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?

Hey I got myself up this morning.

This morning I got out of bed, used the faciltiies, took a shower and got dressed.
That may not sound like much, but one week ago I got a new right knee, A nice young tech got the shower started for me. that may not sound like much but you try getting socks on with a swollen painful knee.
I have a device called a sock aid which does the trick.

And I'm sitting here exhausted and in pain, The nurse just asked me to estimate the pain on a ten point scale and I said (ouch) eight. That got me two pain pills

I'm at a local branch of Health South which rehabilitates folks of all kinds,

I'm also entitled to speech therapy here.

The therapist offered to treat my singers nodules and raspy voice.
While some of you might agree that I need some help in this area, I persuaded my Aussie therapist that I was here for my knee.

I think now I'll go back to bed and relish my triumph,'

Obama, Congress and me.

You and I are not happy with the impasse in government and we are not at all pleased with the Obama administration education program.

But I think we have to consider that the President should get considerable credit for what did or didn't happen to medicare and access to health care in this country.

 On Monday I will be going to the University Medical Center to get a new right knee. I've been extremely well prepared for this. I've been screened by my many specialists: Neurologist, nephrologist, cardiologist, primary care, ophthalmologist, even my podiatrist. I've been informed by a surgical nurse, the anesthesiologist and my orthopedic surgeon..Oh and my physical therapist. ( who makes house calls) I am so ready. I've made my own choices of general vs local anesthesia. And I'm pleased to know that while he is at it I will be getting my bow leg straightened. Did you know they can do that?

I'll be spending at least three days in a private room with a nurse who only has four patients. I'll be able to call any time of night or day for food- they want me to  eat.

I'm among the lucky Americans who has access to the best of American medical technology. I have medicare which will pay for most of this. And I am still part of the University (state) medical plan through United .
Yetta and I pay over $800 per month for this. Hopefully when "Obama care" kicks in this access will be exapnnded to at least a few million others.

Obama didn't get what he wanted in his health plan but he also protected what we have from the attempt to destroy health care and social security mounted by key republicans.

Last night on Bill Maher's show an apologist named Krum said we should welcome the possibility of Romney being the republican nominee and getting elected because any of the others would be far worse.

The reality is that we have to get behind Obama because any alternative the Republicans would offer is pledged to take us back to the era of the robber barons that preceded the reforms of both Roosevelts.

The old red scare has been tried against Obama - they called him a socialist (would that he were) but now he is being accused of trying to turn the country into European social welfare state (would that he was ).

As I see it the only way Obama could lose to any of these is if large numbers of progressives don't vote.
We can't let that happen.

Political incursions into education

During the years of the so-called reading wars I learned that I had lied to my California eighth grade students. The state required that all eighth graders had to pass a test on the state and federal constitution. And one of the things I taught was how a bill becomes a law.  I left out the work of the lobbyists. And I left out the work of the movement conservatives who have developed tactics for using the institutions of democracy to destroy democracy.

No child left behind was a brilliant example of the work of the movement conservatives. They rewrote the elementary -secondary education act which was the major law that brought federal money into the nation's schools with the goals of equalizing educational opportunity. Their rewriting gutted the original act, redirected its resoursces, took control of  curriculum and policies away from the local districts and the states and mandated methods, materials and texts. And it specifically marginalized whole language broadly defined as anything other than synthetic phonics in literacy instruction.

And it disguised its purposes so well as reform that it was supported by both parties and the major minority
organizations.

Diane Ravitch says that under NCLB, the federal government was dictating ineffectual remedies, which had no track record of success. Neither Congress nor the U.S. Department of Education knows how to fix low performing schools. The intent was not to fix the schools it was to destroy public education and put in its place

a privatized system like that of third world nations where anybody with means sends their kids to private schools , public schools serve only the working poor, aand the non-working poor are forced out of school at an early age. 

They accomplished this by using the federal money as bait to force the changes they sought in state educational policies and local application. In his campaign, Obama took advice from reputable educators such as Linda Darling Hammond but he also listened to the same people who had created NCLB.

In fact his administration discovered that you could force change without actually giving the states money.

Under the bad sports metaphor of "Race to the Top" states were required to change such important policies as teach tenure to appply for a grant and then they only give the grant to a few states.

NCLB- still  the law of the land n education- has a time bomb ticking, By 2014 all children are required to be proficient in reading. If not all schools will be labled failing. In Lake Wobegone they only have to be above average.

Now the two parries each have a plan for modifying NCLB. But in the spirit of this Congress they differ sufficiently that no change will actually pass. Which leaves the schools of america caught in the limbo

of enforcing a law nobody wants with less money. And that means teachers losing jobs and pressure on those who still  teach to be faithful to bad programs out in place by massive conflicts of interest under the past administrtaion.

Maybe what we need is teachers occupying the DOE in Washington like they did in the state capitol in Wisconsin. Or how about occupying both political conventions this year? Wouldn't it be great if we shut down all the schools while the two parties were nominating their candidates?

That would be a  lesson from the teachers.

