Musings (Borderline Ramblings) on ChatGPT

What to make of ChatGPT? 

That's the question many educators are wrangling with. What do we do with this new tool that will remove the heavy lifting necessary to writing one's thoughts? 

Well, I do know that in my district our students do not have access to ChatGPT. This alone speaks volumes. This AI writing tool is worrying to those of us tasked with teaching students to become better communicators when using the written form.

Some Background: Ramblings & Ray Kurzweil

Be forewarned: This will be a musing, rambling mess on ChatGPT. My mind -somewhat- amok. Call it a backlash to the many formulas for writing ChatGPT is likely to boil the written word down to. Call it the effect of years of interactions with digital gamification forces like binge tv-watching, online shopping, and every-minute breaking news. Call it old age. Call it whatever you like in your own, AI-unassisted, words.

That's right. I have not used ChatGPT to write any part of this blog. Yes, I suspect we will see more notices in our future that some, all, or no part of something printed involved a writing AI.

I am not some Luddite or ill-informed individual. I am keenly aware that AI assisted technologies have been in play a long time and will not slow down or go away. ChatGPT could be banned in schools across the world and the technology would still be sought and used by students. If anything, I fully expect companies like Apple and Microsoft to incorporate some form of AI more fully into their word processing programs, and I am certain schools will soon adopt writing AI in some manner, including my own district. In many ways, we have already.

I've read several of Ray Kurzweil's future-projecting books, The Singularity is Near, The Age of Spiritual Machines, and Fantastic Voyage. This was in the early 2000s, and I marveled then at what he projected would arrive on our present-day doorsteps. If I am recalling correctly, I believe his timeline for the arrival of the AI Age was roughly correct. He noted that the period of time from the 2020s through the 2030s would be one of incredible acceleration in the use of AI and the growth of medical breakthroughs. It certainly held my fancy. How incredible it would be to live in a time of nanobots, gene editing, glasses projecting 3-D overlays of the world before you, and the possibility that we might live... forever.

I also wondered about ramifications of it all. What would an AI driven existence do to us? As much as we would gain from it, I contemplated, what might we lose? Our independence? Our curiosity? Our humanity? Our (insert your own idea that amounts to a loss of something that makes us human.) In the end, it bothered me not because Mr. Kurzweil had clear enthusiasm for future machines and the roles they'd play in our lives. He rarely did more than touch on their dangers. There's plenty to debate as to what makes us human. Does becoming machine-reliant negate our humanity, or would it make us more of who we are? Or would we become something new?

Given that AI assistance is already in play to differing degrees, I suspect we have some ideas as to those answers. 

Mental Exercises: Spellcheck & Predictive Email

One exercise I try from time to time, when I attempt to project outcomes for myself, is to take something similar from an earlier time and try to track it to now and how it's impacted me. This moment, I am thinking of spellcheck. When this assistive program -godsend to some and bane to others- arrived, teachers debated its place. Some explained: Spellcheck helps those who struggle with spelling focus on writing and does not allow for misspelled words to detract from it. Others proclaimed: It is undermining the learning process how to spell. Today, this debate is an afterthought in education. Almost no one worries if students relied on Spellcheck for their work. Spellcheck is part of the fabric of our day. We only really pay attention Spellcheck these days when our students continually mistype words even as they have spellcheck available to them. Using this rudimentary example, it seems that any reservations I might have on ChatGTP are not warranted. And yet...

...and yet, I do know that our school system has renewed its efforts to teach our youngest learners how to spell without the use of a spellchecker, and this is because there remains real value in learning the rules of spelling as it is the other side to learning to decode words. Learning to spell well helps with phonics, phonemic awareness, affix study, and so forth. 

A more recent item I considered regarded predictive writing in emails. Think of how email now offers us suggestions on how to complete our thoughts. It was neat when it first arrived and does work as a shortcut to typing. However, more often than not, and I'm sure I'm in the minority, it perturbs this writer because this fledgling AI so frequently offers pablum of one kind or another and not what I intend to communicate. Honestly, I don't recall much fretting over the arrival of this tool, but I feel as if there should have been. On its simplest level, the predictive writing does a satisfactory job. What concerns me is that we may all soon be starting and ending our thoughts the exact same way as we continually defer to what the AI assumes we're working to write. (More on this subtlety later.)

Though I've had reservations for these advancements, I know these assistive technologies are not going anywhere. We can hold ourselves away from these tools only so long. We are weak. I am weak. (Though I will note for the record that I had avoided owning a cell phone for my entire life until this past year. I watched early on as adults struggled to not touch their phones and knew I didn't want that for myself. Why I caved in and adopted a phone is for another article, but Apple can thank Dunkin Donuts and computer firewalls at work for my change of stance.)

Nothing But A Tool: Chisels & Hammers, Jackhammers, and TNT

ChatGPT is often noted as "nothing more than a tool" by those who wish to downplay the impact it will have. Allow me to almost agree. ChatGPT is a tool. I wouldn't however refer to it as "nothing more than a tool". The thing about tools is that they can be compared along a spectrum. Some tools are simple in their use and impact; others may be simple but have far greater impact.

I'll be literal about tools, to begin.

Picture a hammer and a chisel working to break apart a concrete walkway. It can be done with labor, resolve, and time. Now, picture the jackhammer performing the same task. Hella lot quicker, no? Both are tools, but each have completely different impacts, literally and figuratively. ChatGPT is the jackhammer of writing tools when compared to writing assistive programs like Spellcheck and predictive email salutations. Calling it a "tool" belies how this program will come to change lives.

I recently read an article in my local newspaper in which multiple educators from elementary through college were asked about ChatGPT and what they made of it. It was, surprisingly to me, largely viewed as a positive event, something that needed to be looked at a little more before being brought into  classrooms. At least one educator noted that every time we introduce some new and powerful technology we all claim something is finished and done, only to discover it is not. I believe the comparison was how calculators would ruin students' math abilities and did not.

