HOLY CRAP DO I GET TO BE THE FIRST COMMENTER ON YOUR BLOG? [F1RST P0ST!]
Exciting to see more attention being driven to Egan — but of course I would say that! Actually, I have a more substantive question: what sorts of things are you thinking about when you write:
> “Could you use these frameworks for everything? Even I, an admitted Egan fan, don't think so.”
I’m curious to see whether I can say how I might teach the topic within Egan’s framework, or whether I’ll need to step outside of it.
Thanks for the comment! I couldn't be happier that you are the first commenter.
This might be worth a full post in itself but let me give a short version: 7x7 = 49, 你好 = hello, 'ea' -> long e, short e, long a.
The more procedural the knowledge and the less connected to other pieces of knowledge, the less I think Egan's frameworks apply. I am a second language teacher and just found out about Egan relatively recently but my impression is that it will work better with content than skills. Does this fit your model?
Brandon suggested I come over here and give a stab at the "why" behind ea and the three sounds, and the idea that this could be "Eganized"
I'll start by saying that I am a huge fan of approaches to reading and spelling that incorporate the "why" behind the language. Structured Word Inquiry, Linguistic Phonics, The Logic of English curriculum, and so on.
Every "why" question about the sounds English vowels make has to make a stop at the Great Vowel Shift and at the concept of "Printers in the late 15th/early 16th centuries trying to make sense of chaotic English spelling."
EA starts out as a rare spelling in middle English, and in early modern English becomes more common as printers look for ways to distinguish between words that would otherwise be homonyms and to make the sounds (at the time) as clear as possible. It's my understanding that Great/Steak/Break did not move during the great vowel shift, so they are more of a relic of previous pronunciations. The now "ee" sounding words mostly moved during the great vowel shift, as did the "eh" sounding words that moved a bit differently. But ea may have been used by printers to represent more than one sound, since it was a bit of a "new innovation" in spelling at the same time the vowel shift was happening.
I feel like a lot of the "why" questions about vowels are less illuminating than a lot of other spelling "why" questions, because the answer is almost always some combination of the above. But maybe just knowing that this is why vowels are a bit "messed up" is enough to make some difference.
But when it comes down to the nuts and bolts of memorizing that clean is spelled clean and not /cleen/ and head is spelled head and not /hed/, there really aren't a lot of "stories" that are going to help, in my opinion. Learning spelling frequencies helps a bit, but in the middle of words ee and ea for long e are about equally common, and while it is a bit shorter list to memorize the ea to spell short e (instead of e alone), so it is really a matter of repetition and visual memory.
In the Orton-Gillingham groups I'm in, people are always trying to come up with "tricks" or "generalizations" for some of these hard spelling choice situations...but they all break down somewhere and the end result is students who struggle with spelling have to put in many reps to learn that girl has ir while turn has ur.
Thank you Kirsten, for your very interesting comment! I also enjoy a good story about linguistics and etymology, particularly anything that emerges from weird historical coincidence. There probably is some value in letting children know about the vowel shift.
I do think that that for many students the easiest way to learn when to use these different sounds is repeated exposure. This is why we have lists of sight words. You could create lists or rhymes or poems in order to highlight common examples of the different ea sounds in words, but this is an area where memorization may be the best you can do.
I really appreciate this, Kirsten. I think that what I take away from this re: Eganizing is that some academic content is too complex to be captured well in a simple story — but that it’s still helpful to hear the story to understand WHY it’s so danged complicated.
In such a situation, I wonder what other tools could be helpful for memory. I think the guiding principle here could be the various tricks from the art of memory that the ancient Greeks & Renaissance Europeans developed. Basically: make things weird to make them memorable.
I’d have to understand the history of ’EA’ better to get this right, but I’m imagining something like three boxes: ‘EA’s that say /ay/ (and always did), ‘EA’s that say /ee/ (but used to say /ay/), and ‘EA’s that say /eh/ (but used to say /ay/.
(Um, this is all wrong, isn’t it! I hope we can just roll with it.)
Each box would be filled with its respective words, and could get its own color and font. Kids could practice saying the “old-timely” pronunciation, and hearing its oddness.
In general, the goal would be to give each box a “flavor”.
