Deep Feedback and Deep Word Use

....Was reading a Mother Jones article about private vs. public universities and how well they teach writing, critical thinking, and the like. Of course there is the familiar argument about how we can't really teach sophistication, and the differences in how your papers are attended to, and by who (professor or TA), but what pranced out at me was mention of how paltry the actual deep feedback is, for written assigments, with  budget cutbacks.


That is what is sorely needed - a mentor, a teacher, a trusted adult, with whom to talk about your writing with. Sigh!


Pity the middle school Language Arts teachers, who subscribe to Educational Journals, read the articles that their guest in-service providers hand out, take summer intensives in how to better teach writing to hormonal media-soaked pre-teens, and YET, they don't have the time to really spend with them, one-on-one, discussing the revisions needed in their writing, create deep goals for their writing improvement, and simply have time to READ all those papers! Okay run-on sentence award there, for me.


Someday there will be a way to tape record comments of a teacher while they skim a paper, with some futuristic mind-reading software, and the student then uses those to create a revision, which then gets read by a Grad Student who is doing an in-service project as part of their teacher certification.  In the meantime we need smaller classes and great teachers and bigger budgets and (refrain of song repeats here)

And how I wish this Scrabble sentence were true!

This summer I am also awash in reflections on the Vocabulary Deficit. For BOTH the students whose families have "means", as well as the foster kids who I am overseeing the interventions for this summer, I see serious gaps in vocabulary, as we read fiction, non-fiction, and everything in between. I am shocked at the limits of their understanding of academic language (aka "book words" or the ability to draw from sophisticated lists of synonyms for what they are reading - or what they are writing).


I mean, I don't spend time with them on a word like "cabaret" or "arid" but when a soon-to-be 7th grader doesn't know what "finite" or "prohibitive" means, we may be headed for a roadblock or two in assigned readings in 7th or 8th grade. Duh. 


Oh, if I am in a thunderstorm kind of day, July mood, with fewer clients than I would like to have this month, and cleaning even the tops of door jambs to pass the time, forgive my melancholy. But the vocabulary gap is real. As is the dearth of adult feedback to our budding next generation of writers. 


As one of my favorite bloggers says, "Today I don't have any upbeat tips, just words strung together to make you think, and smile."

WORD PRECISION

I have harped on my students about strong verbs until I feel like a repetitive robot. I have practiced choosing the precise noun, and they roll their eyes when I look at their writing and ask, "What KIND....(?)" of bug, or desk, or dog or game.


And then there are adjectives. Not so harpy about those, but they do have their place. Tons of blogs about writing warn, "Not too many adjectives; no one will take you seriously" and other such platitudes. Well, I think kids need to learn that when you are short of verbs in a couple of paragraphs, you had better have some adjectives. I have done my own research in children's novels, with a sample of 16, and it is true that J.K. Rowling, Lemony Snicket, Rick Riordan, and others use this rough math equation.


Adjectives are the words that create the most hilarity in Mad Libs. They are what make-up about 1/4 of our English Language. They are what make poetry leap off the page. They are also what sports reporters use well.  Or overuse. 


"The flimsy pitch reeled through the suspenseful air."
"There were even hints of their lethargic 118-108 victory Sunday against an undermanned and injured Sacramento team."
"Wimbledon, the oldest of the Grand Slam events, remains beautifully suited to Federer's Swiss army knife of a skill set."


Use?
Overuse?
You decide.


Adjectives are what kids can struggle with because they know they want to say, "The Waterpark was awesome," but their teacher - or someone like me - has told them that "awesome" is a tired word. So they reach into their lexicon of words and can't quite find a synonym. 


Time for the Thesaurus? Maybe. Remember, that is not a tool to be used without adult supervision, because just dunking a fishing rod into there and retrieving the first word encountered results in sentences like this, from one of my students, an almost 6th grader:

The slides at the Waterpark were majestic and we had a jocular day.

The cost of trying to avoid awesome and fun.


Using the Visual Thesarus is a great strategy, and so much more motivating (!) yet still it needs a tag attached to it: "Do not use without Adult Supervision." Caveat: $19.95 a year.

So....what do the new Common CORE Standards say?


Here is a snippet from Grade 6-8:
Use precise words and phrases, relevant descriptive details, and sensory language to convey experiences and events.


My kid-friendly version of that is "Show Don't Tell" and "...use words that will make your readers see what is in your imaginative mind."
And, of course, I show them how their favorite authors use precise words. Wimpy Kid doesn't count as a model, though. Wimpy words. Imprecise. Okay, okay, not every page. I am such a curmudgeon about that series.


Ooops. I was supposed to be talking about Word Precision and Adjective Use.


I am sticking with my rough equation.
Paragraphs need either solid strong verbs, OR precise adjectives, but not both.


