PUTTING THE HORSE BEFORE THE CART

Hierarchy and sequence are essential in neuroscience.

C-WORTHY CORPORATION OCTOBER 11, 2023

Good day, visitors. Welcome back. If you read the previous two blog posts, you know how American education fails. Putting the cart before the horse with 100% transitive verbs for standards is a design failure. Learning is SHOW and TELL, not tell and don’t show. Politicians who want to eliminate the Federal Department of Education only observe that our country is someplace in the middle compared to other major industrial nations when considering reading, writing, and arithmetic. They only see failure, not the reason why. Neuroscience allows us to comprehend the value of visualization before verbalization. We will keep the verbal standards but reverse the order of presentation. Hierarchy and sequence are essential in neuroscience.

There is ample evidence that the educational experts we admire and quote don’t know curriculum standards are backward. By referring to the sourcebook: Schmoker, M. (2011) Focus: Evaluating the Essentials To Radically Improve Student Learning. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, the experts make claims revealing that lack of understanding. Citing the author Schmoker discussing habits of the mind, “But even more radically, I believe these four standards could productively replace almost all of our current K-12 English language arts standards, as well as the confusing verbiage that accompanies the standards in areas like science and social standards” (p. 38). My respect for Schmoker’s work goes far beyond pointing out that his need to eliminate standards is a mistake. Again, the standards are backward, not wrong. In the Focus book, “One prominent expert on standards observes that many of them are merely “pretentious gibberish” (Sandra Stotsky in Garner, 2010, p. 8).

Pretentious gibberish might mean somebody forgot how to decode transitive verbs, which make up 100%  of educational standards. Once again, keep the standards because verbalization is vital for the difficulty of teaching the English language. In other words, don’t throw out the baby with the bath water. Schmoker makes a case for eliminating standards with the quote, “They start with Marzano’s recommendation that we should eliminate about two-thirds of the standards” (Marzano & Kendall, 1998). Nobody admires Marzano’s work more than me. But at that time, they did not recognize the pattern of placing the verbalization before visualization created the misconception. When educators eliminate two-thirds of the verbal standards, they retain one-third of the same verbal standards that initially confused learners. The Study Script, with its embedded formative assessment, is a solution.

In the next Blog Post, I will share how and why a visualization requirement will arrive before verbalization for standards. Thank you for visiting memtrix.org.