I don't mean to belabor the point of this phonogram specifically, but just in case anyone is reading this later looking for ideas, I do want to point out that you could make things MORE difficult for some students by emphasizing the "original" sound for EA (long a), because it is just so darn rare...and some learners (especially dyslexic kids, or those who are struggling for other reasons) will latch onto that rare spelling and try to use it most often. Hence the order of frequency for the mnemonic I mentioned in your post. It's like the kid who learns about silent e at the end of a word giving a vowel it's long sound for the first time, and then them adding a silent e to the end of every word that has a long vowel sound, when the long vowel sound was there for another reason. (sold becomes "solde").
But I use many different kinds of memory tricks with my dyslexic learner to make spellings stick, especially the ones that are rare. Some are kind of corny, but they seem to work: "Lose lost an o, but floor and door are thieves [aka, they took an O they didn't need]. Poor had to steal an O because it doesn't have enough money."
We have sentences to remember all the words that use a particular spelling, for example, to remember the words where igh is the correct spelling for long i at the end of a word: "Do you sigh or slap your thigh up high when the end is nigh?"
Or the words that are exceptions to the rule to use tch after a short vowel: "Which rich king had so much money for such a big sandwich?"
(Full disclosure, I made up the igh sentence but found the tch sentence on the internet). I have a goal over spring break to make up or find more of these sentences for spellings that I think need them.
We have one spelling song...Have you heard the popular sea chanty, "The Wellerman"? That song was very popular in our house for a while so for the word "once" I started singing "There once was a ship that put to sea, the name of the ship was o-n-c-e" It fits the song perfectly...LOL. We never really even need to practice that word any more because it stuck so well...
No idea if these are Egan-y memory tricks, but my dyslexic learner seems to take well to them at least. :-D
> "No idea if these are Egan-y memory tricks, but my dyslexic learner seems to take well to them at least. :-D"
I think we might be right to call them HALF Egan-y tricks. The Egan-y half is that they're silly mnemonics. The un-Egan-y half is that they don't really bring out what's weird or wonderful about the underlying rule. Maybe we could make them "more" Egan-y if they also related (somehow) to the specific history of how they became that way?
But, as you so aptly pointed out, trying to just make it Egan-y for the sake of being Egan-y could lead to disaster:
> "you could make things MORE difficult for some students by emphasizing the "original" sound for EA (long a), because it is just so darn rare"
Which is to say — and Andrew, I think I'm partially agreeing to your critique — that we can't say that "just Egan-ize as much as possible" is the best we can do. We also need to be really, really attentive to what's happening in the mind of the learner.
Now, I think that Egan-izing will get us like 80% of the way to helping that learner learn profound things, but there's that last 20%...
But, hey, maybe I'm just trying to hard to come across like a non-fundamentalist. (Don't you HATE ed reformer fundamentalists? I do.) I think that if Alessandro were here, he might have a bigger-picture interpretation of Egan (he always does, it's so fun talking to him), and he'd shake his head. What I call "going full Egan on 'spelling rules' he might call 'applying Egan naively'.
Um, Andrew, sorry we took over your comments section!
Ooh! Okay, I think I only have the expertise to answer the math one.
Basically, we start by asking ourselves "what interests ME about 7 × 7?", and then figuring out which tools allow us to communicate that.
Tool #1 — patterns
One thing to recognize about any math fact is that it's intimately related to, well, every other math fact. So one thing you COULD do is look for a cool pattern. And, indeed, there is one with perfect squares. This is hard to say in text, so I'll go overboard in fleshing it out:
a. 5 × 5 = 25, but 4 × 6 = 24.
b. 6 × 6 = 36, but 5 × 7 = 35.
c. 7 × 7 = 49, but 6 × 8 = 48.
d. 10 × 10 = 100, but 9 × 11 = 99.
e. 1,000 × 1,000 = 1 million... can you guess what 999 × 1,001 will be?
f. n × n = n squared; can you guess what (n – 1)(n + 1) will be?
"But how could this be USEFUL in learning 7 × 7?" you ask. Well: IF a kid already knows 6 × 8, then it makes 7 × 7 obvious. If a kid doesn't, now they can connect two facts together, and make them BOTH easier to learn.
Now, that's using Egan's tool of "patterns". Which is one the constructivists make a lot of, and to their benefit. The big trouble is that for some kids, those patterns are immediately interesting — but for others, they're not. To try to gin up excitement, one might use riddles: put a list of those on a wall (maybe as a "Boss Question"), and write "is there a pattern here?". To solidify the memory, one might use metaphors: call the number right below and the number right above "the huggers", and ask why huggers can never QUITE make as much as the regular number by itself.
