3 adoptions

I’ve forgotten our publication date …. the book has been out for only a couple of weeks, and we have three adoptions!

Very exciting.

Exercises officially finished!

I’ve just sent in the absolute last batch of exercises for the student site!

Can’t believe we’re finished.

Wow.

Can you spot the sentence fragment?

From this weekend’s New York Times Magazine:

Adderall wiped away the question of willpower. Now I could study all night, then run 10 miles, then breeze through that week’s New Yorker, all without pausing to consider whether I might prefer to chat with classmates or go to the movies. It was fantastic. I lost weight. That was nice, too. Though I did snap at friends, abruptly accessing huge depths of fury I wouldn’t have thought I possessed. When a roommate went home one weekend and forgot to turn off her alarm clock so that it beeped behind her locked door for 48 hours, I entirely lost control, calling her in New York to berate her. I didn’t know how long it had been since I’d slept more than five hours. Why bother?

Something may look like a complete sentence because it contains a main verb, goes on for a bit, and sports a certain amount of complexity (e.g., an embedded clause). But, as Catherine and I discuss in our book–and in those forthcoming fluency exercises that Catherine mentions below–that doesn’t make it a complete sentence. True, sentence fragments can be effective. But sometimes–as this one did for me–they lead you down the garden path to the edge of a cliff. You expected more words, and here you are at the end of a sentence, having to go back and re-read it. At which point you realize, say, that it doesn’t express one more advantage to Adderall, but rather that it brings up the first of three downsides.

Speaking of advantages and disadvantages, did you spot my sentence fragment? Did I bring you up short and confuse you?

Precision teaching, fluency, and training the “inspector”

A section of the rationale Katharine & I wrote for Oxford explaining what we wanted to do:

Fluent performance means we can perform a skill quickly, accurately, smoothly — and automatically, with a minimum of conscious effort.

Fluency is the hallmark of expertise in any realm, physical or cognitive. In an academic discipline or profession, fluency requires years to develop. But fluency in the more basic skills that underlie complex tasks — composing sentences, in the case of writing — can be acquired much more quickly. Fluency in sentence composition, for instance, can be reached in as little as twenty hours of practice. #faf5f1

Good writers are fluent in at least three essential skills:

• Instantly identifying (or “discriminating,” as learning theorists would say) grammatical errors in their own or others’ writing, often “by ear”
• Instantly identifying (or discriminating) many stylistic flaws in their own or others’ writing (dangling modifiers, long chains of prepositional phrases, unclear pronoun antecedents, etc.), often by ear
• Instantly writing grammatically correct sentences. Copy editing and revision can consume many hours, but the process of simply getting a single grammatically correct sentence down on paper is automatic. Fluent writers never have to consciously ask themselves, for example, “Where does my dependent clause go in relation to the independent clause?”

It is often thought that students can learn to write simply by writing a lot and/or by reading a lot. In fact, this approach rarely works. The reason most students do not learn to write by writing is that they cannot ‘hear’ what they write (or what they read). Their ability to discriminate a good prose sentence from a bad one has not been trained.

Fluent discrimination is important because all performance depends upon our internal “inspection” of results. When we read words out loud, for instance, we are actually doing two things: reading out loud and listening to ourselves read out loud, inspecting our performance for error.

Of course, if we are uncertain what the words on the page sound like, we can’t function as effective monitors of our own performance. By the same token, students who have difficulty distinguishing a fragment from a complete sentence cannot inspect their writing for mistakes in grammar, style, or cohesion – at least not efficiently.

In particular, students who have had little exposure to academic prose (most students, it seems) can’t hear themselves as they write—nor can they tell whether readers will understand what they’ve said.

“Precision teaching” is a method that develops fluency and trains the inspector.

