.
This came today from Lois Bridges:

Here is some good news for you.  The Connecticut Corporations paid $35,000 to have Michelle Rhee speak. They ran full page ads in newspapers and 30 second spots on TV . The talk was free and 75 people showed up. Yetta Goodman spoke two days later at Central Connecticut University because Jesse invited her despite protest from the department saying she was 'old hat.' They charged $60 a person and they did not have enough chairs.  Over 400 teachers came to take notes and learn about a real way to teaching reading."

Louise Rosenblatt  a decade or two older than us, used to wag her finger at us and say " You young people....
We "old hats" appreciate the work you young people are doing to keep the flame of holistic scientific wisdom brightly shining. What goes around comes around- which is what my linguistic friend Pete Friies would call formulaic language as is "old hat"

Frame us as you will: we've miles to go before we sleep- and  books to write and battles to be fought- vebal ones=that is.  And who is this Rhee lady?

Ken Goodman

The living history of my Declaration of Professional Conscience

Decades ago I wrote The Declaration of Professional Conscience  for Teachers.

It was , of course, a declaration of my own conscience in which I stated what I believed a truly professional teacher could agree with . I hoped it could be the basis for teachers sharing with colleagues, their students the parents of heir students, and their administrators. It was away of saying, "I am a professional. I know what I am doing and why I am doing it."

I believed then that in the North America and in many other parts of the world, including third world countries a generation of dedicated and extremely well prepared professional teachers was emerging who were capable of bringing their students to a higher level of literacy, knowledge and sell-confidence than ever before.

At the same time I have always been aware that there are strong forces in our societies that do not believe in public education They would like to control and limit access to literacy and they would prefer to deprofessionalize teachers. 

Over the years the declaration has been republished from time time. At one time every elementary teacher in Venezuela got a Spanish translation.

And recently with the support of Richard Owen it has been widely distributed and found  a place in the 

new political awareness of teachers and their response to the unprecedented attack on teachers and their unions in Wisconsin and other states. Hundreds of teachers have signed the decalration on Richard Owens's website,. http://www.change.org/petitions/a-declaration-of-professional-conscience-for-teachers

And several schools have declared themselves Professional Conscience Schools.

Bess Altwerger , with Rick Meyer, has done much to promote the declaration as a device for gaining respect for teachers in her remarkable work in organizing the Save our Schools march on Washington and the on-going movement that has resulted.

Perhaps some day we will have a secretary of education who understands that it is only through dedicated, professional teachers that American schools can achieve the goal of educating all of our children to the highest degree of their needs, abilities and aspirations. Then maybe the declaration will hang on the door or wall of the Secretary's office. Or maybe not.

Global warming? Whose knowledge counts?

Cherry Blossoms are a month early in DC. In Tucson this morning it may have dropped below freezing. Our citrus are loaded with opening blossoms and I have delicate camelias in full bloom in my court yard. Not to mention two azalea bonsais ready to bloom.
All last week our high daily tempertures were above 80

And still there are decision makers who doubt that global warming is a proven phenomenon

Here is anther example of the disdain in the political world for knowledge, scholarship,or just plain truth.
I'm editing a book for the Reading Hall of Fame based on presentations at several professional conferences during 2011. The chapters document that the same disdain for authority in mandating reading policy is happening all over the world. The World Bank and USAID is funding the EGRA( Distarr) in African , Asian  and Latin American languages. Expensive testing in many countries shows that kids can't read nonsense either in colonial languages or in their own native tongue.Duh!

In France, Germany and Portugal the same pedagogy of the absurd as in the English speaking countries is being  being imposed as part of a widespread attempt to privatize education.

On the other hand perhaps the forces of absurdity may have over reached. They have come to believe their own lies to the point where they are making clear to teachers and and public workers all over  that they have to enter the political arena. Remember it was the Wisconsin teachers occupying their state capitol that precipitated the occupy movement across America.

As my sister used to quote Alice :the world is getting curiouser and curiouser

Retention is a terrible punishment

March 7

Remember that big kid in fifth grade who was 12 years old and used to beat up all the 10 year olds? One of the many dumb ideas that keeps being reborn as the solution to the problems of schooling is that non-achieving kids should be retained in the same grade for an additional year or years.

The latest rendition is the law being perpetrated in Arizona and many other states which condemns children who  haven't met the criteria for reading achievement to repeat third grade until they do.

One of the earliest educational research studies done in 1909 by Ayres was called "Laggards in our Schools" . It grew out of concern for the cost of keeping children in the same grade sometimes for years. Since then many studies have shown that punishing non-achievers by making them stay in the same grade causes more problems than it solves.

Among the problems of retaining kids is the bullying by sullen, over-age over size kids who pick on little classmates in response to their own humiliation.

David Berliner pointed out in an interview on NPR this week that the retainees may do a bit better on tests because they are a year older but the money spent on keeping them in the same grade could be better spent on doing something different for them instead of having them repeat what didn't work the year before.

The dumb idea is often defended against the concept of social promotion- keeping students with their age group through school. We need to understand that as kids grow older their differences in every sense do not decrease they increase.

One misconception so common it is laughable is that all kids showed be "working at grade level". Grade level is an artifact of norm reference testing. It is the average score reached by all children in a given grade taking the test. So by definition half of all kids are above and half are below grade l.