Okay, let's talk about calculators. And, because I am all too familiar with them, I'll toss in a slightly more advanced calculator, the iPad.

When the calculator first arrived, it brought with it serious discussions as to what effect it would have on students and their mathematical abilities. As a kid, for that's what I was when calculators first became inexpensive enough to bring into classrooms, I know that not all teachers allowed them. Many teachers believed that letting a machine do the adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing would ruin a student's independent abilities with mathematics. Some suggested it might even remove the need to study basic math. While the calculator did not destroy the field of mathematics or ruin the ability to learn it, it has changed it.

I share a mere and lowly anecdotal note as explanation. I spoke with a few of my math colleagues this week and asked them to explain how they felt about calculators in their classrooms. Our students are sixth graders, ages 10-12, and still very much learning basic mathematical principles. Unequivocally, I was told that calculators are accepted -to a point. And that point is when they witness their students using calculators to complete basic tasks such as multiplying 3 times 2. And they do see this. Students become over-reliant on the technology, far more quickly than we want to believe is possible. As bad as the calculator can be as a tool if overused, it is a chisel and hammer; not a jackhammer. The iPad is most certainly a jackhammer.

Assistive AI: Learned Helplessness

We sometimes use the phrase "learned helplessness" in education. Because we are so quick to assist students who do not respond readily to tasks, they -very quickly and unsurprisingly- recognize that they need only sit still, avoid beginning their work, and some adult will rush over to help them. This even when they're utterly capable of doing something independently. More assistive tech "tools" means less self-reliance; more turning to a machine to do the heavy lifting for us. ChatGPT appears well on its way to doing massive lifting. Forget the chisel to jackhammer comparison. It's more like a chisel to TNT.

It is entirely possible to shoot back a response as follows: OK, so what if students turn to assistive tech for answers? That's what it is designed to do and what it does extremely well. I do not dispute this. But I like to believe I have at least some observational abilities.

One item I have witnessed all too often with students and adults is how unlikely they are to turn to assistive technologies even when they're curious. I would have a tough time tallying on one sheet the number of times I've heard a student (or adult) ask some question of a group, a question with good merit in its posing, a question that most others agree is a good question, a question that is easily answered by today's standards and no one bothers to figure it out. No one turns to their iPad or iPhone for an answer.

How is this possible? Why hasn't having all answers at one's fingertips all the time not made us more curious or more likely to hunt for answers? Are we overwhelmed? (Yes, I believe so.) Do we have a type of learned helplessness? (Yes.) Has our true sense of curiosity become blunted? (Yeppers.) It's maddening for this guy, especially when I am among adults.

Here's another anecdote to explain this happening. I work at times to teach student to mull things over. Mulling means considering the possible answers to something that one doesn't have a legitimate answer for. An example I use as practice is "Why are manhole covers round?" Long ago, this got students excited. They came up will all kinds of ideas. Ideas that went from well off-base to nearly correct. Today? Most of my students shrug and wait for me to push them to use the starting thinking stems of "Could it be because...," or, "Maybe it's because...." I've taken to rubbing my chin as if I'm in deep thought to trigger them to respond and it isn't always a guarantee then will initiate a response. Eventually, over the course of a school day, one or two kids will ask if they can look up the answer on their iPad. 

Our district has one-to-one iPads, meaning each student has an iPad given to them in elementary school and will have one until graduation. We were early adopters in this. At first the iPad was a novelty; and some jumped readily into using it, others not so much. Covid arrived and it became a "life savor" of sorts. Everything we did with students relied on an iPad/laptop, Google Classroom, and Zoom. When Covid protocols were dialed down and classrooms opened to normal practices, the technology remained in our world, much more deeply rooted in our world. Now, it seems none of my colleagues can back away from this "tool" though all of them, I suspect, understand that it has added to the decline in student focus and critical thinking that we have been witnessing for some time. Let me clear. Students are no less intelligent than when I'd first arrived to teaching 28 years ago. They are less curious, less likely to enjoy reading for pleasure, and more likely to find sustained, critical thinking difficult. 

There is too much to pick from, too many ways to entertain ourselves, and most hurdles to life have been removed. I am not hitting on any new notions here, of course. I am only noting them because they require continual noting. Life has become too easy. We are spoiled. No one enjoys Negative Nelly, but I struggle to see how an AI program as potentially powerful as one that will write for you will make those who need to learn to write better. Most people dislike writing to begin with because it can be such a trying exercise. It takes a lot of brainpower to compose stories, reviews, nonfiction pieces, and essays. Having AI do the bulk of this for us seems a little like -no, make that a lot like- the doting parent who builds most of a planetary model for their child so said-child can bring it to school to get that A. 

We know so, so much about how easily humans can be nudged and influenced for good or bad. And this is before mass data collection and aggregation came into existence thanks to credit bureaus like Equifax and arguable monopolies likes Google and Amazon came along. I recall watching an episode of 60 Minutes where it was revealed that Amazon, which was at the time only a few years into being, was collecting about a terabyte of information on each of its customers. A terabyte! Not for nothing, but I wasn't even sure if my entire life could provide a terabyte of information, let alone a few years of shopping on burgeoning Amazon. Still, that Bezos affirmed statement was incredible. ChatGPT is another potential gargantuan aggregator of information that will boil us down to patterns of thinking and in turn make future writers patterns of thinking. Or, in this case, non-thinking. 

My small rebellion to our love-fest with heavy technological tools is that I have returned to pencil and paper methods of instruction for the last two years. I believe it has bettered student learning. Pencil and paper are single-use items and do not come with chimes, pop-ups, color palettes, or any of the distractions electronic devices hold. They also have no assistive AI presence for a student to lean on. And, I also believe there is an advantage to the feel of a pencil as one reads, draws, and manually writes. The physical process of moving a pencil across a page and working to use one's own wording is powerful in its ability to reinforce understanding. Not so sure on this? Consider this. When phones phones removed their physical buttons they were replaced with haptics because both users and designers recognized that we need the physical feedback. 