Tool #2: Images
I've been playing with how we can make use of "vivid images" to make multiplication facts stick in our minds; I can't insert an image here, so I'll do it in a post on my blog. (I don't claim the image is anything like the best possible way to do it — I'm just exploring it as interesting.)
Tool #3: Humanizing knowledge / stories
Really, what we want to do is give FLAVOR to 7 × 7. One way to do that is just to see if it comes up in literature. Seven is a big number in the Near East — seven days of the Babylonian creation, seven levels of heaven, seven days of the week, seven rings for the Dwarf lords in their halls of stone, and so on. Getting kids to feel the specialness that certain numbers held for other people is useful throughout math, but: does 7 × 7 itself come up? At least once. For the Hebrews, every seven years was a Sabbath year, in which they were to let the land rest. They were to celebrate it once, twice, thrice... and on the seventh time, they were to go further: forgive all debts and release all slaves.
Okay, that's all I have off the top of my head (and with a little help from ChatGPT). I imagine that some teachers might balk, saying that this would be an INCREDIBLE amount of work. To this I'd respond: it's an incredible amount of work for students to not remember seven times seven. And this sort of effort wouldn't be efficient for a lot of other math facts: 2 × 5, for example.
And I should hasten to say that these tools don't replace something like repetition (and spaced repetition) — they just strengthen it, making easy (and enjoyable) something that was hard (and meaningless).
Thank you for posting this. Perhaps I should not have challenged Aang to an airbending competition. I particularly think that highlighting the patterns involved could be very helpful when teaching this topic. I agree that using images or stories might also be useful for certain types of students. I think I can clarify my earlier comment with a full post, but in the spirit of mystery: what do mathematics and Beethoven's 9th symphony have in common?
> "Perhaps I should not have challenged Aang to an airbending competition."
HA! I've thought, sometimes, of running a challenge on my blog: "what's the most boring thing you can think of?", and then seeing who can best bring out what's secretly fascinating about it.
The best case I've seen made that some things are really just dull is this xkcd (https://xkcd.com/863/), but even that I think cheats by (seemingly) limiting the instruction to being superficial and high-level. (I think a deep dive into failed trade summits would be AMAZING.)
I didn't respond to your thing about content vs. skills, and I think there's something wonderful there. Part of the answer is that kids who become habitually fascinated with the content of a domain will actually care about developing the domain's skills, but I think there's more to it than that, even if I have a hard time answering it.
Would you be up for suggesting a few specific skills? Maybe I could better unpack one of those.
Are you in the same big old boat as me, then? Teaching English in China? I like the blog, but after reading Brandon for a while, I'm feeling a bit ambivalent about Egan. It all feels to me like a very decent framework to build curricula and materials and lesson plans around - but not obviously better than any other framework. And the real problems in teaching aren't "what framework do you use?" but "are you competent enough at your subject to even understand what a framework is?"
So, in my area, teaching English to children in China, no one is suffering because of an imbalance of the mythic and romantic. They are suffering because most English teachers can't actually speak English; and the English teachers that do speak English generally can't speak Chinese.
Questions of frameworks are fun - I've been reading Brandon because it's a pleasure to - but I'd take boring old competence over theoretical insight any day of the week.
Do you use boardgames in your teaching? Any ideas that you want to swap? I've had some success with Sorry, Monopoly, Clue, Coup, Sushi Go, and for middle school students, Apples to Apples has really worked.
I am teaching English in Hong Kong. In my experience, the English levels here are much higher than in most places in mainland China. For children, most students have at least some English and basically all the teachers can communicate reasonably well. There is a wide variance based on exposure at home, with children in more educated or well-off families getting much more opportunity to use the language. The biggest problems I face are lack of motivation, and a mismatch between students' language abilities and where their interests lie. The problem is that their interests mature faster than their English ability and eventually they give up, bored, because the language tools they have are so limiting.
I do sometimes use board games in teaching, particularly for smaller class settings. Sushi Go is great. Codenames can work even for bigger classes and you can use it to teach pretty much any vocabulary set you choose. Social deduction games work pretty well if you can get groups of 6-8 players. I've used Spyfall, One Night Ultimate Werewolf and Avalon/The Resistance. Wits and wagers can be adapted for whole-class use as well. I am very into mystery-style games. I turned Witness into powerpoints for whole-class use. I haven't tried it yet, but there is a kid's version of Chronicles of Crime that seems promising. I plan to use a choose-your-own adventure style game book from the line Storymaster's Tales next term for small-group reading.
