Alien Greg retweeted
Myth:
Students learn best through discovery learning.
Don’t instruct them.
Don’t tell them what to do.
Just give them a problem and let them figure it out on their own.
Reality:
Give a class full of kids a trapezoid and ask them to figure out its area before teaching them how.
Most of them will have no idea where to start.
Maybe a third of the class will take it seriously.
Maybe one kid who takes it seriously will figure out the trick... but it will probably take a long time, and most of the kids will spend that time goofing off anyway.
For beginners, direct instruction is more efficient and less frustrating.
Show them the method that works. Work through an example.
Then have them practice with different trapezoids until it’s solid.
Alien Greg retweeted
It is a basic principle of American democracy that the government can’t selectively target individuals simply because of their political beliefs or what they say. But that’s exactly what the Trump Administration is doing to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.
To understand why this is so appalling, it’s important to know the facts. Congresswoman Omar came to this country with her father when she was 12 years old. Five years later, her father became a naturalized citizen. If Ilhan had been 18 at the time, she would have had to apply for citizenship separately. But because she was 17, she became a naturalized citizen automatically.
Congresswoman Omar went on to graduate from college, work as a community organizer, become the first Somali-American legislator elected to public office in the U.S., and win a seat in Congress. There, she has been one of the Trump Administration’s fiercest critics, which has led the president to repeatedly single her out as someone who he believes does not belong in this country.
Now the Administration is actively trying to deport Congresswoman Omar, seemingly based solely on the unsubstantiated theory that she was actually 18 when her father was naturalized, and therefore is not a citizen. Federal agents have raided her home, confiscated personal records, and seized her phone — all to try and uncover a nonexistent smoking gun from 20 years ago that will somehow make their case.
Think about that. The full weight of the federal government is being brought down on a law-abiding elected official because she has dared to criticize the president. And it’s not the first time this has happened. Under President Trump, the Justice Department has repeatedly gone after those he considers his political enemies — from the Attorney General of New York, to the former head of the FBI, to members of the Federal Reserve.
In those cases, the prosecutions either stalled or were dismissed for having no basis in law, and the same is likely to happen in this case. But not before Congresswoman Omar’s life has been turned upside down, her legal bills have piled up, and she’s been forced to spend time fighting unsubstantiated charges instead of serving the people of Minnesota.
The fact that any president, or any administration, is willing to engage in such transparent efforts to intimidate someone should outrage all Americans, regardless of how they feel about Congresswoman Omar’s political views. Because if this becomes the new normal, there’s no reason to believe it will stop with her — or that future presidents, in either party, won’t do the same.
Alien Greg retweeted
There's been a lot of talk in the last few weeks in edu circles about whether the trad education movement has failed, what it needs to do next, etc.
This article is just the latest in a succession of examples that shows how us edu-trads have not been nearly as successful as we hoped in altering elite consensus on education.
We have obviously seen with all the Labour party policies that we completely failed to convince Labour.
But actually, it's not like we've really convinced the Conservatives either. This is Dan Hannan, major figure in Brexit, major figure in Conservative politics, presumably has some idea of who Michael Gove is - and here he is in the Telegraph confidently asserting that we no longer need to know things because we can look things up.
(The ironies in this piece abound, by the way. He argues for lessons in spotting bad bogus arguments at the same time as building an article around the argument that memory doesn't matter any more. He argues that "identifying improbable claims" is a generic skill that can be taught in the abstract, at the same time as claiming that handwriting and geography are obsolete. He says that you can always just look up what you need, whilst signally failing to look up any of the evidence on the role of long-term memory...I could go on.)
I wrote a few weeks ago that there was some evidence journalists at the Financial Times were waking up to all the evidence on cognitive science, its implications for schools, the international test evidence.
But the elite understanding of this is a very thin layer, absolutely skin deep.
The mass of second-hand dealers in ideas are still distilling their frenzy from Romantic pedagogy.
Depressing. I honestly don't know what else we can do.
We wrote the books. We had the debates. We built the schools. We aced the tests.
And then it turned out nobody cared.
Right now it is definitely a bleak time to be a trad. It feels like we are on Athelney Marshes, beset by vandals without and dissension within.
BUT we have to keep the faith. Reality is an undefeated champion. Despair is a sin! What we do works!
It may well be that for now, the New World with all its power & might etc., is going to have to step in to save our bacon for a bit. Maybe the momentum is shifting to @ehanford and Sold a Story, @rastokke and Chalk & Talk, @jettybe3 , etc.
We have got to dig in. As Declan Rice said, it's not done!
This quoted post is unavailable.
Alien Greg retweeted
A fundamental rule of assessment is that there must be clear agreement about what is being assessed which is why “oracy” has so many problems.
Even if you specify elements like “presentation skill, dialogic reasoning, confidence, listening,turn-taking, ability to disagree politely” etc., the problem is that these are all very different constructs. Vocabulary is knowledge, presentation is a performance and confidence is personal trait that is questionable as something you can even teach. Can they all be grouped together and assessed by individual teachers as a “level 7”? Or a “grade B”?