Paper and pencil instructional only? Hm, maybe I do have some Luddite leanings after all. It's a joke, of course. I consider myself more of a skeptic. Most skeptics require proof. Proof and time. Jumping into ChatGPT is a bad idea to someone like me. 

AI Defenders: Far or Short Sightedness?

I've seen some early defenders of ChatGPT. Individuals who are writing articles explaining how ChatGPT can readily be brought into the classrooms to help improve student writing, the most recent article suggesting that students can have the AI write articles on topics being studied in class and then go about editing the article for errors. Right now, ChatGPT isn't a perfect "writer" and the suggested class activity would be applicable, but, is this really a reason to embrace ChatGPT in classrooms?

It is a critical thinking activity to track the thread of an article and see if it follows proper conventions, has good organization, and properly builds a set of ideas, but that's only one aspect to writing and in this instant it is not your own writing but that of an AI that has examined millions of previously written samples. Writing for yourself matters.

I sometimes wonder about those who jump into defending game-changing technologies. Are they doing so because they truly believe in them, or are they looking to be an early defender so they can preen, "See? I told you we'd be using this? I was way ahead of everyone with it." Sometimes, these stances simply gain acknowledgment in the public discourse because they make for the other side of the debate. I think that's worrying. I am willing to recognize that many are also earnest and see ChatGPT and another item that should be brought into classrooms so it can be better understood and potentially harnessed. But, I'm not sure enough people recognize the power, the negative power, AI like this may eventually hold. 

I recall when I first saw parent and student-generated articles during Covid that brashly claimed distance learning was the best things to ever happen for their kids. Many explained that their children were more comfortable at home and that having everything online made it easier to complete work. Any honest educator will tell you that what we taught in those times were below normal expectations. We had lowered the bar. Most early post-Covid evidence points to just how important being in a physical location together to learn from an experienced adult really is.

I've read the articles where people argue that each time some new and disruptive technology arrives it means freeing us up from something we consider a chore and allowing us to explore new things, e.g. free time to stay fit, self-educate, or pursue some passion. Options which few of us choose. Instead, we interact with some digital device while consuming more calories than we should. Humans literally carry more weight than we ever have in history because of technological advancements: more calorie-dense foods, more eating options, greater quantities, and more opportunities to avoid exercising or other physical chores. 

I believe there is merit to physical and mental chores and depriving ourselves of too many of these harms more than helps. I also have a hard time not picturing the opening scene to WALL-E where humans are these amorphous blobs chugging sodas as they ride a hover-seat and watch a computer screen. But hey, that's me. Interestingly, that movie rolled out in 2008 and looks eerily accurate the rare times I go into a movie theater and see those large, reclining seats with buckets of popcorn on them. The only thing missing is the hovering part.

ChatGPT is going to erode more than we are likely willing to admit. It is going to make our brains dense. Anytime there is a major advancement that replaces the human ability to accomplish something there are effects, and not always good ones. And. And, I'll push this stance further, the bigger the tool the bigger the effects. ChatGPT is TNT.

Ethical Considerations, Valuations, and the Elusivity of Truth

Other concerns I have delve into the ethical production of AI written work. As in, what is likely to become our valuation of AI produced writing and the creation of yet another barrier to the truth. 

There are already concerns about the ethical usage of AI to write something as the writing may come whole cloth from original sources of writing. AI has been caught borrowing a little too much of its writing from others, i.e. AI plagiarizes. How long before AI is borrowing its writings from other AI-produced work and what will that look like? Does everything grind down to sheer uniformity? I can't help but think of tic-tac-toe, which is fun until you play someone at your level and every game can only end in a draw. There are no surprises then. Does AI writing become that? I digress and will move to another ideas rattling inside my brain pan.

I contend that AI written work should be less valuable, even as I recognize the complexity in defending this statement.

AI does not spend undue time working to knit ideas together, conduct research, create something new in written form, or find a voice. If it does any of these things, it's because code directed it to do so and it likely got its voice, style, and information from someone else's writing. Yes, there is an argument to made that human generated writing is no less the result of some code we're given and based on the writing of others. Code: When writing, we are expected to follow writing conventions, syntax, and writing structures. Voice & Style: We are influenced by the reading we do (i.e. the writing of others) as well as the beliefs, values and thinking of our time. Is this that different from a set of coded instructions on a chip?

Maybe it's better to judge the value of writing based on what are soon-to-be our limitations as writers once AI takes over. Any human writing that can approximate some near-future AI's writing will be deemed amazing. Or, maybe the value is to be found in voice. Voice in writing, when obtained, is an accomplishment as it is an individual expression. Will AI be able to find its own voice? Will it just be, as noted above, a collection of stolen voices? Or, will AI find its own, convincing voice? If it does form its own voice, will we even be able to understand it?

Here's another way to try and separate the value of AI writing from human writing. Try this thought experiment. You are ready to purchase a significant piece of art in a time when human and AI art are commonly bought and sold. You meet with the art dealer and are told that you have the chance to choose between two pieces of equally valuable art, based on money valuations. They are literally valued exactly the same, these two pieces of accepted art. One work is AI generated while the other is created from human hand's, which do you believe most people would covet most? Which object do you sink your money into? 

I'd like to believe the art done by hand would hold more value. Yeah, yeah, I cheated some in my thought experiment noting that the AI "generated" the art while a human "created" its art. There's bias in that setup, but there's also a kernel of truth in how it feels at this point in time. AI generates; humans create. (*See below for my rudimentary rationale for choosing these words.) Human writing should be more valuable as it likely represents hours of work, original thinking, and the human quality of inspiration. For me, it is the difference between an original signature on a document and a copy of that signature. One is more valuable, more original. 

