The last of the tiger parents?

In his Op-Ed piece in this weekend’s New York Times, Ryan Park contrasts the Asian “tiger parenting” that he grew up with:

hours marching through the snow, reciting multiplication tables… [standing] at attention at the crack of dawn reading the newspaper aloud, with each stumble earning a stinging rebuke.

with the more Americanized way he plans to raise his daughters:

They will feel valued and supported. They will know home as a place of joy and fun. They will never wonder whether their father’s love is conditioned on an unblemished report card.

A specific example of what Park has done so far:

before my oldest daughter was on an early-morning school schedule, I freely indulged her disregard for bedtime on a condition: The night was firmly earmarked for learning. We’d sometimes stay up past midnight, lying on our stomachs with feet in the air, huddled over a dry-erase board and a bowl of popcorn, practicing phonics or learning about sea creatures.

This does sound a tad less tigerish, and a jot more joyous, than marching through snow reciting multiplication tables (or, for that matter, marching through snow practicing phonics!).

But earmarking post-bedtime hours for parent-supervised, erase-board mediated learning doesn’t strike me as more typically American than Asian, even if prone position and popcorn are involved. How many typical American parents are staying up past midnight helping their kids practice phonics or learn aquatic zoology?

Not that there’s anything wrong with that! Loving and teaching, after all, aren’t in competition. We can fill our kids’ days with teachable moments even if we begin well after dawn, eschew snow marches and stinging rebukes, and demonstrate unconditional love. It just takes a lot of commitment and effort!

If traditional Asian parents have something to learn from typical American parents, the reverse is surely just as true.

My first dictée

Dictee #1: Charles DeGaulle 

I guess the good news is that I got halfway through the sentence before it turned into gibberish.

I recognized the word souhaite and knew how to spell it ! (Thank you Duolingo and/or Lingvist).

I’m going to keep doing this one once a day until I can hear the “bonne annee” at the end.

Plus I like listening to Charles DeGaulle wish the nation a happy New Year.

And see:
Le Dictée

Terri on dictée and memory

I had been wondering whether homeschoolers use dictée. Turns out they do.

Here’s Terri: 

Fwiw, many classical homeschoolers do dictee. (Writing with Skill, the writing program by Susan Wise Bauer of Well Trained Mind fame emphasizes it, for instance.)

But it’s more for training kids to hold larger and larger chunks of information in memory.

I do a version of this with my freshmen students. I’ll post an example later. In my case the idea is to help them absorb the phrase-and-clause structure of formal prose. I ask them to write the sentence chunk-by-chunk instead of word-by-word.

I wonder whether dictée exercises are common in foreign language classes.

French L2 classes use dictée. At least, French classes do here in France. I don’t know about French classes in the U.S.

Ed learned French in France, and one of the standard classroom exercises was to listen to a sentence on a filmstrip, then write it from memory. He said it was incredibly hard to do, and incredibly useful, too.

Speaking of, I did my first dictée today. 

I see why French grownups are united in mild dictée-related PTSD.  

And see:
Le Dictée

What does it mean for a teenager not to be “widely respected”?

…besides not getting into Harvard?

It might mean

• being a maverick
• worse: a gadfly
• being sartorially challenged
• being a hyper-focused nerd
• being dreamy and out of it
• being socially awkward
• worst of all: being on the autism spectrum

In its quest for diversity, Harvard is missing out.

Is Harvard alone in this?

Should we care?

Housekeeping

Katharine and I are having trouble editing and saving posts. This is a test.

Google Master on le dictée

Google Master on the subject of le dictée being the solution to all French sounding alike:

Or are we talking about dicter, dicté, dictée, dictai, dictais, dictait, dictaient, dictez, …

Now I’m depressed.

And see:
Adventures in Listening Comprehension
Katharine on listening in French
Google Master on le dictée

Katharine on listening in French

This makes perfect sense:

I’ve often wondered how the level of French mastery you need to make sense of oral French compares with that for other languages. French is my best language, but, when it comes to rapid speech, I often find it easier to follow oral German.

