Anchors, close reading, and a case for problem-based mathematics

Think of the following:

1. What is/was your grandfather like? (If you are or were lucky enough to have known two, pick one.)
2. Who was your best friend in college?
3. Where did you go on your last trip? What was it like?

Sometimes you have an epiphany that seems to connect to so many different parts of your life that you can't wait to share it with the world...and then you realize that - precisely because the epiphany was so tailored to your own experiences, almost designed to fit snugly into your brain - maybe the world won't appreciate how you felt discovering it.

That's not what worries me about this post. What worries me is that the idea behind this is probably something you have all thought of already, and I'm simply late to the party.

Here's the gist: In your life, there are a very few anchor experiences that define key eras of your life. Maybe these moments number in the tens, maybe in the hundreds - but compared to the gargantuan number of memories that we can call to mind when remembering, say, middle school (or the first year of marriage, or your first job, or that house on Garland Avenue, or ages 3-9, or that summer in Argentina, or your maternal grandfather, ...) the number of memories that have come to define the experience is pretty manageable.

These anchors are largely a function of how the mind works. In Funes el memorioso, author Jorge Luis Borges illustrates brilliantly that memory is more about forgetting than about excessive remembering - through a main character who is incapable of forgetting details and is thus entirely unable to generalize (for example, the word "dog" has little meaning to Funes, as there is no unique set of characteristics that all "dogs" share.) As Borges points out, if we actually remembered everything equally, it would be difficult to make sense of anything.

I would guess these anchors are somewhat universal and, over time, become somewhat arbitrary. They're not always the most important memories, and they're not always the most representative of the experience they have, in some cases, come to supplant. When Iyouthought of your responses to the initial questions above, I imagine the same image of your grandfather came to mind that usually comes to mind. To me, the house on Garland always begins with a specific snapshot: Bamboo curtains against a mango-colored accent wall, with the punishing Fresno heat coming through the large sliding glass door. My grandfather always introduces himself to my working memory by blowing a low note on a trombone just above a small child's flapping hair, or leaning back and smiling on a couch in a beach house. Niagara Falls is a view of the falls on my right with my kids playing in the bath to my right. From there, sure, we can imagine a handful of other memories, and push ourselves to remember many more, but the important highlight here is that this one memory often serves as the entry point to all the others.

If possible, think of something new you've learned recently, as we're all famously bad at remembering what it was like to learn something that we now know without thinking. I'll focus on something I started learning long ago (over half my life ago, at this point), so there's a good chance I'll get at least some of this wrong:

Most of my anchors for Spanish vocabulary and grammar came from popular (or once-popular) songs...our teacher enlisted Juan Luis Guerra to teach us about the subjunctive, Joan Baez and Mercedes Sosa for the present perfect tense. In college, I had a professor who emphasized analyzing and memorizing poetry, and for a time I would remember lines of these poems when trying to recall whether a certain object was a masculine or femenine noun. I still remember the line "y caliente...como agua de la fuente" when hesitating for an instant to recall whether to say "el fuente" or "la fuente." What I didn't realize until today was that all of these times when we spent two days on the lyrics to one song, analyzing what the songs meant, we were doing a form of close reading. We were determining the main ideas presented in the song, but we were also internalizing a boatload of vocabulary and grammar in context.

Two weeks ago, my epiphany came during a one-hour discussion about close reading with our instructional leadership team - Rebecca, our principal; Nick, our ELA dean; Chris, our math dean; Dacia, our regional superintendent; and me, our historian (as in history coach, but also as in high school club member who was voted neither president nor treasurer and thus goes home to blog about it on everyone else's behalf.) We talked through a close reading lesson designed around JFK's famous civil rights address, giving our own critiques of the lesson and then reading the critiques by Common Core co-author David Liben and extracting from these some huge lessons regarding Close Reading. These takeaways were fairly life changing:

1. Yes, close reading is about the text. Specifically, a deep understanding of the central idea(s) of a text should guide what kids do. I'm proud to say I knew this one; I'm more proud to say that my understanding of close reading before today stopped pretty much here. So I learned something from this experience :)
2. Close reading is also the activity where we get the most traction with metacognition. Generally, I'm not a huge fan of metacognition as a reading strategy, and I think it leads to a lot of wasted time...but in this context, it makes a lot of sense. To me, it sounds a bit like this: "So notice where you stopped there. Why did you do that?...Which of these sentences seems to jump out? Why did it catch your mind's attention? Make a mental note; that's what you can do as a writer to catch your audience's attention...and as a reader, think of where the author is trying to grab your attention and what they're trying to tell you at that moment."
3. Close reading is one of the best ways to teach and reinforce specific vocabulary.