* I used generate for computer art because ultimately I believe you can trace back the specific commands that directed a computer to make something. As of this point in time, we do not seem to be able to do the same with the human brain. We've learned a lot about the brain and we recognize we've a lot more to figure out. I'm not sure anyone can definitively explain where ideas come from. That seems very much like creation, for lack of a better word. A slight differentiation that I believe matters.

I warned you this would be a rambling venture and it has been. There is only a rabbit hole to dive into when I am given the unfettered ability to write whatever I'd like to write. Here's more of that rabbit  warren of thinking. It could be that the single reason to value human produced writing over AI writing in the near future is because any decently written thing that can approximate the deemed perfection of AI writing will necessarily demand our respect. A machine can draw a perfect circle; a man doing the same in freehand would be a marvel. 

More off-track thoughts on where this may be leading.

Think of the evolution (or is it devolution?) of saying Happy Birthday to someone. Long ago, we would wish someone a happy birthday by attending a function and/or making a phone call. Then Hallmark came along and put its stamp on things, making it a near requirement to include a card (with a pre-written sentiment) as a means of wishing someone joy on their special day. This evolved into the, initially uneasy, approach some took of sending -not physical cards- but virtual cards via email to those they cared about. Physical and virtual cards still remain in place, and even phone calls and parties to some extent, but it has also become completely acceptable to text someone "Happy Birthday" in lieu of any of the above. I'm unsure if you're following where I'm going with this and so I'll attempt to be clear. 

Assistive technologies are making too many things too easy. Shooting off a text takes next to no thought. It also has, in this thinker's opinion, the effect of devaluing one another's sentiments. Some things still matter. The true effort you put into something as an individual without the assistance of a pre-written card or some app, matters. Your physical presence matters and speaks loudly as to how much you value others. ChatGPT is yet another means of devaluing individual efforts. We'll be sending each other AI written communications bearing our sentiments for which we've put no more effort into that saying, "Alexa, write my mom a heartfelt thanks for being my mom this Mother's Day."

Truth. As we have discovered through the proliferation of social media, the truth is now harder to know. This is hard to fathom as we have access to more information than ever before, more eyes on one another, more cameras, more people reporting what they've witnessed, better sciences -and yet, the truth seems less available to us, or maybe more accurately more easy to ignore in favor of some other "truth". People with bad intentions have as big a mic as ever to spread their inaccuracies, and I believe ChatGPT will do the same to written works. Who will know what the truth is anymore when something is given to them in writing? (I am aware that there are people working on this very concern. People who are working to make AI written works noted as AI written, ZeroGTP et al. Good luck with that.)

If I have to make a projection as to where all this will go, it is down a path that seems...bizarre. I think that education will not only adopt AI writing programs like ChatGPT but that education will embrace them as another accepted means of writing. The new teaching will not be how to write from scratch but how to use AI writing devices to "write". Student will be "writing" using ChatGPT to express themselves from beginning to end. They'll tell the AI to make the story more personal, or in first person, or funnier in some section, and to end with a clear lesson. The AI will do the heavy lifting and our time spent of from-scratch writing will decrease because students will find it terribly challenging and forever ask, "Why can't we just use the AI?" It's a balancing act, is the common phrase teachers love to use to express the real difficulty in something, but this is one where most of the weight will be stacked on one side of us -the opposite side of us. 

Things do fade in education, even as slow as it is to let things go. Cursive writing is gone, printed writing is being to fade, silent reading is almost an option now with audio options for everything, etc. 

Ok, maybe, possibly, I'm running too far into the negative with this, but I do know that once someone or something takes over a duty for us, it becomes too easy to rely on it over doing it for ourselves. No one bothers to remember phone numbers or directions anymore. I think of my wife, the luckiest woman in the world to many :). She is the repository for a lot of information I do not bother myself with: birthdays, upcoming events, doctor's names, where the cleaning products are, clothes washing, etc. I rely on her to provide this information, to me. Without her, I would have a harder time navigating life. Could I figure these items out? Of course. But, I don't. It's lazy and unkind in many ways to those in my immediate life that I don't seem willing to learn these important things.

Maybe this is the item before so many teachers and students: Will we make the true effort to learn to write both with AI assistance and without it? Common sense and Vegas will tell you all need to know about which outcome is far, far more likely to happen. 

If you made it through all of this, you are either a glutton for punishment or an AI program gobbling up a poor human's sad attempt to understand the inevitable. 

Everything I Need to Know About being an Educator I can Learn from a Book Published in the 1960's

Do you remember the book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten? It was an

entertaining read that wasn’t without merit. Here are a few clever gems:

Play fair.
Don't hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.

The book made for a fun read and had more than a few people who read it nodding in agreement with its ideas. I wouldn’t go so far as to write that we should hold these early-learned tenants to be truths because that’s not how day-to-day living goes. For better or for worse, adult life can never be shoe-horned into a kindergartner’s world.  It doesn’t mean the book and its ideas aren’t valuable and still have some credence today.

I refer to All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten because I feel like I’ve had in my hands this last decade a similarly worthwhile book. Only this one, titled Principals and Practices of Teaching Reading, was aimed at defining how an educator should teach reading. More and more, I find myself pulling this particular book from a nearby shelf at work to thumb through and compare what’s inside to “the latest research” I am reading.

The book, yellowed and missing a cover jacket, was given to me by a former colleague who has since retired. I recall how heartily he laughed when he’d given it to me, explaining “everything you need to know about being a good reading teacher is in here, Ralph!”  He then slapped me on the shoulder playfully, enjoying his joke because it’d been published in the mid 1960’s. My colleague believed he’d given me something dated and laughable, what’d he’d actually done was handed me 563 pages of irony.

Initially, I remember chuckling for a minute as I perused the table of contents, seeing a section devoted to “Sex Differences in Learning to Read”. How quaint, even droll, such a title seemed as we generally avoid ascribing any significant differences between male and female readers. But, because I am a curious type, I did continue to examine this published work and try to understand just how outdated it actually may have been.