One area where things that sound the same in French–and complicate things for native and nonnative speakers alike–are verb endings. All of the following endings, for example, share the same “close e” sound: -er, -é, -ée, –ai, -ais, -ait, -aient. So the following forms of the verb “to walk” all sound the same:

marcher: infinitive of “walk”
marché: past participle of “walk”
marchée: feminine singular of the past participle of “walk”
marchai: first-person singular past historic of “walk”
marchais: first and second person singular imperfect indicative of “walk”
marchait: third person singular imperfect indicative of “walk”
marchaient: third person plural imperfect indicative of “walk”

Because of this, the French dictée is as much an exercise in grammar as it is in spelling.

I often drop in on Camille Chevalier’s French Today website. (I’ve also bought her first book).

I recall her saying that French parents “are always teaching their children grammar” or words to that effect.

I wonder if this is what she was talking about ?

btw, she has a fabulous post about teaching French to a woman with memory problems that I’ll link to as soon as I get to it. Very interesting.

And see:
Adventures in Listening Comprehension
Katharine on listening in French
Google Master on le dictée

Bonjour (and “Learning to Learn”)

My good friend Debbie Stier was just here for a week — !

Debbie brought Donald C. Smith et al’s Learning to Learn with her and spent part of each day working her way through the text. It sounds fantastic. Using his techniques, she was easily remembering all of the salient points. 

When I get back, tackling L-to-L is next on my list.

Update re: le dictée

I just re-read the post about listening in French & discovered that the section on the reason French children write dictees makes no sense. 

Should be fixed now.

When students don’t look up…

…at what they’ve just written, and at the squiggly lines that word processors generate under questionable word choices and grammatical errors, this is an example of what you get:

(From a recent student paper.)

Actually, most of my recent students have been good about proofreading. Examples like this one stand out to me partly because they aren’t that common, but partly, also, because I don’t understand why they happen at all.  That is, I can’t imagine what it takes to turn something in without (a) noticing these markings, and/or (b) caring to address them.

We’re still a long way from routine, sentence-level revisions!

Adventures in listening comprehension

UPDATE 6/17/108 re: le dictée

It’s really hard to understand spoken French.

I don’t understand spoken Spanish at all well, either, but still.  With Spanish, it seems like I could understand a person speaking Spanish if I put my mind to it. Which I intend to do the minute I get back to the U.S. All these years studying Spanish, off and on, and still not fluent — arrgghh. 

French is a different kettle of fish.

Speaking of germs in close proximity

Which I was: If this is Tuesday it must be Belgium & 5 or 6 other places

I’m reading James C. Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. It’s terrific.

One of his arguments is that the supposed “civilizational collapses” that dot the pre-state record weren’t collapses at all in many cases but, instead, rational responses to the horror of living in close proximity to other people’s germs.¹

Needless to say, I agree.

^{1. He doesn’t actually say “the horror of living in close proximity to other people’s germs.” However, I’m pretty sure he would say that neither cruise ships nor tour buses comport with our ancestral hunter-gatherer DNA.   ↩}

gasstationwithoutpumps on the two learning systems and grammar

Succinct and on the money:

Big chunks of grammar are rule-based learning, at least at the level of what distinguishes academic writing from casual conversation. The rules are articulated in grammar handbooks and can be consciously applied.

Grammar at the level of what sentences one can use in casual conversation is much more “information integration”, as it takes skilled linguists substantial effort to express the grammatical constraints in rules, and fairly complicated rule systems are needed for even crude approximations to grammaticality

That’s exactly right.

The principles Katharine and I teach in our curriculum can be learned–quickly learned–via rule-based learning:

• End focus: put the most important information in the sentence last 
• Known-new contract: start with information the reader already knows, proceed to new information he or she doesn’t know (or hasn’t heard you say yet)
• Cohesive topic chains: many if not most of your sentences in a paragraph should have the same or closely-related grammatical subject (I think the most effective percentage in a fairly long paragraph is around 75%)

And see:
The most important research on learning I’ve read

If this is Tuesday, it must be Belgium and six or seven other places

Cruise ships.

Whoa.

Waxing sententious about sentences

With enthusiasts like Doug Lemov, the sentence is finally, after years of neglect, regaining its due. And this due is long overdue. After all, the sentence is the minimal unit of thought. It derives from Latin sententia, meaning “opinion” (and shares its root with “sententious”). As Catherine has cited J.S. Mill as saying, “the structure of every sentence is a lesson in logic.” And, as I noted in my last post, it’s the smallest unit of prose that lends itself to multiple revisions.