Prediction

I'm working on a book with Steve Strauss whose claim to fame other than being Bess Altwerger's husband, is that he has both a Ph.d in linguistics and an MD in neurology.The other authors are Peter Fries and Eric Paulson.

Steve has brought our reading theory and modern brain theory together to show that our model of reading is consistent with emerging brain theory. I won't go into all of it, but an important aspect of both is the understanding of the importance of prediction.

In reading we have seen that the brain is predicting what it will find as it continues to read.One evidence of that is that  that the eye only fixates on about 70% of the words in any text . The brain, through instructions it send to the thalamus, tells the eye what it predicts it will see and the eye then seeks out evidence to confirm what the brain has predicted and to form new predictions.

A new insight coming from brain research i s that, even in insects, each action, whether mental or physical
contains within it a predication of the next action. That makes it possible to function smoothly and to make continuous response to each situation.

This week we were driving the LA freeways. And I thought about how cars in close proximity traveling at speeds often exceeding 80 miles an hour manage to avoid hitting each other. Each driver is making continual decisions on what to do next as the car hurls forward toward its destination.

The brain can't go through a decision making process each time it needs to what to do next. It must be able to react immediately. It can do so because of what Steve calls feed forward. The brain doesn't feed back to input from the eyes, it feeds forward ready to take the next step.

In reading the brain is making decisions not only from input it is getting from the eye but from information it has stored in the cortex. What we think we see is more important then what we actually see. Perceptions are always the result of what the eye provides as input and what the brain has predicted.

In our book we focus on the illusion that readers have seen all the letters in all the words. Yet as I said they have only fixated about 70% of the words. What they have not seen they have predicted, And on the basis of what is perceived the reader is constructing meaning. Contrary to common focus on careful word identification,  reading is an efficient process of making sense with the least amount of visual input necessary to be effective  in making sense.




                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

The language continuum

I often find as I'm writing  an article or book to explain concepts to my audience that I am clarifying my own thoughts and sometimes making a breakthrough. I liken it to a comedian telling himself  joke he hadn't heard before.  It happens, of course in teaching too.  You understand something yourself in  the course of getting it through to your students.

That's what happened to me recently. I was trying to deal with the common belief among linguists that written language is not itself language but rather an encoding of language. They argue that since written language is not universal and oral language is it cannot be language. The significance of this is that they use it to reject my position that written and oral language are learned in the same way and for the same reasons. They are parallel language processes. Most often these linguists also believe that language innate and not learned. So oral language doesn't have to be learned but written language does.

As I began to write about this I realized that what I believed but had not yet worked through is that both oral and written language are part of  a continuum. Human beings are social and interdependent. Unlike many other animals we take a long time (several years) to become mature adults during which we depend on parents for survival. And the more complex human society gets the more we need to be connected to each other.

Language is the major means of connecting. What is innate is not language but our universal ability to invent language and that depends on our abiity to think symbolically. We can assign meaning to abstractions and manipulate those to represent our need and  experiences to each other.

Furthermore the ability we share to think symbolically is totally recursive. We can use symbols to represent symbols and change the values of the symbols in the same utterances. That's why there are homophones and homographs in all languages. The same sounds and graphic pattern mas have different meanings.

In our view each child invents language but in the context of the social language that surrounds the child. So language is shaped by the interplay between social convention and personal invention and eventually the personal language is consistent with the social language- they join the language community.

For  a young child and a young culture oral language is the most effective means of connection. They need to connect most with family and community. From the beginning though there is some need to store knowledge and experience and so graphic forms are invented- cave painting to tell the story of a great battle or hunt- or symbols and icons to mark significance. Or marks to record quantities or trades.

Eventually oral language is insufficient and fuler forms of written language are needed .They can be preserved and transported so people can connect across time and space.

 Like oral language written language has been invented at many times in many places. That's what is universal-
our ability to invent new forms of language to extend our ways of connecting. That's why deaf people,cutoff from sound based language invent sign based language. And since human communities have neighbors part of the inventive process is taking systems already in use by the neighbors and adapting that to one's own language needs, as the Japanese did with Chinese or the Romans did with the Greek.

This continuum of connection through language requires improved forms for language production as the needs for connection increase. Guttenberg's printing press didn't produce mass literacy  quite the contrary : the need for  the wider spread of literacy produced the need  for and market for printing presses.

So extend this now to cheao pencils.fountain pens, ball point pens, type writers, copy machines,  word processors, etc until we reach the digital age . Now the differences between oral and written language in terms of use and function overlap. We can record sound and images, we can have written conversations on cell phones, we can plan revolutions and get thousands of people in a city plaza on a few minutes notice.

Form follows function in language- Computers developed to crunch numbers and perform fast complex mathematical procedures but they then made word processors possible.

The development of microchips that can store large amounts of data and access it quickly made the telephone a microcomputer that connects us through voice ,written text, and photo and video images in ways that connect us in ways we haven't even thought of yet. And an icon can conjure a game, or book,  or a historical event or turn a phone into a pin ball machine or working slot machine or  bowing alley.

And it all because of our need to get connected.