As it turns out, it wasn’t that dated then and it’s not that dated now. Not at its core principals.

Here’s a specific. I am midway through Educational Neuroscience edited by David A. Sousa and published in 2011. The book is an examination of how the various parts of our brains function and how understanding these can assist classroom instruction. I would call it semi-dense as a text as I’m sure many teachers would find the terminology a bit much while medical students would consider it a children’s book compared to what they need to know about the brain. The attempt is made by the writers to bridge the complexity gap and make it useful to educators.

At its heart, the book seeks to show with empirical evidence the brain science behind student learning. It aims to support general understandings with scientifically researched proof. Here are some examples from a chapter on adolescents’ brains: the burst of growth in the frontal lobes means that teens over-complicate problems, idealize the world, and say one thing while meaning another, teen brains are particularly susceptible to novelty, feedback improves the brain’s efficiency, and the development of the parietal lobes helps teen athletes improve their pace and teen musicians improve their beat.

Teens idealize the world? Teens over-complicate problems? Teens are susceptible to novelty? Are these conclusions really anything we don’t already know? Nope, they’re not. It’s old news. It’s the kind of “news” that makes you think and possibly even say, Well Duhhhhhh. These conclusions are –without doubt- statements of the obvious. And yet, the feeling I get from the text is that somehow earlier generations of educators had no clue about these teenage affects.

Now, I am not as narrow-minded as I might seem, because I do realize that the authors are actually sharing the science behind what we’ve always known and that doing such can be valuable. Pinpointing the specifics of where and how this happens in the brain can lead to possibly doing more than understanding it. Someday it may even lead to correcting deficiencies in these areas.

Right now though it feels the same way people knew that smoking was bad for us long before science proved it. And yet, this book and the many others so eager to share the latest research don’t quite present it this way. It almost never comes off as, Hey you know all that obvious stuff we’ve known forever about teaching and learning? Well we’ve found where and how it happens in your head. We’ve proven it’s not just a collective assumption anymore. No, too often, it’s delivered to audiences as if it’s some new discovery, one that will make the teachers of today so much better than those of before.

Here are some additional conclusions presented in the first half of Educational Neuroscience, which is as far as I’ve gotten to this point.

For successful learning, students must want to learn.

To be able to read heavy volumes of printed materials requires lots and lots of reading of many different types of reading materials.

Clinicians assert that helping children to acquire an awareness of sounds and representative letters that make up words has a direct correlation to reading comprehension.

Successful reading beyond the primary years can only happen if children have become automatic decoders and readers.

The brain stores new information by identifying patterns in it. As it receives fresh material, the brain searches its established neural networks for a background against which it can comprehend the new knowledge. Anything familiar –sensory information (like a remembered scent), a pattern, a relationship – will serve as a connection to information already stored in the brain. If the brain finds nothing on which to build, it abandons the new information.

Use a variety of formal and informal assessments to communicate with your students.

Interestingly, parental assistance should be kept to a minimum; homework is no time for them to hover.

Did you find yourself laughing some as you read? C’mon. You had to because there’s nothing new in those statements. Nothing any teacher hadn’t already concluded decades and decades before.

A little more fodder for the cannon…

Also provided in the book is an educational sequence for combined word decoding and spelling programs.  The authors have created a year by school year approach to developing reading in students. Check out how novel their plan is.

Kindergarten: Phonetic sounds produced by one letter and corresponding letter name and some sight vocabulary.

First Grade: Consonant and vowels sounds and the letters that make them, more decodable words, some exceptions, and an expanded sight vocabulary.

Second Grade: More complex letter patterns and common patterns for word endings are identified and applied to spelling and writing.

Third Grade: Multisyllabic words, unstressed vowels, and common prefixes and suffixes are found in reading and spelling instruction.

Fourth Grade: Latin-based prefixes, suffixes, and roots add to a growing vocabulary for reading, writing, listening, and speaking.

Fifth through Eighth Grade: Words based upon the Greek language and other words found in content level texts and reading selections.

(Side thought: I do find it interesting that Latin precedes Greek for instructional purposes as I cannot fathom why this is recommended. Possibly, Latin affixes and roots are more easily recognized by readers than Greek forms? I digress.)

The Educational Neuroscience plan looks sensible. It may even look remarkably new to those of you who are in the early stages of your teaching career. But, as I’m confident you’re grasping by no, it is not novel.

In thumbing through my trusty 1960’s manual, Teaching Reading, I discovered that all of the aforementioned skills and steps for learning to read are noted within. There’s a section on phonics instruction in which the authors note that “data from recent studies have reaffirmed the position that instructional programs which include considerable emphasis on phonics result in higher achievement at the end of grade one than do programs which include significantly less phonics instruction.”  It would seem that those 1960’s educators already had a plan mapped out for themselves.

More thumbing along and reading uncovers a series of lessons and overviews regarding the regular and consistent instruction of sight words, word families, spelling, root words, affixes, and contextual meaning to students in the primary grades. Again, all of this agreed upon and spelled out in the 1960’s. No brain science needed to prove its validity or value.

One giant difference between the 1960’s list and the Educational Neuroscience list lays in the Reading Teachers insistence that reading doesn’t occur by grade or even age but by practicing and improving in all the components listed above as is natural to the student. The term “ungraded” is frequently used in the Reading Teacher, meaning to group students in classes not by age but by their present abilities and needs. In other words, students aren’t first or fifth graders but rather fall into a broader spectrum of beginning, primary, intermediate reading students.