With regard to Egan's frameworks, I need to experiment more with using them to create actual units before I can really be sure. I think that many of the individual tools/patterns are fantastic and that they can help a great deal with motivation. I do hear you about the difficulty of creating 'meaning-soaked, contexualized learning' when you are confronted by hard barriers to simple understanding. I hope to experiment and report back here on the results.
Those are great ideas. Choose-your-own adventure! Why didn't I think of that? I think I did think of it, but gave up because my students are at a fairly low level. Now I'm much more confident about creating my own materials, so I'll just write one myself.
I have smaller groups, so I can use the games with playing boards, and with careful selection, they are a lovely activity. I do have a copy of Avalon sitting unused, but maybe I'll give it a try with my biggest class.
Hong Kong is definitely a very different environment. But the interest problem is universal, I think. I just fight a continual war for reading. First, persuading the kids to read (and when I say persuade, I generally mean force...). And second, persuading the parents to allow them to read something they might possibly enjoy. I don't know if it's the same where you are, but the message "reading is excellent for a child's education" has been widely misunderstood here as "children must always be reading something EdUcAtIoNaL." No comics or picture books. And don't get me started on those reading lists full of children's classics that children don't actually like. In reality, kids in their teens often still enjoy reading books for young children, and if it keeps them going, then it's really worth it. My favourites at the moment are the Captain Underpants series and the Weird School series. (I think Americans do better at limiting vocabulary - British kid lit like Dahl, Walliams, and even Michael Rosen, all seem to use a lot more words, which just makes them harder for learners.)
I will keep on reading with interest, thanks for your suggestions.
Some of the best successes I've had have been with comic books and graphic novels. Kids love them and you get them doing long form reading with visual aids. Only thing is they love them so much it can be hard to get them transition to chapter books with fewer pictures. I used to get disapproval from teachers and parents but when kids start checking out entire series from the library people start to come around.
HOLY CRAP DO I GET TO BE THE FIRST COMMENTER ON YOUR BLOG? [F1RST P0ST!]
Exciting to see more attention being driven to Egan — but of course I would say that! Actually, I have a more substantive question: what sorts of things are you thinking about when you write:
> “Could you use these frameworks for everything? Even I, an admitted Egan fan, don't think so.”
I’m curious to see whether I can say how I might teach the topic within Egan’s framework, or whether I’ll need to step outside of it.
(Oh, hey — thanks for the call-out on the blog!)
Thanks for the comment! I couldn't be happier that you are the first commenter.
This might be worth a full post in itself but let me give a short version: 7x7 = 49, 你好 = hello, 'ea' -> long e, short e, long a.
The more procedural the knowledge and the less connected to other pieces of knowledge, the less I think Egan's frameworks apply. I am a second language teacher and just found out about Egan relatively recently but my impression is that it will work better with content than skills. Does this fit your model?
Brandon suggested I come over here and give a stab at the "why" behind ea and the three sounds, and the idea that this could be "Eganized"
I'll start by saying that I am a huge fan of approaches to reading and spelling that incorporate the "why" behind the language. Structured Word Inquiry, Linguistic Phonics, The Logic of English curriculum, and so on.
Every "why" question about the sounds English vowels make has to make a stop at the Great Vowel Shift and at the concept of "Printers in the late 15th/early 16th centuries trying to make sense of chaotic English spelling."
EA starts out as a rare spelling in middle English, and in early modern English becomes more common as printers look for ways to distinguish between words that would otherwise be homonyms and to make the sounds (at the time) as clear as possible. It's my understanding that Great/Steak/Break did not move during the great vowel shift, so they are more of a relic of previous pronunciations. The now "ee" sounding words mostly moved during the great vowel shift, as did the "eh" sounding words that moved a bit differently. But ea may have been used by printers to represent more than one sound, since it was a bit of a "new innovation" in spelling at the same time the vowel shift was happening.
I feel like a lot of the "why" questions about vowels are less illuminating than a lot of other spelling "why" questions, because the answer is almost always some combination of the above. But maybe just knowing that this is why vowels are a bit "messed up" is enough to make some difference.