The Supplement gives students a sequence of exercises that develops the inspector and trains them to write sentences and paragraphs fluently. Once students reach fluency in sentence and paragraph composition, they will be prepared to move on to the next step: marshaling evidence and pursuing an argument throughout an entire college essay. #faf5f1

Precision teaching and writing

A few summers back, I attended Morningside Academy’s Summer School Institute, which pretty much changed my life. A slight exaggeration, but still.

Morningside is the only school I’m aware of that guarantees its work:

The school promises that your child will make two years’ progress in one year’s time, in his or her most challenging subject, or tuition is refunded.

Their guarantee covers reading (and writing) as well as math, which brings up one of life’s mysteries: why aren’t charter schools, which tend to produce better results in math than reading,¹ beating a path to Morningside’s door?

Why isn’t anyone beating a path to Morningside’s door, for that matter?

If you were ever inclined to think that success breeds imitation in the education sector, Morningside is proof that it doesn’t.

It’s worse than that, actually: successful techniques like sentence combining and sentence-level rhetorics have gone missing.

Our writing curriculum was inspired, in part, by the precision teaching I watched and practiced during my two weeks at Morningside. I want to stress the word “inspired“; the lessons aren’t a proper precision teaching curriculum complete with slices, fluency aims, and celeration charts. But the philosophy of teaching a component skill — sentence writing — to fluency is key.

Here’s how we explained our project to Oxford.

^{1. [I don’t know whether this situation has changed with the publication of Doug Lemov’s Reading Reconsidered and the headway Core Knowledge has made in convincing at least some charters that knowledge is key to reading comprehension.]↩}

Europe in the Modern World – Instructor Edition

Check out the prices — Europe in the Modern World is $49.95

Let’s resurrect sentence-based rhetorics

Part of what’s distinct about Catherine’s and my curriculum is that we’re zeroing in on the basic building blocks of writing–phrases, sentences, and paragraphs.

It’s here!

Ed just walked in with a copy of the book!

Very exciting.

I’ll take a photo first thing in the morning.

Revising history (example 1): how and why

In my last post, I revised a passage from a high school history book using techniques that Catherine and I teach in our exercises for Europe in the Modern World. I also promised to discuss the specific techniques I used and why I used them.

Rewriting history–revision of example 1

In my previous post, I excerpted a passage from McDougal and Little’s World History. I proposed that this passage could be enlivened by revisions in sentence structure and paragraphing–using some of the techniques that Catherine and I cover in our exercises for Europe in the Modern World.

Rewriting history, example 1

Sentence structure, paragraphing, cohesion—these are some of the things that Catherine and I focus on in our exercises for Europe in the Modern World.

Catherine and Katharine

Catherine: Katharine Beals and I have a new project coming out this month: a linguistically-based, do-it-yourself writing curriculum embedded in Ed Berenson’s textbook for Oxford, Europe in the Modern World: A New Narrative History since 1500.

It’s one of a kind: all of the exercises use sentences from the text, so students learn how to write about history using the history they’re actually learning.

Writing should be taught inside the disciplines, not outside, but for many history professors that’s really not feasible. Today’s students enter college needing help with sentence structure, paragraphing, cohesion — they need extensive work on the fundamentals. It’s too much to manage inside one course.

That’s the problem. Only a handful of colleges and universities offer discipline-specific writing classes situated inside departments; most rely on stand-alone composition classes and writing centers.

Our solution: a sequence of step-by-step, do-it-yourself exercises that begin with the sentence and end with the history paper. Professors can spend as much or as little time overseeing the exercises as they wish.

We’re excited.

I’ve been blogging at Kitchen Table Math since 2005, mostly about math education, but more recently, after becoming an instructor of freshman English, about grammar and composition.

I’ll pick that story up later on. Here’s Katharine —–

Katharine, here: I’ve been blogging at Out in Left Field since 2008, and posted my final pieces this past week–including a couple on penmanship and one on my autistic son J. I’m excited to join Catherine here at catherineandkatharine.wordpress.com.

You can read more about each of us here.