And precise nouns are always called for. 

Brain Stickiness

There is no teflon in the house, but there is teflon in the brains that come here to work with me.


My friend told me this week, while I gushed over new strategies on the forefront of the marriage of pharmacology, and alternative modalities, I learned at an ADD Conference last Saturday, that I need to come back in the next lifetime as a brain researcher. I have come to trust medication more than I would have ever predicted, yet I grow more MIStrustful of "Big Pharma."


"But I don't trust the AMA,", I responded, "because doctors only have, like 16 hours of credits on nutrition, and maybe 12 on stress and the body-mind connection, PLUS they have not healed me as much as my own brain and bodywork have." 
"Well", she said, "that is why they need you."


I have been watching TED Talks lately, because they have short time frames for my short sometimes attention span, uber smart people, yet not ones who live in a laboratory and never see daylight or controversial conversations, plus TED is the place I would speak about ADHD, brain health, schools for LD kids, academic skill-building in the ideal setting, and how to coach a kid who hates reading and writing, if I only knew the right "TED" people.


I tried the Seattle area TED Talks with no response. I am fighting my beliefs that I do not have enough degrees, or that I have too many wrinkles, to keep pursuing this goal. I seems you must present some newfangled idea, creative, original, and life-changing, to qualify. Nothing like a high bar to reduce me to inertia. Just like my kids I tutor! So I will practice what I preach, not give up, and keep searching for what it takes to present. I probably need to really practice what I teach, and "narrow my topic."


I said today to one of my 8-year-olds, "Maybe we could create a scrapbook of your summer trip and you could write little captions." Oh No. That did not go over like it did with my 11-year old girl who did that last summer. She took it and ran with it, practicing starting sentences with interesting beginnings. Instead, for him, it was like presenting a "high bar."

Or

"Let's aim for writing great 5-paragraph essays this school year!" Students are eavesdropping on this goal-setting brainstorm in my living room, while I talk to their parent, usually a mom, and meanwhile, their handwriting, grammar, spelling, keyboarding, thesaurus use, sentence length, and sense of organization is paltry. I calmly reassure them, in my most Glenda the Good Witch voice, that we will work just on sentences for a long time and then only when they are ready, essays. Gosh, I know of NO child or teen who lights up when that word is spoken. And then I deliver the hypocritical news, when they tell of some daunting assignment, like writing about why their school is the best, and give THREE reasons grade, that 5-paragraph essays are not how most magazines or newspapers are actually written.


Speaking of entrenched beliefs, I listened to a talk tonight by Joe Dispenzia, who is an articulate geek who makes sense of the chemicals in the brain, and motivation, learning, and habits. Nothing trivial there. The limbic brain, or mammalian brain, or emotional brain, regulates "internal chemical order." Of course, if the frontal cortex is compromised, as in anxiety-ridden, ADHD-ers, or traumatized people or children, there is less of a dance step integration possible. I just could not help think of my struggling writers, and whether changing their thinking could incur tangible changes in their output and flow. 


My current belief is that the "stickiness' of one's brain is directly related to how healthy the nutrients you put in are, plus the dopamine, plus the amount of explicit instruction you get, and much more. 


Changing Your Brain: The 3 Brains that Allow us to go from Thinking, to Doing, to Being


Oh Yeah! I am supposed to place bullet points in my post in order to follow the rules of BLOGGING! I always forget.

• Nerve cells that fire together wire together. 
• If learning is making new synaptic connections, then remembering is maintaining and sustaining those connections. 
• Warning: Many moving images of dendrites and synapses in the youtube video. Kidding.

http://www.drjoedispenza.com/

Love the resources on his website. Who can argue with the Meditation called, "Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself?"

Remedial Reading and Writing for incoming College Students

Okay, I cannot stand to read blogs that simply cut and paste what other people have written, and tack on a single sentence response of their own. Talk about lacking personal voice!So here I will fitfully, boldly, and guiltily do the same. I do know one of the authors, William Tierney, from my years at Cal State. I abridged the post so as to prevent concentration dilution on your part. The parts in bold are what I am always beating my drum about. 

Remediation in College

Remediation is a massive bottleneck in higher education. Half of the students who show up at community colleges are not college-ready and must complete one or more catch-up courses before they can enter college-level study. 

Every summer for the past decade, we have conducted a writing program for college-bound, low-income minority students. More than 80 percent of them have never written a formal five-page paper. Instead, they’ve churned out short essay after short essay after short essay. When asked to develop an idea or argument beyond two or three pages, they look dumbfounded.

IThe Education Commission of the States reports that only 17 percent of students enrolled in remedial English nationally go on to earn a college degree. That’s a shameful return on what the Gates Foundation estimates to be a $2.3 billion annual investment in remedial programs nationally.