But when it comes down to the nuts and bolts of memorizing that clean is spelled clean and not /cleen/ and head is spelled head and not /hed/, there really aren't a lot of "stories" that are going to help, in my opinion. Learning spelling frequencies helps a bit, but in the middle of words ee and ea for long e are about equally common, and while it is a bit shorter list to memorize the ea to spell short e (instead of e alone), so it is really a matter of repetition and visual memory.
In the Orton-Gillingham groups I'm in, people are always trying to come up with "tricks" or "generalizations" for some of these hard spelling choice situations...but they all break down somewhere and the end result is students who struggle with spelling have to put in many reps to learn that girl has ir while turn has ur.
Thank you Kirsten, for your very interesting comment! I also enjoy a good story about linguistics and etymology, particularly anything that emerges from weird historical coincidence. There probably is some value in letting children know about the vowel shift.
I do think that that for many students the easiest way to learn when to use these different sounds is repeated exposure. This is why we have lists of sight words. You could create lists or rhymes or poems in order to highlight common examples of the different ea sounds in words, but this is an area where memorization may be the best you can do.
I really appreciate this, Kirsten. I think that what I take away from this re: Eganizing is that some academic content is too complex to be captured well in a simple story — but that it’s still helpful to hear the story to understand WHY it’s so danged complicated.
In such a situation, I wonder what other tools could be helpful for memory. I think the guiding principle here could be the various tricks from the art of memory that the ancient Greeks & Renaissance Europeans developed. Basically: make things weird to make them memorable.
I’d have to understand the history of ’EA’ better to get this right, but I’m imagining something like three boxes: ‘EA’s that say /ay/ (and always did), ‘EA’s that say /ee/ (but used to say /ay/), and ‘EA’s that say /eh/ (but used to say /ay/.
(Um, this is all wrong, isn’t it! I hope we can just roll with it.)
Each box would be filled with its respective words, and could get its own color and font. Kids could practice saying the “old-timely” pronunciation, and hearing its oddness.
In general, the goal would be to give each box a “flavor”.
Sidenote: Why did I pick EA instead of any other letter combination? I keep reading this as 'effective altruism' and it's doing my head in.
I don't mean to belabor the point of this phonogram specifically, but just in case anyone is reading this later looking for ideas, I do want to point out that you could make things MORE difficult for some students by emphasizing the "original" sound for EA (long a), because it is just so darn rare...and some learners (especially dyslexic kids, or those who are struggling for other reasons) will latch onto that rare spelling and try to use it most often. Hence the order of frequency for the mnemonic I mentioned in your post. It's like the kid who learns about silent e at the end of a word giving a vowel it's long sound for the first time, and then them adding a silent e to the end of every word that has a long vowel sound, when the long vowel sound was there for another reason. (sold becomes "solde").
But I use many different kinds of memory tricks with my dyslexic learner to make spellings stick, especially the ones that are rare. Some are kind of corny, but they seem to work: "Lose lost an o, but floor and door are thieves [aka, they took an O they didn't need]. Poor had to steal an O because it doesn't have enough money."
We have sentences to remember all the words that use a particular spelling, for example, to remember the words where igh is the correct spelling for long i at the end of a word: "Do you sigh or slap your thigh up high when the end is nigh?"
Or the words that are exceptions to the rule to use tch after a short vowel: "Which rich king had so much money for such a big sandwich?"
(Full disclosure, I made up the igh sentence but found the tch sentence on the internet). I have a goal over spring break to make up or find more of these sentences for spellings that I think need them.
We have one spelling song...Have you heard the popular sea chanty, "The Wellerman"? That song was very popular in our house for a while so for the word "once" I started singing "There once was a ship that put to sea, the name of the ship was o-n-c-e" It fits the song perfectly...LOL. We never really even need to practice that word any more because it stuck so well...
No idea if these are Egan-y memory tricks, but my dyslexic learner seems to take well to them at least. :-D
> "No idea if these are Egan-y memory tricks, but my dyslexic learner seems to take well to them at least. :-D"
I think we might be right to call them HALF Egan-y tricks. The Egan-y half is that they're silly mnemonics. The un-Egan-y half is that they don't really bring out what's weird or wonderful about the underlying rule. Maybe we could make them "more" Egan-y if they also related (somehow) to the specific history of how they became that way?
