Guide, side, teach, tell

Barry Garelick’s Out on Good Behavior: Teaching Math While Looking Over Your Shoulder (Katharine reviewed it here) is a terrific book: funny, affecting, and real. One of my favorite passages, from the Introduction and Dedication:

I want to share some advice I received from Ellen, one of my two “parole officers” whom you will meet in this book….

“Students have more faith in something they think they came up with than something the teacher tells them.”

…Some teachers have told me that they are not allowed to answer a student’s question directly. In fact, the quote from Ellen was her response to my question of why it’s acceptable for students to show other students how to do a problem, but it’s not acceptable if a teacher does so….

From time to time, however, most, if not all, teachers will answer a student’s question by telling them what they need to know in order to solve a problem. And most, if not all, teachers (myself included) feel guilty doing this, because we are taught that that’s giving away the answer and we are handing it to the student, or to put it in more educational terminology: “teaching by telling.”

The Hundred Years’ War.

Ghost teachers again

The district said it had added a new phonics sequence…But it stands by its broader balanced literacy approach…

That’s not enough for parents like Diane Dragan. An attorney who has three children with dyslexia, Ms. Dragan noted that well-off parents in her area regularly pay thousands of dollars to have their children taught intensive phonics at private tutoring centers.

“The irony to me is that the public-school teacher who teaches balanced literacy during the day moonlights to do science-based tutoring for kids who fail to learn to read,” Ms. Dragan said.

An Old and Contested Solution to Boost Reading Scores: Phonics BY Dana Goldstein 2/15/2020

Why is the ghost teaching force such a well-kept secret?

Everyone who’s raised kids in these communities knows it: the reason progressive education “works” for affluent kids is that they’re getting traditional ed delivered by parents and tutors at night. 

All guess, no check

Back when C. was in middle school, and we were dealing with the math program, we had him memorize an all-purpose response he was to use on any and all explain-your-answer items:

“I searched for a pattern, then I used guess-and-check.”