What works? Our 10 years of teaching remedial writing, as well as other research, points to four ways to get students to write better.

• Set specific and understandable goals. Abstract test scores – “You score in the 85th percentile” -- don’t help students, especially first-generation learners, know if they are underprepared to write in college. If students somehow discover they are not good writers, they have no idea what they need to do to improve. 

• Teach students how to revise. What students need to understand is how to make the essay they just wrote better. A teacher’s general comments at the end of an essay, the usual practice, are like an autopsy report: They may tell the student why the paper is weak, but they do not help the writer fix the problem. 

• Teach summarizing, not analyzing: Critical thinking in and of itself is not a precursor of good writing. Putting thinking into words, sentences and paragraphs is the endgame, and that crucially involves the ability to summarize material, a more concrete and therefore teachable skill. If students are able to summarize what they have read, they can better grasp how to put together their own arguments.

These sorts of solutions are not rocket science, but they are, unfortunately, controversial. Adopting them would mean focusing on writing as process rather than as product, an unsettling break for those accustomed to exams and assignments without revision opportunities. But the current remedial writing programs have the dubious distinction of being the first stop on the way to dropping out of college. 

Teaching Boys Who Would Rather Build Forts All Day

This weekend I head north to Vancouver to give a presentation to 115 specialists, as part of the

Canadian Academy of Therapeutic Tutors.

They expect me to illuminate them on the latest and greatest in magic tricks for teaching writing. Not that I am anxious, or nervous. (Hah!)

One of my students (age 7) asked how I was going to do a presentation when I didn't know how to speak Canadian.

Since my last BLOG I started a new little contract-y job, with a Foster Care Agency, and they really do that middle word: CARE. Social Workers who use every ounce of their compassionate bloodstream, and their graduate school smarts, to help these kids feel an anchor. Ahem, a small detail, however, is that these kids struggle with reading. So I come in with my virtual Super Woman cape and assess them, even though the school has supposedly done so, only to find that (surprise!) schools aren't doing the best interventions, or dong much at all. So my pen and my sword pursue best interventions, with elaborate write-ups, and grave predictions about their future, and the schools do not exactly call me up to attend any of their parties or potlucks. I will also be doing mini trainings for the foster parents on how to help their kids in a more pointed way than having them read People magazine over and over.

Lately, while not burning data CDs for my Vancouver-ites, lumbering to Pilates class in the rain, writing long e-mails to parents of the kids I tutor, and stressing about whether I am eating enough greens, or worrying about the futures of foster children...I am....

....Listening to Andrew Pudewa (don't ask me to pronounce his name, but I have exchanged many emails with him over the years) talk about Boys and Writing - an audio of one of his presentations, which are for sale on his website. I am too cheap to spend the hundreds on his curriculum, but I have pored over the Institute for Excellence in Writing materials at conferences, heard powerful stories from homeschoolers, and scratched my head about why I haven't seen the curriculum in classrooms, or on special ed. teachers shelves. Here is a 2 minute clip of him, to get a sense of his wisdom.

Teaching Boys and Other Children who Would Rather Make Forts All Day

What a relief to hear that he is promoting the same strategies that I have fallen upon through my own trial and error, with fort-making boys, over the years. He is BIG ON VERBS.

Here is his website, and the page with some freebies is under Downloads.

I am making tiny progress with the six boys, ages 10-13, who would rather have dental surgery than write.

• One has Inspiration, and a new MAC, and that makes his willingness dial move up to "10."

• Another has new medication, so now he actually uses my 25 pages of writing tools instead of forgetting they are there in his binder, on his desk at home. One of these pages is a reminder about using strong verbs, of course.

• Yet another has taken on my "Think like a reporter" mantra and asks himself often whether he has the 5 W's and H in his writing for school, or for me.

• The Step-Up-to-Writing summary equation is what one 5th grader is hanging his hat on, because it gives such clear parameters for the many summaries that I assign, since we also work on finding the Main Idea.

Identify the item. THEN Use a verb and a bit more. THEN Finish your thought.

The article on sharks

describes the reasons

why there are more attacks today

Verbs for summaries:

explains describes gives compares tells

shows lists provides presents demonstrates

_________________________________________________________________________

And a little humor, or spice, or I am not sure - help me out here!

Why Johnny Can't Write

Video that revisits the Newsweek Cover Story December 8, 1975

If this were a student's paper, I would ask, "Where is your thesis?" It is 7 minutes of garbled reporter speak, and while the essence of the video isn't clear, to me it spoke to how this "alarm" is not new, and we cannot simply blame it on the digital age, or our texting teenagers, but a whole host of things.

If anyone can decipher the "Main Idea", let me know.