We all suffer from confirmation bias and earlier I wondered how the hardcore edutechnophiles would rationalize findings that the US fourth graders who used the most classroom tech performed the worst on standardized math exams?

My best attempt to crawl inside their heads:

Standardized exams are inaccurate assessments, moreover, they assess irrelevant skills.

Do I have that right?

Standardized Exams Are Lousy Assessments

I can’t spend much time on this assertion. Exam validity varies from state to state, content area to content area, and I can’t speak for the fourth grade assessment, but if California’s Algebra and Geometry assessments are any indicator, the ground just fell out beneath you. They’re extremely challenging and extremely fair assessments of prescribed coursework.

Standardized Exams Assess Irrelevant Skills

I can’t cozy up to that first objection but I spend a lot of free time wondering if we’ve prescribed the wrong coursework, especially after the concluding paragraph from Roger Schank’s recent post on math education at The Pulse:

I know this is a hopeless fight, but algebra really matters not at all in real life and the country will not fall behind in any way if we simply stop teaching it. That is not a fact, it is just a former math major’s, UT graduate’s, and Computer Science professor’s, point of view.

There is truth to this, I’m positive. There are studies to be conducted and evidence to be found concluding that, along with the current buffet line of alternative education options, we’ll move to an a la carte mathematics curriculum, even while textbook manufacturers, math teachers, their unions, and parents fearful of the global boogeymen dig in their heels and pull.

Careful, Though

Depending on the strength of your biases, that last one is an ugly rationalization, one which says the only tasks which matter are the ones which involve technology.

It’s worse than, “When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” It’s, “When a hammer is your favorite tool, the tasks which don’t involve nails are pointless.”

There is a very rich, very nuanced conversation to be had here about the math students need (one which I am trying, and failing, to resolve internally with my foundering Feltron Project) and then there is a separate conversation, one which I will find very boring.

The Rationale Which Few Will Cop To

It will impress me a great deal if one of the usual tech proponents steps up to suggest that the implementation of technology in a majority of these classrooms simply sucked, that tech use in math classrooms simply isn’t “there” yet. That’d be totally reasonable and somewhat courageous given the forum.

Courage Aside

It’s obvious to me that this discussion will go nowhere – idealistic tech coordinators and their traditional colleagues permanently gridlocked – if we don’t first resolve the question, “Just what exactly are we supposed to teach here?” and then select some best practices, everyone agreeing to be cool in advance if those practices involve wikis or no. 2 pencils, ’cause we’re sure to find bothI reckon I’d quote some passages from Understanding by Design here if I’d ever read it..

But these emotional appeals to decency and child welfare, my criticisms of which have clogged this blog for the last time for at least a week, treat education’s sore throat with a colonoscopy, demonizing a whole lot of decent educators without much result.

How does the tech-by-any-means-necessary educator rationalize these findings?

I have my guess tucked into a sealed envelope, scheduled for posting later this evening. Until then, speak your mind.

[This li’l storm cloud via Jon Becker via an e-mail from Scott McLeod.]

Jeff Wasserman:

if you figure out exactly what the heezy you’re supposed to, like, DO with Twitter, please to let me know, sir.

I don’t know what you’re supposed to do with Twitter, but Twitter, for now, satisfies my need to publish tiny short-form pillbombs, small-caliber blasts of insight and sarcasm, but mostly sarcasm, the sorta stuff which – for reasons of length and content – I can’t get away with on my blog but which I have to get away with somewhere.

I do this for me, not you, not because I think I have anything you need, but because authoring content of all shapes and sizes is what I need.

Which is why I don’t follow anyoneExcept Zac Chase, who is my entire world for reasons too stupid and petty to recount. As much as I’m interested in the farty minutiae of everyone’s day-to-day, I don’t know that I have time for another timesucking feedreader right now. I have Twitter set to deliver any and all “@ddmeyer” replies, but I don’t have much interest in the TwittersphereOr whatever you people call it. Haven’t been around long enough to absorb the vernacular. beyond my front stoop.

What’s interesting about my specific purposing of Twitter (and what makes it worth even a passing mention on this blog) is that some folks find it inexplicable, even offensive. Perhaps my explanation above will render the conspiracy theories, hyperventilations, and picket lines moot, and I don’t want to generalize too much here, but this all seems a bit too weird, too rich in irony, to ignore.

I realize I’m already positioning myself as the obnoxious party guest at the Twitter Mansion, but here it is on the real: as with a hammer, a fax machine, or any other tool, I’m unobliged to a) Twitter, b) the community y’all have constructed around it, or especially c) the social norms and artifice you’ve invested in that community.

I’m just over here, in my own shed, banging away at some nails because I find the experience satisfying. Watch or don’t, but resenting my satisfaction because it isn’t yours, because this tool doesn’t apply identically to my life as it does yours, speaks precisely to my historic irritation with the School 2.0 sectarians.

So I’m on Twitter now and no good can come of it.