These elements don’t all travel together or map onto one thing either: a confident speaker can have a very weak argument and vice versa. It’s not one thing. Do you grade each separately and average them? So a pupil scoring 9 for confidence and 3 for reasoning gets the same 6 in oracy as a pupil scoring 3 for confidence and 9 in reasoning?
And “Dialogic reasoning” depends almost entirely on what the pupil knows about the topic under discussion: nobody reasons well aloud about something they understand poorly, so a reasoning score is basically a knowledge score without the knowledge specified.
Another one is “Listening” which is essentially unobservable; we can only really infer it from what someone says next after the assumed listening. How do you measure that? And if a pupil responds well to what was just said, was that listening? Or was it knowing enough about the topic to have something to say, or being confident enough to say it, or being quick enough to get in before someone else?
To get a speaking assessment anywhere near the reliability of a written one, you’d need many different tasks, each rated by trained assessors. Even if that was agreed, the workload would inevitably fall on overworked teachers.
We can all agree dialogic talk is a very laudable end but it’s largely a philosophical disposition, but assessment as Dylan points out is something very different. It’s a question of precision, of measurement, of validity and reliability which doesn’t care about how philosophically worthy something is.
Alien Greg retweeted
"Ts need to be intentional about creating S-centered learning environments that value thinking, reasoning, debate, questioning, and relevance."
Crap.
edweek.org/teaching-learning…
@ToddTruitt76508 @amandavande1 @rastokke @RCsEvilTwin @AltB56073878 @rpondiscio @mikesully97
Alien Greg retweeted
"Why are Democrats so OBSESSED with the far-left when they SHOULD BE obsessed WITH REPUBLICANS?" is a new DARVO-esque phenomenon that arose this year.
The online far-left (dirtbag variety) is using this new tactic because it's the first year we've really fought back against their influence, instead of trying to please them.
In reality, we've probably spent *more* time on these people in every other election season.
It's just that, in those previous cases--whether it was 2016 or 2019-2020 or 2024--we were begging them for their votes, pain-stakingly explaining different types of universal healthcare, providing diagrams re: both parties NOT being the same, and/or begging them to stop accusing us of genocide.
They asked us for our attention. They have demanded our attention for years. And we always gave it in exactly the way they wanted it.
"Please, do the right thing. Please help us. Please try to understand the American electorate. Please try to understand the legislative process. Please stop saying the two parties are the same. Please stop minimizing the Republican threat. Please stop saying we want people to die en masse of diabetes or that we love genocide. Please. Please. Please."
Now, we've finally realized this specific cadre of the online far-left is not only electorally worthless, but actually electorally *harmful.* We've also realized they will continue to punish us no matter how much we contort ourselves to satiate their demands.
We've always given them our attention. We gave them TOO MUCH attention. And we've probably always given them much more attention than we do now.
They simply can't stand not being constantly attended to with our pleas for their approval and help.
Welcome to the new era of Democrats having a spine.
Alien Greg retweeted
The most dangerous person in the room is the one who mastered the fundamentals while everyone else was chasing fads.
Alien Greg retweeted
The inability of the left to distinguish between an imperfect ally and an enemy is the height of privilege and will be our downfall
Alien Greg retweeted
"...a pedagogy focused on supposedly generalizable skills like 'critical thinking,' rather than on the acquisition of knowledge, is the chief culprit for the stagnant American performance in the National Assessment of Educational Progress as well as PISA."
Yup.
jamestraub.substack.com/p/th…
Alien Greg retweeted
This 🧵 from 2024 is sadly still very relevant. Indeed, even more so. Our future is being stolen from us in the most open & notorious of ways. People, regardless of their political orientations, are waking up to the threat—not rogue agents but rogue Silicon Valley CEO’s!
#Resist
Alien Greg retweeted
This kind of misguided Romanticism causes real harm.
Alien Greg retweeted
It's just really hilarious rightists have declared themselves the defenders of Western civilization.
They are themselves the Third World!
In values, American rightists don't cluster with the West but with China, Russia, and Turkey. richardhanania.com/p/how-tru…
Alien Greg retweeted
The "Finland Miracle" was a cautionary tale in confirmation bias. Finland was never the miracle it was made out to be, nor is it a total failure now. Instead, its trajectory proves there are no shortcuts to educational excellence.
The qualities that initially made Finland a global star(high teacher quality and deep social equity, both are good start) were real. However, those strengths were undermined when the system abandoned instructional rigor in favor of "progressive" fads that prioritized student autonomy over foundational knowledge.
As we look at the decline in PISA scores, the lesson for school leaders is that no amount of "student-led" ideology can compensate for a lack of structured, knowledge-rich curriculum.
Alien Greg retweeted
I think it's pretty cool that if we play our cards right, England could have pretty much the best education systems in the world within a few years. We now know the ingredients. We need to double down.