Points 2 and 3 were new to me, and point 3 had me reflecting on everything I had ever learned, leading to the stream of consciousness you may have wisely abandoned by now. Because when you read a small sample of text over and over again, and focus intensely on its meaning, you are exposed to the same words in the same context to the point where you essentially memorize certain lines of text and their literal meanings. From JFK's speech you may remember "a moral issue" and "a partisan issue" and the amount of time each of these stayed in your working memory while grappling with larger issues...from there, you'll likely associate (at least for some time) the words "moral" and "partisan" with these specific lines.

When I was first learning Spanish (now over half my life ago), I learned through a lot of close reading in the form of listening to the same songs over and over. Juan Luis Guerra taught me the subjunctive and "la fuente" (as opposed to the incorrect "el fuente".) Joan Baez and Mercedes Sosa taught me how to express gratitude while reinforcing what little I knew about the present perfect tense. I was reminded in our Close Reading conversation that repeated exposure to many of these song lyrics led to a level of memorization that allowed me to call specific experiences to mind in order to remember - even at the word level.

In math, this brought me to the idea of a problem-based approach to learning. Sha Reagans, incredible math teacher and current principal of Newark Collegiate Academy (High School), used to teach an 'anchor problem' for every concept, so that students could refer to this problem when thinking through the concept later. From my own schooling, I still remember the "interior angle of a five-pointed star" problem when it seems a situation could become more clear by circumscribing (drawing a circle around) a figure. I remember "Twelve Days of Christmas" and "Snail Climbing a Wall" when thinking about the limitations of discrete functions. This may be another case of me looking for confirming evidence, but this line of thinking leads me to believe ever more firmly in a problem-based approach to math teaching and learning.

Throughout our lives, though we are subconsciously choosing anchors to represent various experiences, these anchors don't always telegraph themselves. That bamboo curtain didn't jump out and say, "Take note: I'm more important than the dusty backyard," but I always think of it first regardless. In school, however, the anchors I remember first when thinking of Spanish or math or chemistry are usually the carefully chosen and designed experiences chosen by my teachers. Furthermore, we didn't simply experience these once and move onto the next thing - we spent time with each to ensure that the memory would stick.

For teachers, I see one clear implication of this idea:

Know what you want the anchors to be, and design students' learning experiences around these anchors. Prioritize the most important content and ideas, and ensure that students have repeated exposure to this content and these ideas. Get the most out of small experiences, rather than simply trying for more experiences.

I'm curious what parts of this do not resonate with folks. Does anybody experience anchors in their own lives differently? How do we reconcile the idea of learning primarily through a small number of well-chosen experiences with the (conflicting?) idea of exposure to a broad base of content, breadth of vocabulary exposure? I'd appreciate any thoughts you have in the comments.

On chess

In early July, I taught our kids to play chess. Barbara thought it was OK, but Sebastian ate it up. He now asks to play chess all the time and I, of course, oblige. The other day, he asked the esteemed Mr. Pierre to play. See the photo at right.

Here's the problem: I'm not very good at chess. I mean, I know how the pieces move, and I can think a couple moves ahead, but whenever I'm up against an opponent with any kind of chess training, I'm toast. So while I'm consistently beating Sebastian for now (brag!), I'm not really going to be able to help him become great. Because I think, in order to become great, your teacher know a lot about the subject - at least good enough to ask you great questions and push your thinking.

Here's the context for that photo: It was about 15 minutes before our first Achievement First Day of Practice for the year, which is a funny name for a day when all teachers get together for professional development. I've been to a lot of professional development over the past 10 years, most of it actually pretty good (I know this is not typical; I live a charmed life.) None of this PD, however, has been as focused on building teacher content knowledge as this day was. We dove into student work to engage in conversations about how to get our kids closer to excellence. We looked over the upcoming units we were going to teach, making sure we really, really understood the content we were going to teach and how we were going to go about developing it. We had each done several hours of pre-work, mostly in the form of diving into the content we'd be teaching, to make sure we were going into these conversations prepared to discuss big ideas. And at the end of the day, we definitely had a much better understanding of the stuff we were going to teach. 