But, as you so aptly pointed out, trying to just make it Egan-y for the sake of being Egan-y could lead to disaster:
> "you could make things MORE difficult for some students by emphasizing the "original" sound for EA (long a), because it is just so darn rare"
Which is to say — and Andrew, I think I'm partially agreeing to your critique — that we can't say that "just Egan-ize as much as possible" is the best we can do. We also need to be really, really attentive to what's happening in the mind of the learner.
Now, I think that Egan-izing will get us like 80% of the way to helping that learner learn profound things, but there's that last 20%...
But, hey, maybe I'm just trying to hard to come across like a non-fundamentalist. (Don't you HATE ed reformer fundamentalists? I do.) I think that if Alessandro were here, he might have a bigger-picture interpretation of Egan (he always does, it's so fun talking to him), and he'd shake his head. What I call "going full Egan on 'spelling rules' he might call 'applying Egan naively'.
Um, Andrew, sorry we took over your comments section!
Ooh! Okay, I think I only have the expertise to answer the math one.
Basically, we start by asking ourselves "what interests ME about 7 × 7?", and then figuring out which tools allow us to communicate that.
Tool #1 — patterns
One thing to recognize about any math fact is that it's intimately related to, well, every other math fact. So one thing you COULD do is look for a cool pattern. And, indeed, there is one with perfect squares. This is hard to say in text, so I'll go overboard in fleshing it out:
a. 5 × 5 = 25, but 4 × 6 = 24.
b. 6 × 6 = 36, but 5 × 7 = 35.
c. 7 × 7 = 49, but 6 × 8 = 48.
d. 10 × 10 = 100, but 9 × 11 = 99.
e. 1,000 × 1,000 = 1 million... can you guess what 999 × 1,001 will be?
f. n × n = n squared; can you guess what (n – 1)(n + 1) will be?
"But how could this be USEFUL in learning 7 × 7?" you ask. Well: IF a kid already knows 6 × 8, then it makes 7 × 7 obvious. If a kid doesn't, now they can connect two facts together, and make them BOTH easier to learn.
Now, that's using Egan's tool of "patterns". Which is one the constructivists make a lot of, and to their benefit. The big trouble is that for some kids, those patterns are immediately interesting — but for others, they're not. To try to gin up excitement, one might use riddles: put a list of those on a wall (maybe as a "Boss Question"), and write "is there a pattern here?". To solidify the memory, one might use metaphors: call the number right below and the number right above "the huggers", and ask why huggers can never QUITE make as much as the regular number by itself.
Tool #2: Images
I've been playing with how we can make use of "vivid images" to make multiplication facts stick in our minds; I can't insert an image here, so I'll do it in a post on my blog. (I don't claim the image is anything like the best possible way to do it — I'm just exploring it as interesting.)
Tool #3: Humanizing knowledge / stories
Really, what we want to do is give FLAVOR to 7 × 7. One way to do that is just to see if it comes up in literature. Seven is a big number in the Near East — seven days of the Babylonian creation, seven levels of heaven, seven days of the week, seven rings for the Dwarf lords in their halls of stone, and so on. Getting kids to feel the specialness that certain numbers held for other people is useful throughout math, but: does 7 × 7 itself come up? At least once. For the Hebrews, every seven years was a Sabbath year, in which they were to let the land rest. They were to celebrate it once, twice, thrice... and on the seventh time, they were to go further: forgive all debts and release all slaves.
Okay, that's all I have off the top of my head (and with a little help from ChatGPT). I imagine that some teachers might balk, saying that this would be an INCREDIBLE amount of work. To this I'd respond: it's an incredible amount of work for students to not remember seven times seven. And this sort of effort wouldn't be efficient for a lot of other math facts: 2 × 5, for example.
And I should hasten to say that these tools don't replace something like repetition (and spaced repetition) — they just strengthen it, making easy (and enjoyable) something that was hard (and meaningless).
Thank you for posting this. Perhaps I should not have challenged Aang to an airbending competition. I particularly think that highlighting the patterns involved could be very helpful when teaching this topic. I agree that using images or stories might also be useful for certain types of students. I think I can clarify my earlier comment with a full post, but in the spirit of mystery: what do mathematics and Beethoven's 9th symphony have in common?
> "Perhaps I should not have challenged Aang to an airbending competition."
HA! I've thought, sometimes, of running a challenge on my blog: "what's the most boring thing you can think of?", and then seeing who can best bring out what's secretly fascinating about it.