Schools need to deal with this diversity.  Dewey said it clearly : we can make the kids adjust to school . Or we can adjust the school to them.  As a teacher I knew I couldn't win them all- some kids have real problems schools can't solve alone. But every failure was my failure too. What is the point of punishing kids for not learning? Even worse is punishing inner city kids who have never had one teacher for a whole year for the failures of their system. Or the smart kids who do ok on the tests but don't do the dumb work sheets and get failing grades.

 And retention is the a terrible punishment. It humiliates. A nine year old who reads at the level of some six year olds is still bigger, more physically developed, and with more mature interests. He or she will do better with age peers. The research has consistently shown that.

This is one more example of not honoring the knowledge of professionals and imposing political decisions on both professional teachers and unfortunate students.

Let's make the politicians wear the dunce caps for another bad old idea

John Stewart on Arne Duncan

Last week John Stewart had Arne Duncan on the Daily Show. He was not a kind interviewer. He kept citing "my mother who is a teacher and her friends.tell me" confronting Duncan on Race to the Top. Duncan would not disagree with anything. He was like a programmed robot . Every;response was a political slogan Yes teaching to the test is terrible. But Stewart kept bringing the topic back to the misuse of tests and the negativity of Race to the Top.

It was one of his better interviews and showed Stewart has been listening.


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A continuum of connecting through evolving language

My recuperation from my knee replacement goes well. SO I can pick up my morning posts.

Here's an idea I've been exploring: A continuum of connecting through language  

         The ability to create language is universal among people so they are always able to find new ways to connect as they are needed.  Some linguists believe that only oral language is language and that language is innate- built into our brains. One argument used by those who say written systems are not language is that written language is not  universal in human societies while oral language is.  But what is innate is not language but the ability to think symbolically. What is universal is the ability to create written language when it is needed. That's when the need to be connected exceeds the span of oral language.

.            We need to connect over distance and time. We all, as humans have within us the ability to create language. So written language has been invented many times in many places. 

            Most often the process involves borrowing and adapting forms from another culture that already has a system. The Roman alphabet was based on one borrowed from the Greeks ( who were brought as slaves to Rome to act as scribes and teachers) And Hebrew and Arabic writing evolved from the same sources as the Greek alphabet. But other writing systems were being invented in Asia, South and Central America and Africa. They were invented wherever they were needed.

            Only 150 years after Alexander the Great built his huge empire and spread the use of the Greek writing system for political and communication purposes from Greece to Afghanistan, the first Qin Emperor of China, the one whose terra cotta soldiers are buried with him in his tomb in Xian imposed a writing system on his whole empire .  It represented meaning directly in its symbols rather  than speech patterns so that they meant the same thing for everyone in his empire even though their dialects could not be mutually understandable. Perhaps that is one reason his empire held together for centuries while Alexander's fell apart after  his death.

            So when societies became more complex, as nations grew, written language developed. The purposes were communication beyond the reach of the voice and as a means of storing knowledge that was accumulating: an archive. Language creates social communication; written language is more useful for connecting our memories- the shared knowledge our cultures build.             And it may be sufficient for a small group of specialists to be literate on behalf of the  community. In Egyptian society the writing on stone or papyrus was done by a small group of scribes.  Hebrew scribes wrote messages for the Persian emperors in Hebrew script which were  then read by other Hebrew scribes were they were received.

            In the middle ages monks copied laboriously by hand the religious texts that were important in their societies. And they also served as scribes for the political rulers.

            Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai two tablets on which were written- according to the old testament- by the hand of no less than God- the ten commandments. The accomplishments of the Pharaohs are memorialized on the walls of their tombs by inscriptions in hieroglyphics. The Incas and the Mayans created written inscriptions and elaborate written calendars. And of course the foundations of the world's great religions are represented in holy writing which preserved the oral traditions that had served the purposes earlier.

            Since early writing systems needed only small numbers of literates they could function as a terse minimal code as long as it was understood by all who used the system. Hebrew and Arabic didn't fully represent the phonology leaving out most of the vowels. Classic Chinese represented primarily the content words leaving out the grammatical markers.  The monks of the middle ages were basically archivists- copying manuscripts by hand for the libraries where they could be read by the very small group of literates who carried out the literacy functions for their societies. The Vatican library today has a huge historical collection of the world's writing but only the  Pope can borrow its books and only scholars and high ranking church officials are even permitted to visit the library. In the Name of the Rose Umberto Eco describes the library of  a14th century Italian Monastery where books are stored but hidden away even from the monks who spent their days copying books.

            Often Gutenberg's invention of the printing press is given credit for the revolution in literacy, making inexpensive books available to a  wider range of literates. But in the socio-historical view I am developing, here is a prime example of how changes in society bring about technologies which meet the need. The need for larger groups of people in complex societies to be literate created the conditions for Gutenberg's printing press to be a commercial success. The demand for books stimulated  the invention. That's not unlike the appearance in more recent times of xerography and the appearance on street corners of copy shops or the multifunction home printers that copy, scan, fax and transmit texts and images.

            The concept in architecture that form follows function applies equally well to language. We have the ability to create language forms to serve every new function. But also new forms- the printing press for example- leads to new functions. Computers were created for the purpose of crunching numbers but then they were adapted for the functions of language they could serve.

More on this topic soon Any responses?