I love this development, because you could teacher-move the heck out of a class, but if you don't understand the material, kids aren't likely to get very far. Conversely, when teachers deeply understand the content they're teaching, they can take kids really far. I think of John Rajeski in Atlanta, a professional writer-turned-teacher whose students consistently become solid writers. I think of my high school history teacher Mr. Ethen, who seemed to live and breathe history. Without the deep knowledge that these teachers possess, the ceiling for their students would likely be fairly low. But this doesn't mean you have to be a content expert before you start teaching. If you find yourself in charge of teaching something you don't know much about, you can learn this stuff - it just takes work. And I'm glad that, in the case of our small network of schools, we've decided to make this so important that we're spending a few days outside of school this year exclusively on educating ourselves.

Back to chess. Barbara is starting to come around (see photo), and now I'm even more psyched about our kids getting better at chess. This means, of course, that I'm first psyched about learning a lot more about chess myself. I've been practicing with a good book, but now that I've found Elizabeth Spiegel's blog and corresponding curriculum, I know where I'm going next, and I know it's going to be a lot of fun for everybody involved...much like I know our classes at school are only going to get better and more interesting as we continue to deepen our own content knowledge.

Game on.

That's that terminology I don't like

My face-to-face and phone-to-phone conversations about Achievement First tend to become a love-fest of sorts...there is so much thoughtful stuff going on in our network, plus I love our school, and there's really nowhere else I'd rather be. But there are some things about the ed reform movement at large, including AF, that I'm not a huge fan of. In particular, though I love so much of what we do, I don't always love how we talk. I'm not asking for these things to be changed, and I think I understand the rationale behind all of the terms (and will continue to use many of them when appropriate because I generally believe that alignment is a good thing.) Here is a brief list:

1. Upspeak.   This is where you end every statement with a rising tone, as if it were a question? But what's more annoying? is when it's used? at every natural pause? in a SENTence. (the last word is spoken in a definitive downward-moving tone.) I reckon this is a function of ours being a youthful movement/organization, and that this linguistic feature is merely a mirror of a general shift-at-large over the past 15-20 years. I don't have any philosophical qualms with this one, and I don't believe it belies an underlying lack of confidence (as Taylor Mali posits); I just find it annoying.

2. Scholars.   I had some professors in college who were scholars. There were Biblical scholars, scholars of medieval Spanish writing, scholars of 19th-century Brazil, world-class mathematicians (who are scholars in their own right), and Constitutional scholars. I've heard the argument before that calling ten-year-olds "scholars" belittles the term...and that may be the case, but I know that's not the spirit in which the term is used. It is used to mean "a future scholar", or "one who is studying and working hard, as scholars do." That's cool. I like reminding kids I'm working with that they are on their way to doing great things. What I don't like is the implicit statement that we're not going to treat kids like kids. Rafe Esquith likes to remind us all that kindergarteners barely know where their belly buttons are, and that treating them as if they were already in college is a bit absurd. I think about Barbara and Sebastian, ages 7 and 6, respectively, and it cracks me up to think that they are referred to as "scholars" at school. Yes, I hope they end up extremely well educated, but I'm also aware that they currently enjoy ice cream, have horrible taste in television shows ("Dog with a Blog"), and don't like wearing pants at home (but seriously, who does?) I propose that we replace the term "scholars" with "kids" and, if it helps us keep their potential in everybody's mind, focus on asking these "kids" great (dare I say rigorous?) questions that inspire them to think deeply.

2.5.   KIPPsters.   This one is just pure baggage. In 2009, when KIPP Fresno closed, we had to confront the truth that there would be no KIPP for our kids to come back to. Tying their identity, even tangentially, to a school that was about to close seemed like a bad idea; we preferred, instead, to focus on helping them develop their character regardless of their surroundings. It also reinforced the "you're better than all those other kids" narrative that goes against our overall mission of helping all kids. I'm fine with "this is a special place" and "let's work on going against the norm and becoming extraordinary"; I'm less OK with "you're better because you won the lottery and got into this school." Though I think it's obvious, my dislike of this term has nothing to do with the kids this term is used to refer to. I love the kids I've had the pleasure to teach in Fresno and in Jacksonville, and I've met a lot of amazing kids from KIPP schools across the country. I just don't love the term KIPPster.