So, even while the book’s authors note that teaching and learning phonics early on is important, they do not limit it to one grade. Yes, yes, it’s likely the Educational Neuroscience writers don’t think phonics are only taught in one year and never again, but there’s a clinical tone or message to not noting as much, to merely listing the type of reading instruction that should occur at each year because they’ve determined that this is exactly when the mind is best suited to learn it. They’re focused on age and grade and not on the diagnosed ability of the student at that time. It’s an important distinction in my mind, because it puts social promotion further back on the stove, onto the back burner, focusing more on advancing students only when they demonstrate ability with certain important reading skills. Think about it. How often have you felt like a student of yours could easily pass for one much lower or higher than the grade level you teach? It happens, and often at that. Wouldn’t it be nice to focus only on them and where they are versus how far from where they should be? This is the drive behind Writer’s Workshop. Students ae frequently paired to texts they can work with, regardless of their age or grade, and asked to show understanding using what suits them.

Before I move too far astray, let us see what my 1960’s book on teaching reading has to say about sound teaching practices and developmental steps.

The book opens with 14 principals of teaching reading. Most I list as a principal without its accompanying and expanding text. With a few, I will include both the principal and a modicum of textual support as given by the authors.

1.       Learning to read is a complicated process and is sensitive to a variety of pressures. Too much pressure or the wrong kind of pressure may result in non-learning. Reading is not the simple sum of its parts, because in every case the reader must be considered in the process and each reader is unique. Reading always involves the simultaneous application of a great number of mechanical skills and comprehension skills, all of which are influenced by the reader’s attitudes, knowledge, and past experience. Reading is a complicated process.

2.       Learning to read is an individual process. Even though all children in the lowest group have the common characteristic that they are poor readers, grouping them physically in the classroom and psychologically in the teacher’s mind is of negligible value unless the teacher adjusts learning situations to each child’s need for instruction.

3.       Pupil differences must be a primary consideration in reading instruction.

4.       Reading instruction should be thought of as an organized, systematic growth-producing activity.

5.       Proper reading instruction depends on diagnosis of each child’s weaknesses and needs.

6.       The best diagnosis is useless unless it is used as a blueprint for instruction. Diagnosis itself has no salutatory effect on the performance of the child tested. If diagnosis alone had salutatory effects, it would be possible to raise a child’s level of performance indefinitely by more and more diagnosis. It may be noted that extensive testing and metal filing cabinets full of individual folders do not necessarily make a better school. Testing in many American schools has become an end in itself.

7.       No child should be expected or forced to attempt to read material which at the moment he is incapable of reading.

8.       Reading is a process of getting meaning from printed word symbols. It is not merely a process for making conventionalized noises associated with these symbols.

9.       Any given technique, practice, or procedure is likely to work better with some children than with others. Hence, the teacher of reading must have a variety of approaches.

10.   Learning to read is a long-term developmental process extending over a period of years.

11.   The concept of readiness should be extended upward to all grades.

12.   Early in the learning process the child must acquire ways of gaining independence in identifying words whose meanings are known to him but which are unknown to him as sight words.

13.   Children should not be in the classroom if they have emotional problems sufficiently serious to make them uneducable at the moment or if they interfere with or disrupt the learning process.

14.   Emphasis should be on prevention rather than cure. Reading problems should be detected early and corrected before they deteriorate into failure-frustration-reaction cases. However excellent the instruction in our schools, some children will not profit from as much as others. The early detection of impairments and immediate attention to them are cornerstones of effective reading instruction.

Pause and look at these 14 principals to teaching reading. Do any of them really standout as dated or unfamiliar to you? They don’t seem that way to me. In fact, the majority are highly recognizable in so much of “the latest research” being cranked out. I remind you, in case you’ve not done the math, that this book, which I’m comparing on some level to Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, is quite close to 50 years old; and, quite likely, was not  the leading authority on teaching reading at the time.

I remember that the educational wave prior to SRBI was an emphasis on demonstrating how I differentiated instruction in my classroom. If you’ll recall items 2, 3 and 9, you’ll see that there’s evidence of our forefathers-in-reading keen understanding of the importance of differentiation. Possibly, however, you think I’m reaching. It happens. Therefore, in support of my claim that earlier generations of teachers grasped how important differentiation is to students and instruction, I note pages 301 and 311 in Teaching Reading which come under the heading “Differentiation of Instruction”.  Not long after this this section of reading comes an entire chapter devoted to “Individualized Reading”.

Clearly differentiation, which was being presented to me and my colleagues just prior to the SRBI wave as “the latest research”, was actually a lot newer in the 1960’s. And yet, there was such a rave and fervor for differentiation in all the workshops and publications at the time that one couldn’t help but assume it was brand new.

Today, the reading world is afire with talk of common core goals and RTI practices. If you’ll refer back to principal 14 on the list above, you’ll see that Teaching Reading writers already had a strong sense of how important prevention was to reading success when they wrote “The early detection of impairments and immediate attention to them are cornerstones of effective reading instruction.”

The list of items in Teaching Reading that pre-date the recent research findings I see in today’s professional publications is at once unsurprising, affirming, enlightening, and amusing.

Wow, this is a long (and I’ll fully admit rambling) read. For that, I apologize and will curtail all the rest I’d intended to include. I do hope that my intent wasn’t missed, because while it may seem like I was forever bashing one book while championing another, I was really working to underscore the strangeness that has become education today. Too much is trotted out as "new" when it's actually something old but proven and merely better defined or understood. It is not new and not going to save education.

Today, we feel we’re uncovering one amazing discovery after another when it comes to students and education. And yet, what we’re actually doing is affirming what’s been know long ago by pinning down the specifics of what we already knew to be true. Educational Neuroscience is a fine book and does uncover the mysteries to how our brains function and how students learn. The thing of it is... I'm not sure I really need to know it. What I need to know is what works with my students. The science and data behind it is just gravy.Like I wrote, everything I need to learn about being a reading teacher I can learn from a 1960’s textbook. 

Last curiosity. A quick search of this book turned up a 10th edition on Amazon. It seems like this book has had some legs over the decades. It'd be interesting to know how much they're evolved over those years given so much of what was written so long ago still seems worthwhile and relevant. 

