A couple of articles FYI

This one from the Washington Post we discussed briefly on Monday. About standardized testing in general: I'd like those of you who are teaching in the public schools now to bring in and share whatever you can of the tests and preparation materials. If you've got stuff in electronic form, email it to me and I'll post it.

Here's a horror story about, among other things, coordinating conjunctions. Since it's a bit long, I'll cut to the chase for you:

1) How do you expect your students to come out smart when your school is named "New Dorp"?
2) Having overlooked this obvious point, the faculty at New Dorp were trying to figure out why their students couldn't write a logical argument very well:

Maybe the struggling students just couldn’t read, suggested one teacher. A few teachers administered informal diagnostic tests the following week and reported back. The students who couldn’t write well seemed capable, at the very least, of decoding simple sentences. A history teacher got more granular. He pointed out that the students’ sentences were short and disjointed. What words, Scharff asked, did kids who wrote solid paragraphs use that the poor writers didn’t? Good essay writers, the history teacher noted, used coordinating conjunctions to link and expand on simple ideas—words like for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so. Another teacher devised a quick quiz that required students to use those conjunctions. To the astonishment of the staff, she reported that a sizable group of students could not use those simple words effectively. [snip]

One teacher noted that the best-written paragraphs contained complex sentences that relied on dependent clauses like although and despite, which signal a shifting idea within the same sentence. Curious, Fran Simmons devised a little test of her own. She asked her freshman English students to read Of Mice and Men and, using information from the novel, answer the following prompt in a single sentence: “Although George …”

She was looking for a sentence like: Although George worked very hard, he could not attain the American Dream.

Some of Simmons’s students wrote a solid sentence, but many were stumped. More than a few wrote the following: “Although George and Lenny were friends.”

The article raises a very important argument in which I think both sides are wrong: the "top down" vs. "bottom up" argument.