3. Rigor (and its derivatives).   Does this mean "difficult"? "At a level that requires application or analysis, rather than simple understanding or recall"? "Scaffolded in such a way that kids can figure out the meaning on their own, but in a stepwise fashion"? When we were looking at some of our mistakes after the Year of Terrible Results (2011, in Jacksonville), we identified "rigor" as a huge gap. What we meant was that we were asking questions that were too easy and that didn't force kids to keep the concept in working memory (in order to apply the concept) long enough for it to make its way into long-term memory. I understand that "rigor", in our case, was a shortcut for this more precise but long-winded verbiage, but it means so many different things to so many different people that it now leads to more confusion than clarity. Let's either have this word mean one thing or take a break from it until we figure out how to dress it up to convey the specific meaning we're going for (e.g. "You should try increasing the Blooms-Rigor of your final question" vs. "Maybe your questions aren't difficulty-rigorous enough.")

4.   The Achievement Gap.   I'm not the first one to publicly dislike this term because it takes "white achievement" as the norm and implicitly accepts that this should be the norm by comparing other groups to white students' achievement.  I'd much prefer to talk about "educational inequity" or "gross unfairness" (which reminds me of Dr. King's quote, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice anywhere", indicating that educational inequity is everybody's problem.) Look, I don't have a problem comparing our students' work to that of their wealthy, largely white counterparts, because I want our kids to do as well as possible, and this is the group that is currently doing the best. But let's just name it. We're not reinforcing a standard sense of norm by saying we're comparing our kids to normal kids out there who have regular opportunities; we're comparing our kids to the students who are performing the best. On standardized tests, in writing samples, and the like.

5. Acronyms and ultra-precise terminology for everything.   Last weeks, we sat in an otherwise very good training that took a 3-minute detour to clarify the difference between TDQs and EBQs, how each related to the PBA in its relative need for framing and context vs. contextualization. The point of the session was to learn how to ask better questions - why can't we just call this "asking better questions" and then clarify what characteristics good questions have at various points in the lesson, to achieve different purposes, etc.? I get the need to precisely define terms, but I think we may have jumped the shark here. Some of you may

6. Trite phrases.   There are a host of other words and phrases I think are comically overused, like transformational impact (particularly to describe some good-sized jump on a math test), climbing the mountain to college (which most often runs together as Clem The Man To College), and...

...write your guesses/contributions in the comments :)

Remembering the Gatorade: Reflections on our family trip to Venezuela

I spent about 2 ½ weeks in Venezuela this summer with my wife Maria, our daughter Barbara (age 7), and Sebastian (age 5, then 6). I then came back to a job I love in the US while the rest of my family remained for a couple more weeks. Most people I have seen since returning to the US have asked about the trip, and I have yet to find an answer that really captures an honest answer to the question, “how was it?”

Truthfully, there was some good and some bad, but in the end it doesn’t really matter how it was in some general sense. I tend to polarize my past experiences after the fact, and I often remind myself of this when I’m in the middle of an experience that lends itself to this type of polarization. For college in general, my summer working in Argentina, and a recent trip to Niagara Falls, I remember thinking I would probably idealize the experience ex post facto and – lo and behold – I think back fondly on those times, even though not a lot of dopamine was coursing through my veins at the time. The two weeks my family and I spent together in Venezuela, on the whole, were a great way to spend the summer, and, more importantly, were crucial to our kids' development. As time distances me more from the experience, I’m increasingly seeing things this way, though there was certainly a lot I didn’t love at the time. I call this remembering the Gatorade. Skip to the end if you don't particularly care about the details but still want to know what a sports drink has to do with memory.