Amazon Wants to Bury the Hatchette. It is to Laugh

I use Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP, Amazon’s publishing arm) to self-publish my fiction writing; and as a result I periodically receive emails from KDP regarding any manner of items they believe important to share. Sometimes it’s an interview with a self-published author who has hit it big using KDP; sometimes it’s a list of tips for getting your work discovered; and sometimes it’s a list of improvements the company has made to its service.

Generally, I ignore what I receive from KDP. That is until a few weeks ago when I received an entirely new form of correspondence from them: a plea to me, as a KDP user, to email the CEO of Hachette Publishing on KDP’s, i.e. Amazon’s, behalf.

You can read Amazon’s letter here.

In reading the letter, one brimming with passion and multiple bolded sentences, I couldn’t help but laugh.

The crux of matter: KDP/Amazon believes that Hachette Publishing (a sub-division of Legardere) is charging too much for the digital versions of their newest book releases and Amazon would like for me, along with the rest of its self-published authors, to email Hachette CEO, Michael Pietsch with the following points and requests.

• We have noted your illegal collusion. Please stop working so hard to overcharge for ebooks. They can and should be less expensive.
• Lowering e-book prices will help — not hurt — the reading culture, just like paperbacks did.
• Stop using your authors as leverage and accept one of Amazon's offers to take them out of the middle.
• Especially if you're an author yourself: Remind them that authors are not united on this issue.

The letter also details the lengths Amazon had gone to in an attempt to meet on some middle ground with Hachette and work to lower the entry prices for its digital copies. Amazon noted that Hachette was found guilty of colluding with other companies to keep digital book prices unnecessarily high, that, in fact, lowering digital-book price points creates more profits because far more sales are made, and that a “healthy reading culture” needs cheaper reading materials to compete with other popular media forms.

Hachette, the letter explains, flatly rebuffed Amazon. Digital books prices, though far cheaper than physical copies, would remain the same. 

Hachette’s refusal to work with Amazon left Amazon no choice but to place sanctions against Hachette and its authors. That’s Amazon’s belief, not this author’s.

On first blush, the matter smacked of the usual exorbitant greed companies too often seem to have. Anyone who has even a sliver of understanding about digital versus physical copies understands that the former costs next to nothing to deliver to customers. 

Again, on first blush, Hachette comes off as both greedy and flat-out wrong.

So, what made me laugh?

Well, it was taking that half moment before deciding what to do next to pause and ask: What does Amazon have to gain from this letter campaign? They want me to believe, as a customer, I’ll be part of a group that topples a heartless company and trumps a wrong. Fact is, Amazon’s real gain is more obvious:  more book sales and therefore more money for them. There is also a secondary –almost as valuable- benefit, which I share later. 

Human skepticism runs stronger and stronger each year, it seems, and I’m confident more than a few of you reading this also questioned Amazon’s true motivations. Making money is after all what companies do. A company is an insatiable money earner and I believe we all grasp this. 

What’s amusing is that Amazon didn’t quite admit this in its letter. No, the letter was saturated with noble intent and sentences possessing a tone of good versus evil. To Amazon’s credit, they listed among their many solutions to getting Hachette to crack the following.

•  authors [would] receive 100% of all sales of their titles until this dispute is resolved

• [Amazon] would return to normal business operations if Amazon and Hachette's normal share of revenue went to a literacy charity

Hard to see why Hatchette would balk at either of these offers. Amazon seems awfully sincere, dedicated even to providing the best for readers everywhere. And yet, I was chuckling quite a bit at this point. 

Amazon is not leading a revolution with their Hachette letter. They’re manipulating the propaganda machine to their benefit. 

Amazon is a company; by definition this means profits are central to its being. Leading its customers and users to believe that it’s basically a white knight fighting solely on their behalf and not its own greed is silly. [For proof of this consult with my wife who heard me laughing several times as I read and reread the letter. Weak reasoning, I know, but I couldn’t resist.] Worse is that Amazon doesn’t admit that it would stand to earn quite the altruistic shot in the arm if it can lay claim to getting Hachette to lower its prices to the benefit of readers the world around. That second, unwritten, goal is the other benefit a company like Amazon hopes to gain from its letter campaign. Of course, it’s somewhat hard to embrace Amazon’s magnanimity when it’s calling for author works to be available to all and also cutting off Hachette’s books until it gets what it wants.

And so… amid chuckles I decided to write a letter to Hachette CEO, Michael Pietsch, though not fully in the spirit Amazon asked of me. 

Hello-

As you likely know, Amazon is making a tremendous push to have independent authors(hacks, really) like me reach out to your company with the expressed aim of having you reconsider your stance of charging hardcover prices for electronic copies of the same title.

Initially, I was whole-heatedly in agreement with Amazon.

Of course, I'm not exactly balking one hundred percent either.

They are correct in noting that digital copies incur far less expense to make and send; and continuing to ask for hardcover prices in this instance is ridiculous. Amazon also correctly points out that in many instances lowering the price point results in more sales and more profit in the end.

However, that's where I begin to see altruistic flaws in Amazon's request of me.

Let's face it both of your companies are worried about the bottom line more than the customer. Amazon stands to profit a ton too with lowered price points on books coming from your publishing house and others. Honestly, I don't care which way your company goes with its prices. Business is business and I'm under no obligation to buy your product. However...

...it might interest you to know that I have in the past 3-4 years held a limit-to-what-I'll-spend-for-a-digital-copy attitude. Essentially, I'm unwilling to pay more than 9.99 for a digital book -with a very few exceptions for favorite authors. One, it is next to nothing for you or Amazon to get that too me. Two, I realize that digital amounts to "renting" not owning an item. When I buy a physical copy of something, that's forever. Not so with digital. Amazon can pull that copy right off of my Kindle or Amazon account. It's happened to others. Amazon could also go belly up. That's happened to companies too. So, I won't pay too much to rent.