The best case I've seen made that some things are really just dull is this xkcd (https://xkcd.com/863/), but even that I think cheats by (seemingly) limiting the instruction to being superficial and high-level. (I think a deep dive into failed trade summits would be AMAZING.)
I didn't respond to your thing about content vs. skills, and I think there's something wonderful there. Part of the answer is that kids who become habitually fascinated with the content of a domain will actually care about developing the domain's skills, but I think there's more to it than that, even if I have a hard time answering it.
Would you be up for suggesting a few specific skills? Maybe I could better unpack one of those.
Are you in the same big old boat as me, then? Teaching English in China? I like the blog, but after reading Brandon for a while, I'm feeling a bit ambivalent about Egan. It all feels to me like a very decent framework to build curricula and materials and lesson plans around - but not obviously better than any other framework. And the real problems in teaching aren't "what framework do you use?" but "are you competent enough at your subject to even understand what a framework is?"
So, in my area, teaching English to children in China, no one is suffering because of an imbalance of the mythic and romantic. They are suffering because most English teachers can't actually speak English; and the English teachers that do speak English generally can't speak Chinese.
Questions of frameworks are fun - I've been reading Brandon because it's a pleasure to - but I'd take boring old competence over theoretical insight any day of the week.
Do you use boardgames in your teaching? Any ideas that you want to swap? I've had some success with Sorry, Monopoly, Clue, Coup, Sushi Go, and for middle school students, Apples to Apples has really worked.
Hello Phil,
I am teaching English in Hong Kong. In my experience, the English levels here are much higher than in most places in mainland China. For children, most students have at least some English and basically all the teachers can communicate reasonably well. There is a wide variance based on exposure at home, with children in more educated or well-off families getting much more opportunity to use the language. The biggest problems I face are lack of motivation, and a mismatch between students' language abilities and where their interests lie. The problem is that their interests mature faster than their English ability and eventually they give up, bored, because the language tools they have are so limiting.
I do sometimes use board games in teaching, particularly for smaller class settings. Sushi Go is great. Codenames can work even for bigger classes and you can use it to teach pretty much any vocabulary set you choose. Social deduction games work pretty well if you can get groups of 6-8 players. I've used Spyfall, One Night Ultimate Werewolf and Avalon/The Resistance. Wits and wagers can be adapted for whole-class use as well. I am very into mystery-style games. I turned Witness into powerpoints for whole-class use. I haven't tried it yet, but there is a kid's version of Chronicles of Crime that seems promising. I plan to use a choose-your-own adventure style game book from the line Storymaster's Tales next term for small-group reading.
With regard to Egan's frameworks, I need to experiment more with using them to create actual units before I can really be sure. I think that many of the individual tools/patterns are fantastic and that they can help a great deal with motivation. I do hear you about the difficulty of creating 'meaning-soaked, contexualized learning' when you are confronted by hard barriers to simple understanding. I hope to experiment and report back here on the results.
Those are great ideas. Choose-your-own adventure! Why didn't I think of that? I think I did think of it, but gave up because my students are at a fairly low level. Now I'm much more confident about creating my own materials, so I'll just write one myself.
I have smaller groups, so I can use the games with playing boards, and with careful selection, they are a lovely activity. I do have a copy of Avalon sitting unused, but maybe I'll give it a try with my biggest class.
Hong Kong is definitely a very different environment. But the interest problem is universal, I think. I just fight a continual war for reading. First, persuading the kids to read (and when I say persuade, I generally mean force...). And second, persuading the parents to allow them to read something they might possibly enjoy. I don't know if it's the same where you are, but the message "reading is excellent for a child's education" has been widely misunderstood here as "children must always be reading something EdUcAtIoNaL." No comics or picture books. And don't get me started on those reading lists full of children's classics that children don't actually like. In reality, kids in their teens often still enjoy reading books for young children, and if it keeps them going, then it's really worth it. My favourites at the moment are the Captain Underpants series and the Weird School series. (I think Americans do better at limiting vocabulary - British kid lit like Dahl, Walliams, and even Michael Rosen, all seem to use a lot more words, which just makes them harder for learners.)
I will keep on reading with interest, thanks for your suggestions.
Some of the best successes I've had have been with comic books and graphic novels. Kids love them and you get them doing long form reading with visual aids. Only thing is they love them so much it can be hard to get them transition to chapter books with fewer pictures. I used to get disapproval from teachers and parents but when kids start checking out entire series from the library people start to come around.