If you’re curious about what all happened, here’s a brief list:

• Our family of four was staying with my wife’s family, which is not without its issues.
• Venezuela is currently a very dangerous country. One night, we returned to the house at 1am and had to call a friend who was ‘in’ with some of the local troublemakers in order to escort us back home. There’s a lot of stress because of this sense that things have never been this bad – most people we talked to had been robbed at some point in the past year, which can take its toll.
• Venezuela is facing its worst economic crisis in recent times. When a store receives a shipment of butter, or corn flour, or toilet paper, there are lines down the block. It’s tough to live in a place where you don’t have access to what you need. 
• I was sick for about half of the trip, which is par for the course. It’s all but impossible to avoid unfiltered water, even with a great deal of effort, and this water has the effect of absolutely wrecking my intestines. Every time.
• The exchange rate is artificially held low (by a factor of 5) by the government. So the prices are sky-high for people who live in Venezuela, and dirt-cheap for visitors. 
• Interestingly, we filled up a 30-liter tank of gas for 3 bolivars, which amounts to about 10 cents (at the unofficial exchange rate.) This one cent per gallon exchange rate is the result of exorbitant oil subsidies, which some op-eds in local papers assert primarily help the rich (who can afford cars.) I’m skeptical of this argument, since people who ride buses also end up paying for gas, albeit indirectly. Regardless, that’s some cheap gas.
• I was on a plane a few weeks ago, and for the entire 40-minute duration of the flight, I was the most scared I’ve ever been. I filed an FBI report about it later, and I’d include the details here, but my sense is that the FBI doesn’t like people blabbing on about things you’ve asked them to investigate.
• It was absolutely wonderful to spend so much time with Barbara and Sebastian.
• Though it was a bummer to not be able to walk around Maria’s family’s neighborhood (for reasons of safety), the upside was that I got to read a lot. I read or listened to the following:
• The Alchemist
• Moonwalking with Einstein
• Practice Perfect (again)
• Antifragile (almost done!)
• To Sell Is Human
• The Book Whisperer
• A bunch of Radiolab podcasts

…And, inspired by Josh Foer, I decided to memorize the only list I had handy, which was the list of 42 “rules for getting better at getting better” from Practice Perfect. Going into PD season, this has definitely come in handy!

• Barbara started speaking Spanish with everybody she could find, having extensive conversations about anything and everything. 
• Sebastian’s last trip to Venezuela was when he was 2. His Spanish isn’t as good, and he was getting really frustrated with the fact that everybody seemed to constantly feel the need to tell him that his Spanish wasn’t very good. His response was to ‘prove’ that he speaks Spanish by rattling off a quick dialogue: “Yo sí sabe español. Como estas bien como estas tu bien como estas tu bien gracias.” Sadly, as those of you who actually habla the español already know, this didn’t help his case very much.
• After I came back, Sebastian had his 6th birthday party, and apparently a good time was had by all.
• I really enjoyed spending time with my father-in-law. He’s a good guy, and we haven’t spent a lot of time together in the past. My favorite episode on this trip was when he invited himself (and me) to go fishing at 9pm with a fisherman who was going out for his daily catch. They caught the fish; we promptly fried and ate it. 
• The low point of the trip was at a concert (which was great – Billo’s Caracas Boys, which is still a phenomenal group) when I ran to the restroom, only to find that there was no toilet paper. I ran to another restroom owned by the same locale and again found no paper. I ran out and told the manager there was no toilet paper, and he replied, “That’s correct.” Ultimately some napkins from the bar had to suffice, but nothing can take back the sheer terror of his response.

In the end, though, this trip wasn’t about me having the time of my life. I left for the last two weeks (to come back and work), and my family stayed; by the end of the trip, our kids didn’t want to come back because they were having so much fun with their cousins. Barbara told me she wants to go back to Venezuela when she’s 25. I say that sounds great, as long as the country is less of a mess by then.

So, looking at the above, if all incidents have equal weight (which they don’t; wondering how your kids will do when you likely die in a plane crash isn’t something you cancel out with fresh fish), there’s about an equal ratio of positive to negative comments. That’s nice, as it allows me to choose how I remember the trip. 

For guidance, I’ll go with my natural tendency, but look to Barbara for guidance on what to call this tendency:

Barbara told me something about the trip yesterday that made me think we’re probably doing some combination of raising her right/being very lucky parents and maybe not talking about social norms quite enough. We were walking through the soda/sports drink aisle at Target, with lots of people around, when she loudly broke the silence with: “One day in Venezuela I had really bad diarrhea. I had to eat only mashed potatoes and drink Gatorade all day. It was the best day ever.”