In the end, the market will settle this matter. If I were a betting person, I'd say you'll end up lowering your price point. Buyers will make that happen with their dollars. 

Well, thanks for letting me drop my thoughts into your electronic well.

Somewhat sincerely,

Ralph

Yes, it’s a smart-alecky email and, no, I did not receive direct feedback from anyone at Hachette, but anyone who has half his or her sense can see through the true intents of Amazon’s letter. Or, so I hope. 

In time, I did receive a letter from Hatchette. Same form letter response, I’ll gather, every other KDP user who directed emails to Mr. Pietsch got.

You can read his reply letter here, but I bulleted the key ideas below.

Among the notable highlights of his and Hachette’s reply are:

• 80% of Hachette’s digital copies are sold below a 9.99 price point

• costs for printing, promoting, shipping physical books is off-set by higher digital price points
• digital piracy cuts into earnings

•  higher price points for specific titles come down with paperback version

• both Hachette and Amazon are big businesses and neither should claim a monopoly on enlightenment

I put the last highlight in red because I cannot help but applaud Mr. Pietsch for being truthful with me where Amazon seemed to want to avoid that.  Amazon asked me, and its users, to run off like a pitch-forked mob and demand justice for Hachette’s evil practices; and that was uncalled for.

I do feel, as I wrote in my email to Hachette, that this will all settle itself with lowered price points in the end. Money speaks loudest to companies. If nothing else, Amazon’s letter has sparked a fiery discussion, one that doesn’t fool too many, however. Customers know what companies want –dollars and more dollars.

Some final notes:

On principle, I don’t agree with high price-points for digital copies of materials –especially because I truly do not own these “books”. I won’t get into too much detail here but pretty much any digital item one buys today is simply a long-term rental of that item. Amazon has removed purchased copies from customers before and can do so at any time. Unlike a physical book, which I can hand down from generation to generation, that’s not the case with digital versions. Thus, do I make every effort to buy items I wish to read at rock-bottom prices.

Also, on principle, I don’t have issue with companies and their modus operandi of earning profits. As written, that’s what they are and do. How can I find fault this? Where I find fault, and oodles of humor, is when companies work to paint that truth away and expects its customers to now know any better. Believe me,  I would have respected Amazon’s letter request far more if they’d just written: we want cheaper price points for all books because we want make more money. Oh, and, by-the-way, you too will benefit greatly.

Any other ploy…?

Well, it is to laugh.

Dogs of War Has a Home in Middle School Classrooms

Dogs of War Makes for Terrific Reading

A colleague, well aware of my affinity for graphic novels, made sure to hand off to me a copy of Dogs of War by Shiela Keenan and Nathan Fox, as well as, a copy of Romeo & Juliet by Gareth Hinds. As of this moment, I doth not have anything to scribe about the latter, not having read it… just yet. For the former, I doth have plenty to scribe about.

Dogs of War is comprised of three short stories, each depicting the role one canine has played in one of three wars –WW I, WW II, and Vietnam. Although the stories are named after each of the dogs (Boots, Loki, and Sheba), and this leads you to believe you’ll be following closely their stories, the canines generally share the spotlight with their various human protagonists. Some might be upset to going into the work to find out the dogs aren’t the main thrust of the book. For me, that hardly mattered. I found the storytelling for all three tales to be brisk, informative, and interesting throughout.

In “Boots”, the first story set in WWII, readers are thrown into the harrowing experiences of trench warfare as viewed through the eyes of a 16-year-old soldier and his loyal dog. Floods, mud, cold, poor nutrition, and bullets –Oh, there are bullets!- fill the story panels as a 16-year-old Donnie and his mates work to hold to a bloodied length of land and survive their terrible battle against the Germans.

If this were all the story had to offer, I’d be hard pressed to find the motivation to write about it here. Where the story develops into something worth sharing with you and (hopefully) with students is in the author’s attention to historical details.

When our human protagonist, Donnie, and his canine, Boots, first find their newest trench allies, the soldiers are, almost pleasantly, trading hot bullets with the Germans over walls of sandbags. Young Donnie is surprised by this but told it’s merely “the morning hate”, whereby each side essentially recognizes that what transpires between them is a common morning occurrence –as if to say, Oh this shooting at each other is nothing to worry about. This seemingly misplaced attitude amid battle is actually –to borrow from our British friends- spot on. Many a soldier who returned from WWI reported as much. I read that some soldiers referred to the morning volley of bullets as “trading tea”, a cute moniker for a dangerous practice. But, the pithy remark underscores something about the sensibilities of the time. Soldiers, on both sides, still held to a sense of nobility in fighting a war, a sense of gentlemanliness. Even if they were trying to knock one another off.

Not wanting to give away too much, I’ll add that "Boots" presents an account of WWI that any middle school student would find highly interesting. Heck, I’m middle-aged and loved seeing the brief scene in which a soldier is cooking up some juicy lice he’s plucked from his uniform.  It’s a story sure to spur discussion about what war, life, and attitudes were like in the early 1900’s; and that can only be a good thing for those of us trying to feed youthful mind.

The other two stories in the collection are equally accurate in their depiction of how men and animals behaved in their respective wars. I was particularly appreciative of the author’s decision to not simply turn these stories into Disney-esque accounts of dogs at war. In fact, although the dogs are presented as the heroes to the stories, they’re really closer to secondary characters, the human protagonists being far better fleshed out for readers. Again, the cause seemed to be to show war as it actually was without making it inaccessible to middle school students. It was also to show how dogs have served our soldiers for a century and more.

Keenan’s and Fox’s story is worthy of classroom use. A halfway decent teacher (and I think I juuuust make that cut) can use the interest it garners to spin students off into further reading exploration about war, dogs, the 1900’s, the 70’s, and much more. I’m already thinking this book will be a fine companion piece to Cynthia Kadohata’s novel Cracker! The Best Dog in Vietnam, a historical fiction book about a dog and his handler helping men survive during the Vietnam War.