 Let’s coin the phrase “remember the Gatorade” to describe the glass-half-full phenomenon when applied retroactively. So, remembering the Gatorade, it was a pretty good trip. We reconnected with a part of our family we don’t see often, our kids developed a more rounded sense of who they are and where they come from, and we’ve all gained in some way from the experience of truly living in a place so radically different from where we are living now.

Teaching tip (look for this in Teach Like A Champion 2.0):
Use the last 20 seconds of your class to Remember the Gatorade, reminding kids of what a great time you’ve all had, how hard everybody worked, how much they all embraced and learned from mistakes…even if this stuff only happened a little bit. People will remember the end of class positively, and – if this is what you’re doing at the end of class – will, by extension, remember all those positive attributes and come to class tomorrow ready to learn from mistakes, work hard, and have lots of fun doing it.

A Raisin In The Sun

I've spent the last 3.5 days packing up our apartment (to move to a house a couple blocks away), teaching our kids to play chess (while cracking myself up by playing out several scenes of Searching for Bobby Fischer in my mind), running, napping, and reading up a storm. In fact, since Friday afternoon, I've read the following:
The Misfits,
Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key,
Getting Away with Murder (the true story of the Emmitt Till case),
The end of Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls,
Everything Doug Lemov has ever written on the Teach Like a Champion blog, and, most recently,
A Raisin in the Sun.

(all in all, about 700 pages, but, more interesting: Which one of these things is not like the other?)

I saved A Raisin in the Sun for last because I was least excited about it; I'd read it as a freshman in high school but didn't particularly like it. I remember, in fact, arguing with my English teacher about the movie adaptation, me on the side of "Sidney Poitier is totally over-acting this scene", and her on the side of "well, he was nominated for a Golden Globe largely on the basis of that scene so..."

Well, now.
It turns out I see things a little differently at 32 than I did when I was 14. This time, from cover to just-before-the-cover, I found the play profoundly heartbreaking. Not so much because of what math teachers would call the surface features of the play (the plot, for example), but rather because the underlying tension and frustration all but scream at the reader. It all felt very personal.

So, here are a couple takeaways:
1. The backdrop of this play is a wonderfully horrific description of the effects of systemic oppression, and
2. It is really, really hard for 14-year-olds to truly understand literature about the human condition.

Disclaimer re: #1: I haven't ever suffered the effects of systemic oppression directly, so I'm sure a lot of the meaning and connection was still lost on me.

Thoughts re: #2: Just as background knowledge influences literal and inferential comprehension in a big way, so life experience seems to be the driving factor behind emotional reactions to literature. As a teacher, this is a good reminder that some of your kids are going to connect very deeply to some themes, but not everybody really has the experience to get all worked up over a character deciding not to go to work for a couple days. This is why I cry get bad allergies in both eyes when I read The Giving Tree with my kids, while they're just glad we're reading a nice story together.

Bonus thoughts: Reading all of this in such a short time was a good reminder that there is a huge difference between good literature and great literature, and the distinction is just as much in the reader's mind as it is in the text itself.

The Ort Report

Last week, our lower school (5th and 6th grades) went "camping" at Camp Jewell, close to the Massachusetts border. We had a fantastic time - we all had one heck of a time: Kids canoed and climbed rocks and swam in the lake and built a fire and went on a nature hike and performed campfire skits and made s'mores and...we learned about ort.

At every meal, our camp counselor would have us sing the "ort report" song and would reveal how many pounds of ort we had left uneaten at our last meal.

As you may be able to see from the bar graph, we steadily reduced the amount of ort left at every meal. That's good - it's generally a good thing to get kids to care about not leaving so much food and drink behind at meals. And all that really happened was this: We got excited to see the number (by doing a quick song and dance), our counselor gave the occasional tip* on how to reduce our ort, and we saw the number at every meal - represented neatly in a bar graph.

*My favorite tip was this: When using milk for cereal, keep in mind that one bowl of cereal takes about half a carton of milk. So you may want to find someone else who wants cereal and just get one carton of milk among the two of you.

I like the ort report for two reasons:

1. It helps kids care about a great cause, and one I suspect we don't talk about as much as we used to - not wasting food. But this isn't the nebulous "kids in China are starving" argument; it's more of a soft sell.
2. The ort report, whose stated purpose is to show how many scraps of food (and drink) were left uneaten (and...undrankened?), also helps foster other great habits: cooperation among table-mates, planning ahead for what you'll actually eat and drink, and erring on the side of taking less food than one may take otherwise. Economists call these other effects 'positive externalities.'

This all got me to thinking: What are the other 'ort report' -type activities that produce positive externalities in schools?

The one practice that comes to mind is the practice of asking students for evidence (usually text evidence) to support their answers. This gets kids to read more carefully, to evaluate each other's answers more carefully, check their own thoughts to make sure they're supported by evidence, and, ultimately, learn to pay closer attention to details in the first place.

Other than that, I'm struggling to find something as useful or elegant as the ort report. I'd love to hear more ideas in the comments...

In the meantime, one positive externality of the fact that this ritual is about ort is that, in reading this short post, you learned a new word exclusively through repeated exposure. Nobody defined ort for you, but, if pressed to define the word, you could probably get pretty close to the dictionary definition. This is the power of embedded, indirect vocabulary instruction. So thanks for reading, and congratulations on your new word - you ort to be very proud of yourself.

Sorry about that last one...

Should kids read less?

Instead of reading for four hours a day, I think our kids would be better off reading for two hours a day and consuming carefully selected media (movies, television programs, podcasts, plays, and the like) for the remaining two hours. Here I mean National Geographic specials, Mythbusters, historical speeches, and anything else that meets essentially the same level of criteria we would set for the books and texts our kids read.) Real Housewife fans, sorry for getting your hopes up.

When you're reading, assuming what you're reading meets some minimum bar of quality, you are doing a couple of things:

#1. practicing decoding, fluency, and comprehension skills (i.e. practicing reading), and

#2. learning something about the world that can someday apply to other texts you'll read, or, in a more broad sense, other situations you'll encounter. This means context, content knowledge, and vocabulary.

When you're watching TV, you're not doing #1. Well, you're not practicing decoding or fluency, but you are practicing some sort of comprehension skills. And, unless your decoding and fluency skills are incredibly advanced, you're doing #2 much, much faster. By "doing #2", I mean building context, content knowledge, and vocabulary - not pooping. Grow up.

Just like professional athletes build their football abilities on the field/court/pitch part of the time, and in the weight room the other part of the time, we need to start targeting the knowledge gaps in more efficient ways than waiting for a child to sound out and slog through text he doesn't yet understand. Of course, the underlying philosophy here is that content knowledge (specific "background knowledge" for a given text) is essential for reading comprehension, and matters much more than a more generalized list of reading strategies.

If you're not convinced, I invite you to read the first three paragraphs of Laura Ingalls Wilder's "The Long Winter", a 4th-grade-level book, and think about what circumstances (in terms of applying reading strategies and knowing something about the world) would lead to a middle-school student from New Haven to be able to answer the questions that follow. What would such a student from New Haven have to have experienced in his/her education (or in his/her life) in order to fully comprehend these three paragraphs and accurately answer the questions that follow?

1. What does "corked it tightly" mean?

2. When does this story take place (what time of year? what time of day?)

3. Show me the motions Laura likely used when she "drew up a pailful of water".

4. After Laura had drawn the pailful of water, why did she rinse the jug?

5. What caused the prairie to shimmer? What color is it likely shimmering?

You and your kids can strategize away - good luck with that. In the meantime, we'll be driving to Iowa (hey Trpkosh), following the position of the sun, and handling hot, dark objects while discussing how color affects heat absorption and how evaporation has a cooling effect. Or, at the very least, we'll be watching TV and movies about the prairie, and building our knowledge of the world. You may decode one percent faster from the extra reading practice, but we will have a leg up when it comes to forming a coherent mental model of what we're reading.

As a bonus, here is a video of a 'science walk' my daughter Barbara and I took last week. She undoubtedly grew as a reader during these 45 minutes - more, I'd say, than if we had taken 45 minutes to read about flowers and erosion. Enjoy!